# Looking again at Festival Hall’s roofline

The round windows are one of the Hall’s defining features. In the photographs, heavy moldings rise over their heads and reconnect between the windows. Our earlier model made that part of the building look too much like a plain cylinder.

This pass gives those windows deeper framing and a more distinct upper cornice, while retaining the thin, continuous line at the foot of the dome. We also replaced bead-like horizontal joints with flatter courses and added architectural framing at the dome’s foot and crown. The dome shape, window positions and entrance layout stay in place. [Frontal photograph (P001)](https://www.loc.gov/item/2013649781/), [oblique photograph (P019)](https://www.loc.gov/item/2013649761/).

The photographs guide the relationships between these parts. They do not give us measured profiles, exact depths or a complete rear elevation. Those details remain interpretations, and the new framing does not fill in the missing sculptural figures.

Sol implemented the related architectural changes together; Astra compared the source photographs, set the limits and integrated the result. Most new detail lives in the separate ornament package, so the main Hall file can retain its existing detail. Our local review tool now offers a short upper-Hall sweep that changes angles and lighting within one loaded scene. That avoids reloading the entire ensemble for each view; we have not measured a performance or token saving.

The high-angle review caught something the front views missed: the first crown moldings looked like separate floating strips. We revised their connections so they read as curved courses. This is why the review includes views from above as well as the familiar view from the Cascades.

This batch also reached a provisional check on how much geometry the explorer keeps loaded. Inspection found repeated, identical vertex records in the colonnades. Sharing those records preserves the triangles and their surface attributes while making the same model smaller. It is a data cleanup, not a reduction in architectural detail; broader loading improvements will still be needed as the reconstruction grows.

The [Progress page](/progress) records the latest work alongside the remaining gaps. This is another step toward a more complete building, not a claim that Festival Hall or the whole fair is finished.