DIGITAL LUCERNE

 I’m using Lucerne as a case study for a multidimensional exploratory process. It started off as a painting, a therapeutic physical activity that took me back to my late teens.

The scene was selected from a day trip, 4 years ago. There is something magical about exploring an ancient city on a whim, with no clear plan of action, wandering through the streets and drinking in the atmosphere. My eyes are constantly scanning the buildings, asking myself questions, looking for new insights.

The central focus of the painting is a church. I decided to sketch this out in Revit. Switching to the digital realm takea my mind on new journeys. St Leodegar was a medieval monastery, so there were cloisters to rough out and sloping terrain to approximate. BIM sketching implies data and there are so many sources available now. Google earth, Wikipedia, image search terms. Very soon I am immersed in the William Tell myth and the emergence of the Swiss confederacy from Habsburg domination.

How not to get lost?  It’s a bit like the painting process. Trust your instincts, maintain a holistic view of the project. Let the main themes emerge in a natural way. 

 

Lucerne lay on a crucial trade route. The St Gothard pass is the most direct route from Milan to Zurich. Mule trains from Northern Italy dropped down into the Reuss valley at Altdorf, where Tell reputedly shot the apple from his son’s head, where Landburgher Gesler held sway on behalf of the Habsburg dynasty.

From there, Lake Lucerne marks the beginning of a navigable waterway all the way down to the Rhine: Basel, Strassburg, Karlsruhe, Rotterdam. Revit may not be designed for cartography but I’ve had some good results before, extending outwards from a study of a single building of historical interest.  Mapping out terrain in simplified terms.  Extending well beyond the "20 mile limit."

I’m grabbing 1km squares for free with Cadmapper. It’s a rough and ready approach, not being too picky about exact placements. Beyond the town centre, I default to “freehand” modelling the folds in the landscape based on rough heights from Google Earth. Merging pieces of topography together, using thick floor slabs to represent city blocks. 

 

  

The river Reuss exits lake Lucerne and loops around some lumpy hills before doubling back and heading towards Zurich. The railway line runs parallel to the river. As we approached that morning, the river was on the right and on the left, a long body of water, the Rotsee, with the hills and mountains looming straight ahead. 

I'm setting up a series of dependent views, zooming in progressively and exporting to Jpeg to insert in this post, placing images into blank spaces on my "map" ... not exactly the text-book approach to Revit but it's helping me to place my memories of that day trip into a broader context.

 

It seems to me that the old road North from Lucerne ran on the far side of the Rotsee and took a shortcut between the hills, arriving at the Lake in front St Leodegar. Old Maps show that the modern lakefront there is reclaimed land. The same is true of the station plaza which was my point of arrival. 

 

The grand, mostly classical buildings along that lake front presented an interesting challenge for my “BIM sketch” skills.  How rapidly could I catch the essential feeling of those structures? 

Google Earth’s “3d buildings” feature has been very useful in this endeavour, but the activity of creating my own digital models is really crucial.  Learning by doing.  I’m really glad that I started off this sequence of activities with a painting, getting down and dirty with the brushes and the texture of paint. Moving forward using digital tools is yielding fascinating insights into history and geography. Some of my assumptions may well be false, but we learn by proposing ideas and chasing them down. If I find myself in the weeds I will backtrack and learn from the experience. 

 

This post is a composite then of various techniques, ideas, disciplines.  The history of a city, the convenience of a mobile phone for “research on the fly”, the tactile qualities of acrylic paint.  The chuch of St Leodegar, like St Annes, Limehouse uses the composite order for the main piers that define the nave.  But, although both churches could be labelled “Baroque” they are very different.  The baroque here is an insertion into an older church and Hawksmoor’s style is quite far removed from the German type of Baroque.  Also these are pilasters, applied to a wall face defining a linear nave.  Hawksmoor unified nave and aisles in a single volume with four freestanding, circular columns of the composite order.

The capital itself follows similar principles: Ionic scrolls, much larger than the volutes found in Corinthian, but still with the two rows of acanthus leaves.  St Leodegar inserts a shell top centre, replacing the commonly used hibiscus flower.  It’s a difficult form to capture in Revit, and I have kept it very simple. Something to return to later perhaps.

Lots of stories here. The flow of trade from Northern Italy to medieval Europe. Lucerne as a fortified city profiting by protecting that trade route. The arrival of the railway and transition to tourist destination. Lucerne was a pioneer in this field apparently.

Humour me. The Himalayas formed when India crashed into Asia from below. Subduction, tectonic plates and all that good stuff. Kathmandu is a historic city that lies on a trade route through the Himalayas.

Italy was squeezed up into the European under belly as Africa drifted north. The alps resulted. I visited Kathmandu in 2007 and began some of my earliest BIM pencil studies on my return to Dubai. Ten years later, a day trip to Lucerne and now, in reflecting on that, I see connections and try to weave together stories using a blend of digital and manual tools.  

