WORKING HASTILY

Hastings is a small town on the South Coast of England. It has a multi-layered history including the famous Battle in 1066 that allowed the Normans to wrest control from a Saxon elite. Fishing still plays an active role in the local economy and makes its presence felt along the Eastern shoreline in the form of black, weather-boarded storage towers and working vessels drawn up on the pebble beach.

I have friends in Hastings who I have been visiting, off-and-on for over 20 years now.  Nick and I know each other from architecture school circa 1970.  He became an architectural journalist and I "dropped out", returning to my northern roots, training as a bricklayer and playing in a band.  Towards the end of this phase of my life, Nick invited me to work on his latest project: a book about squatting.

We had both been involved in the squatting "scene" in London in the early 70s and I had a certain reputation for sketching and cartooning.  I was to be the illustrator, his partner Caroline Lwin was the designer and he was Editor. Various people contributed a chapter each.  Since then he has gone on to become well know in the Community Planning field, writing a handbook and maintaining a website on this topic.

I always enjoy spending a couple of days with Nick and his current partner Jane: relaxed atmosphere, delicious wholesome food and stimulating conversation. This time he reminded me about a book he had showed me before: "Harry the Pencil" based on a lifetime of hand sketching to support design development on an urban scale.

He also brought out another book, called "Design Thinking Drawing" by an Australian architect with a comparable talent for sketching birdseye perspectives, design diagrams, all kinds of images that support the design process.  I was struck by the richness that can be conjured up by a few rapid strokes.  Some of the drawings must have consumed huge numbers of man-hours, but others were rapid and impressionistic, but equally effective.

more examples here

I have been trying to revive my hand drawing skills for 3 or 4 years now, mostly be way of digital tools. I decided it was time to loosen up a bit more, to focus on “fast and fluid“, emphasise the raw energy of an intuitive sketching process. So I spent a morning in Nick and Jane’s living room, working up two views from Project Soane as rapid digital sketches.

Why would I degrade data-rich BIM models, lovingly rendered, into scribbled sketches? What are the positives here?

Audience Appeal: people react well to hand sketches.  There's a warm and fuzzy feeling combined with a certain sense of admiration (I wish I could draw like that).  It's a bit like playing a musical instrument.

Lack of Pretence: There is no confusion about whether it's a photograph of a real building. People are used to the idea that an artist's impression may take certain liberties.  You don't have to worry too much if some aspects of the image are speculative, or that people will obsess about some minor detail.

I’m very happy with my progress. Two sketches in a morning that also contained a walk in the park and a fair amount of chit-chat. Pretty good progress, and I’m not ashamed to show them alongside the work I did almost 40 years ago at the height of my powers. The image below is from another section page for the squatting book. It was a spoof on a Heineken advert for a section that highlighted how squatters could actually help to raise the profile of a neighbourhood, injecting new life into old housing stock.

My digital toolkit has come of age. I’m showing the gear against a background of bed sheets because that’s where much of the work is done. I can take a break from sitting at my laptop, stretch out and look at the world from a different angle.  We are mobile beings who settled down and built containers for our lives.  Keyboard and mouse belong to that urbanised identity.  Touch interfaces recapture something of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.  Just a thought.

Switching images between mobile devices via the cloud leads naturally to integration with the social world we all inhabit. My immediate family is spread at regular intervals from NZ to Florida, by way of Singapore, Dubai, UK. The more fluid my sketching becomes, the more likely I am to share family moments using that medium, it’s more personal and allows me to strip out irrelevant detail. Pretty much the same qualities that appeal when presenting design ideas or analyses of historic buildings. This next one is from a very special last morning with my grandsons during my most recent visit.

I’ve been dealing with a medical issue since just before Christmas. I couldn’t get the operation I needed in Dubai, so I returned to England for 3 weeks. The visit to Hastings was part of my recovery period. I didn’t get down to the old town this time. These sketches are based on pictures I took with my very first digital camera in 2002. I was visiting from Zimbabwe with my son who was on a gap year. Both of us were about to go through a series of changes though we didn’t know it.

Digital photography sat beside CAD for a couple of years. Sketchup came along and shook things up a bit. Zimbabwe went down the toilet, Joe was studying in Cape Town, I decamped to Dubai and got my hands on Revit. From Dubai I have been able to travel more frequently, building up a database of images, including those early ones of Hastings. It’s part of a project I call “the way we build”... Just a set of reflections on what it is to be human, using the buildings we make as my point of departure. 

