RUSTICATING

There are several areas of the Bank of England where the bottom story is treated as a rusticated base.  So far I have been “cheating these by adding a thin extrusion created by drawing out the pattern of stone blocks.  It’s all a bit tedious but that was the choice I made.  In practice these kinds of treatments often have splayed joints which emphasise the solidity.  I decided to experiment with a different approach.

 

 

Text from a LinkedIn post I created at the time ( a couple of weeks ago)

My day today. Working on the rusticated ground floor of Sampson's Bank. Three different wall hosted families, moderately complex, with nested face-based void sweeps to get that chamfered stone block look. Dipping into my classical columns library also. A bit of attention to detail needed to get consistent alignments when turning those little corners. Classical details can be quite demanding, but also rewarding. Learnt a lot.

 

 

So far I have three different families using this approach.  None of them are really quite finished.  They tend to have a mix of the two approaches, with projecting string courses and keystones treated as veneers.  I will need to redo the families on the courtyard side also, and to sort out wrapping at all the reveals.  You can see the difference between the two approaches in the next image.

 

 

The face-based family itself has an instance length parameter and a sketch-based profile for the void sweep that does all the work.  Some day I may upgrade this to a loaded profile to allow for different joint styles.  I’m happy to have made some progress in representing this kind of masonry wall in Revit, but there’s a lot more to be done to really crack the case I think.

 

 

I added wooden doors for the three openings.  The side doors for pedestrians are straightforward enough, but the central archway needs to handle carriages so the door leaves have curved heads.  Given that these are thick walls and I have used groin vaults for all these external passages, based on buildings I know in London and thinking of security.  So when I decided to show the door leaves in an open position it became obvious that there was an issue with them snagging on the internal vaults. 

I have recessed the inner arch and pushed the vaults up higher.  Let’s try to face up to these practical issues if we can.  There are fireplaces and chimney stacks to develop further, internal paneling for the transfer offices on the upper floor.  Looks like the attic floor needs to be raised where it clashes with the central half-round window.

 

 

Lots of little details to add / resolve but I think it’s time to move on to something else and come back fresh to Sampson’s bank in the next round of updates.  I’m thinking it’s time to tackle some of Taylor’s work.  Probably start with his screen walls which I have never looked at very closely.