GREY STORY ELEVEN - AUGUST 2013

How can I make my work and ideas more accessible to students of architecture and building?  I really believe that “BIM sketching” is a powerful research strategy. Learning by doing. BIM outside the “day-job” box.  A tool for understanding, unshackled from the chains of commercial ROI.

This post from 2013 was in response to enquiries I receive from time to time, mostly from students, asking for access to my models.  This one made my Ronchamp Chapel model available in DWF format.

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2013/08/chapels-for-free.html

 

 

Every now an then I get asked to write an article or speak at a local event by our PR person. (we’ve had 4 or 5 of those over the years, all women, all really great)  

The link here seems to be dead now.  Generally speaking I find BIM articles quite boring and I can’t hack the usual “BIM expert” persona, so I always go for a provocative angle that subverts the mainstream view of BIM as a fairy-tale solution to commercial issues. 

I got the idea of creating a version of the Gartner hype cycle using Revit.

•      So I could talk about different stages in the BIM journey
•      Introducing the metaphor of “getting on the BIM bus”
•   A demonstration of using Revit in a non-standard way, as a communication tool.

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-bim-bus.html

 

Once in a while I do a fairly straight “tips & tricks” post.  Actually I don’t use keyboard shortcuts all that much in Revit.  Looking this post over again, I realise that I have forgotten about half of these.  Maybe it has to do with me being very “analog / visual oriented” 

 

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2013/08/speed-kills.html

 

 

This was a period when I was exploring the conceptual massing tools quite intensively.  Just a little experiment looking at the behaviour of three types of family which exhibit some aspect of the conceptual massing approach to form-finding. (Generic Model, Generic Adaptive & Conceptual Mass)

 

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2013/08/mass-murder.html

 

Every once in a while I get involved in master-planning or “urban design” … basically design at the scale of groups of buildings, city blocks, housing developments.  Sometimes this has been through my day-job.  At other times it has evolved out of my interest in a particular architect from history.  I did some studies of Palladio’s villas in context, and I looked at Hawksmoor’s six London churches in their different urban settings.

I know there are other tools that can tackle some of this stuff, and I have high hopes for initiatives like TestFit.  All the same I do think there are times when it makes sense to work directly in Revit … and WE NEED BETTER TOOLS.  For example it would be useful if the “Roads” category actually did something instead of just sitting there for no particular reason. 

When I did this post I was very hopeful that I would figure out lots of cool stuff for masterplanning, but it never quite took off. I continue to dabble from time to time, but no major breakthroughs. 

 

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2013/08/master-blaster.html

 

 

MUSICAL CHAIRS

 

 There has been a sudden burst of music videos on my YouTube channel.  I thought the extra time “home alone” generated by the pandemic would allow me to get my music going again, but somehow that didn’t really work out.  I’ve played a bit and I even posted a couple of songs early on, but mostly there was always something else grabbing my attention and creativity … until this week.

The proximate cause was starting to use my balcony.  Dubai is a desperately indoor kind of place mostly and I miss my garden in Africa.  There is so much fine sand in the air that if you don’t use a balcony regularly it’s just covered in dust.  Working full time it just never seemed worth the bother, but working from home has changed that.  Now I enjoy sitting outside for ten minutes and sweeping the floor has become welcome physical exercise.

The knock on effect of this has seen me taking the reorganization of my indoor living space one step further.  I converted my dining table into a home office some months ago, and cleared space to do some arts & crafts work.  Now I realise that I don’t need a conventional sitting room at all.  So I’m throwing some stuff away and creating 4  working corners with the home office in the middle.  So one corner is for music and I got my valve amp out.  That led to upload no 1 

 

That one is in standard tuning and I had my line6 set to simulate a 12 string guitar sound.  No particular reason.  Because I haven’t been uploading at all regularly, I’m not trying to practice these songs up and get a polished performance.  I’m afraid the enthusiasm of the moment will pass and nothing will get recorded at all.  So I’m just being spontaneous and impulsive.  I have a music stand with a clipboard and some bits of plasticine to hold my phone at roughly the right angle.  Then it’s just press and go.

If this becomes a regular routine then I can think about working songs out a bit more, but increasingly I’m drawn to the spontaneity of the “live-stream” idea.  I’ve been trying to get closer to that with my linked in posts on my Revit work.  It’s nice to have the long blog-posts summarising work over two weekends, but I’m also enjoying taking screenshots of what I’m doing “right-now” and giving people a bit of a feel of my weekend progressing.

Next day.  Evening came, and I was sitting over the other side of the room with my acoustic guitar. Open G now, and using my brass slide.  

 

 

Around sunset next day I decided to take the guitar out on the balcony.  Elvis / Willy Nelson song.  I’ve messed with this a few times and never quite got what I wanted.  This take is pretty rough, (forgot the first line, hit C# instead of C) but no time to get faint-hearted about this.  One take and upload.  Let’s be honest about it.  The next para is what I wrote on LinkedIn … forgot to give it a title in my haste, but corrected that just now.

Mid winter in Dubai, so it's cool enough to sit out on my fifth floor balcony and do an al fresco take on a song I haven't played for months and which I haven't yet cracked. But I quite like this version of the punch line which just came to me tonight.

