SWEET FIFTEEN

 This visit is starting to wind down. Family Xmas was amazing, but the two overseas branches have gone back and my two grandsons spending the next week with their mum. So I am focusing on basic domestic routines here at my retirement flat. Then it will be back to Dubai for a final 3 months stint before the permanent move.

I took a long walk this morning. Cold but clear. Passed the porch that was under construction during my last visit. It's starting to weather in very nicely. Made a hearty vegetable omelette for lunch, with a cup of frothy coffee. Also explored a possible outing to visit a church or two. Hope I can fit that in. (didn’t happen)

 

A new year begins. This will be the one where I take up formal residence in England again. Inevitably I find myself reflecting on the 45 years away, and the 15 years of my blog www.grevity.blogspot.com  Blogging has helped to focus my work beyond the commercial limits that most Revit users set themselves. Drawing by hand was never like this. You drew for work and you also drew/painted/wrote books for pleasure and to engage with a broader audience. (ie not just talking about drawing technique)

It has always puzzled me that more people don’t see this “new way of drawing” as a general tool for thinking and communicating beyond the world of commercial projects.  Here I mean “drawing” in the broadest sense of using images and models as part of an exploration of ideas. It has always included “data”, embedded information. Drawing is never “just drawing” but the advent of BIM has given an extra stimulus to integrating visual, numerical, textual ... knowledge and wisdom to solve problems and share ideas. I store a folder of the images and text for each post on my OneDrive cloud and here is the set for 2025, which has been my second most prolific year for number of posts (after 2012)

 

There have been definite phases to my blogging journey.  Early on I was mostly exploring the capabilities of Revit itself. The blog was a personal diary recording that journey and motivating me to think about it more carefully. Then I was sucked into Zach Kron’s parametric pumpkin competition and began to attend Revit Technology Conferences. This was a wonderful community for me to connect with others in the international BIM world. 

 

 

Along came Project Soane which Paul Aubin encouraged me to join. It became an obsession for two years, long after the competition had ended.

 

 

The idea of voluntary collaborations with users across the globe took root and morphed into Project Notre Dame soon after the tragic fire. So many wonderful friendships grew out of those two endeavours.

 

Then came Covid. We all have our different views about that time. To me it was a mixed experience. Fear at first, then an opportunity to spend more time on my blog and related explorations, then sadness at how lockdowns had caused so much damage, long after they had served any useful purpose. In Dubai it was better in that people had to fund their own survival as work contracted. Many went back home. Others trusted that the economy would bounce back which it did fairly quickly without incurring vast debt.

 

 

I transitioned to a hybrid work routine, having already passed 70 and voluntarily reduced to a four day week. Props to GAJ for allowing me to do this, for paying me out on my salary arrears and gratuity over the past year or so, which has allowed me to set up a retirement plan, belatedly.

 

The latest phase of my blogging is still based on Revit and Historical Buildings but tries also to reflect on life as I post to Linked In several times a week and collect 3 or 4 of these snapshots into blog posts that can be read as a sequence stretching back 15 years.

 

 

I will continue with my Hampshire Churches project, retiring to that county in April, and hopefully make more of my work over the past 15 years accessible through the website that Daniel Hurtubise has helped me to set up.  www.thewaywebuild.io  many students of architecture have contacted me over the years and found this site a useful resource for their projects. Studies of other buildings can be found on this blog, and the Revit files were uploaded to an ACC hub last year. I just need to tidy things up and export them to the file formats we use on the WWB site as free downloads. These are non-editable. If you want native Revit, you will have to prove yourself as a contributor to the work.

 

 

Neither Daniel nor I will gain any income from this work, and at some point I will need to find a way of funding AEC software licenses. But I’m determined to continue, and to share the results openly. Apart from that. Happy New Year to everyone. A Luta Continua.