SWEET FIFTEEN

 This visit is starting to wind down. Family Xmas was amazing, but the two overseas branches have gone back and my two grandsons spending the next week with their mum. So I am focusing on basic domestic routines here at my retirement flat. Then it will be back to Dubai for a final 3 months stint before the permanent move.

I took a long walk this morning. Cold but clear. Passed the porch that was under construction during my last visit. It's starting to weather in very nicely. Made a hearty vegetable omelette for lunch, with a cup of frothy coffee. Also explored a possible outing to visit a church or two. Hope I can fit that in. (didn’t happen)

 

A new year begins. This will be the one where I take up formal residence in England again. Inevitably I find myself reflecting on the 45 years away, and the 15 years of my blog www.grevity.blogspot.com  Blogging has helped to focus my work beyond the commercial limits that most Revit users set themselves. Drawing by hand was never like this. You drew for work and you also drew/painted/wrote books for pleasure and to engage with a broader audience. (ie not just talking about drawing technique)

It has always puzzled me that more people don’t see this “new way of drawing” as a general tool for thinking and communicating beyond the world of commercial projects.  Here I mean “drawing” in the broadest sense of using images and models as part of an exploration of ideas. It has always included “data”, embedded information. Drawing is never “just drawing” but the advent of BIM has given an extra stimulus to integrating visual, numerical, textual ... knowledge and wisdom to solve problems and share ideas. I store a folder of the images and text for each post on my OneDrive cloud and here is the set for 2025, which has been my second most prolific year for number of posts (after 2012)

 

There have been definite phases to my blogging journey.  Early on I was mostly exploring the capabilities of Revit itself. The blog was a personal diary recording that journey and motivating me to think about it more carefully. Then I was sucked into Zach Kron’s parametric pumpkin competition and began to attend Revit Technology Conferences. This was a wonderful community for me to connect with others in the international BIM world. 

 

 

Along came Project Soane which Paul Aubin encouraged me to join. It became an obsession for two years, long after the competition had ended.

 

 

The idea of voluntary collaborations with users across the globe took root and morphed into Project Notre Dame soon after the tragic fire. So many wonderful friendships grew out of those two endeavours.

 

Then came Covid. We all have our different views about that time. To me it was a mixed experience. Fear at first, then an opportunity to spend more time on my blog and related explorations, then sadness at how lockdowns had caused so much damage, long after they had served any useful purpose. In Dubai it was better in that people had to fund their own survival as work contracted. Many went back home. Others trusted that the economy would bounce back which it did fairly quickly without incurring vast debt.

 

 

I transitioned to a hybrid work routine, having already passed 70 and voluntarily reduced to a four day week. Props to GAJ for allowing me to do this, for paying me out on my salary arrears and gratuity over the past year or so, which has allowed me to set up a retirement plan, belatedly.

 

The latest phase of my blogging is still based on Revit and Historical Buildings but tries also to reflect on life as I post to Linked In several times a week and collect 3 or 4 of these snapshots into blog posts that can be read as a sequence stretching back 15 years.

 

 

I will continue with my Hampshire Churches project, retiring to that county in April, and hopefully make more of my work over the past 15 years accessible through the website that Daniel Hurtubise has helped me to set up.  www.thewaywebuild.io  many students of architecture have contacted me over the years and found this site a useful resource for their projects. Studies of other buildings can be found on this blog, and the Revit files were uploaded to an ACC hub last year. I just need to tidy things up and export them to the file formats we use on the WWB site as free downloads. These are non-editable. If you want native Revit, you will have to prove yourself as a contributor to the work.

 

 

Neither Daniel nor I will gain any income from this work, and at some point I will need to find a way of funding AEC software licenses. But I’m determined to continue, and to share the results openly. Apart from that. Happy New Year to everyone. A Luta Continua.

 

XMAS UK

 

Side entrance to the War Memorial Park. This was on the way back from buying milk. An avenue of trees with pollarding guides the eye to focus on a bandstand with clock and sheet metal roof.. Was any of this ever functional?

I don't much care because it works so well as part of the composition of this public Green space that I walk through already daily. Looking forward to observing the dramatic passage of the seasons, something that neither Zimbabwe nor Dubai have.

Those warm climates have been great but after 45 years away I'm ready for the drama of Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter again.

