INTERNATIONAL STYLE CITY

 

More Revit - fueled analysis of International city where I live. Using the map I started a few weekends back to organise my research efforts. Some walking around, but mostly Street View.

As it turns out, the three clusters closest to me have the same basic structure with 5 different building types. One gets 8 repeats and the others four each. Heights are 3, 4 & 5 storeys, highest in the middle of each cluster.

I had a vague idea of this based on living here for 16 years, but it's quite satisfying to reverse engineer it all with my BIM pencil.

 

 

I aim to integrate my work into the embodied learning experience which is life. Sitting on my balcony should connect me to the world, geographically, artistically, historically, socially.

The grouping of "countries" at International City is a little strange, but no more so than the facade styles. This is not high architecture, but it's where I live and I've always been suspicious of architectural snobbery. Part of the reason for abandoning the profession for fifteen years in my twenties and thirties.

This analysis is a work in progress, but I want to express my own gut feelings for these designs, some of which work much better than others. Many architects would just dismiss the whole miserable lot as shoddily built pastiche.

But this is home to 50 thousand souls plus me. So why not ponder how it might have been improved, without changing the concept or spending more money, just basic design skills.

5 countries/styles x 5 plan layouts x front & back views. Street view snapshots organised on a Revit sheet based on the understanding gained from the massing model.

 

 

Almost ten years ago I was trying to persuade the partners that BIM was the future. We had a short series of weekly sessions where they experienced the basics of Revit in a hands-on way.

I chose Villa Savoye as a building they would enjoy architecturally, that was fairly small, and contained such Revit elements as ramps, railings and curtain walls.

For me it was a great experience but it didn't break through as fully as I had hoped. There remains to this day a "class divide" between concept designers who love the CAD /Sketchup combo, and production teams who are expected to "BIM it up"

All the same I love this old model which I will be dusting off for some revived training sessions with more junior staff.

 

 

The first two pages of a concept design booklet for Villa Savoye. It uses a GAJ title block because I was using this Revit model for training sessions in the company. (long, long ago)

Everything here is native Revit except for one small jpeg of the site taken from Google Earth.

I have always thought that the Desktop Publishing capabilities of Revit are underplayed and underdeveloped. I understand why the concept design team use a sophisticated DTP package with the ability to track right and left hand pages, vary text spacing, apply background images or gradient fills to a page...

But for some projects concept brochures would be more efficiently delivered direct from Revit, with the ability to update almost instantly with design changes, if only some of these DTP capabilities had been incrementally added over the last ten years.

I get it. The factory conceded the "concept design space" long ago and accepted the industry conclusion that Revit is "documentation software" with a strong presence in the BIM world, with its bureaucratic management bias.

But it's a terrible shame that concept designers and delivery teams continue to live in different worlds, with some brave exceptions.

The seamless flow from client briefing to handover and facilities management remains elusive, despite the hype.

So it seems to me.