ROW PLANTING IN 2013

 More reminiscing. This is a continuation of a thread from mid October.

In 2013, one of our lead designers at GAJ was a Spanish architect called Ignacio.  He was responsible for my spiky geometry explorations.  His team were all Sketchup guys, but we often talked about how to capture the geometries he was exploring within a Revit environment.  One of these projects was a diagrid flowing over a “rolling hillside” form.

I learnt quite a bit more about divided surfaces and complex geometry. 

 

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2013/06/lumpy-diagrid.html

 

Furniture.  These days I am often involved with bringing the Interior Design component of a project into Revit.  Usually my role is content development and designing “BIM processes” ... schedules, data, specification codes.

I have quite an interesting collection of furniture content, acquired over the years.  One file is devoted to designs by Fritz Hansen.  The approach to generating the required geometry is quite varied.  Sometimes it’s best to download a mesh from their website and combine this with symbolic lines and masking regions in orthographic views. (Some people reject this approach) Sometimes native Revit geometry does a good job.  Sometimes you need to be a bit more creative with the Revit geometry tools.

These days I usually use very low-res geometry for the 3d views, and a CAD-like representation in Plan.  The visualisation and detailed spec is handled by a non-BIM team.  We just need a recognisable object which cross-references the specification code.  It’s less than ideal in my view, but that’s the current state of play in my office.

 

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2013/07/furniture-fritz.html

 

I was exploring “the space of possible rigs” following on from the success I felt I had with my “scalable rectangular rig.”  Presumably the simplest type of rig would be a straight line.  What can you do with that?

 

 

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2013/07/snake-oil-rig.html

 

 

The rectangular rig is amenable to expressing the graph of an equation, could be a quadratic, for example.  I explored this idea to create a general family of forms, of which one particular instance would be the Gherkin by Foster Associates. This is based on work I did for one of my presentations at the Revit Technology Conference in Auckland a few weeks earlier. 

I’d like to paraphrase the last sentence of this post here.

“If you are interested in the History of how buildings work, then a tool like Revit is an amazing aid to research”

Seven years later we have developed that idea much further with our work on Project Soane and of course the Notre Dame model.  Open-source, collaborative research into our built history.

 

 

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2013/07/american-history-practical-maths.html

 

There follows a series of posts that take the scaling properties of the Planting category, and nest it into system families like Curtain Walls.  The first one is based on a common sand-cement “brise soleil” block.  How useful is it to make this infinitely scalable?  That’s a moot point, given that these things usually come in a couple of standard sizes. 

Maybe if you were designing screens made from cast aluminium panels.  Depending on the quantities you might be OK with a custom mould for the project.  So at design stage, the ability to easily vary the scale of the pattern might be useful.

 

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2013/07/screen-planting.html

 

 

 

The next post takes the scalable, decorative curtain panel concept a bit further.  At least it imagines further examples of designs which might benefit from this approach.

“I'm backing the double-nested technique for situations where you want to play around with the size on the fly, experiment with design ideas quickly.”

 

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2013/07/say-cheese.html

 

Back to classical architecture for the final post in this series.  Stone balustrades, carved mouldings, standard designs like egg & dart.  Can the scaling properties of double-nested planting help out here?  I made quite good progress with this here.  And since then I have developed these families a bit further.  In the comments Paul Aubin raises an interesting point.  How do you do this around a curve?

 

One answer I explored later was to use a railing.  It’s not very nice to have carved stone enrichments, (or maybe plaster cornices) in the Railings category.  If only we could assign a railing to a couple of other categories.  Maybe Wall Sweep, or even Generic Model.  I’ve no idea how realistic it would be to do this within the Revit core code, but it’s the kind of thing that I think would be useful.  One of the annoying “restrictions” we would like to remove, to paraphrase a recent post by Tim Waldock.

 

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2013/07/row-planting.html

 

 

WILL IT SCALE?

