FRIDAY NIGHTS IN DUBAI

 Relishing my weekends in Dubai. They won’t last forever.  I’ve known Bayt as Wakeel for almost twenty years I guess.  Used to be a favourite meeting place when visitors came to Dubai.  It’s not  quite as exciting as it use to be. That’s mostly me I think. The Abra rides have changed a bit as well.  I prefer the newer version now that I am less steady on my feet, but so many happy times, crossing the creek on those old boats in the open evening air. Coloured lights reflecting in the water.

 

On the Deira side of the Creek.  Haven’t wandered through these alleyways for many a year. Colourful displays of goods on a humid evening. Crammed with atmosphere and memories.  Salesmen shouting out their wares.  It’s good that Dubai still has places like these to contrast with the ultra-slick modern tourism that has expanded exponentially since I arrived in 2004.  Dubai has been good to me.  I was rescued from the desperation from Zimbabwe in political and economic turmoil. Hyperinflation and shortages of basic goods.  In those days I still had great respect for newspapers like the Guardian and the Independent, but friends from the UK sent my links to articles about Dubai which were so negative, scornful and frankly racist, that I started to question the way that things has changed since I left UK 25 years earlier.

 

Now I am on the point of returning to a country that is the same but different. No longer will I drive on six lane highways past megaprojects that spring up overnight.  Britain used to be the most vibrant and innovative country in the world.  In my teenage years the music from  Merseyside took the rock and roll of American origins and transformed it into a message of hope for mankind.  Swinging London led the world in style.   I am still immensely proud to be English and British, European even. But do we have the vigour of places like Dubai and Singapore?  Definitely not, for better or for worse.

These are cities that have tapped into the cultural energy and financial capital of immigrants from all over the world while retaining tight control over citizenship and even permanent residence.  You come here to contribute and to prosper, as long as you are able. Make trouble of fail to pay your own way and you are out.  No endless appeals or special pleading. It can be harsh, but it works and Europe as a whole seems to be slowly waking up to this more muscular approach to an open society.

 

Another contrast.  Al Boom Tourist Village. Feels like a throw-back to the Dubai of 20 or 30 years ago.  We went to look at possible dinner cruises on the creek by Dhow.  Almost went for that option, but looked around and chose the Egyptian restaurant on land, but with a nautical theme.   The young band was great. A successful fusion of traditional and modern.  Food, service, ambience, value … It was wonderful to discover this little gem hiding in plain sight for all these years.

 

I have been to Souq Madinat so many times, but not in recent years.  We even played here for three or four years in a row at Fete de la Musique when I had my three piece band: "Out of the Blue."  Seems so long ago now.  We dropped off at the hotel by mistake, happy accident really.  So much of my work with Godwin Austen Johnson has been on hospitality projects. This is not one of our projects but it almost could have been. I like to think we would have done it slightly better but it’s pretty good as a balance between design integrity and serving the tourism market it targets. 

 

The souq itself is an interesting comparison to the old souq area in Deira.  Much pricier shops of course and somewhat sanitised atmosphere, but those are givens of the brief.  You have to acknowledge the ability of Dubai to keep diversifying its tourist appeal.  The recognition that water is a key element. Abu Dhabi has more of that just naturally but Dubai has been able to engineer a huge increase in waterfront property over the past two or three decades. 

Nice glimpse of the Burj Al Arab next door.  I has been eclipsed to some extent by later “modern marvels” but still a memorable sight in its own right. To repeat, I’m really enjoying getting out on a Friday night and taking advantage of this amazing city that has been my home for 21 years, and counting.

 

 

 

SHEET DATA +AI

The upper half of my Hampshire Churches study area.  The two kilometre grid is clear without becoming obtrusive (Revit Halftone) Major roads are prominent and minor roads subdued. Thick orange denotes modern highways and town bypass roads. One obvious mistake on this export is the M3 from London to Southampton, (which skims the S.E. edge of Basingstoke) is shown as a minor road.  Still a work in progress.

Also showing Rivers and streams which obviously affect village placement. And starting to show country estates which are still quite common, but much more so in 1900.  I’m showing the 19^th century versions because along with the railways this makes a fascinating record of a turning point in British history.  There are also straight lines in dark red which represent Roman roads.  Lots of these, giving time depth along with some thick red ellipses to represent Hill Forts, presumably dating to pre-Roman times.

 

A section of the schedule which occupies the far right edge of the sheet displays basic date embedded in the church objects.  Colour coded circles for Saxon/Norman, Medieval, Georgian, Victorian and Modern.  I will probably adjust the classification system and the data fields later on, but it’s a good starting point.  Names of Architects only really apply from the post-Medieval era, and I haven’t sourced all this data yet, but making steady progress.

The point is that I’m increasing my conscious and sub-conscious grasp of the history of this area which will become the context for my retirement and is already me second home.  More and more visits, days out on the bus, hijacking of friends and relatives with cars to come. 

Two Grok.  My prompts were for Notre Dame and the Bank of England, with a bit of context as to how I wanted them presented.  The Notre dame shot suffered contamination from earlier requests.  I had asked for a landscape with a watercolour effect. My first attempt to generate an image in Grok and partially using the suggestions it gave me for first use of this feature.  Obviously you need to clear the prompts completely, perhaps restart the app.

