JANE IN THE WOODS

 

Eye-to-eye with Jane Austen this morning as I shop for fresh fruit and veggies in a rare break in the drizzle.

I got a half hour of walking in and got some very useful shopping in. Thai spring rolls, mixed pickles, (gulf style) a jar of garlic paste and Tunisian dates. Reminders of Dubai while revelling in English weather and environment. I miss my colleagues at Godwin Austen Johnson though 😍

Got my first hormone injection on the NHS this week. Took a while, but just in time to maintain continuity.

 

 

This is my local church again. All Saints, Basingstoke. I've been messing about with these street level lancet windows. Only partly parametric right now. The geometry of the top portion is tricky enough without that extra demand.

To get these bevels, the "cut" is replaced by a set of voids. There is an extrusion following the shape of the glass, locked to ref planes on the interior and exterior face of the wall.

I end up doing some drafting to set out the curved wall sweeps for the bevels, and there's a lot of trial and error, with the occasional "failed to create..." message. One trick I use is to start the path for a curve with a short vertical. That way the profile can be edited in a true plan view.

The glazing is a nested family and so far I only have the height under parametric control. All the curved geometry is locked to the springing point of the arches and moves up and down in lockstep.

Good enough for current purposes.

 

Following on from yesterday, I have revisited the clerestory windows and cleaned the geometry up a bit.

As usual it's an iterative process: building, reflecting, looking again and again, trying another approach, doing something else, coming back with fresh eyes.

There are probably a dozen different window types in this church, so plenty to keep me busy as I settle firmly into life in England. hashtag#dubai is often in my thoughts and my friends at Godwin Austen Johnson. An innovative practice in an innovative country. So proud to have spent over twenty years working there.

 

I'm working on variations to my walk through the park (I also have street walks) Today I was trying to stay in the shade which took me through to an unmowed patch that I later learned is the Butterfly Garden. It's a rather splendid display of wild flowers and long grass. I will definitely make this a regular diversion.

Just beyond that, is a small woodland area, just enough to give the feeling of being enveloped in a cool shady grove. Emerging from this I found myself on a familiar path heading past the map where I discovered the butterfly name.

All this seems to be native Hampshire species, but soon enough I came across a splendid conifer which I take to be part of the romantic planting scheme for Goldings Park when it was attached to a private house.

I'm looking forward to my first full year of exploratory walks, striding out from home, these snapshots becoming familiar places as they pass through the seasons.

 

 

FIRST PASS AT MY LOCAL

 

Captured as a site in Forma.  Loaded as a proposal into Revit.  This is Basingstoke town Gothic Revival (early and late)  The modern shopping mall shows up in lemon yellow (and grey). The file is far too heavy again. I’m not using this workflow often enough to figure that out. I think the upper layer of the toposolid is part of the problem, being broken up into individual plots.

The blue building, lower right is Goldings, with the War Memorial Park below extending into the bottom corner and beyond. The railway line and station are captured in the top left of the zoomed-out plan.  I may well build up most of this as a massing model with recognisable representations of individual buildings and terraced rows, but that will take a couple of years I suspect. Let’s see what happens.

For the moment I want to focus on the churches. Modelling the immediate sites in-place here, then transferring to Revit models which can be linked in to this file and to my overall Hamphire Churches map.

 

All Saints, Basingstoke. Add a (red) floor slab to the site file to represent the church plot, with a slope arrow to match the toposolid. Replace the footprint geometry with an in-place extrusion. Just a temporary placeholder. Select and group. Convert the group into a link. Open the link in Revit and start placing walls. As usual the measurements are all educated guesses. It will all be adjusted along the way. I have quite good photographs, inside and out, but that's about it. More to come.

 

The day when I started to get a handle on this church, the nearest proper church to where I live, about 10 minutes walk, max. Google Street View was the game changer. Not proper rectified photography, but a reasonable source for estimating height to width ratio.

The map comes from the Historic England entry. Lots of interesting buildings in the frame, but nothing older than myself that I wouldn't happily pull down. It's not that I hate all modern architecture, but everything below the top 20% is somewhere on the spectrum of disappointing to dire. I don't think that was true when we built in recognisable styles without embarrassment.

