Lever House first crossed my radar screen as a teenager
studying history of architecture as part of A level art. Like many famous
buildings we tend to know one photograph very well without much understanding
of the underlying logic of the design. This post was a serious attempt to pursue
my vision of “the way we build”… using BIM to undertake “deep dive”explorations
of selected buildings, vernacular traditions and technologies. How do they
function? How can we understand them as processes or sequences in time? What
about the social context? Or geography and climate? I discovered a connection
between Larkin Building and Lever House : both built for soap companies.
Down to earth with a bump. The next post is a parking family
I developed for my day job with an instance check box to display a car in plan
and 3d.
The next one is an early foray into Point World, although I hadn’t yet coined that term. This
parametric version of a candela style shell vault is fun, but I didn’t have a
way to control the origin so it always sits on the ground.
The second Hypar post includes a render, back in the day
when Mental Ray was still an exciting feature. I remember being disappointed at
how similar these all looked in a perspective view, despite varying the
parameters quite dramatically. Perhaps the message here is that parametric controls are wonderful as long as you know when to use them. Sometimes they can be an expensive item with no real purpose. Judgement and common sense trump pyrotechnics any day of the week.
My youngest son was a student in London and whenever I
visited him I took long walks to reacquaint myself with this marvellous city that
hosted my transition to manhood. I had walked around the outside of the Gherkin
and taken photos. I was attracted to the idea that it would showcase my Doric
Pumpkin methods while supplying an interesting contrast to Lever House. How
long did this first exploration take?
The final image was a source of great pride. For the most part, a simple
Revit render, but with just enough photoshop trickery to confound the sceptics.
In the next post I discovered the impressive steel framing. Tubular
legs braced into an A frame with variable width and inclination to the
vertical. Figuring out how the floor plate rotates on each successive floor to
create spiral voids was another exciting experience. What a terrific demonstration
of the power of BIM as a research tool for the student of architecture or
building technology.
Back to Lever House and more conventional curtain walling. This
glass box hides considerable design complexity within its transparent skin. I
enjoyed the juxtaposition of massing diagrams with apparently finished renders
of an “as-built” model.
Back to the day job and images from four different projects that
we were working on at that time. The master planning study never went anywhere,
but the other three proceeded to site. Three different design architects,
briefs and site contexts. Sometimes I wish I could have devoted more time to
this blog, but I wouldn’t want to have missed the challenges I have encountered
in my day job plus the social interaction with people from all over the world.
Ronchamp. Was this my first attempt to model a church? Did
it really spin off from attempts to model a more conventional church using
Conceptual Massing? I had forgotten that. Once again I am stunned by how far I
got in a short space of time. All the same the photoshop work betrays my
impatience to deliver some usable images from an incomplete model. Quite a lot
of cheating going on here. But is it really cheating when you are learning so
much in the process?
I can hardly believe how productive this period was. Bolstered
by the achievements with Corbs little church, I decided to tackle the ultimate
challenge, my hero for so many years, and a project I visited in my late 20s
when I was still a bricklayer. The wiggly seats had been a topic for analysis
when I returned to university as a 40 year old. I wished to portray Gaudi as
the ultimate functionalist, and a strong case can be made. The way the seats
host conversational groups, support the back, shed the rain, afford views of
the distant sea… More smoke and mirrors here, but also some mind blowing
learning and skill development.
The second Parc Guell post exploits the extraction of topo
from Google earth and fairly successful attempts to map an image to the
surface. Once again I was learning on multiple fronts at a hectic pace. The
forest of doric columns supports a rainwater storage tank by the way. It’s staggering
that Gaudi has been treated as a willful stylist who refused to bend to
practical needs. I think that’s fallen away to some extent now, but he is still
mostly portrayed as a sculptor of fantasies.
And to conclude… my fascination with language. I had been
reading a book by Guy Deutsch which conveys the infinite malleability of
Language and its penchant for repetition. Enter the BIM pedants, with almost no
grasp of linguistics but an utterly reprehensible wish to defend their position
as “experts”. You can’t say “BIM model”, its bad English. Do me a favour.
Language is never bad if it helps people to communicate effectively. Idioms
constantly evolve and words frequently reverse their meaning, depending on
context. Grow up. And more importantly desist from practices that deliver
put-downs to people on the edges of BIM.
We need to be welcoming and responsive. If BIM can’t bring everyone
in the industry inside its circle, it will surely fail.
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