LATE HARARE, EARLY DUBAI

 

2005 was an interesting year for me. I started to settle down for an extended stay in Dubai. I had no idea that I would stay for another two decades, but I was adapting, finding my feet, building a life.

These two images are from late in the year. One shows me waiting in line to renew my Zimbabwe passport. It took me best part of two weeks with multiple sessions of queuing for several hours to get that new passport which was vital to continuing my work in Dubai.

I was very proud to be a citizen of Zimbabwe by registration, meaning that I chose that path. Ultimately it had involved renouncing my British Citizenship so there was no real alternative to the queues. Despite the pain and bureaucracy involved in keeping a Zimbabwe passport, I was very reluctant to give it up. Being Zimbabwean by choice was such a big part of my life.

The other image is from the second office Xmas party where our band, GAJ rocks performed. Running that band really helped to integrate me into the practice and it was a great source of stress relief while putting in 50 or 60 hours a week to keep up with my responsibilities.

2005 was also the year that I started to use Revit. What a journey!

 

When we first acquired Revit licences, I was in the middle of a project using Autocad. The site was around the edges of Emirates Golf Club. Several parcels of land that were underused. The aim was to build residential units and generate income.

The top image is a hand drawn perspective of the CAD scheme. We had a couple of guys in the office who specialised in creating these images. Some use of photoshop of course to "colour in" the initial line drawing.

That scheme went out to tender, but the client was unhappy with the prices when they came in. The office manager came up with a strategy for rescuing the project while giving me a chance to get my teeth into Revit.

We reused a villa design from another site. I learnt about linking multiple instances of a project into an overall site file, and very quickly we had basic construction drawings plus rendered perspective views. I had picked up a tip online that involved generating a black and white image plus a render at the same resolution and combining these in Photoshop.

So that's the lower image. Not quite as seductive as the hand drawn sketch, but twenty minutes versus a couple of days. Now we have real-time renders like Enscape of course.

 

I have been converting old cassette tapes to mp3. Turns out to be pretty easy, although the quality is variable. That's mostly down to the condition of the tapes to be honest and the random balance you get by placing a cassette recorder in the middle of a rehearsal room.

I rescued the original tapes from my house in Zimbabwe earlier this year when we cleared it out for sale. Bought the Walkman style player last week on Amazon and set to work.

 

There are tapes from my Sheffield bands in the 70s and from a blues band in Zimbabwe around 2000. Also some solo recordings from the years between, including multi-track work in the 90s.The styles vary I always drift back to the blues, but the Sheffield band used a lot of 60s material, gravitating towards punk and new wave which were in the air.

In Zimbabwe I was inevitably drawn towards African styles. Wonderful dance music. Repeating 4 bar patterns. I hope to gradually add visuals and upload some of this to YouTube. A bit of personal history.

 

Going back to 2000 (Y2K) and I was effectively a single dad with a day job as an architect. For severaI years I had been playing music with a bunch of loosely connected musicians. Three of us coalesced for a while and played regular gigs at bars and cafes. That lineup had very divergent musical tastes which was a lot of fun, but it came to an end.

Out of the blue, one of the musicians in that wider circle phoned me up and proposed forming a blues band. It was a challenge. I had never fronted a band vocally. And never been in a specifically 'blues' band. I was used to taking lead vocals on a couple of songs, lead guitar on most and some backing vocals.

Neville had developed a couple of dozen rhythm guitar parts and practised these up with a bass player and drummer. We had a first session at his house where he played these to me and I allowed a song to well up from my subconscious based on three decades of improvising around blues standards.

It worked. We refined those raw beginnings with more deliberate structure and variation. But those first intuitive takes held true.

Highway 51 is a song I picked up from Bob Dylan. I played it on a beach in Turkey in 1971 then off and on over the years but never on stage with a band. This version is very different but shares a fast driving rhythm, somewhat synchopated.

We called ourselves King Bee.

 

 

WAVING ACROSS TIME

 

This was another early concept design in Revit for Brian. I don't quite remember what his input was. He had the design very clearly in his mind for sure and probably provided an enigmatic sketch plus some verbal direction.

After that I would have fed him periodic images from the model and gradually grasped his intentions. At this stage, I was so blown away by the way you could set up a series of views on sheets then update the model and re-export the booklet without leaving Revit.

I couldn't understand why anyone would fail to see the power of this approach. But people become attached to the processes that have worked in the past. Project leads who mostly supervise teams often prefer them to use software they were familiar with when they were more hands-on (Sketchup /Autocad).

 

 

So this booklet from 2006 represents the period when I was pushing hard for a BIM - centred process from cradle to grave. This proved much harder than I had imagined. I think many others will have had similar experiences. Sadly, instead of the continuity that was implied in various diagrams that circulated at the time, the cycle has been chopped up into distinct phases, with completely different teams, often different software packages and skillsets.

Whether software - agnostic cloud platforms can solve this issue, or whether they just chop up the work between ever more specialisations (Information Management etc) Time will tell.