Hastings Old Town is one of those places that seems to have grown organically: houses in a range of styles and materials tumbling down hillsides and setting up an endless series of picturesque viewpoints.  Tile cladding, weatherboarding the black and white rhythms of old fashioned timber framing, projecting floor joists that allow the upper floor to cantilever beyond the ground floor footprint, leaded glass in diamond patterns,  It's the kind of place that's very difficult to model convincingly using BIM tools, but looks great in a hand drawn sketch. 

There is something organic about Peter Richards’ work, his "Design Thinking Drawing"is very rapid and process oriented..

He observes, he imagines, he analyses. The Hand-Eye-Brain continuum churns through material rapidly and effortlessly but with results that often surprise and arrest. It’s a search for meaning, as is the way I’ve been building digital models, collecting photos and plans, reading historical accounts, blogging... and increasingly sketching ... different ways of exploring towns and cities around the world. Consider this wonderful evocation of Chicago by Harry-the-Pencil.

When I got back to Dubai, I discovered that Harry’s book is available online.

harry_the_pencil

I’ve talked to Nick a few times about the potential of BIM to add something new to urban planning processes.  But is it user-friendly enough?  Think about the power of hand sketching to capture ideas quickly and win over the hearts and minds of local residents.  How can we inject this kind of fluidity into BIM processes?  I don’t think we quite know how to bridge that gap yet.

I remember spotting the chance to take a shot of a seagull, perched on a chimney, with the seafront in the distance. It seemed to capture something about layers of meaning and the richness of urban life (Hastings old town).  The parallel world of birds and insects that make incidental use of our buildings. The all but obsolete technology of open fireplaces that stimulated the coal mining industry in England, making possible the industrial revolution.  The pier in the distance, since burnt down and renovated in much simpler form, complete with salvaged charred timbers, reused in inventive ways.

Digital photographs freeze moments from our past at a phenomenal rate.  On a good day out in a new city I will collect about 400 images.  When I bought rolls of 35mm film, a dozen snaps would have been a very extravagant day.  Is this akin to the invention of writing, or the printing press?  Suddenly we have external tools that bolt on to the evolved memory system in our head.  We can store up knowledge and experience in new ways.

I guess the first drawings and clay figurines were similar leaps forward (or sideways) taken many thousands of years before writing began to appear.  So here am I fusing drawing and modelling with the digital realm, trying to inject the raw power and fluency of ancient artistry back into my work.

A luta continua.  The struggle continues

ELLIPSE IN RESIDENCE

When Residence Court was built, it nestled into the NW corner of the site where the dog-leg of Princes Street joined Lothbury.  Later on this section of Princes was closed off and incorporated into the NW extension.  Two sides of the court were dedicated to 4 storey apartments for two senior officers of the Bank, and a  third to offices for the Chief Cashier's department.  On the fourth side a screen of columns atop broad flights of steps denoted the boundary with Lothbury Court and the bullion passage.

In the N.E. Extension there are several elliptical spaces.  Now the ellipse is not available in the "drawing toolset" for walls.  This is quite logical. You couldn't apply normal "location line" behaviours to an elliptical wall.  If the Interior Face was an ellipse then the Exterior Face would not be.  You can't have two ellipses that are parallel to each other all the way round.  Because if you scale an ellipse, the long axis will increase by more than the short axis.

One solution is to use 4 arcs that meet tangentially.  I was aware of this workaround, I've even used it, but I had never looked carefully into the subtleties of the setting out.  This turns out to be very interesting.  We are dealing with the Secretary's Parlour, and tracing over the plan at cellar level I came to realise that you need 4 centre points (which define a diamond) Extending the 4 sides of this rhombus, establishes the meeting points for the arcs, and the length of one side gives you the difference between the major radius and minor radius.

I quickly realised that in this case we were dealing with a 345 triangle.  This allows the vertical, horizontal and diagonal measurements to all be whole numbers.  Clearly this would make life easier for both draughtsman and builder.  I probably spent a couple of hours figuring it all out, but the insights gained were definitely worth the effort.

I have a generic fireplace family that is used wherever I need a fireplace, but lack specific information about its appearance. It is set up with simple formulas that scale the geometry based on a width dimension. In the cellars below the principal floor are the kitchens and washrooms for the residences above where the secretary and chief accountant lived.

