Goddard Engineering Building


Robert Goddard Engineering Building at Happy Valley University
SimsHost subscribers can download this lot from The Sims 2 at SimsHost by clicking on the image.
Approximately 2.6 megabyte zip file. Community lot, 5x3; flat terrain with full basement.
The building in the download is mostly just the shell with minimal interior outfitting. Includes elevator shafts, stair wells, and bathroom facilities on the second floor.
Use a Clean Installer to filter out game hacks.


If the computer lab at the University of Illinois married the National Air & Space Museum, their children might look something like this!

It really bothered me that there were no classrooms or laboratories on my campuses, so I started working on some buildings to complete the college facilities. It starts with a home for the engineering department with enough space to accommodate classrooms, offices, laboratories and shops.

Named for Robert Goddard, the Father of American Rocketry, the Goddard Engineering Building at Happy Valley University is a four-story monument to the power of steel, reinforced concrete, and glass--a testimonial to the state of the art in civil and architectural engineering.

The basic architecture is a steel-framed building with tilt-wall concrete walls and a white brick veneer, built around a dual elevator core. This is pretty much the standard construction technique for the high-rise buildings at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. The tiered facade over the main entrance echoes the design of the doors in the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

It includes a single fireproof stairwell as part of the structural core. For safety reasons it really ought to have two of these, but the file was already approaching 5 megabytes and I haven't even outfitted a single classroom yet, so I decided that this was a good point to freeze the construction and create a downloadable file. For the same reason, I stopped putting in the windows.

Sims have absolutely no use for classrooms and laboratories, but most of the engineering buildings at the schools I've gone to usually have at least a student lounge facility, and sometimes such niceties as a library, study hall, lunch room, and even a small shop that sells regalia and clothing with the livery of the engineering department. So it would not be out of place to outfit this building with most of the things you would find in a typical downtown lot.

Even a swimming pool in the basement would not be entirely out of place. Engineers like to play in the water. Hydrological test facilities (for water courses, harbors, ship hull testing, and so on) often look like swimming pools; and neutral buoyancy facilities (such as the Weightless Environment Training Facility and the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory at the Johnson Space Center) are swimming pools!

This building would also make a pretty impressive dorm for your campus. If you outfit it as a dorm, be careful not to include too many dorm doors. If you have more than a dozen dorm doors you'll get so many NPC students running around that your game will slow to a snail's pace.

Since there aren't any elevators in The Sims 2, the elevator shafts are empty, but at least you can see where I would put dual freight elevators (laboratory equipment is big and heavy). There are also shafts for four passenger elevators, arranged in gangs of two elevators side-by-side. The open bay next to the side stairs at one end of the building is a nod toward the need for a truck-height loading dock in a building like this.

wow. this is a truly beautiful building. Again, I'm impressed!

Quote:

Named for Robert Goddard, the Father of American Rocketry, the Goddard Engineering Building at Happy Valley University is a four-story monument to the power of steel, reinforced concrete, and glass--a testimonial to the state of the art in civil and architectural engineering.

I hate to disillusion you, but new university buildings don't get named "in honor" of people. They get named for the person who contributed the most bucks toward the construction.

Rose/Miros

Hey! That looks like some of the buildings I've seen at NASA in Houston. (go figure....hehe)

Amazing work Greg!

I've said it before and I'll say it again, Greg you da man. Even if you never used this building it would make your neighborhood view of the campus look better!

Thank you, thank you, thankyouveddymuch! :smilehap:

Yup, I really want to dress up my campus so that when I look at the neighborhood it looks like a real campus. It really throws me out of the story to just see a bunch of houses and dorms surrounding a few shops and a library.

For me, a large part of The Sims is building a little scale model of a town.

The Sim City player in you.

Yup, and being a model railroader for years'n'years before these new-fangled electronic things were invented.

Hmm *sensing a theme* I only had a couple of small layouts as a kid (HO and OO guage?) But I loved going to the Model Railway Club at the park.

I had Lionel trains as a kid; those are O scale.

I didn't really get into it until I was in college, when my roommates and I built an N-scale layout all around the basement of our townhouse. The scenery really wasn't much but it was probably the best-engineered model railroad layout in town!

I still have all the rolling stock squirreled away in boxes somewhere in the Warehouse of Doom.

Lol I don't doubt it for a minute, Greg.

Intrigued by the memories, I checked Google to see if there were any sites about John Allen's famous Gorre and Daphetid model railroad.

Sure enough, there are! See here: http://www.railroadpix.com/rrphotos/Model_Railroads/Logging/

John Allen's creation is probably the peak of the art in model railroading. It was featured many times in every model railroading magazine that I know of. It's so realistic that it makes an appearance in the stock titles for the television show, The Wild Wild West.

For a thousand more links to sites about the Gorre & Daphetid Railroad, check this link to Google.

What a great site. what a cool hobby. World building! The Sims and now Sims 2 is the same kind of fun, not so real in some ways but more real in others ("living" sims) and not so space consuming or expensive.

I was just thinking: I get a lot of attention and feedback from the buildings I put in the Hullabaloo, but also check out all the great stuff the webmasters are making!

I'm working on this week's SimsHost Chronicle (a day late) at the moment, and I keep seeing houses where I'm imitating Liss: "I want it!"

Not to pick on anybody in particular (and certainly not intending to overlook the awesome work of all the folks who are building houses), but hey, look at this one from The Big Brick House!


Log Home with Custom Walls
by The Big Brick House
From an update to be published in SimsHost Chronicle #134

Casey made a set of custom log walls just for this house, and from the looks of the screen shot I'd say it was darn well worth the effort.

It's kind of a shame that The Sims 2 only has one, incredibly steep roof pitch. The shed roof over the loft would work out a lot nicer with a more shallow roof over that section.

I tend not to download houses because as soon as I do I'll want to create a family who would enjoy that house, and suddenly I'm off on another Sims adventure while my star line characters are just hanging out and playing kicky bag until I can get to them. However, our little conversation here gave me the idea of just using them to decorate my neighborhood so that I don't have so many empty lots and unimproved streets in the neighborhood view.

I spend a lot of time just looking at my neighborhood view, watching the hang gliders sail past and the birds dive-bombing all the freshly washed cars on the street while groovin' to the music.