I imagine you get questions like this all the time, but I need a start-to-finish tutorial on modeling a building from scratch. A couple of photos are attached. I want to learn how to model the building and texture it, how to place in geographically, the whole works. Is there a tutorial out there for the complete beginner?
I have exact dimensions of the building.

I want to model the changes in my town and nearby military installation over about a 180 year period, showing roughly 100 buildings as they come and go over the years. Is there a nifty way to do this? I'm thinking of having one layer per year but this would involve lots of duplication: a building that exists for 50 years would be repeated on 50 separate layers. I obviously wouldn't have to do every single year but there would still be a lot of layers and duplicates. Is there a better way?

Also, I'd like to have a slider that shows the years from 1840 to present, and let the user slide it to animate the way the town changed over the years, or select a specific year to see the town at that time. Make sense? Is that possible?

Thanks