ABOUT TOWER
2000 NEWS
TOWER2000
NEWS FRONTPAGE
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Tower 2000.com capitalizes on an attention grabbing virtual reality Web site featuring news and op-ed against a backdrop of striking photoreal images of historical landmarks in and around the business & cultural area of the Tower District in Fresno, California. Through a dramatic series of photorealistic renderings, images simulate the Tower District as it appears from various locations. The Internet advertising agreement was negotiated in 1997 with Web Portal, Inc. by Mr. Bill Kuebler, Executive Director of the Tower District Marketing Committee, with a final edition of the Web site to be concluded in the year 2000. Web Portal designed and owns the Web site and leases advertising space to Tower District merchants who pay a nominal monthly service fee to Web Portal. The design concept and photoreal rendered images are the work product of software engineer and designer Thomas Hobbs, M.S., and business economist Howard Hobbs, J.D., Ph.D. of the Corporate Legal Division of the firm, WebPortal, Inc. of Palo Alto, California. Tower2000 News Photorealism Photorealistic rendering for the Web interface is a technique pioneered by Web Portal, Inc. in 1993. Web Portal designers and writers create an architectural 'sketch and script' to give the Web site interface the combination of a strong representation of perceived reality, with a high degree of interactivity and entertainment. The classic 50's style jukebox carries strong thematic emphasis and is a simple, friendly way to access all of the Tower2000 Web site's features.
Theater of the Mind The world-famous histroic site of the Tower Theatre for the Performing Arts is the perfect foil for assembling a number of individual exhibits under a public domain icon. Web Portal uses a metaphor comparing very dissimilar businesses as if they were actors following a script in a 1950's-flavor Hollywood production film in contrast with thematic daily news stories.
Taking this design tack means that the metaphor is first presented through slick, seamless, and attention grabbing graphic presentations. The hands-on slide show invites interactivity and exploration once the surfer enters the Tower screening room auditorium and takes a seat. The Tower2000.com slides are photoreal 'stills' that serve as a transition from a virtual theatre metaphor to other locales within the site.
1950's Influences on Tower2000.com
A short piece from the book: 'Rules?' - 'Here are my rules: what can be done with one substance must never be done with another. No two materials are alike. No two sites on earth are alike. No two buildings have the same purpose. The purpose, the site, and the material determine the shape. Nothing can be reasonable or beautiful unless it's made by one central idea, and the idea sets every detail. A building is alive, like a man. Its integrity is to follow its own truth, its one single theme, and to serve its own single purpose. A man doesn't borrow pieces of his body. A building doesn't borrow hunks of its soul. Its maker gives it the soul and every wall, window and stairway to express it.'
In Edward Hopper's famous painting 'Nighthawks', [1952], he expresses his version of Ayn Rand's philosophy (inset below). He gives his viewers a sense of quiet city spaces, juxtaposed with the power of the heroic individual, then softens it by a suggestion of cooperation among its citizens and a Free Press.
All are searching for meaning within a world whose architectural designers structure reality through the use of dramatic buildings, open and closed space, and lighting. The city, is seen as a lighted stage. The spaces and buildings and its newspaper journalists are the necessary stagecraft against which the human drama is experienced as 'real'. Hopper's work is part of the Collection of the National Museum of Art. It was the Ayn Rand philosophy combined with the works of Hopper that inspired the photoreal environments that are the trademark of WebPortal, Inc. Our designers and news writers build virtual reality Web sites that are subtly expressive of those philosopical insights. |
Ayn Rand, 1905-1982, the Russian-born American writer primarily known for her novels such as The Fountainhead (1943), defended a conservative philosophy expressing itself in civic architecture, a daily newspaper, and private finance of public buildings. Her hero is widely believed to have been modeled on the life and designs of F.L. Wright.
In her magnificent 1957 book [later a Hollywood film] Atlas Shrugged Rand writes 'My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.'
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