SCANNING THE PAST

 
I live in the middle. 10 storey blocks with no common theme but similar floor plans, known as the CBD. The photo shows the typical elevation of a ring of seven storey buildings enclosing the CBD. Not sure what to call that style. "Contemporary Moorish"? The master developer may well have used a label like that. Who knows?

Generally speaking this is the high point of the neighbourhood in terms of design. Beyond this ring are clusters, themed by country. Rather crude attempts to mimic national styles. Spain is probably the least objectionable. Nevertheless International City has become a lively suburb. Lower middle class, short on parking and landscape, but lots of little shops and cafes. Affordable, practical, real.

I like living here, but I ought to get out more 🤣🤣🤣

 

1991 is almost half a lifetime away for me. My youngest child was 3 years old and I had made the agonising decision to leave him in Harare with his mother and grandparents while I went to Joburg to complete my 5 years of Architecture Studies after a gap of 18 years.

I had started to dabble with CAD, but only just. Roughing out in pencil on butcher paper then inking up on tracing was my favourite way of working. This was a History of Architecture assignment, part of 5th year which I had entered, based on my first degree at the Bartlett and a couple of years in an office in Harare.

The theme of that fifth year course was History of Urban Settlement. These drawings, comparing Bristol and Tripoli, are based on book research and imagination. As I remember, they were photocopied and coloured by hand along with 4 or 5 other pages. 

 

I have been to Bristol, but not to the medieval city obviously and it was more than a decade before these drawings were produced. I have never been to North Africa, sadly.

Exercises like this one helped to formulate the mission that I call "the Way We Build" coded as WWB in my file structures. Drawings are models. Attempts to distill some critical aspect of real life to a physical or digital medium. The process of creating this abstraction an adventure that helps us to restructure our brains.

A sense of history. Invaluable.

 

 

2006 was still fairly early in our BIM journey at GAJ. It seemed like an absolute no-brainer to me that we would transition most of the office to this approach quite rapidly. Of course there was resistance and scepticism, mostly from the higher levels. Strangely enough Brian, right at the top, was very positive about the potential of Revit. On the other hand, having recently restructured to take in junior partners, he wanted them to make their own minds up.

I was the highest ranking staff member pushing Revit and was thrown challenges by Brian on a regular basis. This one was a quick preconcept booklet to lure a client into commissioning us for further development. Of course you are lucky if 20% of these quick schemes go any further and this one didn't. In fact it was an attempt to revive an idea from a few years earlier that also went nowhere.

Much of this is using Revit as a desktop publisher, laying out reference images on sheets. The model itself is very crude, an exercise in massing. But there is a schedule of areas thrown in there. Live data of course.

How would I have reacted if I had known that the concept design team would still be using Sketchup and Autocad, Photoshop and In Design as their primary tools, almost twenty years later? Probably better that I kept believing for another decade or so before easing into more of an elder statesman role.

 

 

EVERYDAY STUFF

 

1986... towards the end of my stay at the Curriculum Development Unit. I was planning out how to complete a series of five booklets under the Let's Build Zimbabwe brand. Targeted at lower secondary school, a syllabus called ZJC at the time. (Zimbabwe Junior Certificate)

Almost 3 years into my time at CDU, I had developed quite a clear vision of how to structure these booklets. Packaging them up so that teachers can easily pick and choose parts that they find useful. Suggesting a well organised scheme for how to work through the syllabus in a logical sequence while providing a good balance of activity types, week by week.

These were rough sketches for the title pages of module D, intended for the fourth term of a five term course. (term six being reserved for catching up, revision and exams) I wanted to move away from just using dry technical illustrations and make the link to real life situations with perspective sketches.

 

 

Important to make music a regular habit if I am to regain the fluency of my heyday. This is a song I've approached in different ways and not even attempted for probably 10 years now.

Laying down the first track I didn't know what song I was going to do, if any. Just working on my old tricks. 12 bar in G, standard tuning. Trying to stay in sync with a drum loop. Then I decided to overlay a second guitar with a slightly different tone. Not sure if that comes across really (the tone)

Finally I decided to add some vocals and at that point it became this old standard. BB King is probably the best known version. Maybe he wrote it? Added a few handclaps and grunts to spice up the rhythm part.

