TRACING GOTHIC

 

BIM sketch version of St Michael, Basingstoke. This is a Revit family helping me to understand the basic massing of a medieval church. It's part of a much larger study of Hampshire Churches, still in its early stages. "I do and I understand"... the way that I have approached drawing for 70 years. Physical, digital, 2d, 3d, geometry, data. It applies to all of the above.

This is just extrusions. Some solid, some void, maybe half a dozen in total. As long as it remains a family it will be lightweight with data attached that can be scheduled to compare a series of churches. So it's a thinking tool with future extensibility. Like me "not just a pretty picture" 🤔

 

The signs of organic growth over many years are unmistakable. Differences of materials in roof and walls. I love the chequer-board flint and stone. I've spotted some misinterpretation by me already. We learn by our mistakes.

It strikes me that St Michael's could be a metaphor for Basingstoke, the London Overspill town, with its patchwork splicing together of old and new. Picturesque, not in an overly pretty way but in a messy-but-fun, lived-in kind of way. I'm exploring and learning every day. And then I will be back in Dubai, with time to reflect.

 

Just a short stroll outside the front gate of my apartment block, and looking down at my feet of course. Four different kerb details. Their must be some kind of history to this but could well be impossible to retrieve.

Let's just say that new houses have been built, new services laid, pavements resurfaced, patched up, driveways spliced in. Roads and footpaths are asphalt throughout. Easy to patch up and refresh I suppose. Kerbs starting top left and going clockwise as follows.

Basic precast concrete with a mitred corner. Seems to be the newest. Next is a stone-on-edge kerb with a flat stone gutter. I think that's the oldest. Now comes a concrete kerb with a red concrete-brick border. A token break with functionalism perhaps. And finally another stone kerb. Granite this time, I think, and a hefty cross section.

I'm guessing that the road was once stone cobbles, and the pavement flagstones. There may be fragments somewhere, but I haven't stumbled on them yet. There are some places with concrete pavers and traffic calming measures at side-streets in a variety of materials.

I'd better leave it there.

 

 

I would call this a first stumbling venture into the darkness. I have some kind of idea what's going on with this example of Gothic tracery but not enough to set about recreating it methodically, with a sureness of hand and eye.

It's always like this for me with something new. I do my best to follow a logical process but at some point it gets away from me and I just try to keep going as best I can. Simplifying and approximating. Hoping to learn something by my mistakes.

Often enough by the third or fourth attempt it becomes much easier. I find it hard to remember what was so puzzling. Let's hope that I reach that point with Gothic tracery, or at least with this one rather simple example from St Michael's Basingstoke.

In Revit terms this began as a detail item, tracing over one of the photos I took last year. It's not exactly tracing because the image hasn't been rectified. So even here I am starting to estimate and simplify, to predict what the inner logic is going to be when I understand it better. Then I "correct for prediction error". I'm putting this in the language of cognitive science. That seems to be how brains and bodies work, at a largely subconscious level.

 

The detail item is just a tentative skeleton, with extra drafting in places. I needed to move into three dimensions to make further progress. So it's loaded into a generic model family and placed on the "front" view. From here on its mostly sweeps. The profiles are sketched in place for now. Just feeling my way into it.

There's a lot of overlapping geometry. I will consider how best to clean that up in a future iteration. Right now I'm happy to say it's starting to look the part. Pathways are forming in my conscious and subconscious brain. The journey has begun.

This is digital modelling in Revit. Very different from a stone mason's setting out. But it's a way for me to begin to imagine the accumulation of artistry over several centuries as Christian Europe rebuilt itself in the aftermath of the Roman empire and the break in continuity of the classical tradition.

Gothic tracery. A metaphor for the birth pangs of Western Europe?

 

I had a really productive morning yesterday. A LinkedIn post, a walk in the park, clean Kitchen, make coffee. Those should be the everyday routine starters but I don't always hit all the marks.

I got the bus into town. Shopping, visited the medical practice where I have registered, dropped off some records from my oncologist in Dubai, post office... Those are all important items on my to do list as the clock runs down on this visit.

I was just in time to get to St Michael's and go inside. That was a first. I now have shots from both sides of the the window I am using as the starting point for my tracery study. At first glance it's remarkably similar, inside and out. Not sure what I was expecting.

 

Compared to the 19th century church I attended at the beginning of this visit, St Michael's is very obviously not the product of a single mind. It.has grown in an additive way over several generations.

I'm thinking of three phases, maybe three evolutionary stages in our approach to Gothic (the pointed architecture) St Michael's belongs to phase one, a slow unfolding of ideas, styles, capabilities, belief. All Saints would be phase two. The style resurrected, extended, transformed. Applied to a new mechanical age. And we are in phase 3. The conservation, interpretation, worship of a lost past. Several lost pasts.

You might call them the manual, mechanical, and digital eras perhaps. With great power comes loss of innocence, loss of belief maybe. But the buildings remain. Still calling to something deep within us. And I stumble blindly on. Still trying to understand.