At sports architecture firm Populous, model builders deal with the ...

Populous, which was called HOK when the model shop was created 13 years ago, is often the first in the country to receive new machines from manufacturers who want to test them in real-world conditions.</p><p>Each year, the shop goes through a semi-trailer full of material: wood, resin, acrylic, Plexiglas, rigid foam, urethane, acid-etched brass, steel mesh, paper, wire, hardware, paint and masking tape.</p><p>The model shop is on the second floor of Populous&rsquo; On display in the ground-floor lobby and second- and third-floor offices are models of the new University of Minnesota football stadium, the Baltimore Ravens football stadium, a partial model of Nationals Park in Washington, D.C., and models of the scoreboard and various fa&ccedil;ade options for the remodeled Yankee Stadium. It took three months and 2,200 man hours of precision drawing, cutting, painting, fitting and gluing to complete.</p><p>The very day the Marlins model was going out the door, a rigid foam topography base arrived at the model shop for use in another marquee project that already was well under way: a presentation model of the new Kansas City Wizards stadium in Kansas City, Kan., set to open in June.</p><p>Weeks earlier, as the stadium had begun to rise across the street from the T-Bones&rsquo; of plans takes place on computers, the majority of work in the model shop is hands on: from mixing dozens of paint colors to represent paving stones, bricks and other surfaces to cutting out tiny acid-etched metal parts and placing them with tweezers.</p><p>In the case of the Wizards model, one of the most daunting challenges was modeling the hundreds of vertical metal &ldquo;fins&rdquo; Knight said.</p><p>To help the co-owners really visualize what the fins would look like, Knight and Spear had the model shop create 22-inch-high mock-ups of a few fins, which show the forms and perforations better than the tiny ones on the full model.</p><�p>Partial models, such as the large-scale fins, are an important and large part of the model shop&rsquo;s workload. models of the Wizards canopy roof, Knight said, &ldquo;so we could better understand what we were drawing, rather than only looking at it on a computer.&rdquo;</p><p>The roof on the finished model tested the model builders because the huge trusses &mdash; </p><p>While the stadium roof takes 13 minutes to close, the model roof closes in 2 minutes, which is too fast, but any slower and it would be nearly impossible for the eye to see it moving.</p><p>Sometimes, the model builders have to cheat the scale when using premade accessories such as people, cars and trees. In the Wizards model, for example, the human figures are slightly off scale because no one manufactures people in 1:25.</p><p>Spear and Knight say they were in constant contact with the model shop during the construction of the Wizards model, and they marveled at the result.</p><p>&ldquo;They are really, really talented,&rdquo; Read full story here: adult-web1.finiser@blogger.com