It's nothing special, but I'm putting in the effort.

PS the images are all from my visit to Porto in 2016. A wonderful city.

 

 

 I discovered City Walk during Xmas week. It's just a stone's throw from the apartment we rented for our family Christmas meetup. It was a fun place to walk around during the day. Nice outdoor feel, makes a refreshing change from all the indoor malls.

We had a couple of nice meals there, not cheap, but no complaints given the quality of the food, presentation and atmosphere. I decided to go back with a friend once I was recovered enough from my operation. So that's what we did last weekend.

 

Totally different vibe at night. Equally positive. Lots of excitement in the lights and screens. Tables outside on the pavement. Very nice piece of salmon. I'm left wondering why I didn't do this more often. Fair enough, I don't have the energy that I used to have. I tire easily. But maybe I can find a better balance.

 

 

SING THE RED PLUMBING

 

William Morris was a young man from a wealthy family who studied Classics at Oxford, fell in with a group of Medievalists, and went on to set up an Interior Design company (in today's language) He teamed up with architect Philip Webb to design and build the Red House for his young family.

Clearly he was a romantic idealist, choosing a sparsely populated rural location to the South East of London for his new home. The design is L shaped, defining a garden court with a central well. I'm not sure if this was the primary source of water in the early days. Maybe it was largely symbolic.

I found one of the original well drawings online and knocked up a very rough placeholder family, let's say LOD 100. Over the past few days I have been upgrading this. I will call it LOD 200, not because I have much faith in the official definitions of these stages, but just because I envisage at least one more upgrade, maybe two.

 

 

This recording is multi-track me from the GAJ rocks era... 3 or 4 years after moving to Dubai. We had an office band and were talking about inserting original compositions into our repertoire. I wrote the song while living in Zimbabwe, towards the end of my time there.

The guitar breaks were not part of the original composition. That was just a spontaneous idea that came to me while recording a demo for the band. It makes the song a fusion of styles. There is an obvious influence from African music, but slower and more laid back with a hint of country music.

Listening to this now I find myself wishing I had the stamina and focus to create something as tight as this now. Between the hormone therapy and the passing years... No regrets, but I don't have the same energy levels.

All the more reason to put things out there. Lots of images from Zimbabwe but also other stuff. Random nostalgia from a life of buildings and music and living in different cultural contexts.

 

 

Why would an architect do this kind of plumbing schematic? Well that's what we used to do on smaller jobs in Zimbabwe. This dates back to the early days of my return to the architectural profession after a long detour. I was still trying it out. Hadn't yet returned to university to complete my studies.

I was in my late thirties. My youngest son would have been a toddler. My whole life was quite challenging, but nothing ventured nothing gained right? Almost half a lifetime ago and I had so much energy.

The colours were laid down in the bylaws. Brown for soil pipes. Green for waste. Red for vent pipes. This was an alteration to an existing light industrial premises. I think the plumbing schematic was a question of convincing myself that the scheme was workable, as much as anything.

I did site supervision on that job as well. All part of the learning curve.

 

This is from the first draft of a building text book to be used in Zimbabwe secondary schools. After three years working in the Curriculum Development Unit. I was finally coming to grips with how I really wanted to structure the learning experience.

We were trying to combine applied maths, drawing, problem solving and practical work. Weave it all together into a coherent experience. These four pages illustrate that intent. Applied Maths used to estimate quantities of building materials. Simple exercises with helpful illustrations.

Problem solving exemplified by the solution of brick bonding problems. This can be done by dry-bonding full-size bricks outside on the practice ground, or by arranging miniature bricks on the desks inside the classroom. The practical work here is learning to form different styles of jointing.

The drawing exercises are also presented using a problem solving approach. Challenge the students to visualise a section view of common objects. In all cases there are suggestions for exercises and activities.

This was some of the last work I did in that department before moving on to running a course at the University. The book series remains unfinished.