ALDERSHOT WRAP

 

Aldershot again. Developing the churchyard with its paths. In its current state there is an overcrowding of trees which makes it difficult to see the building clearly. I have kept just a sprinkling.  The building across the road is now a care home but was previously the vicarage, and “The Grange” presumably a private house with extensive grounds.

I have yet to develop the Manor House beyond the grey extrusion from Open Street Maps. It occurs to me that there is an opportunity here to introduce phasing, not just for the church, but also for the town. But I think I’m approaching the point where I will drop it for a while and do something else.

There is likely to be a site visit in April or May and a possible collaboration which I won’t go into yet. I did some deeper research on the railways. Should have used AI perhaps, but I stuck with my own brain box, added some notes and annotations to the site context sheet, along with snapshots from old maps and a couple of chain lines representing the railway lines themselves.

 

 

I wonder what it felt like for the villagers when the first barracks blocks started going up and the whole area began to urbanise in response. At first the soldiers would have hiked across from Ash Green, but before too long Aldershot got its own station and a dedicated siding for army trains coming from London with a full load of recruits.

This all began in the context of the Crimean war which gives us a tragic connection to the present. History ripples through the landscape of Hampshire like a chalk stream with multiple channels.  

 

The sheet of exterior views has a space along the bottom. I could add a whole series of small photos taken on site, like a film strip. Or I could compose some more text. That decision can wait a while. I picked out two images from the web to add to my three model view. The pen and ink drawing must be by the T.G.Jackson the restoration architect of 1910. If you look carefully, there are some small differences when compared to the as-built scheme. Not unusual of course for a perspective like this to be produced to sell the design to the client and for design detailing to continue afterwards, sometimes right up to completion.

 

The first study sheet has been cleaned up since last I shared it. Also some model development which shows up on the long section. Lots of questions about how things actually work but I did my best. The pews were removed some time ago, maybe at the time that the meeting room/café was added. So at the moment the church is modelled as it was say 50 years ago. When I have more information we can look at phasing and bring it all up to date.

I’ve enjoyed this study. Funny how things just crop up and send me on a detour. Important not to lose touch with the main project, but this was a good meander in the river.

 

 

CRICKET IN ALDERSHOT

 

For all my Zimbabwean friends on here. A proud moment to savour. 🏏 🇿🇼 😂

Further progress on my study of St Michael the Archangel, Aldershot. Named after the warrior of God appropriately for a town historically tied to the adjacent army camp.

Working up the interior (work in progress) and making a start on a context file exported from Forma (an online application that is part of the AEC collection that comes with most Revit subscriptions. The wider aisle is of course the original nave, hence the twin gable roofs, one steeper than the other. The Victorian extension to the North is broadly speaking perpendicular in style. Lots of interesting contingencies of its historical development. Doubled up columns/walls in a couple of places.

A stair that begins in the west end of the nave and makes a tricky shift across the diagonal into the bell tower. This last part is subject to confirmation on site, but it's the best I can do on current data. The site is sloping from West to East, but by how much? Forma suggests quite steep, photographs not quite so dramatic. Site visit needed.

All good fun.

 

Context file for St Michael's, Aldershot. Not sure if this is effective use of my time, but I generally justify these kinds of efforts by telling myself that all the painstaking work in the foreground is allowing my subconscious brain to chug away in the background thinking more deeply about the project.

To put it more simply I'm getting to know a place by cobbling together a model as best I can and constantly thinking about the simplest level of detail that will give me something I can use. I could have paid for a more accurate online model of Aldershot, but would that be good enough? ... and it's not like I'm earning money any more.

 

It's a BIG file also, even after reducing the number of points quite drastically. Toposolids are great, but for some purposes I would like to go back to the topo-surface workflow. Anyway, some of it is a matter of cleaning things up, then there is the business of making little families for some of the buildings.

I came to realise that this part of Aldershot tends to have Victorian/Edwardian terraces along the older, distributor roads, and 1930s style semis filling out the interior blocks. I tend to stop at arbitrary points in the process of changing a model like this. There's no way I will ever replace all the clunky grey blocks. Basically I shop around here and there, locking for repeating units. Make a family. Populate a couple of streets. Get bored. Move on.

Probably I will do some more after I set up some views and see where the weakest bits are.