BUILDING STONE COLD MEMORIES

I’m trying to post several times a week on Linked In.  These are mostly sets of images from my timeline, dating back anything up to 20 years (when I first acquired digital photography.)  The theme as always is the way buildings reflect the culture they spring from (time and place)  Ways of life can be very different around the world. 

 

There are a few little tricks to help convert snapshots like these into seamless textures using bitmap editing software like photoshop.

Offsets that bring the edges into the centre and back again. Clone brushes to soften out the hard edges along those crosshairs. It takes effort and judgment to do a decent job but I quite enjoy the challenge from time to time.

These images are from my visit to Porto in 2016. Three walls and a floor. Stone is such a wonderful material. Sadly neglected and treated too clinically in much modern work.

The old guys knew how to create surfaces that aged with majesty and grace, embracing the ravages of nature and entering into a symbiosis with the plant kingdom.

 

 

This is a follow up to a post by Silviu Stoian which reminded me of some Revit studies I did soon after getting back from Volterra 2018 (the Reality Capture workshop.)

"Cap and Pan" roof tile system which has an amazing ability to adapt to different roof widths and "not quite square" shapes.

You can vary the gap between pans, you can let the gap increase course by course, you can even use an upside down pan instead of a barrel cap.

All the tiles have a built-in taper, so that they fit together at the overlap. You can’t help but admire the deceptive simplicity.

The last image is my interpretation of a wood and brick flooring system, using the typical roman brick proportions so loved by Frank Lloyd Wright. A cross between a brick and a tile really.

You can see the under side of these floors if you look up when passing through some of the narrow alley ways that cut across between streets in Volterra.

 

 

Mutare Club, photographed in 2003. Capital of Manicaland Province, along the Eastern border with Mozambique. This was towards the end of my stay in Zimbabwe.

Hyperinflation was ramping up and the politics was becoming toxic. I still didn't know how I was going to get out of that frying pan but I was certainly starting to worry.

All the same I was deeply impressed by the history and technology of the buildings around me and building up a library of images with my new digital camera.

Is colonial architecture a source of shame? An opportunity to display your inner resentments? We seem to be tempted by these follies in recent years.

As a response to climate, an exercise in proportions, a balancing of solid and void, surface and line... I have always found this building rather charming.

 

 

A staircase by Le Corbusier in Boston, Massachusetts

‘Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts’

Winter of 2008/2009... Visiting my daughter. We drove up from New York to Boston one weekend. Also saw the Lion King on Broadway.

 

 

 

 

Western Uganda, 2009. Off the beaten track, heading towards gorilla country (the mountains that mark the border with D.R. Congo.) We didn't actually get that far. But we did pass through Kilembe, a semi-derelict copper mine town.

Perhaps many of the former workers stuck around and carved out a subsistence living on the steep slopes. The carving metaphor is apt. Must be hugely labour intensive. First of all digging out a shelf for the house, then hauling up water and everything else on a daily basis from the valley below.

Wikipedia suggests the mining activity has been resuscitated. So what's the better life?

Regular money and living in barracks-like company housing.
Backbreaking subsistence farming in direct contact with nature.
Chained to a home-office laptop with Netflix and deliveroo for company.

Who can say?

 

 

Two of these are undersides of roof assemblies. Tuscan roofs tend to be quite shallow. Is this partly because they often use the same basic support system as many floors? The third pic (with the arch) is a floor.

The common factor: square section timbers, spaced one brick-length apart, supporting rows of headers. There is enough free play in the system for it to follow a slow curve and accommodate odd angles. This approach also results in a fairly high thermal mass, "flattening the curve" across a 24 hour temperature cycle.

Those three pics were taken in Volterra in 2018. The fourth is from a bit further south: a slightly different tradition, where both cap and pan use the same barrel tile.

I love this eaves detail, where the last tile in each valley is projected slightly, delivering water into the gutter while leaving it relatively open for cleaning. Elegance and function combined.

Solutions like this emerge from generations of artisans learning from each other, trying things out, keeping what works. Cultural evolution working its magic at a subconscious level that self-conscious design professionals like me view with awe and envy. 🤔

 

 

THE WEEK THAT WAS

 Linked In posts for Early October 2022.  Playing guitar on my balcony, starting a painting project, looking back at my one and only visit to Portugal, and the “ancient past” of life in Zimbabwe.

There is a certain severity in the architecture of Porto. Partly the nature of the local stone, partly the maritime climate blowing up river from the Atlantic. But this is tempered by a somewhat idiomatic sense of the baroque.

What does that word mean? Like all words it means what thousands of people have coopted it to mean in a variety of contexts. Meanings morph continuously. It implies a bending of the rules of classicism, a bending of surfaces also, perhaps a bending of space-time 😜

Spiral columns, broken pediments, complex curves at every turn. Some snippets sifted from my visit in 2016.

 

I'm embarking on a little painting project. It's one of those things that just kind of happened. Can't remember why I started taking closeups on my balcony. Just a whim I guess.