 

Blog posts from early 2013

This was an exciting period for me.  I visited New Zealand for Revit Technology Conference, to stay with my sister in Auckland and to see something of that unique country.  Alfredo Medina came up to me at the RTC social, introducing himself and sparking a lifelong friendship.  I sat in on a couple of Marcello sessions, heckling him on the difference between Doric & Tuscan, but feeling totally inspired and motivated.  His scalable Tuscan column (based on a spline) got me going.  I was aware of basic spline behaviour (two ways of stretching the end point by using the TAB key) but I had never thought of using it to scale a profile, or a revolve sketch.  This was rather early in my journey into classical architecture and long before Project Soane took a hold on my life.

I stand by my conclusion at the time.  You can do classical architecture well, and you can do it REALLY BADLY.  Take the time to study and learn.  It is a very deep well of tradition.  If you are not to put in the hard yards, just leave it alone. 

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2013/06/spline-sailing.html

The glass onion arose from a challenge that cropped up at work.  It’s a good example of using “pick 3d edge” to create complex curves using the traditional family editor.  Probably I should go back to this and see if I can make it more fully parametric.  The last part is also interesting.  Using the rectangular rig to make parametric domes … a family of onion species with different proportions.  I think I should revisit this whole area.  

St Basil’s cathedral, Moscow … anyone?

 

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2013/06/making-glass-onions.html

 

And back to the Tuscan Column theme.  This is not my current approach to capturing the fundamental variety that is available using the Classical language, but it was an important step along that road. 

I really must get back to my column collection, and get it into shape for sharing, at least with a limited audience.  The whole range of Classical elements within Revit should be an established open source project.  Paul Aubin’s book was a huge contribution of course, but I think we could do a better job of extending this, developing robust content and sharing it widely.

 

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2013/06/tuscan-rig.html

 

 

I think “Flat People” are still useful.  Photoreal is great … but not always.  Sometimes you want a more stylised, line-art approach to the graphic presentation of an idea.  Early concept design for example.  You might not want to mislead the client into thinking your design ideas are more fully developed than they actually are. 

This is my second post on the topic and I had a couple of people share their collections, so I created some more, as I had promised. 

“One thing that experienced users with a public presence can do is to create better content and make it freely available.”  Here, here! I’m still in favour of that.

And another quote from the end.  I’ve been saying this for a long time now.

“we should also strive to treat Revit like a pencil.  Just pick it up, let it become one with your hand, eye & brain, thinking about the vision you are trying to capture.  Let the tools become transparent.  Create.”

 

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2013/06/more-pancake-people.html

 

This is another “revisit”.  Spiky geometry that is easier to make in Sketchup than in Revit BUT tends to lose it’s ability to translate into a solid.  Mesh objects won’t support the “mass floors” feature which is so useful in Revit based early design.  I haven’t used Formit for some time, so I’m not sure if the conversion is more predictable or easier to handle using that route.  Another thing to get back to.

Maybe most people would use Dynamo and direct shape geometry these days.  Will have to talk to Daniel about that.

 

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2013/06/spikey-stuff.html

 

 

It seems like almost every post from this time-frame is something I want to explore further.  This is a variation of the rectangular grid.  This time a circular rig with radial spokes.  There is an exchange with Paul Aubin in the comments.  He has a very elegant method for modelling volutes in his book.  Currently my volutes are very abstracted and low-res.  Perhaps I could combine this rig with Paul’s approach to create a parametric volute generator.  Once again, maybe dynamo would do a better job.

 

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2013/06/spiral-rigging.html

 

IN PRAISE OF DRAWING

Early 2013 and I was building up towards an epic trip to attend conferences in London and New Zealand, visiting friends and family along the way. 

For the “BIM Show Live” event in London, I wanted to depict BIM as a continuation of the grand tradition of DRAWING, aka “visual thinking”.  Matisse cut up pieces of coloured paper with scissors to create 2d images.  Reitveld cut up pieces of cardboard to design 3d furtniture.  There is an incredibly rich vein running through our history, stretching back at least 30 thousand years.  We create “models”, representations of reality, diagrams, solidified thoughts. 

So here is a post that lays out that idea: first of all some historical musings, then some of my attempts to do “BIM pencil stuff” aka thinking aloud with Revit.