This church opened during the Great War. Paid for by a wealthy local clergyman and designed by Temple Moor. Why is the upper roof in plain clay tiles and the aisle roofs in blue slate? Was it an attempt to mimic an old church, built in stages? Or is it just to do with different roof slopes? No idea.

 

It’s all terribly rushed and broad brush, but first-pass massing is just about there, including the annexe/scout hall/whatever it is. Not much spare room on the site and the orientation is only approximately East-West, but the church does have a certain presence in the neighbourhood and clearly once supported a rapidly growing suburb to the South of Basingstoke. Let’s give it another week or so before moving on. It would be a travesty to leave it in this state. 

 

 

BAROQUE POETRY WEDGES

You know it’s time to move on when you haven’t touched a project for three weeks. So let’s tie a little bow around Borromini for now. I made giant strides on my model of “Charlie 4 Fountains”  during this iteration, considering there was very little there when I picked it up again in Dubai towards the end of March, in the closing weeks of my 22 year stay in Dubai, when the missiles began to fall (not that I saw any)  That seems so long ago.  

I have two sheets set up in the project worth sharing. These geometries always seem less challenging after the fact, but of course I have highly simplified the ornamentation. Hopefully I well take it forward again in the future and tackle some of the sculptural detail (abstracted into forms that Revit can handle)

For now I am happy that my own grasp of the way this church was built has moved forward significantly.

Borromini is the quintessential figure of Italian Baroque in my view. Taking the rebirth of classical thought with its reverence for the past, and bursting forth in a new wave of creativity. This then spread across Europe, taking different paths in different countries and in different art forms. (art, music, sculpture, architecture)  The key takeaway for me is the beginnings of a constant churning of movements in the West, each generation seek a new language of expression. The birth of the modern world.

 

Sheet Two of this small baroque church in Rome. To create a Revit model, which is more than just geometry) is to deeply probe the design and construction of a building. Now that I have retired, after 22 wonderful years at GAJ, my Revit work will be confined to the task of grappling with the history and meaning of “The Way We Build”

My perspective is influenced by my own history. Born in England, moved to Africa at 30 yrs old, then to Dubai in my Early 50s, and retired back to England at 75. It’s Western centric, but so is the making of the modern world and my bias is leavened by spending most of my adult live in Africa and the Middle East. This Baroque church expresses the birth of modernism, that feeling of moving into uncharted territory, creating something new and unprecedented, moving beyond the outdated stiffness of the past.

It also illustrated the pendulum swing between complexity and simplicity, rationalism and emotion, form and function, art and science, that continues to unfold with our human story. There are no easy answers of course, only engaging with the subject matter. In the case of architecture and building this is all around us.  Thankyou Francesco Borromini, I hope to get back to you at some point in our uncertain future.

 

Goldings Park (now War Memorial Park) is a classic example of English picturesque landscaping, unlike the formal gardens of Europe. This style belongs to the Romantic era when artists were moving beyond the constrictions of High Renaissance form. It’s carefully designed, but seeks to evoke unspoilt nature. There is a large oval where Deer and sheep would once have done the lawn-mowing job. And around the edge, blocking out views of urban sprawl, a variety of trees both indigenous and exotic.

Over the years, a smattering of man-made components have been placed for pictorial effect as well as utility. There is a bandstand, an aviary, different kinds of path, a small lodge … And embedded in the main asphalt path around the edge there are several wedge-shaped stone pavers with poetic lines cut into them. These often occur at park benches and I have wondered who composed the lines.

Last week I did a web search on one of them.  It’s adapted from the opening lines of “Ode to Evening” by William Collins, a romantic poet from Hampshire (Chichester). Such a delight to slowly unpeel these layers of history. And in the background, a rear view of the travelling circus that spends a few days here every year. The caravans are “all mod cons” but still there is a whiff of romance here also and memories of childhood visits to circuses in Barnsley and Blackpool all those decades ago.

 

 

 

I've been fighting off a seasonal bug for about ten days now, but today I felt strong enough to get out at 5am and take a long walk. We are having a heat wave so sunrise is a good time to get the exercise in to avoid heat stress.

I was able to document more of the pizza-slice paving poems. Samuel Johnson and Thomas Browne. Different eras, but both great influences on the English language. It will be good to hold these guys in mind as contemporaries of certain churches and shifts in building style.

Look them up. I knew both names, but no facts about Browne. Always something to learn if you keep your eyes peeled.