I can never really come up with an exact arrangement. I'm always messing with the timing, phrasing etc so it always needs to be a fairly robust riff I can improvise around. Applies to both guitar and vocals.

 

 

AND MY BIRD CAN SING

 

Let’s try to cobble these LinkedIn posts into a blog.

I’m enjoying a new process of several short posts over a weekend, as I work.  But it would be nice to keep a more permanent record going on the blog here.  It started on Thursday evening with the decision to take a crack at an Art Nouveau door by Victor Horta.

The interesting aspect of this is how to maintain some parametric resizing ability with these irregular shapes. Weekend preview.

I love the Art Nouveau elements! One of my favorite periods for both Art and Architecture! Yes I fell for Art Nouveau as a teenager in the 1960s. Part of the "Art is Rebellion" metaphor I guess. 🙄

 

 

Tricks of the trade in a BIM context. To stop these delicate quirks /flourishes in the corner of door frame and opening from distorting as you flex the door size... It's possible to create reference planes while in "sketch mode" and to tie them to the edges with locked dimensions.

 

 

This part is quite tricky. I can keep the arc tangential to the bottom edge by locking it to the centre line of the door panel. But as I vary the door width the spline twists. Really I would like it to always meet the side edge at right angles... more or less. I love these challenges and what I learn along the way. About #doors, architectural history, #joinery #geometry ... #revit

Life is good people 😎

Thanks for posting..... it's always fascinating to see your experimentation and great that you share your knowledge

My Pleasure. Wouldn't be half as much fun without the sharing bit 😁

you're using a spline. Have you thought instead of spline to try with two arches that you can control?

I'm using splines for their automatic scaling when you lock the two ends. Works very well for the curvy transom, not quite so well for the quirk, but it will do for now. Thanks for the suggestion.

 

Hotel Max Hallet, 1902. Just a quick #bimpencil sketch this afternoon. Building the house around the door 🙄 May get a bit further tomorrow. Thanks to those who posted comments and suggestions, all useful to be sure.

 

 

It started with a door, but these #bimpencil adventures always lead to unexpected pleasures. Three glass pods balancing on steel prosthetics like pirates' legs lured me into some careful setting out this morning, and to add an "arch flattening" parameter to my half-round opening family so that it can double up as elliptical. More steel peg-legs next to support those arches. Fascinating stuff to be sure, to be sure, (Jim lad.)

... and to my shame I had never heard of Victor Horta; as ever, thanks for the invaluable back-handed (unintentional !) education I am receiving from you (all) 🥂

Interesting modelling. Would be nice to see the original windows to compare

Hotel Hallet by Victor Horta. Lots of photos online for this and his other houses in Brussels.

good luck with the curved top of the curved windows. You are not modelling with curtain walling system of Revit, right?

I have been using a curtain wall to rough this out and towards the end of the day made a loadable family for the top portion. Will share more tomorrow. It would be possible to spend some weeks modelling this house so I am being quite selective about how far I take any one family. The aim is to understand the rationale behind the design

 

 

They look a bit wierd from the outside, but nice curved window seats overlooking the garden. The top lit stair hall is typical Horta.

Excellent. i like the basement being on garden gf as well. but keep in mind function unless the 3 windows are each used desperately( piano, office desk and seating in the middle) y not make the middle one larger (maybe oval maybe just a striated really big bay window).

Thanks for your comments. This is a study of an existing historic building from 1902 in Brussels by the originator of the Art Nouveau style, Baron Victor Horta.

Love the window seat feature !

Certainly a labour of love and a search for deeper understanding of the way our species has built containers to inhabit in different times and places. I have a passion for history, for learning by doing, for geometry too, I guess. I have a deep interest in the building trades stretching back some 50 years and have been messing with computers for more than 35. Sometimes call myself a BIM addict 🙄

 

 

Just a rough BIM sketch, but a fantastic learning experience for me. Try to imagine being a Brussels lawyer in 1902 and commissioning this chic, state-of-the-art townhouse from the famous Victor Horta, pioneer of Art Nouveau. 50 years later I was just one year old. 70 years after that will take us to next year. Will I take this further? Does anyone else want to take a couple of door/window families and run with them? Stay tuned folks

 

 

There was an interesting exchange with Mark Maas who I already knew a little from the Notre Dame work. 

Why won’t you work with profile families?

Profile families are great Mark. Not sure how they would help in this case. Maybe your question is why don't I assemble my more regular framed door panels as a series of sweeps? Not sure I have a good answer to that. Perhaps I will give it a serious shot one of these days and assess the pros and cons. I have always used loaded profiles for the architraves (trim) and often for the door frames, but not so much for the construction of door panels.

the purple lines good be you’re profile family. I think profile families are more stable and have more possibilities to flex dimensions. And you can easily exchange them within the host family.

On reflection I think Mark’s proposal of using a loaded profile for the glazing cutout in the door has a lot going for it.  Definitely want to try this out in a future study.  One further bonus is that you can use the same profile for the glass as for the hole it fits into.