Alpine1 – The world’s most hardcore way of building a Minecraft Skyscraper

I’ve spent the past 8 months or so designing and building this Minecraft condo Tower my guidelines from the urban planners were to create an iconic Tower as one of the tallest buildings in the city of Everton including condos a ground floor shop and an underground parking garage I’ll explore the city to

Find some potential designs sketch plans for the architecture floor plans and structure and then spend way too long building and Furnishing it in Minecraft so today I’ll be bringing you along with me on my quest to complete a large skyscraper complex for once in my life

But for now let’s find find out why I had to build a skyscraper in the first Place once upon a time there was a lumberjack named Alfred that lived in the northern forests of Everton he cut down pine trees for a living to sell to the workers who had then used them to frame buildings in the city after he cut down his trees he

Would replant them but this Lumberjack had a secret technique when replanting to make make his trees grow stronger than any other trees before them one day he moved to the city to open his own shop Alfred’s Pine Emporium the city of Everton bought up all of the pine they

Could get the strongest Pine ever known Alfred got rich off this Pine but Alfred wanted More so he set his sights high he found an empty lot in downtown Everton and decided to build a skyscraper but he was a lumberjack he had no idea where to start so he called up the only person that he could trust with his Secrets Yeah so basically Alfred just made me sign a non-disclosure agreement not sure why he chose me over any other Architects from the city maybe it’s because we look alike now that I live in Vancouver I figured the best first step was to go out explore the city and see

What I could find here get some water it’s important a bag your notebook and your pen there’s this new one under construction called The Butterfly I thought it looked pretty neat so I wanted to get a closer look okay I’m going the right direction it’s somewhere

Down here this is the back end of it ooh yeah okay let’s go down here and check it out rectangular base and then the top is very much not there’s also an older building there I don’t know if you can see that there’s some Old Stone work now

Usually I’d feel pretty guilty about having a square Tower base and a rounded Tower but they do it here so I don’t feel as bad I knew I still wanted to do something round on the bottom so I went around the block to check out the other

Side so you have this church which is maybe connected I’ll probably use the Arches as inspiration and then maybe I’ll find something else instead of this pattern and that’s exactly what I did but we’ll get to that later the idea with this floor plan is that you have

Four circular sections so you have two on this side and two on the other side but they’re not exactly aligned you have these two put the other two back and then shift them back a little bit of course I needed to design the connector

Too so I plan to use a similar curve now if you’re an architect or at least a good one you know one of the most important parts of building design is how people interact with your building even if they never go inside I’m talking about the streetscape I walked around a

Bunch to get a feel for the area the busyness how people get around but there’s one detail that’s really easy to miss but it’s one of the most important rain protection I decided to include overhead rain protection on the sidewalks around the tower even though 99% of people walking around would never

Step foot inside it’s just part of being a good architect I got back to my studio and decided it was time to sketch out a vision sketching out the lot with the north facing upwards the lot is 67 across and 50 deep with the smaller side having a slight incline on the North

Side there’s an existing building right up against the property line that’s about 1 to 2 floors tall same idea on the west but it’s closer to 9 to 10 there was some existing Greenery mostly in the form of trees but I had permission from the city planner Rainey

To remove them if needed I figured the best place to have the entrance to the residential Lobby was on the South Side off to the left since it was furthest away from the busy intersection next it was time for the bubble method every time I need to create a floor plan I

Write down the name of the rooms inside circles and if you need them to be physically connected by a door or a hallway I draw a line you don’t need to build every room you have planned out but write them down anyway just in case

I then pulled out the old Legos for some reason drew some walls that I did not follow at all and added additional floors connected by stairs and elevators drawn in a different color finally I sketched out the shape of the complex also known professionally as massing I only know these professional terms

Because of my degree and if you’re wondering if a degree in architectural engineering is right for you join my email list and be notified when my paid video series comes out it’ll tell you all about what you can expect from the degree and where you can go in your

Career all right I think you know what time it is it’s it’s time to start building so to make this condo Tower as realistic as possible I delayed the project repeatedly by spending the entire Budget on Timbits but don’t tell Alfred cuz he’s um well you’ll see I

Threw down some ACAA blocks here in CAC to design a wavy floor template I was told the building couldn’t be taller than 195 blocks so I added a scale and measured it out using a diagonal line I added the first circle with the radius of 11 making the edges tangent to the

