MEMORIES AND TRANSITIONS

 

This is Revit work from 2006. Designed by an architect in our Dubai office called Eva. She was used Autocad and Sketchup which was normal for concept design architects at GAJ, not just then, but for most of the time I was there (22 years)

I was trying to advocate for a full-on switch to Revit and would insert myself into projects towards the end of concept design showing how a similar standard of output could be achieved using Revit.

 

If the projects proceeded to Schematic design then we would be ahead of the curve, although at this stage neither the clients nor the other consultants showed much interest in the BIM idea.

This project went no further. Whether Eva and her partner ever made the transition to BIM, I couldn't say. They went back to Germany two or three years later and apart from the occasional nod on Social Media, I have lost touch.

 

 

Although it's just across the road from us, I didn't notice this terracotta capping until this morning. Suffering from neglect, aggressive hedge growth and cement pointing, the classical beauty of the egg and dart motif still shines through.

What was the original context. Not likely to be a gatepost, located right on the corner of a corner plot. I'm guessing it was a termination to iron railings running in both directions. These would have been cut down to feed the war foundaries, first or second.

I will make a point of looking for the sawn-off stubs set into a low boundary wall. These were pointed out to me as a young boy growing up in Barnsley when the second war was still fresh in adult minds. We played at killing Germans often enough with our toy guns.

 

 

Partly right and partly wrong. I thought I would find evidence of railings on low walls around the corner from the plot corner pillar of yesterday's post. Not so.

But I did find this on the next street down. I do believe that's lead, poured into a socket cut into a stone coping, once-upon-a-time securing an iron railing. Some of the stone is spalled away.

 

A YOUNGER ME (ZIMBABWE 1985)

 

In January 1985 I was working in the Curriculum Development Unit of the Ministry of Education in Zimbabwe. We were producing teaching materials for secondary schools. Pupils had a choice of practical subjects. Some schools offered woodwork and metalwork, some offered agriculture and building.

 

 

My subject was building. Traditionally this had been a course for less intelligent students and restricted to bricklaying practical work. When I joined, the decision had been made to broaden the subject and offer it to all ability levels. We wrote a booklet for teachers to suggest practical work for the new course. This included a schematic breakdown of the course into modules and units with ideas for practical work, problem solving, drawing etc developed in parallel.  Note the hallucinated words generated during AI cleanup. 

 

The booklet was duplicated on poor quality paper from a stencil. Years later I wanted to rescue this work. The digital scans I had were terrible and attempts to enhance them with Photoshop patchy and time-consuming. Now that AI tools have become commonplace, work like this becomes much easier to handle. I have access to AI on my Samsung phone and for this purpose I stumbled on tools built into Microsoft One Drive. The OneDrive “fix” option with “enhance clarity” does a remarkable job, even restoring headings that were clipped in half.

 

The Samsung tools are useful for enhancing the remastered artwork with spot colour. Possible to do this with the bucket fill tools in traditional software, but it takes a while. This was one click (maybe two) and threw in a very attractive variegated brick colour as a bonus. I still have reservations about the use of AI, but bit-by-bit is starting to find its place in my workflows. Nothing too dramatic, but with this booklet I think I can do something that otherwise would never had come to the top of my task list. The amount of manual rework had just become too daunting.

 

One of my ideas was to make a simple training rig that simulated a foundation trench, the process of plumbing down to mark corners, and building up to match a datum peg.  During Covid I decided to retrace the artwork with a digital stylus. The next step would have been to recreate the pages using InDesign or similar. Never happened.

I decided to run this through some of the Samsung options. Quicker than using Photoshop but results are highly variable.  The remastered artwork is bottom right, as created while stuck at home in pandemic mode. Bottom left is “anime.”  Nice and clean. Extra pop from the colours. Top right is “watercolour.”  Even more pop, but perhaps a bit less clarity. Top left is “crayon.”  Positively bizarre but I have found it useful in some cases.

 

 

BROKEN PROMISES

 

Further investigation of the broken bond posted a week ago. Many thanks to all who took an interest.

The snapshot was from the rear of the last house in the row. Broken bond above the kitchen window on the ground floor of a double storey offshot to the rear of the house. The layout is familiar, common to many terraces and semis of the Victorian/Edwardian era which saw so many towns expanding rapidly across Britain. In fact my son’s previous house was very similar to this, albeit slightly smaller and part of a terrace. There may have been an “offshot to the offshot” for outside WC and coalhouse.

 

 

In this case it’s a group of seven semi-detached houses built with polychrome brickwork in an eclectic style. Seven pairs, which appear on a map of 1913 and perhaps under construction on the 1888 map. So probably Victorian. There is a possibility that this pair was the last to be built, perhaps after 1888 (the resolution of the map makes it hard to be sure, the group of semis are shown as a single block, but there is a gap at the end of the row).  In most cases the outside WC has been demolished and replaced with a modern extension.  Styles vary.

 

The gable at the far end of the row uses Flemish Garden Wall, obviously 9 inch (one brick) thick. The facades are all in Flemish with pale/cream string courses and quoins plus the occasional blue brick header. The original photo of the broken bond is from Jubilee Road which I take to be the Golden Jubilee of 1887, just before the map. (available of the National Library of Scotland website as an underlay to the 1913 survey, with transparency slider. What an excellent resource that is.   

 

 maps.nls.uk

 

 

 Windows are timber sliding sash set behind brick reveals. From my experience working on similar house construction in the 1970s as a bricklayer and general builder, the sash box will occupy the thickness of the inner leaf plus plaster, and be finished with architraves to match the door  frames. 

 

 

Was the polychrome intended to convey a red-white-&-blue patriotism?  I haven’t spotted any original rainwater goods, but I’m guessing cast-iron. In Sheffield it would have been timber gutters with cast-iron downpipes. Actually there may be one cast-iron downpipe in the next image. Fretwork barge boards, handsome tall chimneys. The builders may have been a bit lax in their approach to bonding around the back of the building, but you have to admire some of the craftsmanship and respect for local traditions on show here.

 

The use of stretcher bond on the side and back of the last block I take to be a “rationalising” measure, using metal ties. Don’t see the logic of introducing cavity walls just at the back of the building especially when windows there follow the same logic of brick reveals. Did all the headers on the front façade of the building carry right through the wall? Maybe not. Did they actually use metal ties? Perhaps they just hoped for the best. 

 

The broken bond seems to arise from window openings that are four and a half bricks wide. On some other blocks in the same area the windows on the end wall have quoins in white brick. Obviously these need to be symmetrical and planned for at ground level. Broken bond above and below results. Maybe they wanted the reveals to be symmetrical even when they weren’t picked out in this way. Perhaps it was “the way we do it”

 

 

 

This has turned into a much deeper dive that I originally intended but all the better. My aim is to keep studying the buildings around me, especially the older ones, and to gradually come to a deeper understanding of what’s going on. To conclude I will conclude with another visual from the study of my son’s former house that I did in Revit (incomplete). The sash window study earlier in this post also uses Revit of course. My tool of choice for many years now, as an architect, whether on commercial work, or on personal historical studies like this.

Many thanks to all who offered their thoughts and suggestions on the original Linked In post. That’s what prompted me to do the deeper dive and it turned out to be a lot of fun.