So I have created a generic kitchen range along similar lines.  This was done purely from memory, but later I remembered having images of the range at the Soane Museum (his own house).  Probably I will make a version of the range family that matches this more closely.  Maybe I will make a few different ones based on various reference images.  I'm old enough to remember working versions of these ranges.  Several of my elderly relatives were still cooking on coal fired kitchen ranges when I was a boy.

The secretary's house features a long straight stair with a half landing.  I'm pretty sure these would be stone steps cantilevered out from the wall, each one resting partly on the one below.  That's how the stairs in his own house are, and the ones in his churches.  As for the balustrade, he had two or three designs that he favoured.  Perhaps the most common is a shallow "S" curve.  I decided to have a quick go at this.  It's not quite right when you look closely, but it's certainly heading in the right direction.  At present I am still showing timber construction for the upper flight.  Maybe so, maybe not.

I'm a firm believer in flexible and lightweight generic families.  Seems to me they are crucial to fluid and responsive early design processes. I've got a fairly good modular door system going, but what about the architraves (trim)? Soane used fairly complex mouldings. I wanted to be able to scale these based on a "Trim Width" parameter.  With a bit of thought you can set up a grid of reference planes governed by 3 or 4 sets of equality constraints and make the depth proportional to the width.

The Doors and windows in this model were mostly created "on-the-fly" while fighting my way through the jigsaw puzzles of Project Soane. What was the original design intent: (functional relationships, lighting effects, structural constraints, response to previous work).  There have been periodic attempts to impose some order and consistency, but to be hones, they really need a thorough overhaul.  For one thing, my approach to making door and window families has evolved quite a lot since I started Project Soane.

Sliding sash windows in thick masonry walls usually have a recessed internal sill.  In Revit this requires using voids rather than cut openings.  The windows around the principal floor of residence court have two narrow sidelights and a segmental pediment. Originally I made this with cut openings (as you do). On converting them to an internal recess, the issue of vertical origin arose.  Where previously the lowest point was the base of the window frame, it now became the base of the internal void.  This explains why one of the windows has "jumped up".

The residence court roofscape is a bit of a puzzle.  I've played around with various arrangements.  I know that the top floor has a mansard treatment along Lothbury, behind the "battlements".  But it's not clear how this turns the corner, or just how it buts up to the porter's lodge.  At one stage there was a light well around the corner, up against Princes Street as it used to be.  This may have been enclosed later on, but currently I prefer to keep it in the model.
I think it gives light and ventilation to small bathrooms & toilets fitted into leftover space.  I'm also speculating that the triangular stair rising up in this corner is top lit.  The circular lantern is there to remind me to give it more thought.
 

TRIMMING THE EDGES

We're going to walk around the edges of the Bank towards the North & the West: a series of narrow triangular spaces just behind the screen wall that need to be tidied up, elevated, re-assessed.

We looked at the Reduced Annuities (upper and lower) in the last post but one.  I'm not happy with the narrow passage between the battlements and the Reduced Annuities Upper.  Was it really like that?  Could it be made wider by supporting the upper wall on the joist ends below?  Flitch beams perhaps to support the load of masonry offset from the wall below?  If the walkway was blocked here, how did the guards get around to the battlements along Threadneedle Street?  Hmmm.  Note the parapet and stair behind the barracks that I am trying to keep apart.  Lots of questions, but we are definitely moving forward.  Oh yes, those windows in the tower above the Rustic Lobby, groups of three in each side, but I guess the ones facing back into the upper storey were blind recesses.  Something else to get around to.

Moving North again to the Doric Vestibule, what I like to think of as the VIP entrance.  Off to the sides there were two semi-circular stairs.  What were these for?  The levels are difficult to reconcile again.  There are small adjacent rooms to access, and the upper floor of the Printing Court, but what about the screen wall battlements?  I'm starting to think that the two stairs have different functions: one is connecting to the Printing Court, the other takes you up to a flat roof and from there to the wall.  More work is needed to figure that one out, or at least to arrive at a plausible solution.

Once again I am trying to resolve alignments, anomalies, overlaps etc as it becomes clearer how the spaces fit together.  We may never really know exactly what was built, but my goal is to make it believable, and to be consistent with work Soane did elsewhere.  Sometimes it's just a matter of splitting walls in different places or making slight setbacks to resolve 3-way junctions in a cleaner manner.  Ultimately I want to be able to tell an interesting story about the history of the Bank and its architects.  That's not going to be possible as long as the model remains awkward and incomplete as soon as you stray away from the major spaces that are well documented.

