from san francisco's golden gate bridge and sutro tower
to seattle space needle and the empire state building
architectural models rarely look as elegant in their simplicity and
construction as the kit's designed by studio for
metropolitan craft model maker larry srinivasan takes
iconic buildings and landmarks from the bay area and beyond and shrinks
them down into beautiful laser-cut miniatures
that capture the essence of their structure and construction
we recently visited larry's san francisco workshop to learn how he
designs his architectural model kits and see his
experiments in miniatures fabrication and joinery
i studied architecture in art school and i worked in some architecture firms for
a number of years and then i i kind of got tired of
working at a computer every day and i wanted to build things so
i got a job as a woodworker in a in a cabinet shop
and uh he taught me basically all the woodworking techniques and joints and
things and i really enjoyed it and i just liked
working with my hands and working with wood a lot
so then i went back to architecture again
and then discovered model making which was a great
kind of combination of woodworking and architecture
so i started doing professional model making
for a while yeah and at the scale and these are many different scales of
course because these buildings are all different sizes you know
some hundreds of feet tall you're working
with materials that are very accessible and familiar whether it's corrugated
cardboard or eighth inch thick sheet ply i like using sort of humble materials
too like like plywood and cardboard and and sort of elevating them
by by cutting them really precisely and
making them into something really
special
yeah i was um interested in you know how to how to depict a building
um i i wanted to depict it in more of a structural way
rather than having a skin of windows to show the floor plates
because that's kind of how we associate this
design with the transamerica building it makes it more fun to put together too
when it's um a series of plates each plate is is
representative of a floor so there's actually um
44 floors in the in the tower the the bottom the base of it is is a
a few stories high and it has a truss system
which is it was all built for earthquake safety
so there's this large truss at the bottom
and just tapers up to the top into a point
but it's definitely an iconic san francisco
building and it's a beautiful structure
people instantly recognize it as part of san francisco i heard the
real estate up here is pretty expensive
there's an elegance in your work uh it's going to take the sutro
tower where you you are layering it looks like you know
two sheets of eighth inch ply but there are interesting
angles here like sutro has it bows out the bottom it's a triangular shape
but the way you've designed you know the the center pieces
to interlock and press fit right right must have taken a lot of trial and error
yeah it did um in in concept i knew that it would work
to have this kind of a joint with um a double lap joint i guess they
call them but it's um it took a a few tries to get
the the geometry right and to get the sizes
right i had to i was i was using a lot of my
architectural training to do the the the drafting behind it to get it
right but the good thing is once you figure it
out in in 2d and a good cad file it's your your set
and you can you can cut them as many times as you as you need to
so lasers do vary a little bit between machines um
the kerf size which is the the size of the cut
and how much the how much wood it takes out
that varies a little bit but
generally it's very it's an extremely consistent um
process and i've really enjoyed getting into kind of
the the really microscope the micro details of it and how it all
fits together
yeah this is actually the only etched brass model that i'm currently making
it's um it's all made out of folded brass sheets
and the the parts are all chemically etched
so it comes as a flat sheet about 24 inches
wide and it was a great way to to show all the different trusses the
delicate lines of the trusses and uh i try to
capture really as much more it's it's like another level of
detail of the tower that you can show um a little
the next sort of level of detail for the tower beyond
just uh straight pieces of wood these are all triangular
um sections after all the brass work is done it's
it's gold basically in color and then i just
airbrush all the white parts of it and then tape it off and airbrush the
red parts all of those different surfaces are
rendered here on that one so that's kind of the
the most accurate sutro that i make so it's kind of an involved piece it
takes a couple of weeks to make it when you look
at something like the golden gate bridge the tower for
example there are publicly available blueprints
that you can use for reference but when you're modeling this
you know do you look at the way it was put together that steel and then
you try to align your pieces in that way as well
yeah exactly i i try to keep the um
the construction of the model in a way as true to the spirit of the
the the original structure as i can um and really use a lot of the same
structural um qualities uh in the golden gate
bridge it's a it's a beautiful art deco kind of design that uses sort of
these layers of layers of veneer on the side and these are
layers of steel really in in the original
and so it's it's a it's kind of like something i i
like to translate the real structure into a into something
that makes sense as a as a skill model too
i kind of i kind of i'm attracted to these sort of working structures you
know that they're they're kind of these background
structures of in in the city that they're not always seen as as objects
you know to to look at and but they're they're really beautiful structurally
and so like the scaffolding and the cranes
um and they they uh yeah they have a lot of
different details to them that i think adds a lot of visual interest i
notice on the back wall here you've put on display the individual
pieces that make up some of these kits um are
these kind of your explorations and in the way you've put these models
together can you walk me through some of these
yeah sure yeah um yeah i just wanted to do like i did a few joint studies
when i'm developing a new model i i um first test out all the different
connections and a lot of these joint studies are
are glueless joints like the the billboard kit which you did
um this one here i wanted to have people be able to put it together
without any glue so um i kind of developed a few
joinery techniques i guess you could say to like
connecting a dowel to a piece of plywood with these tiny nipples that bite into
the wood and hold it there so it's pretty
effective for a model um and another example is like
these cables um the tongue is just slightly tapered so it
it can fit into the hole and and just snug in there
so so that way it kind of also helps in the case of any kind of
variance in the cutting it gives you a little leeway