 

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2013/02/what-do-you-mean-just-drawing.html

 

 

For New Zealand, (which was to be my first Revit Technology Conference as a Speaker) I had set myself ridiculously ambitious goals.  There were at least 4 separate 2 hour sessions condensed into one 75 minute PowerPoint.  I see conferences as opportunities to motivate myself, chances to tackle something challenging and see it through to a conclusion.

I chose three office buildings from the history of architecture, set out to model them in Revit, and then to tell a fascinating, interwoven story … ranging from design analysis, via structural form and environmental performance, to social and political significance.    

Casa del Fascio is a famous work of Italian Rationalism from the 1930s.  Every now and then I return to this model and take it a little further.  Always something new to discover.

 

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2013/03/i-spent-weekend-preparing-for-rtc.html

 

I had bought a Microsoft Surface … the very first model.  I wanted to integrate hand drawing into my digital world, so I was playing around with the touch screen, with OCR, with cloud syncronisation between devices.  It has taken a few years for this to become an everyday reality.  Partly because the technology needed to get better, partly because you need to act it out in physical reality, to adapt your hands, eyes & brain to new possibilities. Learning takes time.  Thinking is an embodied process.

I was about the role of suppliers and contractors in BIM processes. 7 years ago most people thought Revit was a clever software tool for architects. Builders, Suppliers & Sub-contractors didn’t see why it would impact the way that they worked.  I sketched a diagram with irreverent acronyms to explore the idea of digital collaboration across the whole industry.

This is starting to happen.  But in my view we still have a long way to go.

 

 

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2013/03/surface-effects.html

 

My day job involved trying to bring our Schools Team into the world of BIM.  During that work I applied my experience with adaptive components to modelling a parametric slatted screen.  It was fun, but my cleverness got the better of me.  There was a far simpler solution using the Curtain Wall tool. 

It’s easy to get the idea that you should do everything “the clever way,”  Not really.  Keep it simple.  Only bring the heavy guns out when you really need them.

 

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2013/03/primal-screen.html

 

 

In the next post I seek to justify my “cleverness” by imagining a situation where the complexity of my solution would really be needed.  This was a fun exploration, but not very convincing as a “real-life” example.  I tried to gloss over this be showing an image of C.F.A. Voysey’s deceptively simple stair screen.  But in the end that just proves the value of a simple solution.

The Orchard, Chorleywood. Difficult to explain why this is such an impressive design.  Definitely something that should be explored with the BIM pencil.

 

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2013/03/curve-that-screen.html

 

 

The second office building that I chose for my RTC NZ presentation was Lever House, the original “glass box” office tower from 1950s New York.  Here’s a sentence that I wrote.

“I firmly believe that BIM software opens up the possibility of an exchange of ideas and information about our built past. far beyond anything currently available.”

Still working on that 😊

 

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2013/03/pull-that-lever.html

 

 

From time to time I share some images from work that we are doing at GAJ.  There are confidentiality issues to skirt around of course, but sometimes I feel that we have produced something that could inspire others to push the boundaries of BIM a little further. 

I stopped using Sketchup 15 years ago.  Sadly many young architects think that BIM authoring tools lack the fluidity to express design ideas, especially in the early stages of a project.  My day-job role is mostly focused on the production stage, but every now and then I get a chance to show that Revit may not be so clunky after all. 

Fluency is a state of mind and it is acquired by putting in the time to learn your trade.  I’m not dissing Sketchup.  I used it in the early days, before Google bought it out.  But once I got my hands on Revit there didn’t seem to be any point in starting a project off with one tool only to begin again from scratch a few weeks later.

 

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2013/04/i-just-want-to-share-some-of-revit.html

 

Of course one reason that Sketchup gets used so much is the available library of “assets”  Easy to find furniture, household items, trees etc.   Also lots of stylised people doing all the different things you might want the inhabitants of your perspectives to be doing.  RPC people are great, but you only get so many, (out of the box) and they don’t look all that brilliant in shaded views.

I set about creating some Sketchup-style people for Revit and shared them.  I invited my audience to join in the fun and we did make some progress.  Arguable, Enscape assets have made this work somewhat redundant, but maybe there is still a place for flat people.  Everyone loves the clarity of a simple line drawing, don’t they?