I do have a nostalgia for the heady days of 2006 when I was so excited about the digital transformation. There is still hope, if we keep that flame alive.

 

 

I guess we all share the aspiration to some extent, to live the hero's journey, to imbue our life with meaning, age gracefully, relish the boundless energy of youth, savour those years of parenthood, remain true to ourselves.

This song uses a couple metaphors to convey that idea. The shape of a wave. The close fit of a glove. I was quite young when I first conceived the idea as a lyric, but I didn't know how to develop the musical interpretation.

I'm an ageing hippy, an old boomer, and the Blues was always my first love. But I do enjoy collaborating with musicians from completely different traditions, especially where there is scope to improvise. I haven't really followed popular music trends since about 1979, but every now and then someone introduces me to something interesting.

U2 is a case in point. The guitar work here is influenced by the guy in the woolly hat. Long echo with a slow decay. I had a Zoom effects unit at the time.

Acceptance. I doubt I will put this much effort into crafting a multi-track recording ever again. Incomplete as it is. If I am to continue playing music, I have to grasp the creative energy when I have it. Embrace the rawness, the stumbling along.

Meanwhile, here is a "third time lucky" reworking of a 45 year old idea.

 

 On the left is me. On the right the work environment I was plunged into 21 years ago. Clockwise from top left.

Sketches and notes from 2012, my first Revit Technology Conference in Atlanta. It was a chance to see my daughter, explore New York and get to know some of the BIM guys that I had begun to meet online.

Part of my ongoing fascination with the Way We Build has to do with the little details of everyday life that make different cities around the world feel different. That sense of familiarity with home and curiosity when travelling.

Keith's details for Bab Al Shams. Hand drawn on squared paper. I was in awe. How could BIM ever achieve this level of fluency? Then a scheme from before my time. The type of residential project I would soon have to tackle in Revit. The biggest challenge was the cavity walling with external recesses.

Finally, part of my presentation at BIM show live in London in 2013. The emergence of the BIM pencil idea. Going through old papers is such fun.

 

 

SCANNING THE PAST

 
I live in the middle. 10 storey blocks with no common theme but similar floor plans, known as the CBD. The photo shows the typical elevation of a ring of seven storey buildings enclosing the CBD. Not sure what to call that style. "Contemporary Moorish"? The master developer may well have used a label like that. Who knows?

Generally speaking this is the high point of the neighbourhood in terms of design. Beyond this ring are clusters, themed by country. Rather crude attempts to mimic national styles. Spain is probably the least objectionable. Nevertheless International City has become a lively suburb. Lower middle class, short on parking and landscape, but lots of little shops and cafes. Affordable, practical, real.

I like living here, but I ought to get out more 🤣🤣🤣

 

1991 is almost half a lifetime away for me. My youngest child was 3 years old and I had made the agonising decision to leave him in Harare with his mother and grandparents while I went to Joburg to complete my 5 years of Architecture Studies after a gap of 18 years.

I had started to dabble with CAD, but only just. Roughing out in pencil on butcher paper then inking up on tracing was my favourite way of working. This was a History of Architecture assignment, part of 5th year which I had entered, based on my first degree at the Bartlett and a couple of years in an office in Harare.

The theme of that fifth year course was History of Urban Settlement. These drawings, comparing Bristol and Tripoli, are based on book research and imagination. As I remember, they were photocopied and coloured by hand along with 4 or 5 other pages. 

 

I have been to Bristol, but not to the medieval city obviously and it was more than a decade before these drawings were produced. I have never been to North Africa, sadly.

Exercises like this one helped to formulate the mission that I call "the Way We Build" coded as WWB in my file structures. Drawings are models. Attempts to distill some critical aspect of real life to a physical or digital medium. The process of creating this abstraction an adventure that helps us to restructure our brains.

A sense of history. Invaluable.

 

 

2006 was still fairly early in our BIM journey at GAJ. It seemed like an absolute no-brainer to me that we would transition most of the office to this approach quite rapidly. Of course there was resistance and scepticism, mostly from the higher levels. Strangely enough Brian, right at the top, was very positive about the potential of Revit. On the other hand, having recently restructured to take in junior partners, he wanted them to make their own minds up.

I was the highest ranking staff member pushing Revit and was thrown challenges by Brian on a regular basis. This one was a quick preconcept booklet to lure a client into commissioning us for further development. Of course you are lucky if 20% of these quick schemes go any further and this one didn't. In fact it was an attempt to revive an idea from a few years earlier that also went nowhere.

Much of this is using Revit as a desktop publisher, laying out reference images on sheets. The model itself is very crude, an exercise in massing. But there is a schedule of areas thrown in there. Live data of course.

How would I have reacted if I had known that the concept design team would still be using Sketchup and Autocad, Photoshop and In Design as their primary tools, almost twenty years later? Probably better that I kept believing for another decade or so before easing into more of an elder statesman role.