The habit of combining photos in fours is just part of housekeeping my image gallery, but a couple of days later I realised it might be interesting to buy four cheap canvases at the local supermarket and mount a set of semi-abstract compositions close together on the wall.

Early days yet. Just roughed out the first two. Will get all four up to this stage and hang them together. Then I can keep looking at them. Bursts of activity as the spirit moves me. Layers of shading and texture oozing up from the subconscious mud.

Is anything ever finished? There will come a point when I'm more interested in starting something else.

 

 

Glazed wall tiles as an external finish are common in Porto. Sometimes they are flat and smooth, sometimes embossed. Blue and yellow are common with a white ground.

They form a marvellous contrast with the coarse grey stone. Splashes of colour and a surface that can be scrubbed down before the maritime life forms take too firm a hold.

Memories.

 

 

Just messing about on my balcony after a productive day of Revit work for my day job.

Music is such a great way to divert the brain from its endless chatter.  Slide guitar instrumental in open G.

 

 

These are photos I took in Bulawayo 20 years ago. At that stage I never imagined I would move to Dubai barely 18 months later.

Are these relics of a disgusting racist past? That would be one interpretation. Actually I have no way of judging the humanity of the architects involved though it's certain they were all white.

I do see a rich historical record: four different attempts to capture the mood of the time and to project the identity of a rapidly growing city with government buildings, offices, banks and hotels.

I was on a visit to the school of architecture there to teach a group of students about setting out buildings in a hands-on way.

Special memories for me. I wonder where they all are now?

 

 

I have many pictures of metal railings in Mauritius, dating back to the early days of my exposure to digital cameras. I will have to fish them out. Indeed a little series of posts on Port Louis would be a pleasant diversion methinks.

But these ones are from Porto. Much the same vocabulary. Some of these are castings, some hand forged by muscular blacksmiths. Of course I prefer the latter for pure aesthetics, but it's hard to resist the economics of mass production.

Call it the William Morris dilemma. I guess it brought us the modern movement with all its benefits and pitfalls. Don't get me wrong, glass balustrades are great. But you gotta love these old railings. Weather-beaten and rusty, they still tug at the heart strings.

 

PORTO DOORS

 

I visited Porto in 2016 for a conference. This was about half way through an 8 year period of attending as many Revit/BIM events as I could, often as a speaker.

I was already moving towards small group events and meet-ups with a broader range of people involved in construction when the pandemic called a full stop.  Moving forward I hope to continue this trend and especially to visit new cities around the globe to think about “The Way We Build”

For sure I will be photographing doors, and pondering the different responses to climate, culture, security, and symbolism.

 

I recently posted four of these Porto doors on LinkedIn, suggesting that it would be interesting to build Revit families that capture their essential form.  When building a BIM model, we always have to think about the appropriate Level of Detail for the intended purpose.  We will always be simplifying and abstracting to some extent.  Hinges and locking mechanism are probably best captured by a specification code rather than attempting to duplicate screw threads in 3d.

I do have a modular system for assembling door families.  This aims to minimize effort and maximise reusable content.  Once I have created a style of door panel, it should be available to all current and future doors families with a minimum of effort, whether they are single or double, hinged, sliding, folding … whatever.

So I set about building these four doors, using an appropriate starter family from my collection.  I already have proven approaches to fanlights, double doors, curved heads etc.  These are fully parametric and interchangeable.

The system is based on nested components with a standardized naming of the nested elements and of the parameters used to vary proportions, materials etc. 

 

Attempting these four doors was a useful test for my system, which performed well for the most part.  Taking a panel with 4 vertical divisions and duplicating it to create one with 5 is straightforward enough.  I do have components that emulate traditional mouldings and raided/fielded panels.  The downside is that this increases the levels of nesting.  You have to make a judgement call.  Do you want to just refer to typical details, or do you need to use these families for close-up renderings?

In this case I am just using flat extrusions for both glazed and solid panels.  But the fanlights and security bars needed to be addressed, even if in simplified form.  My rule of thumb is that you can recognize the various door types in a project at a glance.  Anyone who knows the project will tend to fill in some of the details subconsciously, but only if there are no obvious discrepancies.

So the security bars on the blue door are incomplete (missing from the fanlight and highly simplified in the door panels)  And the fascinating design of the red fanlight doesn’t perform too well if you change the proportions to radically.  It’s quite challenging to make a design of this complexity parametric, but I enjoyed having a go.

I could spend more time on these four examples, but I have a feeling that tackling some doors from other city visits will prove more compelling, when I pick this up again.

For that matter, there are plenty of variations from my Porto visit to test other aspects of my system.  Folding doors, elliptical and pointed heads, for example. 

From past experience, waiting until I am deeply enmeshed in modeling a historic building to develop a new type of door is likely to result in a rushed family which breaks under pressure.  After all, I may only need one specific size for the task in hand so really robust parametric behaviour may be lower priority than progressing the main building model.

So exercises like this one can be useful to expand my system and make it more adaptable, especially to deal with traditional designs and older buildings.