TWO SIDES OF DUBAI

 

It's all a question of framing. You can see the upside or the downside in most situations. It worries me a little that we prefer frame human activity as harmful to "the planet" or whatever word you choose to frame something sacred outside ourselves.

These are pictures from one of my morning walks. I have been living in an unfashionable suburb of Dubai for 17 years now. I can frame that in a positive way. I enjoy living amongst the "common people" who keep the city running. It lacks the glitz of tourist areas and keeps you mindful of the harsh climate. But all the same, purchasing this flat was a smart move. Like so many others I came to Dubai to climb out of a financial hole, and switching from rental to ownership early on has made a huge difference on many levels.

So you can point the camera at the empty plots, the discarded rubble, the feral cat limping on three legs. You can notice the street-football pitch marked out on a corner of the pavement because there is a shortage of proper play areas. (or because kids are resilient and resourceful)... OR...

 

You can frame the view to catch the miracle of a city in the desert. The carefully calibrated landscaping maintained with recycled water. The animals that adapt and survive. I don't have a picture here of the corner shop that is packed with curious and helpful staff who light up in smiles and greet me the moment I enter. The guy who picks out 10 Dirhams worth of juicy dates for me as soon as I catch his eye. Human contact with people who I could frame as victims earning pitifully low wages, but don't.

They are also survivors. They are happy to have an opportunity to earn hard currency and to remit some it to their families. Instead of showing resentment and distrust to an englishman in their midst, they see another opportunity to learn, to interact, to share the simple pleasures of common humanity.

Dubai has been kind to me, just as western media have been quick to point a finger at its faults. I see both sides. But as a fallible human I'm not willing to cast the first stone. Better to hold on to twenty years-worth of positive memories, with the occasional shadow to keep me straight.

 

As part of the celebration of twenty years working at Godwin Austen Johnson in Dubai, I was offered a free night at the Palace Dubai Creek Harbour. This is a project that I worked on extensively during 2018 and 2019, setting up the initial Revit models for the architectural elements, creating most of the family content, and managing the doors and windows package right through to the end of detail design.

It's my first time to visit the site. In fact it's closer to where I live than I had realised. The hotel is fully operational but the area around is not quite finished. Give it another year to be fully buzzing. All the same I can't help wondering what it would be like to live this lifestyle on a daily basis. The glamorous side of Dubai.

 

Too late for me. I made my choices 50, 40, 30 years ago. But it's timely to catch this glimpse into the parallel world that I ignore for the most part as I go about my business in this desert theme park. Kudos to Jason, and others in the concept design team for developing this very sleek and elegant solution. The interiors were by another firm, and like most of the ID work I have had to incorporate into a BIM workflow over the past 15 years and more, executed entirely in 2D Autocad (plus some fancy renders of course, possibly outsourced)

We had to model the basics of the ID for them for the sake of coordinating with MEP and Structures. The same was true for Landscape Design. It's starting to change now. More and more subdisciplines are adopting BIM. Transitions take time. Forcing them is not always a good idea.

Bottom line. The interiors are great. Much better than I had imagined, and quite seamlessly integrated with the architecture, while taking the edge off the minimalism that works so well externally. Landscape too. All the eye-rolls and cursing from our BIM team now forgotten. So glad to have experienced the project from the other side of the fence.

 

Selfies on the balcony of my room. "Living the life" just for a moment. I suspect if this became my everyday reality it would lose its sparkle. But as a break in routine it's perfect. I can see why some people fall in love with Dubai and others feel a deep resentment and suspicion.

For me it's just the backdrop to my life for the past 20 years. The last phase of my "working life" effectively as I gradually figure out some kind of "retirement" phase. Hopefully that will be pursuing my passions, but necessarily at a slower pace as my energy levels tail off. It's OK.

Revit model versus built reality. Not a direct comparison but perhaps more useful. Cutaway axo of a partially developed model. Structure in pink (linked model). External shell for the Architecture was divided into three files. The podium across the entire site. The 45 floor apartments, and the 10 storey Hotel. Actually the podium contains shell and core up to first floor level. The two towers were divided into interior and exterior. Interior models are not shown here.

