A SKETCH IN TIME

I distinctly remember, as a student (50 years ago  😕) thinking about the kind of living space I would create for myself. It was something like a shed, with spaces & tools for music, painting, model making, a drawing board, maybe bicycle repair.  Lock down has pushed my apartment somewhat in that direction.   It started with the home office, arranging all my digital devices.  I have my exercise bike and musical stuff arrayed around the bedroom.  Then, the week before last, I cobbled together my own little artist’s studio. 

 

 

There are two parts to this post.  I bought some plasticine and modelling tools last year after returning from the UK where I met several skilled artisans: master plasterers, stone masons, sculptors.  Plasticine may seem a bit puny, but I just wanted to make a start at doing something a bit more physical … something that would act as a foil to the digital world that I have embraced.  I attempted a few bits and pieces soon after that, but never really got going.

So I decided to try again.  No clear idea of what I would do, except that it would reference classical ornament: the stylized foliage and scrolls that I have been exploring in the digital realm.  I took a porcelain tile sample as my base, rolled out some conical sausages and just started pressing them into shape.

 

 

I have some boxwood spatulas and a few woodcarving gouges that I bought at the same time as the plasticine.  The chisels have never been sharpened.  Need to get a stone for that, but they cut plasticine well enough of course.  Just trying to learn some basic skills, and to develop a degree of fluency.  It’s easy to mess things up with such a sticky and malleable material that doesn’t harden, but you don’t want to get too bogged down.

After rapidly roughing out three tadpole-like squiggles, I took a break and scribbled over one of my phone pics.  That meant picking the image up from google photos, downloading to local on my ipad, and drawing on new layers using Autodesk Sketchbook Pro (excellent free software with versions for PC and android, so I have it on all my devices.)

I was just drawing shapes and trying to “think classical”, letting the subconscious do its thing.

 

 

Then I returned to the physical model and carried on adding pieces of material in vaguely leaf-like forms.

Nothing is planned out.  I just kept looking at it and thinking “where can I add a bit next?”  It developed over a period of 3 or 4 days.  One thing about living on your own.  You can leave stuff lying around without sending someone else barmy.  For the first couple of days I was disappointed that it didn’t hang together very well.  Seemed to be a collection of unrelated bits and pieces.  But I kept at it and just let ideas well up from my subconscious.  “maybe I can add a leaf at a lower level here to balance things up …”

 

Eventually I got the idea of anchoring the composition by wrapping the “pointy end” in strapwork bands.  I wasn’t thinking about turning it into a Cornucopia, but I soon realized that’s what I had.  Horn of plenty.  It’s one of the standard devices in classical ornament.  That was the turning point.  I started to see how to make the shapes flow together a bit, enhancing the sense of unity and balance.

I was working with 3 main motifs: Scrolls, Leaves & fruit-clusters.  Maybe there are two types of leaf.  The aim I kept at the back of my mind was to distribute the 3 motifs to set up a kind of dynamic equilibrium. 

I’m not claiming that this plasticine doodle has any particular merit, but it’s a step forward for me.  I’m starting to think that physical modelling can be a useful complement to my digital work.

So let’s do a quick demo of how to bring this into the digital world.  I did a search and found a free photogrammetry app.  3DF Zephyr Free.  I downloaded and installed on my current laptop.  Taking about 20 photos with my Samsung Note 8 I was able to create a mesh of reasonable density. 

https://www.3dflow.net/3df-zephyr-free/

Actually it’s too dense for my usual method for bringing a mesh into Revit, so … Take it into Max and decimate.  Get the polygon count down until it will export to DXF2014.  I think it’s something like 30k triangles.  I usually start around there and gradually reduce the count until it exports successfully.  Normally I would hide the edges of the mesh in Max, but this is just a proof-of-concept, so I skipped that part.

 

 

It came into Revit and I masked over the tile with a rectangular extrusion (native Revit)  Really I should have trimmed that part of the mesh away, but again I was impatient, plus I’m not very good at it.

Another reason for not investing more time in the mesh is that it’s a bit blobby.  I think it’s always going to be difficult to get crisp lines from a low-poly mesh sourced via reality capture.  Maybe if you model those shapes directly in Max you could optimize the polygons.  But my aim is to integrate physical and digital approaches to modelling. 

Keep trying, I guess.

