The Isambard

The Isambard is a recolour of the Brunel set in a darker red brick. Like the Brunel, this theme was also named after the pioneering Victorian engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel. As some of his greatest achievements involved the use & development of industrial strength brick, decorative cast iron, viaducts and bridges, I have surrounded the building with a double archway to commemorate this - although the arches do not drop, I am happy with this during my own gameplay, but whether you leave the house like this is entirely up to you and your own particular style of playing.

Let me also warn you now that some of the droppable gable sections will bleed in places when the walls are up and they are visible - that is completely and utterly down to my not having grasped the workings of z buffers yet. Again, if they annoy you too much or you cannot find anything to place anything behind them to hide the bleed, feel free to move them / delete them - this house is for YOUR game after all; I just built it this way.

Brunel was an industrial visionary who also possessed an artists eye for the landscape, and when planning his works, his designs always complemented the surroundings they were in. He was also keen to make his structures aesthetically pleasing as well as functional, and there is no finer demonstration of this than in the wrought iron arches and other details of Paddington Railway Station, London, UK. Even the filigree patterned holes stamped out of the arches had a function - to hang cleaning gantries from. Cleaning must have been a dangerous job to have, dangling high above all those steam trains & stone platforms, yet it was done very regularly - with no recorded accidents.

The Isambard - 4 Sim Lane (house only)

This house is for 4 Sim Lane and the house zip does not contain any objects, walls or floors. You will need to download, unzip and install all the object, wall & floor zips from below before playing this house, otherwise you will get the dreaded "missing objects" box and the house will be incomplete - and may even crash your game.

Bay window with flowers that never need watering

A selection of trees in planters.

The illuminated trees will require the Party Lights fence download from the official site. Find it under Build mode / Walls. None of these ever need watering and can be placed indoors or on a second floor to make a secluded roof garden.

Selection of droppable planters, decorative steps and fence.

None of these ever need watering and can be placed indoors or on a second floor to make a secluded roof garden. Please note that the sims cannot walk on or through the steps. Thanks to the awesome talent of Cooptwin The Amazing And Magnificent, the medium and high planter pieces are droppable - you won't see them when played with walls cutaway or down. See more of Cooptwin's work at Another #%*& Sim Site http://www.angelfire.com/retro/vinylp_ants/Stuff.html

Selection of Topiaries

- these can be placed indoors or on a second floor to make a secluded roof garden. Thanks to the awesome talent of Cooptwin The Amazing And Magnificent, the medium and high pieces are droppable - you won't see them when played with walls cutaway or down. Two versions of the Pluto Arch - one with hanging baskets and one without.

Two versions of the Pluto Arch - one with hanging baskets and one without

Sectional bay window (in three pieces)

The bay window is in three pieces, allowing you to make it as large or as small as you like, and has been cloned from the original sectional bay found at The Illustrated Sim http://www.strategyplanet.com/thesims/simsshowcase/illustratedbayhouse.htm

Isambard's life was a hectic sequence of ambitious, high-risk, leading-edge projects involving complex tasks, new technology, people, politics, investors and funding, and throughout his life Isambard never stopped working on projects which called for complex organisational ability: working with clients, creating visionary designs, applying new engineering principles, budgeting and financing, and co-ordinating and motivating people.

The Clifton Suspension Bridge project over the Avon Gorge in Bristol (pictured left, as it stands today) demonstrates all these qualities. It was built at a time of intense competition between ports to retain business and capture substantial growth in trade and economic prosperity. Brunel submitted his radically new design for the bridge (1830) in a competition with Thomas Telford and others. He finally won the design competition but for various reasons it was not built until after his death.

The bridge has many elements from Egyptian style design which was extremely popular at the time, but Isambard's planned sphinxes were sadly omitted from the completed bridge as being too expensive and unnecessary - you can see where they should have sat from the engraving reproduced on the right. One can be fairly sure that were the bridge built during his lifetime, he would have ensured that the money was found for them from somewhere.

