PUDDLE IN MIND

 

On my way back from the dentist. I need to sort my teeth out after decades of neglect: at least salvage a bit of dignity, give a semi-respectable impression in photos. 👀

Anyway, on the way back I noticed some slightly different angles on my local church and the adjacent school. In some ways this was a high point of English confidence and cultural projection. We can come at it with a moralistic attitude as if we would have been so much better if we had been around a century ago or so ago. And yes, the happenstance of history played a massive role. It's no credit to me. I just happen to have been born on these islands in 1951,when things were starting to unravel, though we didn't realise it at the time.

It's not "great" Architecture, but it's competent, coherent, & versatile urban design by an emerging profession with an impressive command of scale and detail. It connects seamlessly with the past and adapts well to New functions and rapid growth.

I'm sorry, but the developers, local government and professions of my lifetime cannot claim to have maintained that standard. There have been flashes of brilliance, yes. But overall a mish-mash of either trying too hard to "innovate" or just going through the motions, building to a budget.

At least we have these reminders of what we could be.

 

This is part of the front boundary of the block of retirement flats where I now live. Lots to see. Moss and lichen which connect to my renewed interest in plant taxonomy and evolution. Lichen is a symbiont, not a plant, but still connected to the evolutionary story of early plants and their cyanobacteria precursor.

Brick on edge coping, holding up better than some of the stretchers below. Could indicate careful selection of bricks to use on the coping?

At the bottom, a course of headers. Kind of makes sense. Maybe English Bond was used for all the below-ground work. But how to incorporate the weep-holes? The way it's done here just throws the bonding out and leads to straight joints. Not a train smash, and I can't think of a better solution offhand 🤔

The main body is Flemish Garden Wall. Which looks good, provides enough headers to tie the two leaves together, and is easier to handle than Flemish itself. The main point of Garden Wall bonds is to allow a fair face on both sides. Or something close.

 

 

Almost 50 years ago my dad gave me a framed picture to hang up in the run down terraced house in Sheffield he had lent me money to buy. It put my foot on the first rung of the property ladder, and although I didn't climb to any great height, owning my own home all these years has had a huge impact. Altogether I've owned seven different homes, switching up and down according to my circumstances, but mostly quite modest.

I wish I was able to tell my dad now how much that picture means to me. It's one of Escher's more subtle works. At the time I'm afraid I may have betrayed my disappointment at not getting a reproduction of one of his more mind-bending compositions. But this simple portrait of a puddle says so much about the nature of perception and the problem of making marks on a flat surface to convey that subtle inner world of eye and brain.

 

What is real? The wheels and shoes that passed by? The sky and trees reflected in the water? The flat surface of the water itself, or the gooey texture of the mud? Or is it the paper, the ink, the wood block meticulously carved by Escher, the master of print technique?

The art work speaks of memory traces and the elusive reality beyond them. The images here speak of my memories. A wall in Zimbabwe, of a house I used to own. All the pictures on it lost in various ways but their complex meanings still alive in me. A still life painted by my dad. Degas ballet dancers. We both loved those.

 

Then there's the puddle in the park after the first decent rain for a couple of months. I let AI turn it into an oil painting to emphasise the plane of the image. It's not a patch on Escher of course, but at least I had a go. Maybe I will find a way of doing a real painting, inspired by Escher but my own take. That's a big ask.

 

TECHNICAL STUFF

 

This is the post that should have come before the last one🙄

Q. Explain the brick bonding here.

A. It's a half-brick wall in Stretcher Bond (face side) There is a stabilising pier on the other side, one brick wide, depth unknown. The alternating courses that reveal this pier are:

Course 1. 3/4, 1/2, 3/4
Course 2. Two headers

The rest of the wall is standard stretcher bond with half lap. The three quarters are there to create quarter lap, so that the half-brick can sit on the joint between the two headers.

I learnt to spot this kind of thing 50 years ago during a crash course in bricklaying. It's stuck with me ever since and is a source of great joy.

 

 

A brickwork exercise that I gave to my students at the University of Zimbabwe about 40 years ago. It's designed to be challenging while using a small number of bricks and without straying into fancy decorative brickwork.

The brick pier is similar to the one I showed in my previous post, but viewed from the other side. The drawing is Rotring pen on bond paper, using a plastic A3 drawing board. State of the art tech in my view, at the time. Photocopiers had recently improved, a lot. So that was my way to produce handouts for the class. Desktop publishing was hardly a thing yet. Cut and paste still meant scissors and glue. But it was effective.