 

 

 

I started on the cornucopia under the inspiration of a successful foray into painting …. Physical 2D painting with watercolours, using a pad of thick cartridge that I found while clearing out my bookshelves. 

Once again, I just jumped in and started making brush strokes with no pre-conceived image in my brain. Sky is blue, wet the paper first and use diluted colour on a big brush.  Let this wash fade out as you near the horizon and dryer paper.  The imagination starts to see clouds.  Squiggles of green below the horizon.  Start with a large brush and rapid flourishes. Be bold.  Follow up with irregular angled strokes in different shades of green.

 

 

Then I found some charcoal pencils and got the idea of whiplash strokes to tie together the vegetation a bit.  Not sure what they represent, maybe they are just imagined patterns in the shadows.  What do I do with the horizon?  White gaps.  I use the pencil to imply a group of higgledy piggledy buildings.  Some reddish strokes for an urban feel from my childhood.  Brick-built , industrial towns.

 

 Then it’s mostly a question of upping the density. Add more detail in the centre to contrast with the bold strokes around the edges.  Try to keep things loose and free.  Jerk the pencil around to invoke foliage.  Apply a similar technique with the small brush for smokestack chimneys.

Had to get a Grecian temple front in there somewhere 😊

So the painting was quite short and sweet, and inspired me to do some modelling.  Hence the cornucopia sculpture. This took a bit longer, with effort spread over 3 or 4 days.  Taken together these two experiments formed a very satisfying departure from my usual routine.

 

 

 

JUNE BUG

A year flashing past.  My youngest son has turned 33.  In a couple of years he will be half my age.  My last-post-but-one reflected on work I did a couple of years before he was born.  Let’s Build Zimbabwe, Module B.  Since then I have re-assembled that booklet, remaining close to the original. I re-typed all the text, & cleaned up the drawings one-by-one.

That was a tedious process in some ways, but spending the time examining them closely was a positive experience.  I’m probably not the only person reflecting on my past life during these strange lock down times, but for me it is turning into a remarkably positive exercise.

I have been motivated to create new drawings of this type: drawing on my ipad, using long lost sketches as an underlay and emulating the crisp Rotring technique that I developed all those years ago.  The aim was to capture the activity of building, the processes, sequences of events in time.   You can do this with video clips now, and I think this is a wonderful addition to our arsenal of educational weapons, but there is a level of clarity in a well though-out-drawing that video capture can never hope to achieve.

The Slack group for Project Notre Dame is a useful sounding board for me, especially in the age of social distance.  It always helps to explain your intentions and methods to someone else.  Teachers often learn more from their lessons than their students, and that’s not a bad thing.  


Module B was the last of the 3 books we had printed and distributed to schools.  (We started with C for historical reasons, then flipped back to the beginning of the series.  D & E never went beyond an outline and some rough sketches) B is the one that crystallized our ideas about how to structure the books.  We came up with a series of ideas for training rigs that would give pupils a hands-on glimpse of different building activities.  One of these emulates a simple timber roof structure, built at ground level so that it is accessible without scaffolding and attendant risk.

When I started on this “restoration project” I was using my phone to capture the images from faded newsprint pages.  It’s fast, and yields images of remarkable quality which sync to One Drive (and my laptop) automatically.  As I moved on to Module A, I was also doing some “spring cleaning” of my flat and rescued an old A4 scanner from one tangled corner.  This had never been set up on my current laptop, but that was easy enough.


The images are still grey and discoloured at the edges, but at least they are nice and square on the page. I have been isolating the drawings in preparation for retyping the text.  It would be wonderful to assemble the entire 5 booklet series.  Task completed, 35 years later?  That would be typical of my life and many of the projects I have embarked upon.  Better at starting than finishing.

I began looking at the “Let’s Build Zimbabwe” series in preparation for a talk I was to give for the Volterra Reality Capture group.  I wanted to give some context to my life-journey, leading up to Project Notre Dame.  The main body of that presentation was a live session of Revit, and I started by looking at the clerestory windows of the nave, which were enlarged about a century into the construction process.  


In preparation for that, I set up a sheet, with a perspective view in the middle and small callouts of the two end conditions, stacked up at the sides.  Judicious use of colour over-rides helps to link the higher portions of roof that pop up at the ends, to the callout views which explain what is going on inside the spaces.

