DISSECTING NOTRE DAME

 Why is the layout of Notre Dame out of square?

I tend to think it was cumulative error, perhaps exacerbated by building around older buildings that had not been fully demolished when the foundations were set out. That would have made the traditional methods of sight lines, tight string and pythagoras, difficult to implement.

A second problem for us was inadequate and inconsistent source data. There are hand drawn plans and a very low resolution horizontal slice through Andrew Tallon's point cloud. We tried to get higher resolution point cloud data but it's a high profile government project, so a bunch of BIM enthusiasts didn't carry much clout.

Revit despises small angular deviations. In any case it makes dimensions difficult and you face the prospect of custom making the arches and vaults for every single bay.

The compromise we made was to make almost everything orthogonal with repetitive bay sizes, but to make the north aisles of the nave wide than the south, and the north tower, wider still. That reflects reality. I think Ryan was the first to notice that there are more statues on the left side of the gallery of kings than the right, when viewed from the plaza in front of the west end.

 

The other half of the grid setting out sheet for Project Notre Dame.

2d drafting that I call a "skew" grid, trying to follow the point cloud footprint, allowing deviations from 90 degrees, but aiming for a modicum of regularity. I took this seriously enough to work it through, but on reflection it didn't make any sense for our purposes.

You might call our model a "didactic" project. We accepted a level of abstraction and simplification so as to better see the big picture issues. The regularities of the model allow us to pose questions, explore possibilities, seek understanding.

It was a fascinating struggle to understand by drawing, modelling, gathering material, questioning.

It. The global cooperation called Project Notre Dame.

 

Two old photos found on the Internet and marked up on one of the sheets in our model of Notre Dame de Paris.

19th Century renovations were very extensive and included things like a new sacristy building between the chancel and the river and linked to the main building by a pair of corridors.

Viollet-le-Duc was not afraid to add new features in the Gothic style whereas today we would make a clear distinction between what has been preserved/reconstructed and new work in a "modern" style.

Who was right? I don't know. Maybe both. Received wisdom will probably change again. I'm certainly glad that the roof and spire are being restored back to how they were before the fire.

 

Drafting views to show the nave as originally built, and as modified about a century later. Early Gothic featured relatively small windows, similar to the preceding Romanesque, but with pointed arches

Gradually builders became bolder. Larger windows, structural drama, flying buttresses. At Notre Dame, the six middle bays of the nave were opened up, but the end bays were not disturbed, presumably for fear of affecting the stability of the spire and the bell towers.

This seems like a simple story, but figuring it out took several weeks of poring over the source material. For me, these kinds of "Sherlock Holmes" moments are fundamental to the work. They justify the time spent building a Revit model "just for fun".

Learning by doing. Learning through play. Lifelong learning. What could be better?

 

 

 

 

 

 

THEN, NOW AND INBETWEEN

 

I'm not sure when I added that caption to the black and white photo, but it captures the mood of a period in my mid to late 40s, when my journey through life seemed to be converging on a golden age of sorts.

Little did I know that Zimbabwe was about to descend into a nightmare of hyperinflation and political turmoil that eventually forced me to travel to Dubai as an economic refugee.

These courtyard offices at Westgate shopping centre were dashed off in that time of optimism and confidence, the calm before the storm. I felt needed in Zimbabwe in a way that I never quite had in UK.

The style here is a pragmatic simplification of the "Florida colonial" dreamed up by the American concept architects for the shopping centre itself. It's not ground-breaking architecture, but where would we be if every development attempted to be totally original.

There is a place for quiet competence in my view. Perhaps a rather large place.

 

A day's work well done.

Assembling door families for a new project. These are based around a modular system I have been refining and extending for several years now. The kind of projects we do almost always require some new twist on the detailing of these elements.

My experience is that if you develop a system that can handle a wide variety of configurations in a consistent way, new requirements will be accommodated without too much stress.

Sometimes I get a bit stuck, start to feel that it's getting too messy. Usually the answer is to sleep on it. The way forward will be clearer next morning, with a clear head. So break off, watch the sunset. Sip something suitable.

Sufficient onto the day, pick up the struggle in the morning.

