The White Stuff

A three dimensional mandala, a work of lace and light, a fragile skeleton hanging weightless between the sea and sky, that is Ivory City by Tosha Tyran based on an idea by Lumiere Noir.

If there is one point in the hyperverse that might be defined as its spiritual heart, this build is it. 

The location of Ivory City has not always been the same, and the configuration of the buildings has evolved over the years, but the heart of the matter has never changed. 

Love and community and a passion for prims.

It hangs on the horizon, a city by the sea, a campus in and of the circle, but a circle of infinite variety.

It's a work of art that aims to give you the tools you need to make your own works of art, primwise. The build is laid out in a series of pavilions that take you through all the basics of prims. 

Detailing all the different shapes of prims, and all the ways a prim can be modified, cut, sheered, hollowed out, colored, replicated, and on and on.

Vince Frost was one of the first 300 people to join Second Life, in 2003, using the name Lumiere Noir. A dedicated educator, naturally his first instinct in SL was to teach, encourage, and inspire people - and so he built a place called the Ivory Tower of Knowledge.

NPC Vince and NPC Lumiere greet you at the Ivory City

It was a place where you could experience all the possibilities that the prim offered. The twisted torus, the sliced cube, the hollow sphere, and all the rest of it. 

He tried to demystify all the hidden and not-so-hidden controls and options available in the Viewer.

Overcoming all those little hurdles that can block a person's creativity, by answering those questions we all wanted to know but were to shy to ask about, he made us all better and bolder builders.

Lumiere met Tosha Tyran, and they became a virtual couple in SL. When Licu Rau founded Craft Grid together with  his partner Tao Quan, Tosha and Lumiere formed the other half of the quartet. Naturally, Lumi ported a version of his Tower to the new grid. Here he is back in a blog post from 2011, with a wooden version of the tower on sim Sophia, in Craft. 

He told me that one of the sad things about SL in 2011 was the fact that the SL version of Ivory Tower had become something of a magnet for griefers who would hassle people and be obnoxious to those who just wanted to come and learn. It's something we in opensim tend to take for granted, how peaceful our existences are - there are so few griefers here that we know the worst offenders by name. 

This iteration of the sim Sophia on Craft is gone now, but Lumi's desire to really lay out all the basics of building in a user-friendly 3D manual did not diminish, and he worked on it for about two years in tandem with his partner Tosha. 

It is Tosha Tyran we have to thank for the structures you see here today. After Lumi's unexpected death in April 2015, she continued with the project, for a time on grid Sanctuary, bringing to completion these beautiful palaces of understanding that persist on Craft to this day.

That makes this build extra special. A sort of Taj Mahal of prims. Many have commented on the cathedral-like quality of the building. It is a repository of memory - not just our recollections of a good man, but also our own first steps in creating things in the virtual environment.

HG Address: craft-world.org:8002:Ivory City