Another couple of days was spent setting up “Window Schedule” sheets, assigning codes to the different types, and organizing them in a logical sequence.  The families are still a work in progress.  Francois is the active member for this domain, with previous input by myself, Alfredo and Daniel.  Looking forward to seeing further progress, including more “stained glass” texture maps.


As you can see, some of the windows are still represented by the plain “placeholder” family that I created right at the beginning of this project.  Probably we need to balance modelling work and sheet setup as we move forward.  Important to make the model accessible to the outside world.  Although incomplete, I think it has reached a stage where it is a very valuable resource for students and researchers in various disciplines.

SQUATTING UNDER THE BRIDGE

The past is another country.  

I remembered that phrase because it’s the title of a book that I haven’t read, a history of Zimbabwe.  I thought it was also a quote by someone famous, but that turns out to be “The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.”  We could do with some of that wry wisdom amongst the current hysteria, but that’s not really my topic today.  The "famous person" turned out to be L.P Hartley, an oddly unfamiliar name.  First sentence of "The Go Between", his 1953 novel, made into a film in 1971, the year before he died.  Screenplay by Harold Pinter.


1973.  Find it on a map.  I was transitioning from “long haired student” to … something else, a leap in the dark.  I had decided during the course of my 3 year degree in … well it was architecture really but they decided to “broaden” the field, which is a bit like flattening the curve I suppose. So it was a flexi-degree at the School of Environmental Studies, aka the Bartlett School of Architecture.

Anyway. I chose London because … well, London.  I had grown up in a coal-mining town “up north” and just wanted to go to the big smoke, where all the ground-breaking stuff was happening.  I had read some Le Corbusier, was aware of Archigram and had also stumbled across Jane Jacobs (The Life and Death of Great American Cities)  I was a quiet, somewhat intense teenager who had lived a sheltered existence in a religious household, but the mood of the sixties had deeply affected most of “My Generation” and I was beginning to see architecture as a mission to solve social problems.  

Where today’s youth might decide to change the world “one tweet at a time”, I aspired to design totally new kinds of cities that would unleash fairness and creativity upon our species.

During my third year I had already decided to veer away from the expected career path.  Instead of designing a school, I set off on an exploration of the “free school movement”.  I saw myself as living out the dream of “self-directed, life-long learning”.  It sounds incredibly naïve in retrospect, but in a sense, I’m still doing that (in between paying my way and raising a family etc.)  So there was no clear transition from being a student to … not being a student.  I carried on going in to the architecture department fairly regularly and stirring up dissent.  I was living within walking distance and living on a shoestring, so why not?  


All that year I had made a point of getting involved in real-world activities.  This included going to a “School Without Walls” conference in Scotland and volunteering at an adventure playground called “The Tufnell Park Playhouse”.  There was also a lot of guitar playing and drawing.  So it was important to me that the formal end date of my studies would be meaningless.  I was already “doing my thing” and wasn’t yet desperate to earn money.  

Rebellion feeds on affluence and free time … perhaps.

I had been living in a tiny box room in a basement apartment in North Gower Street, with a young family that had more-or-less adopted me.  Two young boys with whom I spent a lot of time: drawing, rough-housing, talking nonsense.  I had also run into a group of teenagers from North London who wanted to publish a subversive magazine called “Y-front”.  The theme was to be Anti-School and pro “learning by discovery”.  I new someone who had started something called “The Islington Free Press”, a printing press operating from a squatted corner shop.  One of the highlights of my last two years at grammar school was doing layout and illustrations for a new-style school magazine.

In my final year at university (UCL) I had been drawing cartoons and producing little subversive broadsheets.  When you are young and free of responsibilities, it’s very easy to believe that you can create a new and better world from scratch.  What could possibly go wrong?

There was an idea floating around that change would come from an alliance between students and workers.  Some people said that had started to happen in Paris in 1968.  I began to wonder if I needed to head back to the north of England, to rediscover my “working-class roots”.  It was a romantic notion, but it took root in my imagination and was expressed in notebooks that I kept at the time.

My squatting experience was a “dry run” at striking off in a new direction.  It was a bridge, a connecting ligament between my student experience in London, and the life of my 20s, working in the building trades in Sheffield.  It came about accidentally, but I already knew several people who lived in squats.  Why not give it a go?  There was plenty of empty property in Central London.  

