BROACHING THE SPIRE

 

The Hampshire Churches map has come on a long way.  Time to start modelling again, maybe in parallel with upgrading the map.  So where to start.  I didn’t want to get bogged down with complete churches. There are so many of them anyway… a danger of feeling overwhelmed by the task.

So I thought of tackling common elements and where better to start than bell towers and spires. I want to make these as parametric families that can be used in a modular approach to massing models of the churches.  That way a daunting task could be reduced to a much simpler assembly of adjustable parts. I’m not going to get it right with the first try but all the same it’s best to just jump in and follow my instincts (with a bit of self-reflection on the way)

Based on past work in my “pumpkin phase” I decided to have one parameter that sets the overall scale and several “factors” that adjust the proportions of sub-components.  The first example has three parts: a cuboid (box) an octagonal pyramid (blend of two octagons) and in between a blend between a square and an octagon.

 

More standard/modular families for nesting into my massing models of churches. I use the term nesting because the massing models of the churches are themselves Revit families.  This makes them much more lightweight than linked Revit projects, easier to mover around, display in schedules within the overall “map”,  copy and edit to create new churches. Lots of advantages as long as you don’t try to add too much detail.

So I have another kind of spire. Is this still a broach spire, or does it have some other name?  In any case, “Broach” originally means something pointed. As a verb it meant pierce and came to also mean introduce as in broaching a subject in a conversation. So it’s not clear to me how it came to mean a spire that transitions from square to octagonal part-way up.  But words are like that. Their meaning changes over time, often quite radically.

 

 

I also made several recess families of different shapes.  “Face based” to represent doors, windows and archways.  They will be hosted on extrusions for the most part, sometimes on nested “tower” families with the “cut when loaded” parameter checked.  While I'm at it let's add a spike to the spire. Makes a huge difference in my opinion.  No scaling on this at the moment, but we'll add that if I come across a situation where it is needed, or maybe I will just open up that nested instance and adjust the height directly, probably less trouble. 

 

You have to remain flexible in your approach to families.  No need to add parameters (still less formulas) unless they add significant value. 

 

a

 

There is a third type of broach spire, like the second but with the upper octagon rotated 22.5 degrees.  But before investing time in that and developing more families, I decided to try using the ones I had.  You never really know if you have made the right decisions until you use the content in a couple of different situations.

 

So I picked some churches not too far from Basingstoke, and started assembling massing models. In the case of St Peter Linkenholt, designed by William White in 1871, I have an original floor plan from the Lambeth online archives. St Mary Laverstoke (1896 by JL Pearson) is a church that I did visit in June 2024 when I first took possession of my retirement flat. Here I rely on a historical image from Google Earth to estimate the length of the building and the relationship of the parts.  The third church is the St James the Less, Litchfield, a Norman church extensively remodelled in Victorian times, architect unknown (at present)

I’m trying to “move fast and break things” ... for maximum learning.  Don't get bogged down, there are 400 of these things in the sample set 😕