Property line after stacking it up I cut out an arch window like the one we saw earlier I spaced out the floor height and added a rough connector to the not yet existent second Circle to be able to find where the wave pattern closes with the magic of stairs slabs and trap doors

In Cube pack I was able to make a pretty decent wave after adding the glass around the circumference offset by one I stacked it up by two floors to see how it looked I don’t know about you I think it looks pretty decent but having that stacked up another 25 floors was going

To look pretty repetitive so I decided to switch it up instead of having the top and bottom equally spaced every alternating floor would open and close on both sides the real life building has the same gauge length but shifts them so the peak of one floor is directly above

Or below the trough of the next next I flipped and pasted the same Circle connected by the arch it ended up fitting perfectly within the lot which technically means I’m a genius and better than everyone else I had to take a minute to admire my brain power by

Walking around the neighborhood to see how it fit in so far so good I added an arched connector and stacked it all the way to the top at the very top I cleaned it up and changed the top couple of floors to ACAA planks to make it feel

More complete behind this wall will be rooftop HVAC equipment stairs and elevator overruns a few days later I finally stopped procrastinating and shifted the building from being four Circle centered around the middle point to the offset version like real life turns out it only took about 10 minutes

Worth of work finally it was time to design the structural systems holding this Tower together I used this thing called a Shear wall which is essentially the spine of the tower it’s where all the most important things are like the four elevators two emergency staircases and in real life mechanical and

Electrical equipment when you design a Shear wall there’s two important things to remember first if you’re working with tall thin Towers window space is everything so don’t waste your window Space by having the shear wall up against the sides keep it in the middle second let’s bring your dog into this

You live on the 28th floor and the fire alarm goes off now you need to get out you go into the hallway and everything’s on fire elevators automatically shut down during the fire alarm so you’ll need to take one of the two staircases unfor fortunately for you the architect

Has the brain capacity of a hammer and put the entrances to both emergency staircases beside each other now the only good news here is that you already named your dog marshmallow put your entrances on opposite sides it’s not that hard next I added grayscale flooring walls in the ceiling because

I’m lazy and Grays scale is pretty hard to mess up so to make it a little bit prettier I added some green plants with orange pots I then wrote out some engineering gibberish which basically says hey let’s make the building not fall over after adding these circumference of structural columns my

Challenge was to create floor plans that hid them inside partition walls rather than having them stick out in total I designed three units and mirrored them to make six per floor there’s two full circle units with two bedrooms and four half circle units with one bedroom each

One by one I added wool markings and signs so I can tell where I want furniture and then I replaced them after I forgot to furnish a bathroom I stacked it all the way up but leaving the parapets up top to leave room for the rooftop equipment now you can only get

So much inspiration from one exploration so I felt it was warranted to explore another Vancouver Tower this time down towards Stanley Park so I see this building this is a new building it’s not complete I want to walk around the base because I walked by it earlier and it looked really cool

This one is called Al Bernie named because it’s on alurn street it’s pretty cool on the back it looks like someone took a block of clay and cut out a corner and the front has an incredible curve but I’m here to check out the base so it’s definitely still under construction

I want to see if I can maybe sneak in this bottom part cool path going around here these really interesting supports I guess they are on a diagonal going up so that does make sense back here kind of this cool art they also have this really

Cool rock wait is it hold on okay it is glass I thought I was being tricked I thought it was a mirror so you got a big sidewalk here you’ve got some shorter Greenery along the front you have your vents because there’s a parking garage under there of course you need ventilation

You have some bike racks on this corner this is going down into the parking garage I’m assuming there’s lots of greenery around so I will do something similar and then you have the courtyard down here really interesting it feels like you’re surrounded it’s really interesting piece of art of course down

Here you have the actual entrance to the building lots of cool mirrors this is really cool you can come all the way up here have a seat this is nice you’re almost a full floor above you have two sections of columns you have the diagonal and the

Vertical and then they combine into one and continue diagonally up here you have these connections going left to right of course for some of that lateral stability that’s pretty important and then you have the big columns which are kind of hard to see that right there

That’s a column you got one right here got that one and then you have two more down there okay so I think that gives me a pretty good idea for what I want to do as a base so let’s go keep exploring big rock now that I had inspiration and a list I

