SECOND PASS MARY

 

Persistence pays off. Proud to have been associated with these guys. Wish I had the energy to contribute more.  First came Covid, then hitting 70 and meeting Mr Cancer. But it is what it is. Volterra was a wonderful experience and the ongoing connection with some great people. I may have slowed down a bit, but still doing my thing.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/touf-hassoun-88370114/

 

Second pass modelling of St Mary, Liss and St Mary Fratton this morning. Maybe that should be third pass. It usually takes me three goes to muster the stamina to see these massing models through to a reasonable standard. Better to come back with a fresh eye than just blunder on. Ten years ago I could have managed the blundering, but these days I need to work in short bursts. Probably a good thing on balance.

 

I now have 9 our of 10 Blomfield churches in fairly good shape, representing a fairly diverse sample of his Gothic Revival work and an interesting survey of different arrangements of the required volumes for a church layout. (Nave, Chancel, Tower, Vestry, Entrance Porch etc) By the way, the small bell turret at the junction of Nave and Chancel on St Mary Liss is there because the large,squat bell tower is a later addition, as mentioned yesterday. Always nice to figure out a reason of these oddities of a design.

 

St Mary Fratton is by far the biggest in this group. Fratton is a suburb of Portsmouth, and he was consciously competing with the catholic cathedral of 1882 which dwarfs the much earlier Anglican Cathedral. I am not modelling catholic churches in this exercise, not for any prejudice against that religion and its architecture in England, but just out of need to limit the size of my selection set which is already much larger than I had anticipated. Of course many of the older churches were Catholic when first built and switched to Church of England during the Reformation when Henry VIII implemented his own take on the movement started by Luther, Calvin et al.