 

 

 

Work carried out in bits and pieces over Christmas. Mostly early morning sessions on the laptop before my son came to pick me up for the family activities of the day.

Still on the Privett church. Firstly some tweaks to the tower openings. Tracery and louvres, approximated. Then moving inside to add the large arches between tower and nave, nave and Chancel. The west door is in development, to ensure a convincing representation from outside, from inside and in plan view.

I have added arches striding down the nave sides, pews inside the nave, raised floor and altar in the chancel, and a first pass roof truss. I need at least one more session before taking a crack at the site context.

 

 

 

A Christmas gift to myself. Two books I found in Waterstones on Boxing day. One by the renowned Philip A Gaches, a book I knew about but was thrilled to see available in my local bookshop. Browsing through for the first time it doesn't disappoint, nuggets of wisdom and practical advice made very accessible.

The cathedral book is longer, and I have barely scratched the surface, but I think it will be a valuable addition to my library, now mostly located in Basingstoke, although there are still a few books in Dubai.

 

 

 

The interior of Holy Trinity is shaping up quite nicely. Not finished by any means, but almost ready to put on ice while I look at the context topo link. I am impressed with how Blomfield has mastered his craft. Balancing the solids and voids, the plain surfaces and the ornamented accents, setting up rhythms, playing with earth tones and textures.

I just have to keep going like this until I've brought all nine of his new-build churches up to a similar level, then reflect on the patterns such a data set suggests. I don't know if I will be able to convey the embodied knowledge that comes from undertaking a project like this. All I can say is, have a go yourself. That's the only way to really grasp what the work of a particular architect means to you. Collect data, images, descriptions. Visit actual buildings, make sketches, models, drawing sets. Write your own thoughts, repeatedly.

It's a wonderful way to learn.

 

 

PRIVETT SHEET

 

Privett and Basing Park toposolids extracted with Forma and brought into Revit. Saved as a separate file and linked into the Hampshire Churches map. Here I can explore various overlays in 2D and 3D to identify Basing Park as it was in 1900, reveal the folds in the landscape, see how the House and the church face each other across a valley.

This is the conception of a Victorian gin distiller who employed Blomfield for the church. Fascinating stuff. I do enjoy this work. So far I have placed the church and a few trees. We will be setting up a sheet soon.

 

Holy Trinity, Privett in its setting. Image softened with Pixlr. Looking south, and you can see the sea on the horizon. I don't think this is possible in real life. Maybe from the top of the bell tower on a clear day.

 

 

Half of the sheet layout for Holy Trinity, Privett. Yes, I know, I’m cramming an awful lot into a sheet but that’s the point of comparative analysis. Try to encapsulate each church onto a single page, then you can flip through those pages and start to get a feel for the totality of a particular body of work. In this case Churches in “greater Hampshire” by Sir Arthur Blomfield. In the top half are assembly views of a Revit family that represents the church within the larger project (a map of Hampshire)

Below three perspectives. One interior, then a view looking across the road, and finally a high-level shot looking the other way. None of this is finished, but it’s quite far advanced. It would be good to have a lych-gate family, perhaps a couple of families to represent typical designs. Most of these churches have one. Also a wall around the churchyard and some headstones, again maybe 3 or 4 types.

 

The other half of the sheet for Holy Trinity, Privett. I cropped off all the empty space which will be filled at some point (text, photographs, details ?) What remains is to maps. On the right and ordinance survey map from 1900 overlayed with the Forma/Revit contours as a smaller square. Roads and streams as model lines from the mapping stage of my study.

It would seem that Privett lies on the watershed with water draining North towards the Kennet/Thames rivers which lead to London and the estuary which was so important to England's trade over the centuries. To the south it drains via the river Meon into the Solent Estuary another major historic waterway with major ports at Southampton and Portsmouth. Contour labeling doesn't work on the linked file, but spot elevations do. Hence the levels around the edge of the square. Basing Park is prominent in the top half with the village of Privett towards the bottom left of the contoured area.

The image on the left zooms in on the village, with the church in place, some indicative trees (apparently lining a drainage ditch between fields) and the beginnings of some other buildings. Farmsteads, vicarage, almshouses. Nor real high street with shops. This is a somewhat dispersed rural village as far as I can tell. More work needed.