 

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2013/04/flat-people.html

 

 

I still love Darwin’s “Simple line drawing” with the caption “I think.”  It’s crude and clumsy by artistic standards, but it captures the essence of thinking diagrammatically on a sheet of paper. 

“Tomorrow morning, I get on a plane to London.”  That was an epic journey.  Seems so long ago.  I met so many interesting people along the way, still remember Alfredo introducing himself in Auckland and it was great to stay with my sister there, finally.

 

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2013/04/grevity-world-tour.html

 

 

From my BIM Show Live session …

Life is a journey. Mine has taken me to all kinds of interesting places: geographically, socially, intellectually. Visual thinking has played a central role in my life and the ancient tradition of drawing has been a constant source of inspiration.  I like to draw ... and in recent years BIM has become my favourite "pencil." 

BIM is not a radical break with the past. It’s an amazing tool, but no more radical than perspective or orthographic projection were in their day. When we read Shakespeare we don’t think, “if only he had a word processor, he could have done so much more”. It’s not what you’ve got, it’s the way that you use it.

 

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2013/05/bsl2013.html

 

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2013/05/bsl-download.html

 

 

HAND-EYE-BRAIN (GOING TO CHURCH)

I have been trying to merge the digital and the manual for many years.  Specifically, I began to buy digital sketching devices around 2012.  I had used a Wacom tablet a couple of times but looking at the screen while moving your hand in another universe did not replicate the natural fluency of drawing for me.  And so, in 2012 I bought the “Inkling”, a strange hybrid device which allowed you to sketch on paper with a rather fat ballpoint pen, while a sensor, clipped to the edge of the paper, converted those movements into bitmap files.

The fluency was wonderful.  It was easy to capture my natural drawing style.  But size was very limited by the range of the sensor.  There was no way to go back and add to something you were doing yesterday, and the whole business of setting it up and downloading the files was quite cumbersome.  The initial promise faded and it fell into disuse. I did use the sketches in a couple of blog posts and was rather proud of the extra punch I could get with a couple of minutes adding colour in Photoshop.

I should really try to emulate that style with my current technology.

In 2013 I bought a Microsoft Surface, the very first model to come out.  For a while I had a full set of Windows devices (Phone, Tablet, Laptop) which seemed like the obvious way forward to me, but it didn’t catch on with the mass market, so the phone eventually fell by the wayside.

The stylus available for tablets at that time had a thick spongy ball at the end.  Slightly better than drawing with your finger tip, but not really comparable to the fluency of the Inkling.  Drawing directly on a decent sized screen was good, and I became aware of the Wacom series that has a built in screen, but wasn’t yet ready to splash out on such a device which would be too much to carry around on a daily basis anyway.

My collection of Surface sketches is not very impressive, but you can see that I am trying to find a digital replacement for scribbling on random bits of paper.

There is a gap of about 3 years.  Then I was persuaded to buy an iPad pro with the Apple pencil.  I was disappointed with the pencil and I decided to splash out on a Wacom Cintiq by way of comparison.  The iPad is always at hand but the stylus feels like plastic on glass, too slippy by far.  The Wacom has a great feel but you can’t carry it around with you and the cables are a bit of a pain.  Nevertheless I did some interesting work with these two devices.

Finally I felt like digital drawing could compete with the manual version that had been one of my primary thinking tools for more than 60 years.  Quite a bit of “traceover” work here, but also a couple of pics where I just started drawing on a blank sheet and made it up as I went along, tapping into the awesome power of our subconscious brain.

All the same, digital sketching had not become a daily activity in the same way as pencil and paper.  That was only to happen in 2018 when I finally gave up on my Windows phone and bought a Samsung Note 8.  The screen may be small compared to the iPad, but the stylus feels better.  It seems to grip the glass very slightly which is much closer to how a pen or pencil feels on paper.  Also the charging arrangement is about 10 million times better.  You don’t even have to think about it.  Finally the phone slips into your pocket.  It’s the one device you are going to have to hand almost wherever you go, so you can do a quick sketch whenever the mood takes you.