 

We had trouble with groups for the typical floors. Maybe it's possible to manage them so they never break. With a mixed ability team in two locations and lots of design changes... not so much. But we got there. Maybe one day there will be a more robust solution. Links are not it. For one thing the doors in a link don't register the floor they are on in the master model.

But my days of wrestling with these kinds of issues are drawing to a close, and I can revel in a project become reality. I know it so well and yet the immersive experience of now is quite different from navigating a model and hunting down issues to solve as part of a design team.

 

STEPS TO ASSEMBLY

 

As a teenager I loved these kinds of odd spaces. Can I remember why, almost 60 years later? Not with the same clarity and intensity. But there was a sense of quiet rebellion, of finding beauty in unexpected places, of anti-beauty perhaps.

The Romantic period had a concept of "the sublime"... Natural beauty that is almost frightening. Perhaps I was inspired by that idea, but seeing it in the harsh industrial fabric of South Yorkshire around 1965. Harsh but ageing, stained, dark, mysterious. That's part of it.

Another part was defiance. Subverting conventional pictorial composition. Instead of a central focus, divide attention to left and right. Maybe twist and turn, hint at a focal point out of sight around the corner.

This image is two separate photos side by side, but it triggered an instant flashback to an earlier me, full of hope and creativity. Hungry for life's experiences which stretched out endlessly, intriguingly into the distance.

 

This is me using Revit in Sketchup mode. St Thomas Worting, just on the edge of Basingstoke. One of the churches I visited using my free bus pass, three weeks ago. It's very cute.

Victorian Gothic. Plain tile roofs over, napped flint walls, with a wooden bell tower. True to the local vernacular. You get off the bus and the church is just across the road, set back behind a neat rectangular graveyard. It's a small church with just one aisle, at the back like a lean-to kitchen on a farmhouse.

 

Not sure how many churches I will model like this. Probably enough to cover all the typical elements found in the dataset. It would be neat to categorise these and feed the data into the pins on the map. Then we could do some analysis. Stone towers versus wood, octagon v pyramid, clay tile v slate or lead.

Would that lead to any meaningful insights? For me at least it will be a way to get to grips with a large and complex dataset. I'm calling it a dataset but it's living history. A thousand years and more of human development and conflict in the heart of old England, a big chunk of Wessex, coveted by Saxons, Normans, Elisabeth nobility, the rich and famous of the modern world.

 

Two sheets with assembly views and photos (from my bus trips) I did a prototype sheet before my last visit to UK, these two are extending that work and moving forward.

It's all a bit crude just now, but better to add new churches at this stage than to obsess over modelling, embedded data or sheet layouts. Let's get the first 8 or 10 churches up to this level. Then we can do a review of methods and LOD.

They are both Gothic, but one is Georgian and the other Victorian, a subtle difference perhaps but very interesting, to me at least.

The Georgian church (All Saints, Deane) is embedded in a country estate, an idealised form, of the romantic age, unrelated to local traditions. The Victorian (Worting St Thomas) pays homage to those local traditions while also being "of its time"

More to come.

 

 Just for a change some Revit tips. I realised yesterday I had forgotten how to do this so maybe it can help someone else. Assembly views. I have massing models of various churches made as Revit families. I place one of these these in the Hampshire Map project, select it, then choose "Assembly" on the ribbon.

You can choose several elements of course, but in this case I only want one. Tbe assembly now appears in the browser. Select it and make assembly views. These can then be dragged onto a sheet. Typically I am using two Elevations and a plan, but 3d views are also possible.

The part I had forgotten is how to get the cut-plane down to a level where it looks like a diagrammatic floor plan. Take any elevation view, disable the view template, go to Visibility Graphics/Annotations and turn on Sections. The plan is treated as a horizontal section indicated by a chain line. Select & nudge down to the desired level.

