TRACING ST LAURENCE

 

It’s time to look at tracery.  Let’s start with another drafting view and a real-life example from Blomfield’s churches.  It’s still a massing model so I don’t want to get too deep into the weeds. St Laurence, West Woodhay, up there close to Hungerford in the NW corner of my study area. It’s a very cute little village church, flint with Bath stone dressings. Typically for Blomfield most of the windows are Early English style lancets with no tracery.  So faithful to the spirit of Gothic and realistically cost effective for a small Victorian church.  Britannia was a wealthy society, but villages didn’t have unlimited budgets. My sketch aims to capture the principles but not necessarily the proportions. It's easy enough to stretch the sill down. I may well be using this basic configuration several times on different churches beyond the world of Arthur Blomfield.

 

St Mary, Sheet is almost identical to West Woodhay in it’s overall massing. The spire is different and the tracery more elaborate. Possibly the budget was more generous. It’s even more obvious that this one is not going to be parametric. Once again you can drop the sill easily enough, but probably be opening up in Family Editor rather than trying to get the tracery geometry to respond predictably to the Height parameter. Let’s keep things simple here. I’m perfectly happy to take a copy of a nested family and adapt it “by hand” to suite another context if that is less effort than making it super parametric so that it adapts to every possible use case simply be typing into the Properties dialogue. It comes down to a judgement call, which is not too hard to make when the geometry reaches this level of complexity.

 

Trying out tracery on an actual church model. All the windows are face-based families. I brought a couple of reference images into plan view for guidance. It may seem perverse to model the tracery as a very short sweep. Basically it’s a way of freezing the shape so it doesn’t distort when the width and height parameters change. Unlike extrusions.

The different sizes of windows, doors and louvred are all types of the same family. Only one type needs tracery. That’s why one fixed size of tracery geometry will do the job. All we need is a visibility parameter to hide it in all the other types.

Reload into the host family. Orbit around the model selecting the types one by one and switching off the tracery. You can see from this view of the East end that the sweep geometry is stable.

 

Inevitably when reloading the family into the project, I start to notice minor issues with proportions, roof slope etc. So there are several other enhancements here. In fact there is another window in the centre of the West End that has tracery. I chose to have two sweeps in the model with slightly different profiles to suit the dimensions of the family type. Both have visibility controls, so they are switched of selectively for the various types. 

This church now has a higher level of detail than I originally imagined, much more than most of the other models in my study. Will I go back and lift the level of all the others? I don’t know, let’s take it one step at a time, and trust my instincts. This is supposed to be a fun project for my retirement from Godwin Austen Johnson. Real buildings with a deep sense of history all within striking distance of the retirement flat which will be my primary residence from April 2026.