WHAT DID DE LA WARR ?

In 2014 I was given a guided tour of the recently renovated De La Warr pavilion in Bexhill, a seaside town on the South-East coast of England. It's another classic of early Modernism, with a dash of Expressionism thrown in for good luck. 

Eric Mendelsohn was a German Jew who fled for England in 1933. Both he and his client were sympathetic to Soviet Russia in those heady days, and to some extent the building was intended to be a "palace for the people. The client was both Mayor of Bexhill and a member of the aristocracy.

I started building a Revit model as soon as I got back to Dubai, but it hasn't moved forward very much in the last ten years. So I decided to have another little go. The photos on these sheets were taken during that 2014 visit. And I've claimed the model up a bit.

The intention is to spend a few more days, then move on to another neglected building from my BIM pencil studies of architectural history. There is no way I can tie up all the loose ends in the time that is left to me but I do hope I can hand these models on in a usable state with some educational value.

 

De La Warr pavilion. First pass at the glazing was mostly LOD100. "there is a window here of about this size". You just need a single family, fixed glazing in a frame, no internal subdivisions.

Moving on to second pass, the sides of the auditorium have three sets of double doors with fanlights for each of the original rough openings. I have a ready-made family for the double doors with fanlight in my library. So fastest way to move forward goes like this.

Swap the fixed glazing family out for an empty opening. Place a glass wall within that space. (disallow joins) Place three double door families in that thin glass wall. Make a group. Copy around. Use new group types for raised sill conditions. Update the glass wall to a "subframe" wall type using the same material as the door framing.

The results are not 100%. That is left for another iteration. But it does the job quickly and effectively to move my study forward. Note also that the curtain walling on the rest of the building is represented by that same plain glass wall on first pass.

 

 

FASCIO FINALE

 Giuseppi Terragni was just 28 years old when he started working on Casa del Fascio in Como, Italy. He was the archetypal tragic hero, producing a remarkable body of work before being drafted into the army and sent deep into Russia. His physical and mental health were shattered and he died in Italy before he was 40.

The central space at Casa del Fascio is a re-imagining of the renaissance cortile. An internal space, but with light penetrating from all directions and galleries around the edge. The ground floor opens across its entire width at the press of a button, connecting to a public plaza.

It doesn't seem to have aged a minute. Is that important? Not sure. I'm all for buildings that have a timeless beauty but this one is firmly situated in the industrial era. All the same, it's quite remarkable.

My rendering technique in 2013 involved combining a shaded image with a quick Render using Revit's internal engine. The images aren't hi-res but they are quite effective for most purposes.

This is a building that is difficult to fully grasp by looking at images, however well thought out. For me there is nothing to compare with building a model, pondering over difficulties, composing sheets, adding annotations. That's the experience I crave.

Studying history with my BIM pencil.

 

 

Last two images of Casa Fascio. The exterior is a pure Mental Ray render. Remember the excitement when Autodesk bought that software and bundled it into Revit with a simple interface designed for people like me with low expertise in the complexities of high-end rendering.

External views render quite quickly to an acceptable level. Interiors, not so much. But they can be good enough to provide the extra materiality in one of my composite images. Meanwhile the black lines give extra definition to the glass blocks and the floor tiles. You need to set the Revit materials up properly so that the appearance image and the hatch pattern line up. Hard won trickery that is already slipping into the memory hole. 

 

 

The interior view is looking towards the back of the building. The internal elevations of the atrium are almost as varied as the external facade. Meeting spaces on the left, cellular offices elsewhere. Complete transparency to the outside world, front and back.

The sides of the building face onto relatively narrow alleys. Hopefully this render conveys that fact. Different fenestration for the stair, the vertical stack of washrooms, and the cellular offices.

How many modern buildings draw on the geometry games that Terragni pulled here? More than a few. I'm not sure how to assess Terragni the man. Was he a naive young idealist carried away with his belief in abstract ideas? Was he an opportunist, willing to trample over the rights of lesser mortals. I really don't know. But I do think that the self reflection that goes along with researching and building a model like this, helps me to put my own failings in perspective.

I need to tidy this model up a bit and add it to thewaywebuild.io   So much unfinished business.

 

 

KING BEE IFTAR ... +

 

GAJ iftar at One Za'abeel, The Link. Great crowd of people, classic Dubai "wow factor" design. World class food, of course. It's nice to do this kind of stuff, once in a while. hashtag#how-the-other-half-live.

The views are beyond spectacular. The interior design is what you would expect. Maybe I've seen too much of that kind of stuff, but it doesn't do anything special for me. Creative and competent, but not as impressive as the architecture. Just a personal view.

To be honest I think "groundbreaking modern" is a bit of a dead end, but like I said it's fun for a special night out. I've enjoyed my time in Dubai. It has its contradictions, but I honestly think it's made a huge contribution to the Middle East and to the world beyond. I'm glad to be living in an unspectacular suburb with low to middle-income residents from all over the world, looking to support their families back home.

Still it's good to experience the extremes. I'm reluctant to leave this place completely. Let's see what the next couple of years has in store for me.

 

I'm trying to share more of my musical history to the cloud. My life has not been earth shattering. No fame and fortune. But looking back now, it's been much more of an adventure than you might have predicted say 50 years ago.

And there's a balance of creative endeavours, from my early obsession with painting and drawing, through successive bands in Sheffield, Harare and Dubai... to the BIM pencil / WayWeBuild work of the past 20 years or so.

It's been a great pleasure to rediscover these old cassette recordings, to convert them to mp3, and to explore ways to add visuals. This one uses an online tool called FlexClip and the open source video editor Lightworks. Pretty basic but everything worthwhile begins with baby steps.

 

More slides from RTC 2023 in Auckland. Casa del Fascio by Giuseppe Terragni modeled by me in Revit to illustrate my idea of "The Way We Build" - studying history with BIM. History/Culture /Technology it's all of a piece in my mind's eye. The journey of humanity in the long age of settlement, shelter, specialist skills. .

It's a fascinating building from a turbulent time in the history of Italy. It reworks the Palazzo form of the renaissance but in a totally modern way. Lots of subtle geometric games here. For starters all four Elevations are totally different... while still fitting together quite seamlessly.

 

Each window opening is in fact a complex, multi-layered affair. A combination of slender masonry slabs and posts, operable steel windows and external blinds. Security, shading, ventilation, light. We tend to have a narrow conception of what a window should be, based on standard practice in the place we live for the last couple of decades. But the possibility space is huge and Terragni has come up with fascinating examples here.

They are quite difficult to make as Revit families. Do you cut out a rectangular opening and then put back bits of wall as extrusions within the family. You will end up with lines where you don't really want them. I opted to delete the cut opening and use voids. Also tricky, and the wrapping of finishes will never be quite perfect.

I don't really do these conference talks any more. It's a huge amount of work. My age and my health issues force me to focus my attention very carefully. But for ten or fifteen years they motivated me to really push the envelope on my vision of "the BIM pencil" and "the Way We Build"