From the old photograph, she knew the sawtooth roof faced south for optimal light. She drew a single clerestory profile, then arrayed it twenty times. She extruded walls from the foundation lines, guessing the brick thickness from the width of the shadow in the 2002 imagery. The water tower was a cylinder with a flared top—she lofted it from three ellipses. The loading dock became a 3D solid, its canopy supported by columns she copied from a mill in a neighboring town that was still standing.
But the magic wasn't in the modeling. It was in the layering . google earth and autocad
Mira created a layer called "GHOST_2002" and gave it a faded blue color, 30% transparency. She overlaid the Google Earth screenshot as a georeferenced underlay. Then she created another layer: "CONJECTURE." On it, she drew the things the satellite never saw—the boiler room in the basement, the manager's office with its bay window, the fire escape that the photograph showed half-hidden behind a tree. From the old photograph, she knew the sawtooth
For years, Mira had been an archaeologist of the invisible. Her specialty wasn't digging with a trowel, but stitching together the ghost layers of a city using two very different pieces of software: Google Earth and AutoCAD. The water tower was a cylinder with a