Simple stuff, but very handy for the work I am doing, comparative studies of a large set of old churches. I want to have one simple summary sheet per sheet that catches the basic form. Then it will be easy to flick through these and do some high-level analysis.

 

ORDER & CHAOS

 

Hampshire Churches. I've been working on this for a while now. Last week I was in Basingstoke and visited half a dozen churches by bus. This underlined for me the value of physical visits. Yes there is a lot of information online and my maps are totally indebted to a few splendid websites. But...

There is no substitute for walking up a small country road on a sunny day and taking in the unique context of a village church from ground level. This visceral experience then feeds into the background information I have on file for that church: when it was built, who was the patron, architect, economic context, current status, Google Earth images, historic England data.

I have started to make full-blown Revit models of a couple of these churches. That was before the scale of the project grew to the extents of these two sheets. So more recently I have started making simple massing models as Revit families, which can be used for comparative studies. Add to this spot details, like the recent window tracery example.

So now I'm back in Dubai. Let's see how the project proceeds from here. It's an iterative process, feeling my way forward, driven by curiosity, learning as I go. The data in the schedules is very provisional. Just a framework for further development at this stage.

Using Revit /BIM as a thinking tool. Tying together my visits, my research, my digital studies.

 

The UK branch of my offspring are doing the Zimbabwe experience right now. My son spent the first 18 years of his life there of course, but for his wife and my three grandchildren, it's a completely new experience and what a wonderful time they are having. Still a wonderful place for a very special holiday even though life is hard for most Zimbabweans.

Dubai is also an an amazing holiday destination, but I am living here, and based in an "affordable" suburb. It's taking a while to adapt to the heat etc after six weeks in UK, but I managed an early morning walk today. So to contrast with the Matopos at sunset, I took a pavement picture. No interesting depth of history like the ones I did for Basingstoke, instead perhaps a morality tale. Once things slide in the direction of chaos, it's difficult to maintain any kind of standards in the public domain.

Here you see bollards, bollards placed on the pavement illegally by a restaurant business and treated carelessly by parking cars. A concrete ramp, of sorts cast against the kerb, also unauthorised and breaking up rapidly. Also an abandoned shopping trolley with a scattering of mouldy red onions.

I have enjoyed living here but sometimes this kind of careless ugliness gets to me.

 

 

Why has it taken me a week and a half to get back into gear? (since arriving back in Dubai) It's frustrating, but I guess it comes with my age and health issues. Best to just go with the flow and not stress about it. Then a day like today comes and the contrast makes it all worthwhile.

I started the day with a physio session for my lower back. Mid-morning. Then brunch at the Plaza Cafe. Avocado stacker. Make the hospital visits into a special occasion.

Back home I did some work on the Hampshire Churches study. Time to document the naming and coding of the Heirarchy of land subdivisions. They are church of England structures, but they have always operated in parallel with the civil /political boundaries. It makes me think of the Domesday book.

Almost a thousand years ago a new elite invading the country, going through an exercise a bit like this, recording the subdivisions and attaching data to them. This is just a first draft.

 

This "Subdivisions Sheet" for the Hampshire Churches project is almost complete. The coding system is my own simplified version. It wouldn't really work for the whole country but it seems to be OK for my defined area. I've tried to capture the hierarchy down from Diocese (Bishopric) to Archdeaconry, to Deanary, to Benefice/Parish.

Interesting to know that the word Dean is derived from Ten. So one Bishop has two or 3 Archdeacons, who each have five to ten Deans. A dean would oversee a handful of parishes, each with a variable number of churches.

I'm not worrying about getting this all strictly correct. As far as I can see the lowest levels reorganise themselves from time to time and choose modern-sounding names for their Benefice. I just need a structure of nested folders to keep my data in, so basing it loosely on the official C of E divisions made sense.

There are some 400 churches in my map now. Goodness knows how I shall handle such a number. Random sampling probably. One step at a time. Looking forward to more visits. Probably next year.