The bridge is to this day in constant daily use and is still a spectacular sight from both above on the cliffs and below by boat.

Door, wall buttress, two wall recesses.

I do not know if the door is droppable or not; although I cloned it from the droppable Brunel door, I haven't actually tried this in game yet.

Door no-gap base by Aenigma Sim http://www.strategyplanet.com/thesims/aenigma/index3.shtml and the wall buttress base object is by Marina's Sims http://rt000wy8.eresmas.net/objects/objects.htm Wall recesses cloned from an original base by pktechgirl at the lovely http://www.junipersun.org



Staircase


Walls, floor.


Selection of droppable gable sections, window.

Although I cloned the window (centre above) from the Brunel window, I do not know whether it is droppable or not as I haven't played it in my game yet. The largest gable roof segment comes in two versions - one plain and one with mock windows (the slightly smaller two either side of the window). You can place these sections in any way you like to give the effect of a multi-storey building. As I said above, they may bleed slightly when placed at some rotations - I do apologise for this, but my talents do not yet extend to zbuffers which would rectify this problem. Gable sections idea credit to Ophelia http://www.oph3lia.com/index2.html - although I have modified mine somewhat so that they have all four views and can be placed against walls at any rotation. And thanks to Cooptwin, they are now droppable so that when you play the game in walls down or cutaway modes, they become invisible!

With the Great Eastern project, Brunel had produced something that was at the leading edge of the available technologies of the time. The vision and the design concepts were always pushing ahead, but much needed were ahead of their time - the necessary component materials were not yet available or possible to make (non-degrading flexible material to replace leather fan belting, for example). For this project, he was required by the Great Eastern Company to work with a collaborator, Russell, but Brunel soon felt he was let down by what he saw as Russell's poor management practices. The Great Eastern project hit major financial problems which came to a head as the launch date approached, and Brunel blamed Russell for misuse of funds. Russell seemed to have a better relationship with the press who poured scorn on Brunel. The project went broke, and much of what Brunel needed to complete the project himself was in Russell's hands and a situation of litigation with reputations at stake soon emerged, while Brunel kept trying desperately to regain control of his project.

Isambard's herculean personal interventions secured the launch of the Great Eastern into the Thames - after many attempts needing hydraulic rams. The first launch attempt was a public relations disaster and a human tragedy. Chains snapped on capstans and men died - and although Brunel himself never made this claim in private or in public, there were many rumours of sabotage made by rivals wanting Brunel and his project out of the picture. Soon after a difficult and troublesome launch, and moments after possibly the most famous picture of Brunel was taken, standing dwarfed by the launching chains of the SS Great Eastern (shown below), he collapsed, having had a stroke. He died soon afterwards (1859) and was buried in Kensal Rise Cemetery.

This one engineer in 19th century Britain transformed the landscape and the lives of everyday people by creating and raising what we today would call "venture capital" to build the ideas, devices and systems of new technology - bridges, railways, tunnels, viaducts and ships - that transformed peoples lives and the world as a whole. Inland journeys of hours rather than days became normal. Journies formerly beyond the imagination or reach of the average person were now possible and affordable. The crossing of the Atlantic became safe with the availability of iron-clad, steam driven, screw propelled vessels. Many of his structures and principles are still used to this day - some of which have never been bettered.

These zips were rescued and have been kept safe by Genie and the fine folks at
N99's Preservation of Bandwidth Society

where they can still be requested, if ever needed.

Installation

Unzip to a temporary storage folder, and you must move the files accordingly as below (this assumes your game is installed on your C: drive's "Program Files" folder):

Recolouring

If you would like to redesign or recolor objects from this set, please provide credit on your site and in the object description with a link back to us. Most recolours here are from base items from sites participating in the Recolourers Resource Project, but where I have had specific permission for an item to be cloned for this set, you will need to ask the same permissions from the original designer - these are as follows:

All links to the original site where I have made the recolour from are given.