CLASSICAL XMAS MUSH

It’s November 2012 and I’m all pumped from winning the Parametric Pumpkin Competition for the second time.  That was my Arcimboldo style witch’s head … assembled from vegetables.  Zach Kron, who came up with that competition asked me to do a session on Vasari Talks, a series he was doing with Lilli Smith.  Remember Vasari?  I used it a few times.  The built in solar diagrams and wind animation were useful. 

They asked me to do a demo of the “wig-hat” which was the witch’s hair, assembled as a repeater using spring onions … was it a repeater?  Seems like the recording of my talk is no longer available on that link. 

After the demo, I showed a few images of other things I had done using the principle learned while making vegetables.  I wanted to assure people that my explorations were relevant to the “day-job” world of Architecture & Construction.  This is where I first developed my early concept model of Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasilia Cathedral: fully parametric, as they say.

I also showed a model of the Dubai Creek Golf Club, probably the best-known design by my boss, Brian Johnson (it features on the 20 Dirham note here in the UAE).  One of my first attempts at an adaptive component: three instances, one for each “sail-shaped” roof.

 

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2012/11/webcast-tonight.html

 

This is around the time when Paul Aubin and I started communicating directly with each other.  He was working on a Corinthian capital which totally blew my mind, but also challenged me to think about how I would approach this challenge. 

“How can we possibly standardise and parameterise all that variety ?  And even if we could, where would that get us?  The spirit of the Corinthian seems to live in it's infinite ability to be constantly re-invented.  How do you factor that into an equation?”

I the second half of the post I attempt a stylised version of Corinthian made from brass plate, cut and folded into shape. Designing directly in Revit. Of course in the good old days, there would have been a symbiosis of architect and artisan when conjuring up classical detail, both contributing their skills, experience and sense of proportion.  How should that collaboration play out in the digital era?

 

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2012/11/desert-classic.html

 

 

In the next post I attempt to take a leaf from Paul’s book and create a fully volumetric stone version of the Corinthian capital. It’s fascinating to compare Paul’s approach and mine.  He came at it very systematically, basing his work on Robert Chitham’s excellent book “The Classical Orders of Architecture”

I just jump in and start thrashing around, taking liberties and shortcuts wherever the mood takes me and feeling my way to an acceptable interpretation of the genre.  I was very concerned with “RIGS” at the time: arrangements of reference lines that can be resized parametrically.

There were several iterations before I arrived at my current system for mix & match, scalable classical columns. 

 

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2012/11/a-new-leaf.html

 

 

The next post is quite interesting because someone has posted a Revit version of the Pantheon on LinkedIn recently.  He has taken it a fair bit further than I did.  I toyed with a couple of ideas for representing Corinthian here, including symbolic lines that only show up in parallel views. As usual I am trying to use Revit as my BIM pencil, and extension to my brain, a tool for better understanding how a building works: spatially, structurally, stylistically …

 

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2012/11/pink-pantheon.html

 

 

More rigs and more attempts to explore “the way we build”.  I had extracted a lot of mileage from a “Rectangular Rig” so the question was, would an extra dimension create new possibilities or would it simply complicate things.  The first set of explorations were good fun but didn’t produce anything that I regarded as a significant breakthrough.

At the end of the post I show an image of a Bavarian Baroque church.  I was looking for challenging geometry from our built heritage that might prove amenable to the techniques I had used to create vegetables.  I never got far enough with this model to test that idea out.  Would I be able to represent the free flowing curvature of the ceiling vaults in a convincing way?

 

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2012/11/cube-rig-blues.html

 

 

December now, and an explanation of how I created my abstraction of Niemeyer’s cathedral.  I gave some examples of what happens when you play with the parameters. Vary the number of legs, the angle of slope, the heaviness of the legs in relation to the overall shape. 

Does this kind of “generative form finding” work better than the “artists eye”?  Stupid question perhaps.  All depends what you are trying to achieve.  Whatever too you decide to use: digital or analogue, computational or intuitive, rules based or touchy feely … you need to pay your dues.  If you want to achieve something worthwhile, first acquire a level of fluency with the chosen tools.

 

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2012/12/cathedral-of-light.html

 

 

The first ever AUX in Dubai.  My session was about massing. “Concept design … clarity of thinking … strip away the irrelevant detail … can you capture the essence of the design problem?  … We need to use BIM tools as we would use a rapid pencil sketch”

Looking back, I’m really impressed with the way I prepared for this session, and the balanced structure I devised: a few slides, then a demonstration sequence, and closing with a longer slide show.  This was very early in my career as a public BIM personality.  I have come to realise that my contribution doesn’t always appeal to mainstream audiences.  So be it.  I get enough positive feedback to realise that I am doing something important and useful, and I’m doing it “My Way”.

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2012/12/aux-dxb.html ...

 

I have always been somewhat ambivalent about Autodesk University.  The name is just a branding decision, I get that, but my idea of a university is much more open ended and exploratory that this industry convention.  The next post includes quite a lengthy rumination on the global politics of technology and the need to better integrate our heritage of intuitive hand-crafted ingenuity with the digital sphere that offers so much power.  Power can cut both ways. If it doesn’t mesh with our traditions.

“The main reason I'm hooked on Revit and BIM has nothing to do with ROI or clash detection.  It's a better way to draw.  And drawing has nothing to do with lines, arcs & circles.  Leonardo wasn't thinking "now I'll draw an arc".  He was exploring how the human body works.”

 

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2012/12/hey-you.html

 

 

And so to Xmas 2012, and the “Mush” part of my title.  I figured out an approach to making Arabic patterns that will populate divided surfaces.  This allows you to create Musharabiya Screens that twist and curve.  Creating each new curtain pattern family is a bit tedious, but once you have a small library of these, it’s very easy to create screens of different sizes, shapes and proportions. 

Since then I have developed other solutions: scaling patterns up with the Planting Category hack for example.  But maybe I should give this one another run around the block.  What would I do with it now, almost 8 years later?

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2012/12/xmas-mush.html