MIES ON MY BALCONY

September 2015. A really simplistic Revit model of the Bank of England, as it was in 1830 at the end of John Soane's long tenure as their third architect. Of course I went on to develop a much more detailed model over the next couple of years. With significant contributions by others.

I was just trying to wrap my head around the complexity of a building that had evolved over a century of constant expansion and reorganisation. Hence the colour-coded slabs over the various interlocking zones.

Then there is the screen wall, subtly different from the one in place today. It was totally rebuilt by Herbert Baker, streamlined and shuffled around. There is no single drawing or photograph that shows it exactly as it was in 1830. It was fun to figure out.

Finally the banking halls. Five variations on a theme. Fascinating geometry. Top lit masonry vaults for fire protection and security. What a journey of discovery that whole period was. #bimpencil at its best.

 

 

I'm reading this book about Mies that I found on Kindle a while ago. Helps me fall asleep 🤣🤣🤣

Seriously though, he was an interesting character, coming from a fairly humble background, compared to say Gropius.

A few years ago I started a Revit model of the Tugendhat House. You learn such a lot by scrounging around for references, approximating dimensions, gradually "joining the dots" of how a building works.

The joy and the learning is in the figuring out process. Stumbling around and making mistakes. Then realising WHY, you made a wrong assumption.

 

 

In 2017, I used my Tugendhat House model in a conference presentation that ran through different ways that I have customised Revit families in the Planting category.

I used the Mies villa to illustrate my "Flat Trees"... Diagrammatic and lightweight, used here to help bring a very crude, early-stage model to life. Most people think of Revit as a hard-edged solution for documentation, not intuitive enough for quick broad-brush studies.

These are Enscape renderings given a quick burst of post-processing on my phone. I wish there were some trees in the lower view though. 🤣🤣🤣

 

 

Another look at the Revit model of the Tugendhat House by Mies van Dr Rohe that I built a few years ago. Very basic. Would be nice to take it a bit further.

It's an unusual site and an unusual layout but very familiar to us a century later. You can see once again the sort of graphic images that are possible with my "Flat Trees" families. Nothing fancy, just a couple of thin extrusions at right angles, and cad imports on the same vertical planes.

In the cutaway perspective you can see the basement room mentioned by Alfredo, commenting on a previous post. Some of the large glass windows in the room retract into this space via motorised sliding mechanism. A bit like garage doors in reverse, but without the need to tilt into the horizontal plane.

Bedrooms on the upper, entrance level, living spaces below and a wooded slope dropping away quite steeply connected to the terrace by broad steps.

 

 

Crescent moon, clothes line, pigeon mesh, fake wind towers, fake falconry. International City, Dubai... My little world of urban sunsets. #dubai #waywebuild #photography