The walkway around the top of the screen wall has been modelled with parapet walls on both sides.  That is correct in some cases, and I based it on drawings from the archive.  But other drawings show it as open to the inside.  In fact it seems to be a stone slab cantilevered out over those narrow internal yards.  I know they didn't have health & safety regulations in those days, but this seems unduly reckless.  My guest is that there was a basic iron railing, which is not showing up on those sketches.  That's the interpretation I'm going for anyway, adding railings and supporting the cantilever with a bit of corbelling below.

When we get to Tivoli Corner I have decided to create a flat terrace behind the "attic sentry box"  I think that's the only solution that makes any sense.  The area is too small and oddly shaped to accommodate a small piece of pitched roof.  There are a number of small rooms in the space below that need to be looked at, but for the moment I am cleaning up the exterior.  Let's move on.

So next we come up to the Soldier's Gate and the yard behind which gave access to Soane's New Barracks Block.  Based on my current levels we need a few steps down from the street into the yard, so that's what I'm showing.  No corroborating evidence for these but the alternative would be to drop Lothbury down much lower.  Maybe I will take a look at that possibility later on, but for the moment we are having steps down into the yard.

The elevation of the new Barracks was a mess.  All I have to go on here is the floor plan but I think the solution shown below is a big improvement.  So once again I am taking an educated guess and moving on.  Maybe some additional evidence will catch my eye. now I know what I'm looking for.

So on we go, heading East down Lothbury we come to another triangle.  This is where Princes Street used to terminate before the NW (green) Extension was built.  That's the reason for the curved corner.  That was the outer edge of the screen wall when Soane first enclosed the properties that were acquired for his NE (orange) Extension.  I think that portion probably remained blank after it was incorporated into the site.  But the Printing works was new, and needed to get light and air from both sides.  It's quite scary when you look inside parts of the model that have lain neglected for a year or more.

The central decorative feature of the Lothbury screen wall clearly backs into an attic bedroom in the residence court. but has been modelled as if it was open to the world on all four sides.  Then there are walls that stop half way up an upper room.  I also spent some time adding placeholder fireplaces to these spaces and converting rectangular openings into "real" doors.

At the far end of Lothbury we come to the Consols Library, a structure that was rebuilt as a copy of Taylor's original: four storeys of brick vaulted storage around a central light shaft.  This is a linked file, built originally as a study one weekend.  One corner was sticking out int the apse at the end of Lothbury Court and another overlapped with Russell's C.T.O (Consols Transfer Office) which is also a link.

I've learnt a lot since Russell built this.  Photos and survey drawings show that some of the drawings he used were early design schemes, so there are some small adjustments to be made.  I made a start on this, modifying the niches for example. For the moment I'm just doing what is needed to clean things up at the junctions with the main model. Will come back later to give this space a more thorough review.

The toothed stonework shown on some of the window surrounds was taken from site progress sketches.  Photos show that the final treatment was much simpler.  Once again there are triangular light courts to elevate and stairs to resolve.  Lots of residual spaces to review.  You see a semi-circular lobby in plan and place the wall, then a couple of years later think about the ceiling above.  Perhaps it should be hemispherical.  What about a lantern?  Not sure about that though.  Half a lantern?  Would he do that?

Russell had a lunette at the West End of the CTO.  I think that's based on a Soane archive sketch, but photos show a wide window with a segmental head and 5 divisions.  Now that we can see everything in context it becomes clear that a staircase clips the lunette.  I guess there's a reason for everything.

That staircase is giving access to Sampson's rear courtyard block which had three floor above ground (plus cellars) This is at the corner where the original Bullion Passage came in from the East.  It's fascinating to know my way around this jigsaw puzzle of a building so well, considering it was demolished almost a century ago, and that the passage I just mentioned was moved more than a century before that.  I really do feel that this is an immensely powerful way of studying the past, ( i.e. getting inside the spirit of a period by way of a BIM authoring package)  and something that more people should be doing.

The last post featured hand sketches attempting to analyse Soane's design development process in framing the façade around the Bullion Passage.  Future posts will deal with the passage itself and with further development of Residence Court.  After that, who knows?