Once the Samsung phone had made digital sketching a part of my daily routine, the iPad could gradually creep back into play.  This happened after my trip to Volterra in Tuscany for a reality capture workshop.  Back home I felt the need to look more carefully at the images I had amassed.  There is no better way of looking perceptively than the process of drawing.  As a species we have been doing that for at least 30 thousand years: representing objects from life by drawing on to surfaces and transforming out grasp of reality in the process. From the caves of Altamira to Picasso’s rapid sketches on glass we have been thinking aloud with the “hand-eye-brain” loop that is embodied in the act of drawing.

There is an interesting range of expression here, degrees of abstraction, flat colour v grainy texture, muted tones and garish colour.  The value for me was in the process, the hours spent developing fluency with digital drawing tools.  Doing the work.

In early 2019 a visit to my good friends in Hastings, Nick & Jane, prompted attempts to work more rapidly, to use a freer line, adopt a more impressionistic mindset.  It takes effort, and it’s not always the correct approach to a situation, but it’s really, really important in terms of merging the digital and manual worlds of visual thinking.

HAND-EYE-BRAIN-DEVICE.  We have all become cyborgs to some extent.  Not sure it’s as dramatic as that sounds.  There is a very deep history of transforming our reality with devices.  The way that fire impacted our digestive system and jaws (perhaps a million years ago) was arguably more dramatic than the “digital revolution” we are now experiencing.  Difficult to compare though.

Stone tools, Language, Sedentary life, Houses & cities, specialized trades.  Culture takes the form of physical devices, of institutions, habits of daily life.  Many animals have culture to a certain extent. But we have made it the hallmark of our species. 

Which brings us to the year of Covid.  A couple of pre-covid sketches take very simple images and try to explore the very personal meaning behind them.  My hand resting against the window of a train as we rumble through the English countryside.  The simple barred window of traditional gulf architecture set in a rough textured wall, stained with the ever present fine sand that gets into everything.

Then a series of freehand inventions, trying to capture the flowing scrolls and foliage of the classical idiom.  I want to go beyond tracing over carefully chosen examples.  Just start drawing.  Invent on the fly.  Try to internalize the unspoken rules, expand your natural vocabulary.  The fourth in the series is a venture into the third dimension with plasticine on a textured tile background.  I’m still intending to make a latex mould from this and cast it in plaster.  Extend the range from digital sketching, via hand drawing through to physical object. 

BIM is my “main thing” but let’s continue to blur the boundaries.  If BIM is to fulfill its promise, it must overlap into the world of stonemasons, carpenters and plasterers.  We can’t just live in our heads and our “social media presences”.  That’s the brain freeze of lock down.  Make the connections, not just to a set of group think “friends”. But to the world of work (and play) out there on building sites and city streets.

A couple of months ago, at the height of lockdown I attempted to breathe new life into work I did in the 1980s in Zimbabwe, my adopted country where all three of my children grew to adulthood before we all found ourselves merging into the economic refugee community (legal immigrants all, I hasten to add … I have every sympathy for the youth of Africa, but I don’t believe we are helping them by demolishing the rule of law in those few countries which can act as a partial model for their futures.  If you are passionate about helping “the oppressed of Africa”, why not go and live there, as I did.  Get to know the situation first hand and make some small contribution of your own to economic and social development)

Sorry about the rant.  I started to redraw some of the pencil sketches I was working on just before I moved from the Curriculum Development Unit to the University.  These were attempts to convert the hands-on experience of my 20s and 30s, into teaching materials for courses in Building which were offered as part of the secondary school curriculum.  While at the University I “taught the teachers” … in reality learning as much from the experience as they did.

Which brings us to the past few weeks.  After more than a year of constructing an intelligent digital model of Notre Dame de Paris as part of an international, voluntary group, I felt the need to think about church design in general a bit more deeply.  Put the work in context.

How to do that?  Has to be by drawing.  Make the hands busy and the brain will do it’s thing in the background.  The subconscious will churn away, processing all manner of visual and verbal data that will come popping back into consciousness, unbidden. at the most opportune and revealing moments.  The mind is a phenomenal machine, more than a machine I suspect, though I don’t believe in woo woo.

And so I have been sketching churches.  Mostly on my phone and based on random image searches on Bing.

