LARKIN ABOUT IN BUFFALO

 

1904 and Frank was 37 years old, had been forced into private practice after some years of moonlighting and was well established as a designer of private houses with his own distinctive style. The Larkin Building was his first big commercial project. It’s and office block designed around an atrium and top lit (high level windows and skylights) predominantly open-plan.

Arguably this was the Amazon of the predigital era, originally selling soap just soap, but branching out into groceries, crockery and even furniture. Located in Buffalo New York next to a large factory complex, it was demolished in 1950 (woe is me) I was first made aware of this building by the redoubtable Peter Reyner Banham who was my History of Architecture professor in the first year of my architecture studies in London.

I began to model it in Revit perhaps 15 ago, sadly I found no clear record of just when. There are images from 2011 that were obviously collected as part of my research. It has remained at a very early stage of development since then with perhaps a couple of minor revisits, but this week I exhumed the corpse and made a serious attempt at resuscitation.

 

Further development and the model begins to shape up. This building is a serious challenge in that it no longer exists, and publicly available information is quite sparse. But as ever my strategy is to just press on with what I have and make educated guesses. It’s easy enough in Revit to make adjustment and corrections as I go along. 

 

 

In these snapshots I have added windows and the large skylight at the top level. Big questions about the layout of the lowest floor, of the entrance block at the side, and the upper floor with no external windows and a reduced ceiling height. Could be storage, could be mechanical plant. I think the entrance block probably had some cellular office for supervisory staff and there must have been mechanical plant in the basement, I guess.

One question that occurs to me is where the packing of items for shipping was done (I’m thinking of the soap, which went out in smaller presentation boxes)  Could this have been done in the admin block basement, where the order sheets were close at hand? Perhaps I will never know.

 

Sometimes you have to do this with BIM geometry. I call it “Broad Brushing” or “Catching the Essence”  It’s almost always necessary with decorative detail. You could list half a dozen reasons why that is. For now I’ll just say that on a full sheet of elevations,  anything else while turn into a black blob. If I had the time and patience I could put more work into this family and give it coarse, medium and fine detail levels. Right now I have other priorities, so as long as it looks a bit like FLW doing his Aztec thing that’s fine with me.

 

 

 

The reference image I have is obviously from a computer model. Don't know if this was commissioned by the FLW foundation or some similar organisation. I'm pretty confident it's not a BIM model. Apologies for not being able to credit the source.

 

 

 

 

 

FALLING FAST

 

My next little adventure has popped up out of the ether. For undisclosed reasons I started a rapid “BIM sketch” of Fallingwater, the famous ate project by Frank Lloyd Wright. This is a “quick and dirty” model purely based on publicly available image from the Web, and not worrying too much about dimensional accuracy. Rather I’m trying to capture the spirit of the design and get the layout of the house into my head, identify points of interest and difficulty, start to think about the significance of this project in the long story of humans building homes.

Like Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, this is a vacation home, eminently impractical in some ways, but stunningly creative and inspiring to generations of architects and lay enthusiasts. It straddles a fast-flowing stream with a small waterfall. Overhangs might be a better term, but the overhand is so extreme that straddles seems apt.

 

Four main levels, with just a viewing platform and undercroft at stream level, a main living area above that and bedrooms on the top two floors. So in a way it’s quite a vertical building, but being Wright the emphasis is on the horizontal, with broad cantilevered terraces, and bands of glazing rather than conventional windows. This last attribute is shared with Corb, but otherwise it’s a very different aesthetic for a very different site.

About a day and a half’s work in the images shared here, and these are 75 yr-old days of maybe six working hours, not the ten or twelve I regularly but in a few years ago.  No complaints, I still have a wonderful life and the slower pace has its benefits.

 

For these early sketches I usually set up sheets with several working views on them, to make it easier to see the “big picture” and to jump between open views in a simple and intuitive way. So far I just have the plans set up, with jpegs I found online as an underlay.  A couple of these had scale bars to get a rough idea of the size of things. I also looked at some 3d modes on sketchfab. No guarantee at all how inaccurate these are, but it helped to have something I could orbit.

The real proof of the pudding is in the many photographs available online. Once you have the model roughed-out it’s possible to compare these to what you have and go round troubleshooting. Bit-by-bit the uncertainties pop up and get resolved. It’s a process I’ve been through multiple times not and something I find really invigorating.

 

Elevation view of Fallingwater by Frank Lloyd Wright. For the windows I started with a thin glass wall, that’s the simplest way to model large areas of glazing in the earliest days of modelling, for me at least. Then you can go one of two ways. Use that wall to host window families in such a way that all that is left is a sealant gap between the units, or maybe change the wall type to a slightly thicker metal “subframe” so that the gaps between windows appear as metal posts. I try to follow what I believe to be the construction method used or to be used.

Method two is to convert the basic glass walls into curtain walls and set up glazing patterns. This has its drawbacks. You can’t schedule with the “normal” windows for example. But for now, this is what I have done with Frank’s little gem. I have 3 or 4 different types of curtain wall set up to suit the various conditions. No mullions needed at first but you can get quite a long way with the standard rectangular mullions. I guessed the sizes. Possibly I will convert back to a glass wall once I have time to model window families with the right kinds of openings. This is always more stable than a curtain wall where the sizes of panels are always instance-based and subject to unintentional change while editing the rest of the wall.

I need more information to take the next step. But that is probably coming down the pipe.

 

ALDERSHOT WRAP

 

Aldershot again. Developing the churchyard with its paths. In its current state there is an overcrowding of trees which makes it difficult to see the building clearly. I have kept just a sprinkling.  The building across the road is now a care home but was previously the vicarage, and “The Grange” presumably a private house with extensive grounds.

I have yet to develop the Manor House beyond the grey extrusion from Open Street Maps. It occurs to me that there is an opportunity here to introduce phasing, not just for the church, but also for the town. But I think I’m approaching the point where I will drop it for a while and do something else.

There is likely to be a site visit in April or May and a possible collaboration which I won’t go into yet. I did some deeper research on the railways. Should have used AI perhaps, but I stuck with my own brain box, added some notes and annotations to the site context sheet, along with snapshots from old maps and a couple of chain lines representing the railway lines themselves.

 

 

I wonder what it felt like for the villagers when the first barracks blocks started going up and the whole area began to urbanise in response. At first the soldiers would have hiked across from Ash Green, but before too long Aldershot got its own station and a dedicated siding for army trains coming from London with a full load of recruits.

This all began in the context of the Crimean war which gives us a tragic connection to the present. History ripples through the landscape of Hampshire like a chalk stream with multiple channels.  

 

The sheet of exterior views has a space along the bottom. I could add a whole series of small photos taken on site, like a film strip. Or I could compose some more text. That decision can wait a while. I picked out two images from the web to add to my three model view. The pen and ink drawing must be by the T.G.Jackson the restoration architect of 1910. If you look carefully, there are some small differences when compared to the as-built scheme. Not unusual of course for a perspective like this to be produced to sell the design to the client and for design detailing to continue afterwards, sometimes right up to completion.

 

The first study sheet has been cleaned up since last I shared it. Also some model development which shows up on the long section. Lots of questions about how things actually work but I did my best. The pews were removed some time ago, maybe at the time that the meeting room/café was added. So at the moment the church is modelled as it was say 50 years ago. When I have more information we can look at phasing and bring it all up to date.

I’ve enjoyed this study. Funny how things just crop up and send me on a detour. Important not to lose touch with the main project, but this was a good meander in the river.