BIG TENT

 One of the challenges that was thrown my way during the pandemic. How to represent these tent structures using Revit.

It's great to see the final product getting some coverage now. Looks like an amazing location if you want an exclusive desert experience.

Hats off to the French design team, and to our Revit guys who put together the construction package. Seems like the contractors did a pretty good job also.

Never a dull moment at GAJ.




Further to my previous post. Here are some screenshots from my fumbling attempts to interpret the third hand instructions I received.

Thanks for the comments from Gavin Crump and others suggesting clever ways of doing tension structures in Revit. Unfortunately I don't have access to Rhino and never got fluent with Dynamo. Vanilla Revit is my hammer, and everything looks like a nail to me 😁

The tent poles are fairly straightforward Revit families. Then connecting between these are Adaptive components with variable curves. Instance parameters.

Inevitably on these projects there are multiple cooks stirring the pot, false starts and late changes. But we got there in the end and by all accounts it's a stunning resort.

There were some decorative screens and mud brick walls that I was asked to help with also. Just to keep me on my toes.





Rusticated, Reticulated, vermiculated. Various overlapping terms. Commonly used on the lower stories of classical buildings to anchor them to the ground (metaphorically)

A few images from my ARChive folder (a label I came up with many years ago for my private digital database of architectural history)

How to represent this kind of treatment in Revit? I had a go some years ago while working on Project Soane, but it was a bit of a cheat, just a surface veneer, and very labour intensive.

Why is it so effective? Rough hewn stone blocks evoke a feeling of extra weight at a subconscious level perhaps. This seems to carry through, even when the treatment is abstracted into a more abstract pattern, carved out with great care.

A Web search for "Reticulated Masonry" yielded a variety of images. All useful references in their different ways.

I recently read a book about the evolutionary psychology of comedy which used the acronym JITSA (just in time spreading activation) to describe how our brains work.

This seems to capture the way that all these images relate to the search term. But on a more literal level it also serves as a description of the white on black network that could be veins on a leaf, or perhaps streets and alleyways in some old town.

Memory is not a series of boxes in an ordered array. I think it's more like JITSA. Flickering webs of connections. Nothing makes sense on its own. Concepts arise as dense webs of interconnection, constantly on the move.




Went up the Burj Khalifa today with my grandsons. View from the top looking down at Dubai Fountain. Makes me realise I should get out of my apartment more often 🤣🤣🤣