ROUND AND ROUND (BUS TRIP)

 Not sure what to think about yesterday. Resuming my explorations by bus was a huge positive. The fact that I only visited one church less so. A bit worrying that I felt exhausted by the time I got home. Let's see how the next outing goes.

St Leonards (Sherfield on Loddon) is an old church, but "improved" almost beyond recognition by the Victorian architects Woodman (1865) & Hugall (1870) It would be inconceivable to commit such sacrilege today, but I rather like it. Why is it that we can only build in the Gothic manner with the strictest of conservationist hats on? Is a century old approach (modernism) morally superior to the Gothic revival of a century and a half ago

 

Local materials and craftsmanship that has stood the test of time. There are memorials from the eighteenth century inside and a very nice old organ on the north side of the choir. The altar piece and east window also impressive. Will future generations look back at our humble village structures with such admiration? Not just for the skill and artistic value, but also for the invocation of a time of confident achievement? 

 

 

Sherfield Church End is the location of St Leonards church. Sherfield Court is the manor house, right next door. Pevsner dates it at 1700 with wings from 1922. Private house? There is a moat with island backing on to both church and house. Could be a picturesque gesture? No indication of medieval origins.

The wall between house and church is a tall affair in English Garden Wall Bond. Looking quite battered. I'm looking forward to tackling that round window in Revit. Will I model the stepped edges in the void cut of the window family? That would allow the the host wall to be flint on the outside. Complicates things and leads on to similar treatment for other windows. The perennial LOD dilemma.

The bus ride from Basingstoke is pleasant enough. Winding through private housing developments. Sherfield Park is the last of these, in a classical style, vaguely reminiscent of the schemes promoted by the King when he was still a prince. No information about the architects.

 

Next day I got up quite early and did my "standard long walk" through the park (about 45 minutes) before the temperature got up too much. Most of this walk can be done keeping to the shadows.

Chill out for a while. Received a fruit bowl from my daughter in Florida (via M&S) Had a nibble, then decided to tackle the round window from my most recent church visit. I made the mistake of starting with a drafting view within a project. Then I had to rebuild this as a modelling in place. Errors creep in.

A detail family could have been nested into a generic/window family. No need to repeat the setting out. Maybe I will try again tomorrow. Maybe I will tackle a different tracery pattern. Maybe I will nest the tracery into a wall hosted window family.

I continue to represent the "infill" family as 3 extrusions of different thickness. Glass, Ribs and an intermediate layer that elaborates the basic rib layout. It's a gross simplification but saves a lot of grief with geometry that refuses to form in Revit.

 

 

JANE IN THE WOODS

 

Eye-to-eye with Jane Austen this morning as I shop for fresh fruit and veggies in a rare break in the drizzle.

I got a half hour of walking in and got some very useful shopping in. Thai spring rolls, mixed pickles, (gulf style) a jar of garlic paste and Tunisian dates. Reminders of Dubai while revelling in English weather and environment. I miss my colleagues at Godwin Austen Johnson though 😍

Got my first hormone injection on the NHS this week. Took a while, but just in time to maintain continuity.

 

 

This is my local church again. All Saints, Basingstoke. I've been messing about with these street level lancet windows. Only partly parametric right now. The geometry of the top portion is tricky enough without that extra demand.

To get these bevels, the "cut" is replaced by a set of voids. There is an extrusion following the shape of the glass, locked to ref planes on the interior and exterior face of the wall.

I end up doing some drafting to set out the curved wall sweeps for the bevels, and there's a lot of trial and error, with the occasional "failed to create..." message. One trick I use is to start the path for a curve with a short vertical. That way the profile can be edited in a true plan view.

The glazing is a nested family and so far I only have the height under parametric control. All the curved geometry is locked to the springing point of the arches and moves up and down in lockstep.

Good enough for current purposes.

 

Following on from yesterday, I have revisited the clerestory windows and cleaned the geometry up a bit.

As usual it's an iterative process: building, reflecting, looking again and again, trying another approach, doing something else, coming back with fresh eyes.

There are probably a dozen different window types in this church, so plenty to keep me busy as I settle firmly into life in England. hashtag#dubai is often in my thoughts and my friends at Godwin Austen Johnson. An innovative practice in an innovative country. So proud to have spent over twenty years working there.

 

I'm working on variations to my walk through the park (I also have street walks) Today I was trying to stay in the shade which took me through to an unmowed patch that I later learned is the Butterfly Garden. It's a rather splendid display of wild flowers and long grass. I will definitely make this a regular diversion.

Just beyond that, is a small woodland area, just enough to give the feeling of being enveloped in a cool shady grove. Emerging from this I found myself on a familiar path heading past the map where I discovered the butterfly name.

All this seems to be native Hampshire species, but soon enough I came across a splendid conifer which I take to be part of the romantic planting scheme for Goldings Park when it was attached to a private house.

I'm looking forward to my first full year of exploratory walks, striding out from home, these snapshots becoming familiar places as they pass through the seasons.

 

 

FIRST PASS AT MY LOCAL

 

Captured as a site in Forma.  Loaded as a proposal into Revit.  This is Basingstoke town Gothic Revival (early and late)  The modern shopping mall shows up in lemon yellow (and grey). The file is far too heavy again. I’m not using this workflow often enough to figure that out. I think the upper layer of the toposolid is part of the problem, being broken up into individual plots.

The blue building, lower right is Goldings, with the War Memorial Park below extending into the bottom corner and beyond. The railway line and station are captured in the top left of the zoomed-out plan.  I may well build up most of this as a massing model with recognisable representations of individual buildings and terraced rows, but that will take a couple of years I suspect. Let’s see what happens.

For the moment I want to focus on the churches. Modelling the immediate sites in-place here, then transferring to Revit models which can be linked in to this file and to my overall Hamphire Churches map.

 

All Saints, Basingstoke. Add a (red) floor slab to the site file to represent the church plot, with a slope arrow to match the toposolid. Replace the footprint geometry with an in-place extrusion. Just a temporary placeholder. Select and group. Convert the group into a link. Open the link in Revit and start placing walls. As usual the measurements are all educated guesses. It will all be adjusted along the way. I have quite good photographs, inside and out, but that's about it. More to come.

 

The day when I started to get a handle on this church, the nearest proper church to where I live, about 10 minutes walk, max. Google Street View was the game changer. Not proper rectified photography, but a reasonable source for estimating height to width ratio.

The map comes from the Historic England entry. Lots of interesting buildings in the frame, but nothing older than myself that I wouldn't happily pull down. It's not that I hate all modern architecture, but everything below the top 20% is somewhere on the spectrum of disappointing to dire. I don't think that was true when we built in recognisable styles without embarrassment.

This church opened during the Great War. Paid for by a wealthy local clergyman and designed by Temple Moor. Why is the upper roof in plain clay tiles and the aisle roofs in blue slate? Was it an attempt to mimic an old church, built in stages? Or is it just to do with different roof slopes? No idea.

 

It’s all terribly rushed and broad brush, but first-pass massing is just about there, including the annexe/scout hall/whatever it is. Not much spare room on the site and the orientation is only approximately East-West, but the church does have a certain presence in the neighbourhood and clearly once supported a rapidly growing suburb to the South of Basingstoke. Let’s give it another week or so before moving on. It would be a travesty to leave it in this state.