Redevelopment projects typically took several years to mature.  Developers would slowly buy up a city block, often boarding up empty houses and letting the area deteriorate so that it would be easier to obtain a demolition order.  We felt that we were doing something noble in putting these empty properties to use.  We saw the developers as “evil capitalists” and relished the opportunity to establish zones of freedom where we could create alternative social structures.  

Looking through the old notebooks that I started to keep around this time, I was more interested in learning practical skills than fomenting revolution.  It was more of an internal awakening for me.  Healer, heal thyself, perhaps.  

Self-reliance was a big item.  Learn to cook & sew. And of course, the life-long compulsion to play guitar and to draw.  It's all there in those little dog-eared pocket books.

One day, a friend of mine from the university came up with a proposal.  She needed to move out of the place where she was living and had spotted a boarded-up shop around the corner from where I lived.  In the event, four of us banded together and broke into this old cobbler’s business one night.  

It was a terrible choice in practical terms.  We thought we would be able to turn on the electricity and water.  Most squats did this.  There were printed sheets explaining how to go about it.  It didn’t work out, but by then we had fallen in love with the place, the romance of the shuttered shopfront and the atmosphere of bygone days.  We could walk to the public toilets in Euston Station, or take a bath in the basement flat where I had been staying.  Our squat was a bout half way between the two, and also very close to University College, where my friend was still a student.

My plan to move north had taken shape.  I would move to Sheffield with two friends, one of whom had the money to buy a house, an old brick terrace.  We would do building work to earn a basic income.  I had neither skills nor experience, but my friends had both and seemed willing to help me to learn on the job.  

Moving in to the “Quality New & Second-Hand Shoe Store” helped to acclimatize me to this idea of jumping in at the deep end, ditching my aspiring middle-class future and diving back into the working class seas out of which my father had crawled, (by way of the Second World War).  My parents were mystified of course, horrified probably, but we found each other again eventually.

During those few months, preparing to move, I decided to earn some money. There was something of a building boom going on, and lots of work in architects’ offices. I started by going to an agency who farmed me out to the Telephone Exchanges section of the Ministry of Works.  I wonder how my life might have worked out if I had stayed on there.  

The architect in charge took me under his wing and I think he was very disappointed when I moved on after just a few weeks.  One of the tutors in the architecture department had heard what I was doing and offered me a better opportunity with the practice where he was a partner.  But here again I was just biding time and saving money.  The arrogance of youth.  In retrospect I realise that several sympathetic adults tried to save me from a catastrophic decision.  And they were right to do so ... I think.  But strangely enough it all worked out for the best.  

Some deep instinct inside of me realised that I was not ready to spend my youth sitting in architects' offices.  I needed to take a few lessons in the school of hard knocks first.

The area where I was squatting contained a decaying urban composition called Tolmers Square.  In the middle of the square was a church which had been converted into a cinema.  This had still been operating during my first year at university.  It was demolished.  

Later on, after I moved to Sheffield, Tolmers Square became the focus for a vibrant community of squatters and tenants, including several Indian restaurants and shops.  This had been my locale for a couple of years already before I started squatting.  Not long before I moved "up north", we became aware that there were other squats in the area.  

After I left the whole thing blossomed and we came down to visit a few times.  I still had several friends there, including Harry, an old guy from Manchester who had been sleeping on the streets and moved into the Shoe Shop with us for a while.

I think squatting was some kind of “rite of passage” for me, something I had to pass through to begin my journey to adult-hood.  It was a time when a maelstrom of ideas was swirling around in my brain, many of them wildly unrealistic.  Fortunately I was inclined to look inwards, and although I imagined society becoming transformed (via some kind of permanent revolution) into a utopia of creative anarchy … I thought in terms of building new things, rather than tearing down old ones.  

It seemed to me that if we could build a better world in microcosm, the old “broken” one would gradually fade away.  As I approach 70 years old, I can only smile and shake my head at some of the notions I entertained in the enthusiasm of youth.  

Thankfully, after crossing the bridge of squatting, I embarked on the ship of craft skills, learning to lay bricks and spending most of my 20s working with my hands.  This in turn provided the platform that allowed me to go to Zimbabwe as a building teacher.  But that chapter of my past is another continent altogether.