FAILURE TO LAUNCH

 This was written on 28^th December.

I’m out of time. The competition has awakened some latent energy, but the hazy goal of exploring the massing of several dozen church buildings is still a ways off, and “Day-Job” beckons. It’s fine.

Before fee-earning work swallowed me up, I managed to add most of the religious buildings that I have modelled over the past decade or so. Some of them are full-on Revit projects, others are massing studies in RFA format.  They include three London churches by John Soane, offshoots of the Project Soane competition that meant so much to me 5 or 6 years ago.

 

There are half a dozen detailed Revit models in my collection. None of them are completely finished, but they are all serious explorations. The larger group of more abstract, simplified families is more varied in approach and dates from at least 3 different periods, including this most recent spurt of activity. They are crystallised essences of church-ness. It’s that collection of abstractions that I intend to expand in the first half of 2022.

 

 

In my second submission for Zach Kron’s Parametric Pumpkin competition I assembled a collection of fruit and vegetables. These are families, in the biology sense: organisms that are related in a structured way. I looked at degrees of separation from pumpkins. They were ready-made sets of related challenges: form-making exercises that honed my skills at the same time as pulling me into am exploration of BIM as a medium for artistic expression.  I don’t mean the second-hand connection to aesthetics that comes with working on architectural project.  I was reflecting on the intrinsic expressive qualities of BIM as a medium, as compared to say watercolours, or wood-engraving.

Another way of framing this is to appeal to intuitive, subconscious modes of thought.  Iain McGilchrist makes a compelling case that the modern world has become captured by the left hemisphere with its blinkered, linear, rational logic: over-confident and inflexible. During the pumpkin work of late 2012 I was constantly operating on two different levels. My Left brain was busy making a convincing banana, sharply focused on the task at hand. Meanwhile my right brain remained alert to the bigger picture. How can we assemble this emerging collection into a face?  How will it all come together?  When will I have enough different species to switch into picture-assembling mode?

This is the essence of design. Furious activity. Architects work all night to meet deadlines, often self-imposed. But they must be willing to abandon concepts that have absorbed crazy amounts of energy at the flick of a switch. A light bulb moment that says “wait!” we’ve been looking at this the wrong way.

Could be root and branch, could be a subtle makeover. There are many layers of abstraction to the game of life that animals play. Snowflakes are fractal, patterns within patterns. You can see that as a visual image. You can see it as a metaphor. You can use it as an intuition pump, to extract creative energy from the labyrinthine tunnels of the Subconscious. You can use both hemispheres of your mammalian brain to flicker up and down the layers of structure that define your potential for action.

This is the intuitive, hands-on approach of the “artist”.  We need more of that in the BIM world.