CLOUD PUMPKIN LAND

I've been sifting through the working folders for my blog over the past 15 years. Quite a trio down memory lane. I extracted all the Revit files so they don't clog up my Onedrive. Instead I'm uploading them to ACC so that future upgrades will be easier.

It's quite reassuring to see so many files skip forward ten or more versions without incident. Once in the cloud I can organise the views and sheets to make all this work more accessible, firstly to me, and then... let's see.

The image includes some fascinating early dabbling in the Corinthian Order. This is around the time I started an ongoing dialogue with Paul Aubin which has since matured into a lasting friendship. I was trying to make the point that the classical orders allow for much more diversity than is often assumed. I also believe that a relatively crude abstraction can do the job for most situations.

The search for better generic furniture was a regular topic in the early years of my blog. And then there all those ventures into Point World. Those were heady days. What's another geometry challenge I can tackle? Oh, I know... Bavarian Baroque.

Sure do miss my buddy Bernhard. Gone too soon.

 

It's been great fun revisiting this little adventure. For my 2013 parametric pumpkin submission I went a bit over the top, creating Revit versions of three of Mauritz Escher's mindbending prints.

The dividing line between craftsmanship and art is very difficult to define. Printmaking can be pure craft, working to order. Escher was the consummate craftsman from wood engraving to lithography, but he used that skill to express his artistic vision. Much of his work explores the paradox of capturing our three dimensional world on a flat piece of paper.

 

My pumpkin pieces explored the possibility of BIM as an artistic medium. How to scale complex objects is another theme, one that also concerned Escher. Here the mixing of different viewpoints throws our mind into confusion.

"This is not a stair." Revit has an implied gravity, so a stair on its side will be a generic model. This is not a pipe. My scaleable pipe family imitates copper plumbing. I had an object like this in my twenties. Kept in my toolbag but used for something else.

Lots more jokes and trickery in there, but that's enough for tonight.

 

Still Life Street. Another tribute to M. C. Escher as part of my 2013 submission to Zach Kron's Parametric Pumpkin competition. This has also found it's way onto the Autodesk Cloud as part of my ongoing efforts to tidy up and future proof my BIM pencil work of the past 15 years or so.

Metamorphosis, Giantism, games within games. This was a tremendous learning experience for me and I like to think a source of inspiration for others. This phase of my work has passed away now. It reached a natural conclusion then gave way to Project Soane, Notre Dame and other subsequent ventures exploring history with BIM.

 

But that annual competition motivated to push technical boundaries and to look for the poetic potential of Revit. So often it is regarded as a rigid, clunky tool. So often we hear the call to rebrand BIM as information management. I understand why. But I choose to be a artist and to place my BIM work in the context of hundreds of years of creative expression by designers and builders.

Do we really think we will get to a better world by managing the hell out of life? Yes I embrace digital tools and greater productivity. But none of that will ever move my soul like a baroque church or a medieval town.