TRACING THE BIM PENCIL

 Something I’ve been working on for two or three days now. Strictly speaking it’s just off the edge of my Hampshire Churches map, but it’s in Hampshire as currently defined. From the church Diocese standpoint it’s in Guildford, Surrey but there is a a possible collaboration here, so I decided to go for it.

Unlike most of my recent church models, this is a full-blown Revit project. That makes it a bit heavier and harder to set up comparison sets with data schedules, but it’s good to question assumptions from time to time. Moving to a different methodology then back again sparks fresh insights. A bit like switching between piano and guitar when working on a song.

 

Windows for St Michael’s Aldershot. I’m using very short sweeps for the tracery so the pattern is drawn as a profile sketch. This guards against the whole thing breaking if I have to adjust height and width parameters later, when I get more information.  Think of them as "stabilised extrusions"

 

So I'm using two pieces of flat geometry with a simple step in level. It’s a gross simplification, viewed close up, but I’m good with it. The best interpretation of a Gothic style window I have managed so far,and unless you are studying a single window in isolation, perfectly adequate for the job.  What I like about this approach is that it makes a clear distinction between the "framework" and the "elaboration"  Definitely a method you could use to design your own Gothic tracery.

 

I should have posted more about the upgrade of my BIM pencil files on ACC from 2024 to 2026. Not really the upgrade itself which is thankfully child’s play these days (links intact etc)

But working through the folders and refreshing my memory on stages of completion (nothing is complete in this world of personal exploration spanning 20+ years) Fixing some of the more obvious issues. Hunting down some missing files in mysterious corners of my hard drive.

 

 

 

That was all quite revealing. The collaborative effort called Project Soane is more complete than most, but the site context files and the timeline work from architect Sampson to Taylor to Soane... These elements were left hanging, so I’m starting to tidy that up a bit.

Images here show the bank just before Soane entered the scene. 

 

 

 

2025 WINDING UP DUBAI

 

Having cast my thoughts back on fifteen years of blogging, and being January, I decided to remind myself of the past 12 months, a final transition from commercial work to full time BIM pencil warrior.

Xmas 2025 was spent in Dubai with two thirds of my progeny in a rented flat, downtown. By contrast, Marsa Al Seef has the feel of an old souq, best seen at night. It’s a project that I was involved in, mostly as a developer of custom families to capture the traditional architecture in Revit. I had an operation for colon cancer in January. Still clear a year later. While recuperating I started scanning old papers and throwing away the detritus of 20 years in Dubai. Almost complete now.

I bought a new electric guitar, hoping to bring music back into the mainstream of my life. Still working on that. Revisited William Morris’s Red House, a Revit model I started long, long ago. That was part of a determined effort to move all my “Way We Build” work into the cloud. Scanning included the Building Books we wrote in Zimbabwe and the History projects from my second architecture degree in Joburg. I started to feel nostalgic about International City CBD where I live. And continued to scan sketches and Revit work from the early Dubai period.

I visited Zimbabwe to sell my old house there, brought back cassette tapes and digitised them. Some were uploaded to YouTube. Must get back to that also. Casa del Fascio is an intriguing Italian Modernist building that I modelled for a conference presentation in New Zealand (more scanning and uploading to the ACC cloud)  Then in March, an office Iftar at One Zaabeel. Typical Dubai audacity of design and development.

 

My last full year in Dubai has been spent mostly inside my flat. So going out on Friday nights became an important routine, including my birthday celebration in April. Packaging up my extra-curricular BIM work for the cloud included the De La Warr pavilion model, Revit content collections, and Parametric Pumpkin competition entries. Then in May,  a visit to my retirement flat in the UK, meeting up with my old friend Rufus at St Annes, Limehouse by Nicholas Hawksmoor. Also visiting some Hampshire Churches with more old friends. Then back in Dubai I had another dabble with AI. It’s fast but I can’t really get it to do what I want.

Inspired by the church visits my Hampshire Churches map entered a new phase with data analysis and case studies. There are over 400 churches in my study area, so enough work here for several lifetimes. Hopefully I can do enough in the time I have left to inspire some younger minds to use BIM tools and processes to study human history through the lens of “the Way We Build” Meanwhile, visits to UK getting shorter and closer together now. Can’t help myself looking around at building work in progress, like the porch in the last picture.

 

Having mapped out “Hampshire Churches” as a Revit project file, with basic data assigned to each church, and created massing models for a random selection of these buildings, I looked at the schedule and selected 10 Victoria churches by A.W.Blomfield for a deeper dive. This phase of the larger scheme is still in progress, but I am really pleased with progress made to date. I have been importing toposolids via Autodesk Forma and setting up a summary sheet for each church.  Then there was the GAJ xmas party, and an outing for my electric guitar setup, followed by a fantastic xmas trip to UK. That will be the last visit before moving.

