BIM-MUSIC-LIFE

Six weeks ago I was working on the Red House, home of William Morris and a response to the Industrial Revolution which was turning life inside out across Europe.

Since then I have upgraded the models of two Modernist buildings from the 1930s, attempts to embrace the new technologies and the social transformations that came with them. Links to ideologies well to the left and right.

 

Artistically they represent attempts to sweep everything away and start afresh, repeating cycles of innovation and disruption. Looking back we can see the beginnings of the art scene of today, where conceptual statements and shock value have largely replaced the search for beauty. Shock value trumps gradual evolution of traditions that stretch back hundreds of years.

To be clear, I am not pointing the finger or suggesting I know "the solution". Seems to me it's just a feature of the pace of change in society and technology, the dominance of consumerism and fashion.

I don't have the answers but I am interested in exploring the cultural history leading up to the mid twentieth century when I was born.

 

 

This is pretty raw. Trying to sing and play along to an old cakewalk backing track. It's too fast for my current skill levels, but it was fun to have a go.

Leaving Trunk was an old Taj Mahal number that really caught my imagination. I have tried very hard to "do it my way" many times with different bands, in different countries, at different stages of my life. Rarely felt that I was doing it justice.

Will I find time to do more of this kind of thing and ramp up my musical fluency again? Difficult to say. I'm trying to balance competing claims on my diminishing energy levels.

But I do plan to carry on sharing whatever I can that at least seems interesting.

 

Friday night out. My old Crocs had fallen apart so I wanted to get some new ones. Nearest dedicated shop is in Festival City. After that we found a place called Eataly with a terrace overlooking the creek and the Laser Light Show.

It's a pretty spectacular view with Al Jaddaf on the opposite bank and Burj Khalifa in the distance. We timed our arrival pretty well to get a full range of sky colours. It's been a while since I came here and I think perhaps the first time to come for an evening meal.

 

Many of my previous visits to Festival City were to kit out my apartment. Walking around the IKEA superstore. That was before I discovered online shopping. Before I even had a smartphone, in fact my visits to Festival City span almost 20 years. From the time whem Burj Khalifa was just coming out of the ground, driving around using a physical map book to calling up a ride with the Careem app.

Dubai seemed like a science fiction theme park even then. It took me a long time to adapt, moving from Africa. Now it's been my home for so long, I tend to forget how crazy the pace of change has been. A night out at Festival City helps to remind me.

 

 

WHAT DID DE LA WARR ?

In 2014 I was given a guided tour of the recently renovated De La Warr pavilion in Bexhill, a seaside town on the South-East coast of England. It's another classic of early Modernism, with a dash of Expressionism thrown in for good luck. 

Eric Mendelsohn was a German Jew who fled for England in 1933. Both he and his client were sympathetic to Soviet Russia in those heady days, and to some extent the building was intended to be a "palace for the people. The client was both Mayor of Bexhill and a member of the aristocracy.

I started building a Revit model as soon as I got back to Dubai, but it hasn't moved forward very much in the last ten years. So I decided to have another little go. The photos on these sheets were taken during that 2014 visit. And I've claimed the model up a bit.

The intention is to spend a few more days, then move on to another neglected building from my BIM pencil studies of architectural history. There is no way I can tie up all the loose ends in the time that is left to me but I do hope I can hand these models on in a usable state with some educational value.

 

De La Warr pavilion. First pass at the glazing was mostly LOD100. "there is a window here of about this size". You just need a single family, fixed glazing in a frame, no internal subdivisions.

Moving on to second pass, the sides of the auditorium have three sets of double doors with fanlights for each of the original rough openings. I have a ready-made family for the double doors with fanlight in my library. So fastest way to move forward goes like this.

Swap the fixed glazing family out for an empty opening. Place a glass wall within that space. (disallow joins) Place three double door families in that thin glass wall. Make a group. Copy around. Use new group types for raised sill conditions. Update the glass wall to a "subframe" wall type using the same material as the door framing.

The results are not 100%. That is left for another iteration. But it does the job quickly and effectively to move my study forward. Note also that the curtain walling on the rest of the building is represented by that same plain glass wall on first pass.

 

 

FASCIO FINALE

 Giuseppi Terragni was just 28 years old when he started working on Casa del Fascio in Como, Italy. He was the archetypal tragic hero, producing a remarkable body of work before being drafted into the army and sent deep into Russia. His physical and mental health were shattered and he died in Italy before he was 40.

The central space at Casa del Fascio is a re-imagining of the renaissance cortile. An internal space, but with light penetrating from all directions and galleries around the edge. The ground floor opens across its entire width at the press of a button, connecting to a public plaza.

It doesn't seem to have aged a minute. Is that important? Not sure. I'm all for buildings that have a timeless beauty but this one is firmly situated in the industrial era. All the same, it's quite remarkable.

My rendering technique in 2013 involved combining a shaded image with a quick Render using Revit's internal engine. The images aren't hi-res but they are quite effective for most purposes.

This is a building that is difficult to fully grasp by looking at images, however well thought out. For me there is nothing to compare with building a model, pondering over difficulties, composing sheets, adding annotations. That's the experience I crave.

Studying history with my BIM pencil.

 

 

Last two images of Casa Fascio. The exterior is a pure Mental Ray render. Remember the excitement when Autodesk bought that software and bundled it into Revit with a simple interface designed for people like me with low expertise in the complexities of high-end rendering.

External views render quite quickly to an acceptable level. Interiors, not so much. But they can be good enough to provide the extra materiality in one of my composite images. Meanwhile the black lines give extra definition to the glass blocks and the floor tiles. You need to set the Revit materials up properly so that the appearance image and the hatch pattern line up. Hard won trickery that is already slipping into the memory hole. 

 

 

The interior view is looking towards the back of the building. The internal elevations of the atrium are almost as varied as the external facade. Meeting spaces on the left, cellular offices elsewhere. Complete transparency to the outside world, front and back.

The sides of the building face onto relatively narrow alleys. Hopefully this render conveys that fact. Different fenestration for the stair, the vertical stack of washrooms, and the cellular offices.

How many modern buildings draw on the geometry games that Terragni pulled here? More than a few. I'm not sure how to assess Terragni the man. Was he a naive young idealist carried away with his belief in abstract ideas? Was he an opportunist, willing to trample over the rights of lesser mortals. I really don't know. But I do think that the self reflection that goes along with researching and building a model like this, helps me to put my own failings in perspective.

I need to tidy this model up a bit and add it to thewaywebuild.io   So much unfinished business.