HERE WE GO ASPIRING
If you want to feel happy, help someone
else. You may have heard that idea. I think there’s a nugget of truth there.
This blog is for me. It’s a ritual that has
given structure to my “private study” for over a decade. A routine that
motivates me to go to the extra mile.
But it works because it’s addressed to an
audience. I’m not really motivated to build my audience and “get famous“ but I
only really get the motivational benefit because there are a few people out
there listening. I’m not just talking to myself.
My son Joe told me what a blog was about 16
years ago, or tried to. He was a student in Cape Town. I had been in Dubai for
about 18 months, not sure how long I would stay, but desperate to earn real
money to put him and his younger brother through university, after the Zimbabwe
economy went info free fall.
The focus of this blog has been to document
my personal journey, my weekends of exploring ideas. Digital tools are front
and centre, but the connection to physical activity is crucial. I used to lay
bricks. I’m an old school guy in many ways.
I have been enlarging my map of Denmark to incorporate the Swedish island of Gotland. It's been a good learning experience for me. Drawing maps is always a good way to understand geography better. I like to draw with Revit which allows me to incorporate 3d and data into my sketch.
Perhaps blogging is just an extension of the
internal dialogue that we all carry around in our heads. I have always felt
that language is just the tip of the iceberg, a thin veneer. I grew up with a
pencil in my hand, I think in diagrams and patterns, relationships. Music often plays in my head, one of the
threads that weaves its way through my stream of consciousness.
Perhaps we should call it the internal multilog.
We have no idea how multi-threaded our subconscious world is. I think in terms
of to the physical and chemical
multi-threaded networks that chug along incessantly throughout our lives.
I have often been a night owl. All
nighters. Burning the candle. It’s some kind of flow state.
A dream world now drawing, painting,
playing music into the darkness. Letting the ideas emerge and illuminate a
little circle of light around me as I drift through the midnight hours.
As I got older and became a parent, getting
up early and doing my day took control. I wake around 6 mostly now. So I try to
sleep by 10. But still the night owl is reincarnated as insomnia. I’m typing
this into my phone at 3am. Grasping at ideas before they evaporate with the
morning mist.
The blog has been a motivator for me. It
doesn’t stop me from wandering off in too many directions, exploring ideas but
never really finishing anything. But it does help me to put in regular effort
and to structure my work.
Commercial Break: this popped up on Linked
In. Starbucks effusing over their branch at Marsa al Seef. This is a project along the Creek in Dubai
which I worked on a few years back. Had
a lot of fun making “traditional style” families. It’s an interesting challenge trying to
capture just enough detail to evoke a trad feel, without overloading the model.
I used to keep pocket notebooks. They were
also a mixture of words and images in equal measure. The digital world allows
me to share that activity with others. To interact with a circle of friends and
acquaintances.
I guess my sheet layouts have now evolved
into a kind of notebook format also. Revit views, textual info, images grabbed during
research. Kind of multi-threaded
collages with a BIM feel. Here’s the Gotland churches sheet. Six examples, located via a Revit map,
compared analytically via a set of assembly views with a common layout.
So in a way, the sketching and note
scribbling of my youth has coevolved with the digital era. I acquired my first
desktop device in the late 80s. My first laptop a decade later. Portability
makes a huge difference. You don’t really understand anything until you
experience it. You can have a desk diary that you write up every evening, but a
pocket notebook that travels around with your body takes you into another
dimension. Embodied cognition. These smartphones are dangerous but so was the
printing press.
Meanwhile, I’m exploring different kinds of
spire. These are parametric families.
You get to define the base width, the roof angle, and for Broach spires, the
“knee ratio” (how far up the transition from square to octagon happens, as a value
between zero and one)
I find myself absorbing new tools but still
continuing a journey that began in the 1950s, before I even had television. Visual
thinking + learning by doing. With hindsight, TV was a distraction, far too
passive as a medium. I stopped watching 25 years ago, having wasted countless
hours, although I often drew while the TV was on.
I had a little back-and-forth with my
friend Alfredo Medina who has quite a clever way of creating a parametric
octagon. Not necessarily applicable to the
profiles embedded in these spire families, but always good to share ideas.
I’ve been reading Inspector Morse books
while attempting to drift off to sleep in the evenings. British detective
series. That was a TV series I actually
enjoyed and the books turn out to be equally good in a slightly different
way. Got me thinking about Morse
code. Again the ability of a smartphone
to jump between Kindle and Wikipedia.
Flawed though both of these “knowledge sources” … the ability to do a
quick background check without losing the flow of a story, is quite special,
enhanced further by highlighting nice turns of phrase in the Kindle app, and
using my stylus to capture bits of text/image from Woke-ipedia.
Morse code formed a bridge during the rapid
evolution of technology during the late 19th and early 20th
centuries. Sending messages in real time over long distances. There was a manual/embodied element and an
acquired skill of converting patterns into language at a sub-conscious
level. We are in an age where
technologies are born, spread across the globe, & fade away during the
course of a single lifetime.
The evolution of spire carpentry and the
spread of regional variants operated over much slower timescales, and they
still have cultural relevance. They
aren’t just curiosities in museums like morse keys or floppy disks.
Interesting aside. I’ve noted before how “Join Geometry” can
sometimes lead to cleaning up of geometry that goes way beyond the original
intent. Complex solids with unwanted
edges can often be improved by cutting with a small void in some hidden
location (or joining a small solid)
In this case, joining the two blends that
go to make up a broach spire also improves the orientation of the fill patterns
in the material definition.