 

From there I found myself motivated to tackle something smaller than Notre Dame and to shift back from the Gothic of medieval times to the Classical language of the early enlightenment period.  Hence this weekend, spent “BIM sketching” St Anne’s, Limehouse by Nicolas Hawksmoor: built just over 300 years ago (so closer to the present than it is to Notre Dame’s inception, in years at least)

I will do another post about that process.  For now an image or two.

 

 

 

CLASSICAL XMAS MUSH

It’s November 2012 and I’m all pumped from winning the Parametric Pumpkin Competition for the second time.  That was my Arcimboldo style witch’s head … assembled from vegetables.  Zach Kron, who came up with that competition asked me to do a session on Vasari Talks, a series he was doing with Lilli Smith.  Remember Vasari?  I used it a few times.  The built in solar diagrams and wind animation were useful. 

They asked me to do a demo of the “wig-hat” which was the witch’s hair, assembled as a repeater using spring onions … was it a repeater?  Seems like the recording of my talk is no longer available on that link. 

After the demo, I showed a few images of other things I had done using the principle learned while making vegetables.  I wanted to assure people that my explorations were relevant to the “day-job” world of Architecture & Construction.  This is where I first developed my early concept model of Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasilia Cathedral: fully parametric, as they say.

I also showed a model of the Dubai Creek Golf Club, probably the best-known design by my boss, Brian Johnson (it features on the 20 Dirham note here in the UAE).  One of my first attempts at an adaptive component: three instances, one for each “sail-shaped” roof.

 

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2012/11/webcast-tonight.html

 

This is around the time when Paul Aubin and I started communicating directly with each other.  He was working on a Corinthian capital which totally blew my mind, but also challenged me to think about how I would approach this challenge. 

“How can we possibly standardise and parameterise all that variety ?  And even if we could, where would that get us?  The spirit of the Corinthian seems to live in it's infinite ability to be constantly re-invented.  How do you factor that into an equation?”

I the second half of the post I attempt a stylised version of Corinthian made from brass plate, cut and folded into shape. Designing directly in Revit. Of course in the good old days, there would have been a symbiosis of architect and artisan when conjuring up classical detail, both contributing their skills, experience and sense of proportion.  How should that collaboration play out in the digital era?

 

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2012/11/desert-classic.html

 

 

In the next post I attempt to take a leaf from Paul’s book and create a fully volumetric stone version of the Corinthian capital. It’s fascinating to compare Paul’s approach and mine.  He came at it very systematically, basing his work on Robert Chitham’s excellent book “The Classical Orders of Architecture”

I just jump in and start thrashing around, taking liberties and shortcuts wherever the mood takes me and feeling my way to an acceptable interpretation of the genre.  I was very concerned with “RIGS” at the time: arrangements of reference lines that can be resized parametrically.

There were several iterations before I arrived at my current system for mix & match, scalable classical columns. 

 

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2012/11/a-new-leaf.html

 

 

The next post is quite interesting because someone has posted a Revit version of the Pantheon on LinkedIn recently.  He has taken it a fair bit further than I did.  I toyed with a couple of ideas for representing Corinthian here, including symbolic lines that only show up in parallel views. As usual I am trying to use Revit as my BIM pencil, and extension to my brain, a tool for better understanding how a building works: spatially, structurally, stylistically …

 

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2012/11/pink-pantheon.html

 

 

More rigs and more attempts to explore “the way we build”.  I had extracted a lot of mileage from a “Rectangular Rig” so the question was, would an extra dimension create new possibilities or would it simply complicate things.  The first set of explorations were good fun but didn’t produce anything that I regarded as a significant breakthrough.

At the end of the post I show an image of a Bavarian Baroque church.  I was looking for challenging geometry from our built heritage that might prove amenable to the techniques I had used to create vegetables.  I never got far enough with this model to test that idea out.  Would I be able to represent the free flowing curvature of the ceiling vaults in a convincing way?

 

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2012/11/cube-rig-blues.html

 

 

December now, and an explanation of how I created my abstraction of Niemeyer’s cathedral.  I gave some examples of what happens when you play with the parameters. Vary the number of legs, the angle of slope, the heaviness of the legs in relation to the overall shape. 