These last images were drawn on my phone while lying in bed. Using screen grabs from Google Earth, shared to Sketchbook pro.  Add layers and sketch outlines with the S-pen, fill with the paint bucket.  

Processes that I could not have imagined as a schoolboy immersed in the activity painting.

 

SWISS TREES ON CANVAS

 

In 2017 I spent 3 days in Zurich on the way back from a conference in Denmark. This was my first time to visit Switzerland. On the third day I took the train to Lucerne which made for interesting comparisons.

I have been struggling this weekend to recover from overwork and decided to embark on a second ‘acrylic on canvas ‘ painting. I bought a second canvas at the local supermarket, and while this is convenient, there are issues. I would like to work at a larger size, and I would be willing to pay 2 or 3 times as much to get something made elsewhere.

I went through a fairly elaborate process to select a view from the 500 or so shots I took that day in 2017. From a shortlist of 15 I assembled a collage and processed that to mute the colours, suppress the detail and enhance the pattern of light and shade.

Two of my favourites were set aside as being similar to my first painting ie views through archways in a courtyard setting. The two where stairs were the primary subject seemed a little too abstract for my current needs. 3 or 4 were not quite interesting enough as tonal compositions.

 

I asked myself what my motivations are. Partly it’s therapeutic, tipping the balance away from the digital realm slightly. But it also needs to integrate with my digital work. It should fit into my Way We Build framework. So the architecture should have some intrinsic value. Also I wanted some point of focus and human presence.

My selection has the dynamism of looking downhill, with a cyclist at the bottom about to turn right. There is an interesting framing with trees on the right and fairly bland buildings on the left. The church of St Leodegar with its twin spires provides the architectural and historical interest.

There are other elements that enrich the scene. A pedestrian crossing, a street lamp bracketed from the buildings on the left, a sparse metal Railing that directs the eye towards an archway, a back door to the monastic church.

 

 

 

I used a 4x4 grid again, drawn in a, Revit drafting view, saved to jpg and loaded into my ipad. This facilitated a quick pencil sketch that captured the proportions well enough. Then straight into the broad brush blocking out.

Lucerne is associated with the William Tell myth.  I had to look up the TV show I watched as a young boy, probably one of the first shows I can remember after we finally made the huge leap of buying a weird little TV.  Culture shock squared.  Dear reader: can you remember the transition from Radio to TV as a specific moment in your life? 

Turns out this British production was filmed in Wales (Snowdonia) with a specially written theme song to the tune of Rossini’s overture. “Come away, come away with William Tell…what a day, what a day when the apple fell”  Turns out that the myth is shared by several European cultures, possibly originating in Denmark with the tale of Palna Toki who also shot an apple from his son’s head. 

It’s interesting to reflect on the independent, democratic tradition of Switzerland, the struggle to break away from Habsburg rule, the decentralised governance and distancing from Europe.  Such rich histories to the various nation states of Europe.  Is the EU the modern equivalent of Habsburg Tyranny?  Can we continue to function as cohesive societies as the myths fade via TV soaps into Netflix specials and internet memes? Can our polarised political landscape learn from the religious divisions of the past?  Lucern is a majority Catholic city that formed a confederacy with neighbouring Calvinist cantons.  Do we need a common enemy and if so, who is our Landburgher Gessler?

 

 

 

The church of St Leodegar began as a monastery.  Its Romanesque towers survived a fire in 1633 and now offer distinctive framing to a baroque nave which is less spatially adventurous than the Jesuit church lower down on the far bank of the river Reuss.  I harboured ambitions of doing a quick massing model of St L with Revit, but given my general exhaustion and the primary focus on creating a painting, that wasn’t going to happen in time for this post.

What I’m aiming for, I think, is a multi-faceted integration of Digital and Physical “models” or “twins” if you like.  Reflections on a place that I visited, a cultural context with its own history that can give me pause in my own journey.  There are infinite aspects of Lucerne, Switzerland, Europe, the Baroque etc that I could delve into.  My approach is to create quick sketches, to use the broad brush, to improvise and select intuitively where to focus my attention.  

What does the process of painting bring to the table? 

Certainly it brings back thoughts and feelings lodged deep in my subconscious memory.  This was me 55 years ago as a teenager obsessed with the act of painting.  Compared to a Revit model it integrates the biological inhabitants of a city into my thoughts in a more direct and fluid manner.  The trees and the cyclist are not just supporting props in the way that Enscape3d assets might be used within a BIM model.

 

 

 

How did I do.  I’m pleased with the composition and the process was good.  My technique … not quite up to expectations yet, but it’s early days and some of the brushwork is getting close.  Keep trying 😊

As for the integrated approach, let’s see where this goes.  I would like to spend another weekend or so thinking about that day in Lucerne and weaving some stories as I pore over the pictures that I took on that brief random walk.