so that the the wood the wood has a little give to it and it
allows it to do that that's great and so your preference is press fit
and i kind of like it yeah yeah when you can
this gantry model on the side here you know when i first saw it
looks like a laser cut high power laser cut you know aluminum
but you said this is just like card stock it is
yeah it's just um simple cardstock that i got from a framing
matte supplier um and what i liked about it was that it
it has the color throughout the thickness
a lot of a lot of cardstock is only colored on the
surface but this one since i'm cutting through it so many times i wanted the
thing to look like a solid material and uh
and it worked out pretty well it's that's probably the lightest weight
model that i make it's it's um it was made actually as a a promotional
gift for um a real estate development that they're doing
around the in this area of the crane it's like one of the icons of the city
and what's also interesting is that unlike like the billboard here
you're not piecing corners you're actually bending flat sheets so
yeah it's like a living hinge design is that what it's called it is yeah it's a
living hinge you could call it and um basically using
the laser with very low power score lines to just relieve uh
corners so that you can bend it then and um it'll it'll bend a few times
eventually you know if you keep bending it back and forth it's going to break
but but for but for the purposes of a model
again it's um it's pretty effective and
they can stand up to a pretty good amount of abuse
i mean the very design itself of it being this truss work
is supposed to build rigidity and structure to it
exactly yeah with every new model you do do you try to explore
a different type of joinery does it feel like an iterative process
yeah i like to every material has its own
characteristics and i've tried to experiment around with different
materials um and kind of listen to how how it wants to be kind of
you know treated or manipulated or or designed and
like each each tool in the in the shop has its own
um advantages like for example this i did a series of little towers
just to show different processes and this is just
acrylic sheet bending
and this is just blocks using the wood the wood shop it's using a table
saw basically just showing what kind of different
models you can make based on the material and and
this is a 3d printed one and 3d printing the advantage is that
you can do these double curves so i wanted to have
a design that sort of exploits the you know advantages
of that machine yeah and sometimes even when you're
talking about you know wood and paper it's still mixed media
like this model here of the hollywood sign you're
saying this is a relatively new one but it's
yeah i see corrugated cardboard and some laser-cut ply
um yeah but also very elegant i love the kind of topographical look you have here
for the hillside yeah um yeah it's
it took me a while to figure out how to how to do something i
i started the project knowing i wanted to incorporate the
three-dimensionality of the hill how the letters sort of navigate this slope
and i was looking at a lot of existing hollywood memorabilia and it's usually a
flat depiction but uh in this one you can
actually see how the the letters were arranged on the
hill according to the slope and
um it changes its angles and when you look at it in different
ways yeah and even the way you have the letters
um pressed into the corrugation yeah right you're taking advantage of
that too yeah that's um the corrugation it has a was it it
offered a really nice opportunity to just um
be able to slide the uh these stakes in and press fit them in so
um i'm glad it worked out it's so brilliant
like you could have very easily you know 3d printed the side of the hill right
or or use glue but the fact that this happy marriage of the material
and the scale of the model yeah i like it when those kind of things happen
yeah yeah speaking of scale i know you've done
this golden gate bridge one tower you sell these towers in
you know the etsy store and sf loma store but you also make
a full-size golden gate bridge yeah that's correct actually uh
um i had a store um approach me about that
i was already selling the towers by themselves and
a store on valencia street asked me if i would
consider doing a full span of the bridge and they had a 10 foot
or 11 foot store window so that was sort of the
space i had to work with and so i scaled it up and
um designed the cable structure for that with the uh
with the streets and everything kind of plugs together also
wow i see some of those pieces are cut out you're in the process of putting one
of these together right now yeah i am yeah i'm just
working on it right now actually i just laser cut these the other day
starts with uh just eight inch plywood and then i
i pre-finish i pre-finish the wood with international orange and
and then i do all the laser cutting and then all the assembly after that
so but um it the parts are actually kind of delicate before they're
assembled but once you get the whole structure together
it's actually very strong and it supports itself really well
what are the other projects you have kind of percolating your brain
things that you want to tackle in the architectural world or otherwise
yeah i try to keep a good bunch of projects going on right now
okay well this is a a model for a steinway piano grand piano
and it's all done with laser-cut wood and
laser-cut plastic for the keyboard
i actually measured a piano and made some drawings for it there's
certain elements of a piano which have to be
the same on every piano but there's some elements that you can
also play around with and design so i was looking at this kind of curve
motif here and i put it into the
this is the music shelf and and the legs i wanted to do sort of like a a peg with
these branches on it give it sort of a round look and
um and for the the prop stick i i also wanted to
have a curve again because the piano has all these beautiful curves to it
so emphasizing that then on the as another little
maybe acoustic experiment i was looking at the interior of the lid because
that's a reflective surface for the instrument so i thought maybe
this could be a way to spread the sound out or
broadcast the sound more
so just looking at different design ideas for
uh variations on a piano it's built uh in a similar way to the how a piano is
built um there's a there's a cast iron
harp where all the strings there's a lot of string tension on those so
that's that's sort of the heart of it and then these curved pieces
all these just really great showcase of your wonderful
design sense the elegance in your construction and for
you know people who live in these cities whether it's san francisco or
seattle these are wonderful mementos of the places that they live in
thank you so much for sharing with us thanks for the process well thanks for
coming by i really appreciate you checking them out so great to meet you
larry nice to meet you too