 

On return to Dubai I have been going through the ACC project that now contains almost all the “private study” files created since I began working with Revit and set up a blog 15-20 years ago. I will be looking for new ways to make this available to anyone who might be interested.  I have never thought of myself as a Revit specialist. I am an architect and enthusiastic student of building history. Revit just happens to be one of the major tools in my bag of tricks.  The work on Victor Horta’s Maison Hallet is from the height of the Covid craziness, February 2021. I wanted to have a go at that because I had been looking at challenging door families, but also because he is one Art Nouveau practitioner who maintained a relatively planar approach. By definition this is easier to tackle in Revit than say Gaudi.

SWEET FIFTEEN

 This visit is starting to wind down. Family Xmas was amazing, but the two overseas branches have gone back and my two grandsons spending the next week with their mum. So I am focusing on basic domestic routines here at my retirement flat. Then it will be back to Dubai for a final 3 months stint before the permanent move.

I took a long walk this morning. Cold but clear. Passed the porch that was under construction during my last visit. It's starting to weather in very nicely. Made a hearty vegetable omelette for lunch, with a cup of frothy coffee. Also explored a possible outing to visit a church or two. Hope I can fit that in. (didn’t happen)

 

A new year begins. This will be the one where I take up formal residence in England again. Inevitably I find myself reflecting on the 45 years away, and the 15 years of my blog www.grevity.blogspot.com  Blogging has helped to focus my work beyond the commercial limits that most Revit users set themselves. Drawing by hand was never like this. You drew for work and you also drew/painted/wrote books for pleasure and to engage with a broader audience. (ie not just talking about drawing technique)

It has always puzzled me that more people don’t see this “new way of drawing” as a general tool for thinking and communicating beyond the world of commercial projects.  Here I mean “drawing” in the broadest sense of using images and models as part of an exploration of ideas. It has always included “data”, embedded information. Drawing is never “just drawing” but the advent of BIM has given an extra stimulus to integrating visual, numerical, textual ... knowledge and wisdom to solve problems and share ideas. I store a folder of the images and text for each post on my OneDrive cloud and here is the set for 2025, which has been my second most prolific year for number of posts (after 2012)

 

There have been definite phases to my blogging journey.  Early on I was mostly exploring the capabilities of Revit itself. The blog was a personal diary recording that journey and motivating me to think about it more carefully. Then I was sucked into Zach Kron’s parametric pumpkin competition and began to attend Revit Technology Conferences. This was a wonderful community for me to connect with others in the international BIM world. 

 

 

Along came Project Soane which Paul Aubin encouraged me to join. It became an obsession for two years, long after the competition had ended.

 

 

The idea of voluntary collaborations with users across the globe took root and morphed into Project Notre Dame soon after the tragic fire. So many wonderful friendships grew out of those two endeavours.

 

Then came Covid. We all have our different views about that time. To me it was a mixed experience. Fear at first, then an opportunity to spend more time on my blog and related explorations, then sadness at how lockdowns had caused so much damage, long after they had served any useful purpose. In Dubai it was better in that people had to fund their own survival as work contracted. Many went back home. Others trusted that the economy would bounce back which it did fairly quickly without incurring vast debt.

 

 

I transitioned to a hybrid work routine, having already passed 70 and voluntarily reduced to a four day week. Props to GAJ for allowing me to do this, for paying me out on my salary arrears and gratuity over the past year or so, which has allowed me to set up a retirement plan, belatedly.

 

The latest phase of my blogging is still based on Revit and Historical Buildings but tries also to reflect on life as I post to Linked In several times a week and collect 3 or 4 of these snapshots into blog posts that can be read as a sequence stretching back 15 years.

 

 

I will continue with my Hampshire Churches project, retiring to that county in April, and hopefully make more of my work over the past 15 years accessible through the website that Daniel Hurtubise has helped me to set up.  www.thewaywebuild.io  many students of architecture have contacted me over the years and found this site a useful resource for their projects. Studies of other buildings can be found on this blog, and the Revit files were uploaded to an ACC hub last year. I just need to tidy things up and export them to the file formats we use on the WWB site as free downloads. These are non-editable. If you want native Revit, you will have to prove yourself as a contributor to the work.

 

 

Neither Daniel nor I will gain any income from this work, and at some point I will need to find a way of funding AEC software licenses. But I’m determined to continue, and to share the results openly. Apart from that. Happy New Year to everyone. A Luta Continua.