SCANNING THE PAST

 
I live in the middle. 10 storey blocks with no common theme but similar floor plans, known as the CBD. The photo shows the typical elevation of a ring of seven storey buildings enclosing the CBD. Not sure what to call that style. "Contemporary Moorish"? The master developer may well have used a label like that. Who knows?

Generally speaking this is the high point of the neighbourhood in terms of design. Beyond this ring are clusters, themed by country. Rather crude attempts to mimic national styles. Spain is probably the least objectionable. Nevertheless International City has become a lively suburb. Lower middle class, short on parking and landscape, but lots of little shops and cafes. Affordable, practical, real.

I like living here, but I ought to get out more 🤣🤣🤣

 

1991 is almost half a lifetime away for me. My youngest child was 3 years old and I had made the agonising decision to leave him in Harare with his mother and grandparents while I went to Joburg to complete my 5 years of Architecture Studies after a gap of 18 years.

I had started to dabble with CAD, but only just. Roughing out in pencil on butcher paper then inking up on tracing was my favourite way of working. This was a History of Architecture assignment, part of 5th year which I had entered, based on my first degree at the Bartlett and a couple of years in an office in Harare.

The theme of that fifth year course was History of Urban Settlement. These drawings, comparing Bristol and Tripoli, are based on book research and imagination. As I remember, they were photocopied and coloured by hand along with 4 or 5 other pages. 

 

I have been to Bristol, but not to the medieval city obviously and it was more than a decade before these drawings were produced. I have never been to North Africa, sadly.

Exercises like this one helped to formulate the mission that I call "the Way We Build" coded as WWB in my file structures. Drawings are models. Attempts to distill some critical aspect of real life to a physical or digital medium. The process of creating this abstraction an adventure that helps us to restructure our brains.

A sense of history. Invaluable.

 

 

2006 was still fairly early in our BIM journey at GAJ. It seemed like an absolute no-brainer to me that we would transition most of the office to this approach quite rapidly. Of course there was resistance and scepticism, mostly from the higher levels. Strangely enough Brian, right at the top, was very positive about the potential of Revit. On the other hand, having recently restructured to take in junior partners, he wanted them to make their own minds up.

I was the highest ranking staff member pushing Revit and was thrown challenges by Brian on a regular basis. This one was a quick preconcept booklet to lure a client into commissioning us for further development. Of course you are lucky if 20% of these quick schemes go any further and this one didn't. In fact it was an attempt to revive an idea from a few years earlier that also went nowhere.

Much of this is using Revit as a desktop publisher, laying out reference images on sheets. The model itself is very crude, an exercise in massing. But there is a schedule of areas thrown in there. Live data of course.

How would I have reacted if I had known that the concept design team would still be using Sketchup and Autocad, Photoshop and In Design as their primary tools, almost twenty years later? Probably better that I kept believing for another decade or so before easing into more of an elder statesman role.