Concept

My skyscraper for the contest is inspired by ancient Roman and Greek buildings. I started with the question of "what if they knew how to build skyscrapers back then?".

The initial idea was to create a skyscraper which could fit some of the most commonly known public places from these classical cultures into one building. With a forum, bath house, several temples, a marketplace and an arena!

Process

I'm not a builder. This is the first time I ever built something this big, and it took a lot of figuring out. It's the first time I made good use of World-Edit while building. The first part of this build was one of the pillars, inspired by Greek Ionic pillars.



When I had a good size picked for the pillars, I started with a big circle and placed them around it. I went on from there. :D

In the process of creating this build I had one major set-back. I had the skyscraper almost finished when I made a fatal World-Edit related mistake which caused my skyscraper to be gone entirely, and I took Phrozen's entire server down in the process. (Well done, me! -_-') Luckily the world-save with everyone else's builds was fine, but my skyscraper was gone for good!

Here's a screenshot of the first version of my skyscraper from right before I managed to make it disappear:



Though, I did not give up, and started rebuilding the skyscraper in a new single-player world that same evening. And I think it turned out even better the second time around, since I was already able to fix some mistakes I had made in the first version of my build.

The trickiest part about this build for me was learning how to make good use of World-Edit, and to make round shapes and arches work in a very cubic world. Especially the stairs were hard to get right! I'm quite pleased with the final results, though I was not able to include all of my initial interior ideas.

The Skyscraper

The skyscraper ended up with a ground floor with a bath/pool, 9 middle floors and a Colosseum-inspired gladiator arena on top. The arena has a hidden entrance under the seating which leads to some beds and cells for gladiators and/or wild animals, zombies or other hostile mobs! Could this be a good spleef arena?

There is a big glass circle in each floor, allowing sunlight to light most of the building. This is inspired by a so-called oculus, "eye of the gods" which some old Roman temples including the Pantheon have.

Visuals

The first few screenshots were made using Sonic Ether's Unbelievable Shaders. This wasn't easy, since I work on a 6 years old laptop which does not work well with shaders in Minecraft. I touched up the first two screenshots in Photoshop. All the other screenshots were taken in vanilla Minecraft with the base texture pack.

If anyone would help me with any additional fancy screenshots/renders that would be greatly appreciated! :D

Additional

A big thank you to PMC members Phrozenbit, Tizona and Vovalium for giving advice and feedback throughout the building process.

And apologies to Phrozen and all the members on the RedSignal server for almost corrupting the entire world-save with my stupid World-Edit derps. Won't happen again! ^_^' (The reason I was building on the server in the first place is because I wanted to be around in case anyone needed my help creating regions and adding new members.)

Anyway, thank you for reading! I hope you enjoy viewing this build more than I did the process of making it (the heartbreak when I realized it was gone ;-;). I'm glad I was able to upload a finished skyscraper in time for the contest! :D