Does this kind of “generative form finding” work better than the “artists eye”?  Stupid question perhaps.  All depends what you are trying to achieve.  Whatever too you decide to use: digital or analogue, computational or intuitive, rules based or touchy feely … you need to pay your dues.  If you want to achieve something worthwhile, first acquire a level of fluency with the chosen tools.

 

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2012/12/cathedral-of-light.html

 

 

The first ever AUX in Dubai.  My session was about massing. “Concept design … clarity of thinking … strip away the irrelevant detail … can you capture the essence of the design problem?  … We need to use BIM tools as we would use a rapid pencil sketch”

Looking back, I’m really impressed with the way I prepared for this session, and the balanced structure I devised: a few slides, then a demonstration sequence, and closing with a longer slide show.  This was very early in my career as a public BIM personality.  I have come to realise that my contribution doesn’t always appeal to mainstream audiences.  So be it.  I get enough positive feedback to realise that I am doing something important and useful, and I’m doing it “My Way”.

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2012/12/aux-dxb.html ...

 

I have always been somewhat ambivalent about Autodesk University.  The name is just a branding decision, I get that, but my idea of a university is much more open ended and exploratory that this industry convention.  The next post includes quite a lengthy rumination on the global politics of technology and the need to better integrate our heritage of intuitive hand-crafted ingenuity with the digital sphere that offers so much power.  Power can cut both ways. If it doesn’t mesh with our traditions.

“The main reason I'm hooked on Revit and BIM has nothing to do with ROI or clash detection.  It's a better way to draw.  And drawing has nothing to do with lines, arcs & circles.  Leonardo wasn't thinking "now I'll draw an arc".  He was exploring how the human body works.”

 

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2012/12/hey-you.html

 

 

And so to Xmas 2012, and the “Mush” part of my title.  I figured out an approach to making Arabic patterns that will populate divided surfaces.  This allows you to create Musharabiya Screens that twist and curve.  Creating each new curtain pattern family is a bit tedious, but once you have a small library of these, it’s very easy to create screens of different sizes, shapes and proportions. 

Since then I have developed other solutions: scaling patterns up with the Planting Category hack for example.  But maybe I should give this one another run around the block.  What would I do with it now, almost 8 years later?

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2012/12/xmas-mush.html

 

KIDOLOGY

A couple of weeks ago The Revit Kid (aka Jeff Pinheiro) got in touch and asked me to appear on his podcast “BIM after dark” to showcase the Notre Dame model.  The podcast took place on Thursday night.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqJZKKhoVHs&feature=youtu.be

 

I probably should practice looking at the screen while I think.  Seems like my eyes skew “up and away” when I’m thinking 😊.  Also note the face masks and the Zimbabwe flag decorating the back wall of my apartment.

In preparation for this session I put some time into annotating and organizing the sheet set to tell a story.  The grid studies sheet was already there.  I just added some explanatory text.  How many weekends did I sped puzzling through the reference material, comparing measurements and deciding whether to adjust the model to a new grid?  It went through at least 3 iterations, if I remember right, but we now have something that reflects the size of each bay quite closely, and maintains the basic relationships, but keeps the setting out orthogonal.

This sheet serves as a record of how that works.

Alfredo made a very nice cutaway “view” for his AU session last year, and I have updated this with a few annotations.  It serves well as an introductory sheet.  It was created by placing three views on a sheet and carefully adjusting their section boxes.  You have to place the views in the right order to get them to “overlap” convincingly.  “Send to back” only works with 2d elements.

The upper floor plan.  I love the way this sheet has turned out.  It has developed slowly over the months.  The elevations were added to set up “tasks” based on starter families.  The windows were tagged with their family names, and those families placed in a series of folders along with reference images.  Francois has risen to the challenge of developing these elements, and made excellent progress, though not yet complete. So the windows are now tagged with codes (Type Mark) which refer back to a window types sheet (Legend)

While preparing for this talk, I added some notes and photos so that this sheet now gives a splendid overview of the Tribune Galleries, and of the strengthening works around the crossing by VLD.  I puzzled over the reason for those non-standard bays, from the time we first started the model.  At one time I had decided it was a device to disguise the much wider bay between grids 8 & 9.  The full sequence of events and structural logic has only dawned on me in the past couple of weeks. 