 

 

This is my basic Sash Window family (Revit component) with the host wall hidden. In this version, I have a Yes/No switch for "Equal Height" (meaning "are the top and bottom sashes equal height? Tick the box for yes")

If this is unticked, the "Lower Height" parameter comes into play and the top sash height is calculated accordingly. I am in process of rationalising the parameters in this Family. At the moment it's too complex for the end user.

An experienced user should be in charge of managing all the window families for a project, but also it's important to to strike a balance between parametric, and manual adjustment. I'm picking up this work after a couple of years and even I get confused.

For now it's about deciding on the different configurations I need and building the nested components, but after that I will have to take a serious look at usability.

 

I made these entourage families long ago, 2013 I think. I challenged my followers to share some similar saying I would make more in response. I did get a taker, and the results have been in the GAJ Revit library ever since. These days many people are using Enscape or similar, making this type of family less useful.

The download links on my blog have been dead for ages and I'm aware that many people have been requesting access. To my shame, I never got around to this. Recently a direct appeal on LinkedIn prompted me to take another look.

I sometimes use RFA files to store collections of families. More lightweight than project files for sharing purposes and some other advantages when dealing with modular collections. Most of these are directly based on CAD files that I had accumulated 30+ years ago. In some cases I embedded the CAD file with a visibility switch to give the option of some interior detail.

They do not rotate to be perpendicular to the camera direction, so one option is to copy- rotate the extrusion by 90 degrees. They can still be useful if you don't want a photo-tendered look.

Some of the extrusions have far too many segments. I always intended to come back and optimise, but it never happened. I did manage to edit most of them so the feet sit convincingly on the ground instead of the tippytoes effect you get when tracing blindly from photos.

 

WAYS OF LOOKING

 

Today's walk. It was a long one : hot but enjoyable. The butterfly garden of 2026 was being cut down. I'm sure it will rise again next spring. The cycle of life.

Down Crossborough Hill and Eastrop Lane to St Mary's church. Gothic in style, but Georgian in period, from a time when Basingstoke was expanding eastward, in the general direction of London.

Eastrop Lane is lined with detached and Semi-detached houses of the interwar period. They vary in detail but share a common style. At the bottom of the hill there is an interesting close of Neo-Georgian houses with mansard roofs and pedimented entrance doors. I'm guessing they are late C20th. In the background the weird post-modern spire of festival place.

My route lay past this to the Bus station, where the no12 was waiting to take me home.

 

This is a Victorian makeover of questionable architectural merit, but some historic interest. Disraeli's "country seat" in an age when Prime Ministers had to have one. I suppose the entire city of Manchester now performs this function.

This pic was motivated by a visit by my son and grandchildren. I did a bit of Wikipedia research and pressed some AI buttons to simplify images. We used to call it "seeing the wood from the trees" and I'm finding the AI tools in Samsung gallery helpful in doing this.

Photographs seem to direct our attention to irrelevant detail in a way that viewing the world directly does not. Of course a really good photographer can get around this, which is why photography CAN be an art form. It's not about pretty pictures of sunsets of course, not even those heart-wrenching images of conflict zones. Art is a much more subtle quality.

Needless to say I'm not calling this Art. It's merely a tool to help me focus my attention on the essentials. Great workmanship here, but far too "eclectic" for my taste, or Pevsner's.

 

On my way to get milk, I pass through an area that is named after "yards" These have been converted into parking lots on the edge of the town centre. We used to park here when I was visiting from Dubai to see my son, and we were coming in to shop or to eat out.

I imagine that these were strips of land behind "high street" businesses where stables and workshops are located. When these strips were combined into car parks, the differences in level between properties had to be resolved.

This is how I interpret the raised, cobbled tree ring that I noticed properly today. They wanted to keep a mature tree which had been in a yard that stood higher than the new blended level. Maybe I will find an old map to flesh this story out at some point.

 

 

Images from yesterday evening. Days beginning to shorten, which is exciting for me after 45 years away and closer to the equator.

Bottom right is a conifer with large female cones and small males. My app says it's an Atlas Cedar. This one is a beautiful specimen on a small, flat hillock close to an octagonal gardener's hut. People love to sit underneath the shade here: feels like a magical place.

The other three squares are of a group of limes on the other side of the main field. Two versions of one of the shots: watercolour and oil. For once, the oil is "better" The watercolour AI seems to freak out at the number of separate leaves and just dash some splodges about. Better for showing the support structure though.

Top left is zoomed in further so the watercolour picks up the actual leaves quite well. I darkened the image and enhanced the contrast to better represent the sky peeping through leaves in shadow.