The Bank of England is a less convincing representation of the building but better interpretation of the context.  I asked for late 18^th century London and the Bank as designed by John Soane.  The people and other props are kind of OK.  Is that a horse? Maybe. Not sure about the mountains in the background and the building is a strange amalgam. Some reference to Herbert Baker’s 1930s central feature which is the image you are most likely to see of the Bank as it is today. There is a bit of what could be Tivoli Corner stuck on the end.  Totally the wrong place and what’s with the dome?  That’s just a hallucination replacing the attic storey that Soane designed and Baker retained. 

AI can now speed up the process of finding out who designed a church and pointing to relevant web sites.  Also open sources like this book about church plans on project Gutenberg.

In fact Grok wrote me a few useful paragraphs about an architect I hadn’t notice before (Beazley) who worked for G.E.Street. Pointed me to a deanery map. Gave me some information about and interesting prefabricated church in Southampton. All this is grift to the mill as I tap into a database of some 400 churches to inform my understanding of how “Wessex” has evolved over the centuries.

It’s a very rich story and an essential one in my view as we grapple with the ever increasing fragmentation of society and knowledge, the whirlwind of competing narratives bombarding us each day, the erosion of confidence and social cohesion.  I can’t change these things in any significant way, but I do hope to keep a sense of perspective, and a reverence for the cultural heritage of my ancestors.

 

 

 

DUAL SOURCE MAPPING

 Top corner of sheet two. This is starting to look quite useful. I don’t remember ever going to Hungerford, but definitely worth a visit. They still have a “common” from medieval times.

There were several country estates in 1900, different sizes, some with hunting forests attached. Memories of a very different world. Lord of the manor, farming villages, the railway has arrived like a whirlwind. Change is coming.

Hungerford lies at the junction of the River Kennet and it’s tributary the Dun. Ultimately this water all flows East through Reading then on to the Thames and London. The roads and the railway follow the same route in parallel.

 

 

Due West lies Bath, with Bristol beyond. Branch slightly South and you are heading to Somerset, Devon, Cornwall. I know all this stuff, but it’s been coming to life more vividly as I work on the map in Revit.

It’s taken a lot longer than expected, I mean really a lot, lot longer. That’s OK, just as long as I keep learning along the way. But before too long I must get back to the business of building massing models of typical churches.

 

Extracts from my two main mapping sources for Hungerford. Open Street Map shown above with its 1km grid. I have captured every second grid in my Revit model, so squares of 2km x 2km. The National Library of Scotland map below based on Ordinance Survey maps for 1888-1913 which I am coding as OS 1900.  

I took screenshots from both sources. For the OS 1900 map, you can see the sheet edges where it has been pieced together. Maybe there is a way to switch on a grid that matches the other source, but I didn’t see it.  I tweaked the tint of each jpg with the default Windows image viewer/editor to give alternating squares of pink and green.  Some mistakes along the way, but I was able to line the sheets up fairly well (a lot of them)  Sadly there seems to be a cumulative error when you trace over this compared to the OSM map with its more convincing  and consistent 1km squares

So I have separate views in Revit for these two sources, using OSM as primary and doing some ad hoc adjustments to the pink and green  OS 1900 images as the work proceeds.  Many of the country estates have gone bankrupt by now or handed over to National Trust and shrunk in size perhaps. I’m showing what was there in 1900.  Now this is a labour of love, but it is heavy going so I have to make a judgement in terms of accuracy.  The boundaries of diocese, deanery and benefice are highly abstracted. That was my starting point.

 

 

I am now showing roads and rivers with much more concern for the detailed twists and turns than I ever imagined. (I didn’t really have a plan for showing them at all at first)  I was forced into this as a way to crosscheck the alignment of my two sources on their separate sheets.  The model lines, (roads, rivers, rail) generic model map pins (churches) and the Revit floors / property boundaries (benefices, deaneries etc) are common to all views.  The snapshots of the maps are jpegs and view specific.

So I toggle between the two views, toiling away each day but gaining enormous insights into my chosen place of retirement.  A rectangle from Hungerford to Reading and descending to the South coast. Southampton to Chichester.  There is a pale grey filled region with transparency applied to fade the jpegs down so I can see more clearly. Not a Masking Region because that would also fade the 3d elements, a subtle distinction between those two kinds of region in Revit.

 

GRIDLOCK GROK

 

My boss once told me he’s not a big fan of grids. I get it. Creativity doesn’t come in boxes. But as a Revit user, the sooner you can get a grid going the better. The way Revit introduced 3d grids and levels 25 years ago... it was just so cool.

And yet, the Hampshire Churches map I’ve been working on for two years didn’t have a grid until last week. To be fair, it’s a map. Essentially 2d. Grids are at their most useful for multi-storey projects.

 

It happened by accident. I was playing with Grok (as you do) and it sent me to Open Street Map. Google Maps has been great for pointing me to photos of the individual churches. But OSM has better maps, and they have grids.

So I’m using OSM for today and a Scottish Libraries website for 1900. Alignment is tricky because the 1900 maps don’t have the grid. But I’m getting there.