 

At this point, I took my first detour into family editor.  These small flights of steps occur in two places at the ends of the Tribune Galleries.  In a way they are like a straightened out spiral stair.  But they are also precursors of the “cantilever stair” which became so common in the domestic architecture of Europe from Renaissance times until quite recently.  More accurately called a “torsion stair” each stone tread is supported on 3 of its corners: two embedded in the wall, and the third resting on the step below.

I do love making items like this in Family Editor.  Nothing fancy, just extrusions and a couple of parameters … one level of nesting.  But it’s a wonderful way to understand something that catches my eye in the work of builders past.

 

I’m rather proud of the next sheet, which combines a large central perspective view with smaller plans and sections, plus a couple of small internal camera shots.  This serves to illustrate some complex spatial relationships relating to an enlargement of the clerestory windows that was undertaken almost as soon as the original design was complete.  The story is further complicated by changes that were made by Viollet-le-Duc in the nineteenth century: strengthening the crossing to take the weight of his new spire.

For me, this sheet exemplifies the discovery process that takes place on a collaborative historical investigation like Project Notre Dame.  Week-by-week we gradually tease out a story that spans several centuries of human experience.

Segue to the vaults sheet, by noting those vaults on the previous sheet that are higher on the outside face.  This is a feature of ribbed gothic vaults that I had not been aware of before modelling Notre Dame.  Now, of course, I see it everywhere when I visit old cathedrals.  Alfredo took the adaptive route (what I call “Point World”) and I took a quick look at his 8-point vault, used in the Bell towers.  By way of contrast, I then opened up my attempt to use the traditional family editor to create a flexible 4-part vault with the ability to cover rectangular bays of different sizes, and to selectively lift the outer arches on any of the four sides. 

There are pros and cons to both approaches of course, and I think there is still room for improvement in the way we are representing the vaults.  That applies to most aspects of the model actually.

Jeff passed on a couple of questions from the chat, but I didn’t get to read through the comments till next day.  Interesting feedback. 

On the right you can see drawings by VLD explaining a method for constructing the vault infill between the arched ribs.  Fascinating to me as a former bricklayer.

 

I decided to add jpegs to the elevation sheets. In the process I noticed, for the first time, that we have two old photos taken from a similar angle, one just before VLD restored the spire, and one shortly after.  Looking closely at these, the changes he made to the windows around the crossing are very clear, also the addition of clock faces, and the small stone pyramids capping the spiral stairs.

West End Story … a study sheet for the West End with its Bell Towers and King’s Gallery.  The levels are quite tricky … some tweaking of View Range parameters required.  Assembly of this sheet was the final stage in a long process of understanding how these various spaces fit together; the galleries, balconies and passages that link them together.

Last of the Family Editor detours, featuring the double-nested planting hack and imported mesh geometry with hidden edges.

Alfredo had started to set up a sheet for the Rose windows. I adjusted the scales and added a strip on the right-hand edge.  Legend views of Marc Zappia’s contributions, a couple of notes and one of VLD’s fantastic drawings.

I managed to squeeze in a quick tour of the model in Enscape3d.  For speed I had exported and Enscape executable and had it open in the background.  Imagine a world before Enscape! 

I didn’t have time to show all the sheets.  The sections are not quite complete but starting tell their stories quite nicely.  But I think we covered enough ground for one session.  Clearly there is a lot of potential interest out there in the kind of work we are doing.  The power of “the BIM pencil” to support curious minds in their attempts to enquire more deeply into our built history.

So once more, thanks to Jeff for setting this up and being such a genial host.  I don’t think I have a future career as a YouTube star, but perhaps I could do a couple more of these kinds of live tours.  Notre Dame has more secrets to offer, and we could always go on to explore Project Soane.

If you have made it so far, I can offer you a small reward.  Follow the link to download a PDF copy of the current sheet set.  Far from final, but worth a look, I think.

 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cUAg2Zz6PVw-LaBgwvXn7A8fu7Yz3Qi6/view?usp=sharing