Explored the neighborhood to get a feel for how people interacted with their surroundings there’s a lot of interesting restaurants some murals on older buildings Alleyways being the unsung hero of the city plenty of lush trees courtesy of the rain and people scurrying about their day call me Sergeant cuz it’s time to

Build the base but not just any base I wanted to keep the curved theme going but let me tell you it’s a lot more difficult when the world is made of Cubes the idea was to make a wave shaped overhang similar to the alberie tower oh

Boy did I just make my life complicated here was the original idea where at ground level it would connect to the left hand side at a 45° angle rotate around some invisible center point until it hit the 45° mark on the other side and then it would have an inflection

Point where it would perfectly align with the 56 block mark and attached to the other Tower with a perfect tangent unfortunately this is mathematically impossible I quickly realized I could keep the left Circle but had to change the radius on the right this time the math was correct but something else

Wasn’t I tried to build another impossible curve got frustrated ended up modeling it in Excel to get the X and Y coordinates for Block placement but surprise surprise it didn’t work still not realizing my mistake I tried to change the entire thing into a sine wave once again it didn’t work then I

Realized ized what was wrong in my original sketch the left Circle for the ground curve and the right Circle for the existing Tower were aligned looking at the tower they clearly shouldn’t be this drawing is showing the towers sticking out over the sidewalk by 12 blocks so to solve this problem all I

Had to do was shift the right Circle so the bottom was in line with the center of the left now looking at the tower it makes a lot more sense I adjusted the formulas to account for the world being made of 1 by one by one blocks got my

Formulas and then it took about 30 seconds I outlined the walls added structural columns and the lateral frame added human scaled lights over the sidewalk for pedestrians finished the arch planted some Greenery and started to build the back wall inside my idea was to create a lobby with a front desk

Places to sit and a waiting area for the elevators after making a basic layout I finished the wall with a grayscale gradient going from a dark gray all the way into the same white used for the rest of the tower it was slowly starting to take shape but there is still a big

Problem to solve I knew I wasn’t going to be able to connect the tower fa saw all the way to the bottom without making some weird structure I considered making it like New York Central Park Tower with the large can lever but this is a quarter of the tower we’re talking about

And I could hear my Structural Engineering Professor screaming at me all the way from Ottawa so like any realistic construction project I didn’t touch it for about 2 months not because of this problem it’s more due to my track record of never finishing 95% of my skyscraper bases but I managed to

Guilt myself back into figuring it out so I came up with whatever this is is it strong enough probably just keep in mind this structure isn’t actually holding up the entire circle in Structural Engineering we use these things called tributary areas to figure out how much

Of a load each structural member has to hold I didn’t calculate anything because I’m not insane but keep in mind a large portion of the load will be carried by the sheer wall rather than this contraption next I designed the Eastern base the design requirements included underground parking so I created an

Entrance from the street additionally according to the building code of Canada at least one of your egress staircases must exit directly Outdoors so I added a Corridor leading outside I proceeded to make some wacky design because I was exhausted and used the bottom corner to create a shop called Alpine’s Pine

Emporium no not Alfred’s it belongs to me while continuing to be exhausted and just wanting to get this thing done I added rooftop HVAC with stair and elevator overruns and then immediately got roasted with a request to change the East facade to be fair I did ask for a

Revision from the city planner and it does kind of look like an exhaust vent so taking inspiration from the boxy Tower base of Vancouver’s tallest building I created a light blue facade with horizontal slats to allow sunlight in when it’s low in the sky and block it

During the middle of the day by doing this you get solar heat gains when you need them one final touch was to make the flat bottom of the tower into a wave to create some distinct separation one block two blocks a couple slabs throw on some trap doors and would you look at

That after eight long months of brainstorming iterating exploring building and Furnishing I had finished the tower but you wouldn’t believe who was wasn’t there to see the final result guess where Alfred was not in Everton could tell you that much turns out his super strength Pine was just a hollowed

Out log filled with concrete even worse news Everton had an earthquake during the construction and every single building using his super strength Pine collapsed so guess who got chased out of Everton and guess who’s the new owner of this brand new skyscraper this guy The Lumberjack named Alfred who escaped from

Everton 6 months ago has been spotted in the mountains of India if you see this man do not approach and call 9911 immediately he is considered to be highly dangerous and does Not