FIRST PASS AT MY LOCAL

 

Captured as a site in Forma.  Loaded as a proposal into Revit.  This is Basingstoke town Gothic Revival (early and late)  The modern shopping mall shows up in lemon yellow (and grey). The file is far too heavy again. I’m not using this workflow often enough to figure that out. I think the upper layer of the toposolid is part of the problem, being broken up into individual plots.

The blue building, lower right is Goldings, with the War Memorial Park below extending into the bottom corner and beyond. The railway line and station are captured in the top left of the zoomed-out plan.  I may well build up most of this as a massing model with recognisable representations of individual buildings and terraced rows, but that will take a couple of years I suspect. Let’s see what happens.

For the moment I want to focus on the churches. Modelling the immediate sites in-place here, then transferring to Revit models which can be linked in to this file and to my overall Hamphire Churches map.

 

All Saints, Basingstoke. Add a (red) floor slab to the site file to represent the church plot, with a slope arrow to match the toposolid. Replace the footprint geometry with an in-place extrusion. Just a temporary placeholder. Select and group. Convert the group into a link. Open the link in Revit and start placing walls. As usual the measurements are all educated guesses. It will all be adjusted along the way. I have quite good photographs, inside and out, but that's about it. More to come.

 

The day when I started to get a handle on this church, the nearest proper church to where I live, about 10 minutes walk, max. Google Street View was the game changer. Not proper rectified photography, but a reasonable source for estimating height to width ratio.

The map comes from the Historic England entry. Lots of interesting buildings in the frame, but nothing older than myself that I wouldn't happily pull down. It's not that I hate all modern architecture, but everything below the top 20% is somewhere on the spectrum of disappointing to dire. I don't think that was true when we built in recognisable styles without embarrassment.

This church opened during the Great War. Paid for by a wealthy local clergyman and designed by Temple Moor. Why is the upper roof in plain clay tiles and the aisle roofs in blue slate? Was it an attempt to mimic an old church, built in stages? Or is it just to do with different roof slopes? No idea.

 

It’s all terribly rushed and broad brush, but first-pass massing is just about there, including the annexe/scout hall/whatever it is. Not much spare room on the site and the orientation is only approximately East-West, but the church does have a certain presence in the neighbourhood and clearly once supported a rapidly growing suburb to the South of Basingstoke. Let’s give it another week or so before moving on. It would be a travesty to leave it in this state.