 

Many of you will have seen the Notre Dame slide deck that Alfredo Medina prepared, and the commentary, partly in Spanish. It was amazing for me to be transported back to that period of productive teamwork.

Here I present some snippets from the sheet set. I had forgotten how impressive this was, even in its half-completed state. I made a big effort towards the end to weave some story telling in with the model views. Two products of the same process: a Revit model and a deep familiarity with the building and it's history.

One is a tangible object, a thing, even if digital. The other is internal to me, baked into a human being who went through an extended digital process and came out changed in subtle ways.

There is tagging and scheduling of window types also. Another attempt to make the "exploring history with BIM" label more credible. My conviction remains that the core idea behind BIM is as valid for private study and creative exploration as it is for commercial AEC projects.

But it's a hard sell. The BIM pencil is an expensive toy. (unless you can get licenses through your day job of course, in which case it can be regarded as a CPD activity)

 

Here is a location that has seen men and technologies come and go over the course of centuries. We struggle to imagine the first churches on the site. Heavy stone buildings in the romanesque tradition no doubt.

With the beginnings of the modern footprint comes the pointed arch and a gradual shift towards larger windows and greater structural daring. Later on, a period of neglect and then abuse as we approach the modern era. Statues are butchered. The spire collapses.

All this is bemoaned by Victor Hugo in his wonderful allegorical tale, known in English as the hunchback, and later immortalised in film by Charles Laughton. Public sentiment rallies and Viollet Le Duc gets his chance to imprint his own version of authentic Gothic.

We have him to thank for the wonderful grotesques, and for the projecting gargoyles at the base of the flying buttresses: the most spectacular rainwater spouts I know of. Indeed, the access and rainwater systems were marvellous to unravel as we built our Revit model of Notre Dame de Paris in 2019.

What an adventure that was.

 

Another snippet from the Revit Model of Notre Dame de Paris that we built in 2019. If you envisage Notre Dame as a two headed sphynx, this is the front part. More like a two headed llama posing as sphynx, and like many llamas it has bells on its necks.

Bells helped to make churches the beating heart of their community. They can broadcast time, warnings, celebrations, weekly ritual, death. The text here is quite straightforward description. I would like to have more to say about the symbolic meaning of Bells, but I haven't worked that part out.

Bells broadcast outwards, ringing metal, pealing away. Between and below the organ, columns of air, forced through pipes to fill the interior space with a different kind of music, compatible with air forced up by a great throng of human lungs. Ancient melodies of devotion. Inner voice and outer voice, I should be able to make something of that. Let it stew for a while.

Plenty going on here. Secret passage behind the gallery of kings. Spiral stairs that switch position half way up. Wooden framework that stands clear of the walls so as not to transfer vibration from the massive bells to stonework.

 

Floor plans of the bell towers at Notre Dame de Paris. In reality almost everything is slightly out of square. That's a nightmare for Revit, and for any rational analysis that attempts to capture the bigger picture behind all that random variation.

The compromise we chose was to keep most everything orthogonal, and take up the slack in certain key areas. In this case it's the North West tower, whose ribs are picked out in red.

The access passage behind the row of statues known as the gallery of king, shows up clearly here. Imagine Quasimodo loping along and peering over the shoulder of a king or a bishop from time to time.

Spot the wall-join glitch? Revit users will be able to imagine how tricky it was breaking this down into walls of various thicknesses and heights that join together nicely.

 

 

 

VIVE LA DIFFERENCE

This compilation of recent LinkedIn posts spans 4 different countries and 30 years of my life. So let’s celebrate diversity “of experience”

 

These drawings date back 30 years to the beginnings of my career as a fully qualified architect, having taken a detour of 15 years or so to try my hand at the manual trades (especially bricklaying) and teaching / Curriculum Development.

The site was on the crest of a hill just outside Harare, with the most stupendous view. My boss, Mike Clinton would draw enigmatic concept sketches on little squares of paper the size of sticky notes and leave it to us to make them work.

I attended site meetings while the concrete frame went up, but not much beyond that. Hopefully it turned out OK. As with many such projects the budget was cut back quite dramatically after construction has already begun. I guess it was a bit of a baptism of fire for me.

