TWENTY TWENTY

 

Just as I am sorting through 20 years plus accumulation of books and looking to move towards the last major transition of my life, out come these articles and blog posts.  In recent years, GAJ has had a very dynamic PR department, keeping the firm in the public eye, and motivating us to take pride in our company.  This is a blog post to celebrate my 20 year milestone

 

“Love That Design” coordinated with Elaine to write an article about my 20 years in Dubai. This was to be one of the last acts of her time running our PR dept.  She did a wonderful job in that role and became a special friend.  Wishing her health and happiness as she moves back to UK.

 

Rather bowled over by this article about me. Very well put together. It's been an amazing journey (so far) and I'm looking forward to making another transition over the next couple of years.

Thank you to everyone who has been with me along the way. 😁

 

https://www.lovethatdesign.com/article/andrew-milburn-having-bim-and-design-specialistsits-an-awful-disconnect/

 

Before and after cataract surgery. Looking forward to walking around without glasses in the near future. It's a common thing for people of my age and I wanted to get it done while I'm still on private medical insurance.

No disrespect to the NHS which is a wonderful thing in many ways, but I have heard that there are long queues for many procedures. Some suggested a 12 month wait for this type of operation. Took just 2 weeks to set it up at the American Hospital Dubai who have also been handling my prostate cancer treatment.

Great ambience, top class doctors and nurses, plus my favourite breakfast menu at the Plaza Cafe 🤣🤣🤣

 

 

When I started to use Sketchup, (2002?) I had already decided on "The Way We Build" as the title for a series of books. The idea was to continue the work of the textbooks I had worked on for Secondary School building students during my three years with the Curriculum Development Unit in Zimbabwe. But the subject matter was to be extended now that I had reverted to a career in architecture.

Unfortunately the demands of returning to a profession at the age of 40 didn't leave time for more than a few exploratory notes and sketches. But the power of that title sustained me in collecting images and data, formulating thoughts and dreaming dreams for the next 30 years. It burst out in my enthusiasm for Project Soane, a competition to reconstruct the Bank of England as it was 200 years ago, using Revit.

 

And that spirit was given a new boost after the fire at Notre Dame de Paris, when a small group of Revit enthusiasts coalesced around my tentative first steps and embarked on a collaborative model of the cathedral on BIM360.

So "The Way We Build" has become a slogan, in my mind, to represent a personal research effort over several decades, linking together my years as a bricklayer, my work as a teacher of Building Studies, my career as an architect and BIM addict, and my travels to various parts of the world to look at buildings that express different human cultures.

 

 

 

ON THE SHELF

 

Facade development. The project was known as "plot 14" We actually did this one using Revit Server. All sorts of issues, but we pulled through somehow. Persuading management to fully commit to BIM360 as it then was took some time. It's easy enough to scoff as a BIM specialist, but there are people who have to keep the company cash flow going from month to month. Hard choices.

I am more suited to grappling with the nitty gritty issues of how something is built. How to translate the pure vision of the concept design team into a well-coordinated set of construction documents. The detailing, seen in real life is very impressive. Crisp and clean with just enough inflection and nuance to keep the flittering gaze interested.

I am a big believer in sketch sheets for internal use. Sometimes you can just take screenshots and drop them into Slack or MS teams. But sometimes you need to put four or five views together, carefully framed, juxtaposed and annotated to convey an issue well enough to focus minds on solutions.

 

Plan, Elevation, Section, Axo, Perspective, Schedule. All the view types have a role to play in directing attention to the day-to-day problems. As a day-to-day Revit user, I have to get to grips with what the problems really are. Solve what I can and convey the rest quickly and clearly to those discipline heads who spend much of their lives sitting in meetings, sending and receiving emails. Writing up minutes.

I've done my share of that stuff and I prefer the hands-on role. It takes a large team to design, build and operate a project like this one. A team that changes radically over time. Tools and process that enhance clear communication are vital.

Enter the BIM pencil.

 

I am going through my bookshelves in Dubai, sorting into one's I might realistically take to UK, and ones that I probably won't. Along the way I came upon these two "possibles" which were text books for courses I took during my first Architecture degree 1969-72 at UCL.

They have some sentimental value, and it might be interesting to review the content to reassess the value of the material for my later career in Zimbabwe and Dubai. But they are a bit bulky and probably of little practical use to me as I transition to some kind of retirement mode. Perhaps I will scan selected pages.

 

The interesting thing is that I attended very few of the lectures at the time, and like many of the students regarded the courses as unnecessarily dull. But within a year or so of finishing my degree, when I had abandoned architecture and plunged myself into working with my hands on building sites, the subject matter started to become much more interesting and I realised that I had absorbed enough to pursue it further through private study.

When we are young (under 30?) we tend to classify things rather crudely into "good" and "bad". I know it's fashionable to offer political power to ever younger age groups, and to prolong the years of formal education. In my case it took several years of working for a living and mixing with people from very different backgrounds to knock some sense into my head.

Bottom line: I'm definitely a fan of apprentice type systems, be it for building trades or professions.

 

Letting go of books is a strange thing. Sometimes you get this feeling that a book really opened your eyes, but can't remember the details at all well. The temptation has been to hang on to these and come back later to read them again. Or perhaps to take notes and distil the main points in no my own words.

But ten years and more passes. I'm faced with "to ship or not to ship"... I seriously doubt that rereading some of these books will ever come back to the top of my to do list. So was it all a waste of effort? Maybe, but perhaps the ideas I grapple with on first reading have become fused into my subconscious and become subtle alterings of my world view. Even if I can't trot out a coherent precis of the main argument, the shadow of it may drift across my future musings.

I have to be brutal. The limits of space and time in my pending retirement dictate this. Condense your memories down. Free the mind. Aim for a simple healthy life. Don't dwell on tasks not completed.

 

 

I have tried to develop my own views on genetic and cultural evolution. Richard Dawkins' grand tale inspired by Chaucer. He rubs some people up the wrong way, but this is not that kind of book. It's a clever way of conveying the grand sweep of time, reaching Bach from Humans to the earliest and simplest life forms. I love it.

'Your Inner Fish' was a chance find, bought in New York, 15 years ago. Strangely enough it helped to inspire on of my entries to the Parametric Pumpkin competition, many years ago. Metamorphosis (in a word) and very well written. 'Catching Fire' was another random find, in Dubai. More recently I have heard Richard Wrangham speak (on YouTube) and his later ideas about human self-domestication.

The fourth book is one of those I find difficult to recall in sharp detail. But the topic of how human brains and human culture co-evolved over the past several hundred thousand years is endlessly fascinating.

All four of these books appealed to me as I was extrapolating back from Renaissance to Gothic to Greek and Roman architecture, then beyond. Studying "The Way We Build" across time and space is an obsession of mine. It's a way of penetrating the human story and it has taken me into wider reading of ancient history, archaeology, and evolution. So I record the covers of these books as part of the process of distilling down to the few that I really want to take back to UK.

Ultimately what matters are my own inner thought structures and how they emerge and crystalise into commentary as I visit, sketch, model, photograph in this never ending quest.

It's the journey.

 

 

 

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.