FAILURE TO LAUNCH

 This was written on 28^th December.

I’m out of time. The competition has awakened some latent energy, but the hazy goal of exploring the massing of several dozen church buildings is still a ways off, and “Day-Job” beckons. It’s fine.

Before fee-earning work swallowed me up, I managed to add most of the religious buildings that I have modelled over the past decade or so. Some of them are full-on Revit projects, others are massing studies in RFA format.  They include three London churches by John Soane, offshoots of the Project Soane competition that meant so much to me 5 or 6 years ago.

 

There are half a dozen detailed Revit models in my collection. None of them are completely finished, but they are all serious explorations. The larger group of more abstract, simplified families is more varied in approach and dates from at least 3 different periods, including this most recent spurt of activity. They are crystallised essences of church-ness. It’s that collection of abstractions that I intend to expand in the first half of 2022.

 

 

In my second submission for Zach Kron’s Parametric Pumpkin competition I assembled a collection of fruit and vegetables. These are families, in the biology sense: organisms that are related in a structured way. I looked at degrees of separation from pumpkins. They were ready-made sets of related challenges: form-making exercises that honed my skills at the same time as pulling me into am exploration of BIM as a medium for artistic expression.  I don’t mean the second-hand connection to aesthetics that comes with working on architectural project.  I was reflecting on the intrinsic expressive qualities of BIM as a medium, as compared to say watercolours, or wood-engraving.

Another way of framing this is to appeal to intuitive, subconscious modes of thought.  Iain McGilchrist makes a compelling case that the modern world has become captured by the left hemisphere with its blinkered, linear, rational logic: over-confident and inflexible. During the pumpkin work of late 2012 I was constantly operating on two different levels. My Left brain was busy making a convincing banana, sharply focused on the task at hand. Meanwhile my right brain remained alert to the bigger picture. How can we assemble this emerging collection into a face?  How will it all come together?  When will I have enough different species to switch into picture-assembling mode?

This is the essence of design. Furious activity. Architects work all night to meet deadlines, often self-imposed. But they must be willing to abandon concepts that have absorbed crazy amounts of energy at the flick of a switch. A light bulb moment that says “wait!” we’ve been looking at this the wrong way.

Could be root and branch, could be a subtle makeover. There are many layers of abstraction to the game of life that animals play. Snowflakes are fractal, patterns within patterns. You can see that as a visual image. You can see it as a metaphor. You can use it as an intuition pump, to extract creative energy from the labyrinthine tunnels of the Subconscious. You can use both hemispheres of your mammalian brain to flicker up and down the layers of structure that define your potential for action.

This is the intuitive, hands-on approach of the “artist”.  We need more of that in the BIM world.

 

JUMP! … HOW MANY?

 

How far should I take this?  How many churches to model?

In the last post on LinkedIn I suggested that making Revit families is a "design" process, meaning non-linear, cyclical, "you don't know how to even define the problem until you start trying to solve it"

So I am thinking in terms of multiple cycles, an iterative process. Round 1 was setting up a primitive “system” of nested families nested into a container.  Round 2 applied this system to a real-world example (Notre Dame) Now we are in Round 3, so what? Make a few more? How many? What type?

 What is the landscape of possibility?

 

Winter Wonderland. I'm fascinated by the way words shift their meaning. Slippery as soap. For a couple of years now I've been using an Etymology app on my phone to explore derivations on the fly before those slippery words slither down my memory hole.

Winter is the "Wet" season. Wonderland is a place where girls called Alice believe 6 impossible things before breakfast. Wonder is definitely a slippery word. It can mean fantastic, or it can mean puzzling (I wonder what that's all about? )

 

So perhaps Winter Wonderland can be translated as Liquid Puzzlement, skating across the landscape of ideas, “be like water"    

In that spirit I am skiing through the mountains of potential that church builders have explored for hundreds of years.  I need to gather data.  That's one level of meaning (pattern finding) in this design process.  Reference images from my laptop, bookshelf, kindle, the internet.  Ever the collector, a hoarder and cataloger of little nuggets.

This game is a puzzle because we don't know what patterns will emerge in trying to distill the diversity of history into parametric massing models. Simplified and abstract.  I wonder where it all will lead.

I have a history of rummaging through this magical territory. Let's dig out the projects and families sprinkled across the tree-structure of my laptop. Products of a decade or more of curiosity by my BIM pencil as it wanders across the pages of history.  The BIM pencils wanders, and having wondered. moves on in endless cycles of structured exploration.

 

Fit these into a matrix with labelled rows and columns. Fish out some reference images to populate the empty cells. Let's see what other permutations and combinations are needed.

I'm anticipating a rewriting of the rules, several of them in fact. Pauses to reflect and reconsider.  Why am I doing this. Which fork in the road looks most enticing?  Am I even heading in the right direction?

But first lets work out where we are, survey the territory that we wandered through in order to arrive at this moment, noting also some interesting places that we bypassed along the way.

 

For the most part, this is how I spent my Boxing Day.  Gathering up the threads of my work on churches and weaving them into a cloth with "Warp & Weft" ... aka "Rows & Columns" , "Space & Time", Countries and Eras.

So far this Matrix begins at the Medieval Period, but perhaps I will extend backwards to incorporate the Greek Temple I built long ago, and maybe the Pantheon that was roughed out a couple of years later.  We don't want to lose ourselves in the vast empty spaces of history, but how can you have a Classical Revival without at least a not to the Classical Antiquity that inspired it?

IT’S THE HEIGHT STUPID

 

Let’s take stock:

I created a component with independent parameters: Height, Length, Width, Roof Pitch.  Then I put “length” in the driving seat, with “Scale Factors” to control Width & Height. 

 

Big mistake. “Height” needs to be the Primary Input. As soon as I assemble 4 of my generic “Naves” into a cross this becomes obvious.  Keep the Height constant and vary the length.

So far, there are 3 versions: no aisles, single aisle, double aisle. That’s a step in the right direction, but let’s try to adapt it to a real-world case.

 

 

Notre Dame for example.  I’m using Two Aisles for the Nave and Chancel, One Aisle for the Transepts.  (ignoring the chapels for now, it’s just a proof of concept)

The west end is formed of 3 cuboids, and the Apse can be created from the Nave family by editing the path from a straight line to a very small semicircle.

In 2019 when Project Notre Dame was in full flow, I did a study for my talk at Autodesk University. This analysed the massing of Notre Dame: how it is built up as a series of bays, the underlying geometry, circulation routes. That helped me to consolidate what I had learned from the process of trying to model a medieval cathedral using Revit.

This new model is similarly abstract and simplified, but also different in its approach.  I am maintaining scalable behaviour, partly inspired by the Pumpkin explorations of 2011-2013, partly as a way of facilitating a large range of models of different historical buildings, partly as an aid to modelling at city scale in Revit, (perhaps.)

 

Imagine two extremes.

·         A single family with dozens of parameters that can transform itself into almost any possible church configuration     OR

·         Tackle each church as a fresh, unique case. In which case no need for parameters at all.

Is there a sweet spot, somewhere in between? Each new church could be derived from the closest previous example. Scale it up or down using the height parameter. Then open it in family editor and make a few enhancements. Maybe swap out components, adjust some of the profiles.  Could be a rapid way of developing a lot of church models for comparative analysis.

Nave, Chancel and Transepts just scale outwards from the crossing, which is at the origin of the host family.  So how to handle towers, apses etc. that attach themselves to the periphery?

My current method is to make up parameters on the fly, then define them as Height x “a number”

Let’s see how that pans out when we try to capture a few more examples.