Who knows how my career would have developed if Zimbabwe hadn't gone into meltdown. It was fun handling the architectural portion of projects almost on my own. But it has also been illuminating to play a role in much bigger architectural teams here in Dubai, and to observe the transition from CAD to BIM.

 

These are concept sketches for the project I shared yesterday. Zimbabwe in the early 90s, still full of promise and optimism.

I was using Autocad by then, conventional 2d views, plus a skeletal 3d massing model. I could use this to choose a viewpoint, then print it out on A3 and sketch over, using my experience of setting out perspectives by hand to fill in the detail.

It's interesting that the hand drawn perspective still has a place in the design process whereas 2d CAD is rapidly becoming obsolete as BIM workflows become more and more essential to production drawings/information sets.

 

Parisienne Doorways 🤔

I love collecting pictures of doors from different times and places. There seem to be endless ways to re-imagine this archetypal object with its multiple overlapping functions and meanings.

Come in, stay out, take a peek, stay warm, advertise your wealth. Collection one is a random set of big old doors in Paris. Master craftsmen in wood and stone joining forces to create these wonderful expressions of doorness.

Of course they are also expressions of the class structure of a bygone age and we can't just "go back" to an imagined era of beauty. My hope is that we can go forward to a time when craft skills are valued at least as highly as "college degrees"

Collection two shows details of the "french doors" to the room I slept in. I love the nested curves of the meeting styles. How to represent this "Level of Detail" in Revit? Could we have a family fit for 1:50 scale that hyperlinks to a model targeted at the woodworking shop? Would the coarser scale model automatically update as the specialist trades refined the design?

It's a pipe dream perhaps, but these are important issues for the seamless workings of the BIM promise. Or so it seems to me.

 

 

Nine months ago, and how life has changed. This was just a few days before I was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Like all bad news, this has turned out to have a silver lining. The cancer is under control, I have started to work out how to transition my life into some kind of retirement phase where I see more of my family and friends around the world.

I recently shared images of the "seedy side" of Dubai. Nothing sinister, just the slightly shabby dormitory suburb where I live with thousands of others from around the world who have seized the opportunities that the UAE has to offer. Let's be honest, I belong to the global elite (just about) But I have tried to retain a connection to working class roots and have often lived in mixed and messy neighbourhoods. 

 

 

But it's good to balance that picture with these idyllic images of the Dubai tourist experience. This is what helps to make my lifestyle possible. You can scoff if you want, but Dubai has been good to me and I embrace it's complex, multi-faceted nature.

At some point I will move on, and leave this flawed paradise behind, but oh what memories!

 

When did Lake McIlwaine become Lake Chivero? I don't quite remember but it was somewhere around the time when I was thrust into this fanciful scheme for a 'lost world' resort on the fringes of that man-made water body, a short drive from Harare.

I was in over my head, for sure with a matter of days to produce an A3 brochure. The font settings are all wrong, but the titles and subtitles were placed above the section for manual cut and paste. Body text may well have come from an electric typewriter.

Once again I created bare-bones 3d volumes to trace over, giving a false impression of a worked out scheme. Smoke and mirrors was all that was needed at such an early stage to entice a board of directors into exploring the idea further.

They didn't. But for me, (trying to catch up with an architecture career that I had set aside for almost two decades...) it was a learning experience, a chance to blend hand-sketching skills with photo montage techniques I had picked up at University and with my new-found enthusiasm for computers.

 

 

Exiting through St Pancras after my trip to Paris, these are snapshots of the walk from Eurostar to Underground. I just think the splicing of modernity into a Victorian context has been handled splendidly.

The original programme came in 3 parts:

• Trainshed
• Hotel
• Beer Cellar

The economics of the Midland Line was based on a mix of passenger transport and beer supply to London's vast market from breweries further north.

The hotel has been restored after a period like dereliction. Barlow's train shed is now magnificent in pale blue against Scott's red brick Gothic. AND...

The beer cellars were opened up magnificently, to create a double-storey concourse with shopping mall, ticket sales, passport control etc, all benefitting from the soaring arches above.

I could go on, but for now just note how well the new steel lintels and stone bearing blocks blend in with Scott's Gothic, while retaining a modern sensibility.

I was in a rush to catch a train at Waterloo, but one day perhaps I will study this subterranean world of old-meets-new in more detail.