 

 

 

TUNNEL VISION

Sometimes coincidences can guide is into doing things we probably should have got around to long ago.

 

A few days ago I was at the supermarket buying some reflective tape to scare away pigeons from my balcony and I came across some acrylic paints and a small stretched canvas.  I have been thinking about ordering these online for a while now, so I bought them.

Yesterday as I was setting off on my morning walk I stumbled across this strange wooden frame discarded on the waste ground right next to my building.  Couldn’t understand what it was but the timber looked reusable.  So this morning I took some screwdrivers with me and took it apart.  Took two trips to carry everything up onto my balcony.  I was still intrigued by what it could be, so I decided to put it back together.  Gradually the penny dropped … it must be an easel, as used by oil painters.

 

The fact that I had just bought the stuff I needed to use this wonderful object for the purpose intended was too much for me.  So what should I paint.  I decided to do a street scene.  So looking through photos I took in Volterra, Tuscany in 2018. I came across a view looking into a courtyard that I liked.  Nice pattern of light and shade.  Pulls your eye into the picture and hints at some mystery around the corner.  Good enough.

So I brought the photo into a Revit drafting view and squared it up.  Red lines dividing it up into a 4 by 4 grid.  This should be enough for me to get the proportions of my outline sketch roughly right. 

So I did the same on the canvas and sketched out the picture in pencil.  Loaded the picture on my ipad, and ready to go

 

Turns out I had room on the easel to place the ipad right next to the canvas.  My portable workbench serves nicely as a table to hold the paints, palette and brushes. Magic.  But why has it taken so long for me to get back to this.  I did some watercolour work in the early days of lock down almost a year ago, and since then, the nearest thing has been apple pencil or Samsung stylus or photoshop mouse.

 

Anyway, I had a good session and I’m happy with this for a first roughing out.  Not sure what direction it will go from here.  Hoping to use the paint texture a bit, maybe leave part of the canvas a bit sketchy, probably towards the edges.

So why am I doing this, and what does it have to do with BIM, digital construction, all the other stuff I do on this blog, at work, etc.

Well in my mind it’s all of a piece.  Drawing and modelling are essentially the same.  You take an aspect of the physical world and abstract it, re-present it, explore it’s structure for some reason or purpose, whether because it has emotional meaning for you or because a client has asked you to do it, or … 

It could be physical or digital, precise and painstaking or rapid and sketchy.  I’m a big fan of the “single source of truth” approach to analysing buildings.  But I also recognize that distributed networks and cloud connectivity have a role to play. You can’t embed all the technical specifications of every component into a Revit model, nor would we wish to embed the quantity surveyor’s entire cost database.  “Open BIM” surely means accepting that many different disciplines and approaches contribute to the design, construction and maintenance of buildings.

 

Variety is the spice of life.  I strive for balance between the digital and the physical.  The activity of creating a painting taps into subconscious and emotional aspects of my cognition.  It’s a different way of thinking about a built space that I walked into three years ago.  Why are those spaces so much more satisfying for me than almost any modern equivalent?  Am I just an old stick-in-the-mud? Showing my age perhaps? 

The easel itself has something of that magic.  Maybe it’s only a decade or so old, difficult to say, but it does have the feel of a “relic of times past”  It does evoke for me, reflections on the way the world has changed over the past 70 years since I was born.  It stimulates my hunger for understanding of the generations that preceded mine, going back to John Soane, Nicholas Hawksmoor, the craftsman who built Our Lady of Paris.

I had no conscious memory of this style of Easel.  I could only think of the tripod versions of which there are a couple of sub-categories.  So I looked for images on the web.  Matisse is using a tripod type, Norman Rockwell one more similar to mine.  And there are so many other variations that workers in wood have conjured up.  Fascinating.

 

Day two and I woke early, took my customary walk, then shifted the equipment out onto the balcony to take advantage of the morning shade.  I felt like Picasso, sitting there, bare-chested working away at my painting.  Trying hard to bring out something of the quality of the paint and the brush strokes at the same time as representing the “reality” of the scene.

 I worked from memory and imagination this time, no need to refer to the photograph.  It’s more important from here on in to explore my own ideas and feelings about an urban space of this kind, to enhance the composition, the textures and colours.

Stand back and reflect.  Let ideas come into my head.  Towards the end of the session I suddenly got the age to apply a lemon yellow wash to one face of the archway in the foreground.  Then, when it came to it I continued to the edge of the canvas.  Partly an aesthetic decision, partly an attempt to invoke the multi-material patchwork of walls in Volterra: stone and brick interwoven.

Not finished, but probably on pause for a while.