The idea was to build a city made entirely out of single basic prims that would still work as an immersive 3D space even though the objects themselves were very simple. Only cubes and cylinders, in other words. And not complex structures made out of many cubes and cylinders either. Just a basic big cube/cylinder for the construct itself, with a couple of extras for roof and base (and floors in some cases).

I wanted to do this since, after many years of building in SL, I had come to the conclusion that what actually made the 3D object become convincing  was not the volume by itself but the texture that was put on it. In other words, put a bad texture on the most detailed mesh object imaginable and it won't work. Instead put a good texture on a cube and you are more than likely to get a result.

The textures I used are blueprints of facades of old buildings that I found through a google image search. These are placed on the cube/cylinder buildings, some of which are also semi-transparent, and some of which can also be entered.

And then there is a big city plan placed on the ground.

And then the whole city is also faux-reflected, a very simple trick I got by duplicating all the buildings and flipping them vertically.

And that is pretty much it. Except that it isn't.

What makes the city really work is the special climate, an amazing sky preset created by Torley, called Cobraring 1. This preset colorizes the sky and the city to these wonderful orange, blue and green hues that make the place what it is.
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Blueprint City is probably the most successful thing, in terms of visitor responses, that I have built since my erstwhile island Syncretia. While during the early days of the 2015 re-build there were a lot of visitors to the sim - especially thanks to having become an editor's pick in the SL destinations guide - these days the visitor numbers have of course thinned out. It is thus noteworthy that the visitors that show up almost always go straight to Blueprint City, where they usually tend to spend a lot of time. Which is something that makes me very happy since it bears out my premise that ultimately it is the texture that counts, and not the complexity of the 3D object... ;-)

Blueprint City exists both in SL and on ShapeShifter island on the OpenSim. I first built this at ShapeShifter and later imported it into SL - minus one important component, a mosque. That one had to stay behind due to SL prim restrictions.