VIVE LA DIFFERENCE

This compilation of recent LinkedIn posts spans 4 different countries and 30 years of my life. So let’s celebrate diversity “of experience”

 

These drawings date back 30 years to the beginnings of my career as a fully qualified architect, having taken a detour of 15 years or so to try my hand at the manual trades (especially bricklaying) and teaching / Curriculum Development.

The site was on the crest of a hill just outside Harare, with the most stupendous view. My boss, Mike Clinton would draw enigmatic concept sketches on little squares of paper the size of sticky notes and leave it to us to make them work.

I attended site meetings while the concrete frame went up, but not much beyond that. Hopefully it turned out OK. As with many such projects the budget was cut back quite dramatically after construction has already begun. I guess it was a bit of a baptism of fire for me.

Who knows how my career would have developed if Zimbabwe hadn't gone into meltdown. It was fun handling the architectural portion of projects almost on my own. But it has also been illuminating to play a role in much bigger architectural teams here in Dubai, and to observe the transition from CAD to BIM.

 

These are concept sketches for the project I shared yesterday. Zimbabwe in the early 90s, still full of promise and optimism.

I was using Autocad by then, conventional 2d views, plus a skeletal 3d massing model. I could use this to choose a viewpoint, then print it out on A3 and sketch over, using my experience of setting out perspectives by hand to fill in the detail.

It's interesting that the hand drawn perspective still has a place in the design process whereas 2d CAD is rapidly becoming obsolete as BIM workflows become more and more essential to production drawings/information sets.

 

Parisienne Doorways 🤔

I love collecting pictures of doors from different times and places. There seem to be endless ways to re-imagine this archetypal object with its multiple overlapping functions and meanings.

Come in, stay out, take a peek, stay warm, advertise your wealth. Collection one is a random set of big old doors in Paris. Master craftsmen in wood and stone joining forces to create these wonderful expressions of doorness.

Of course they are also expressions of the class structure of a bygone age and we can't just "go back" to an imagined era of beauty. My hope is that we can go forward to a time when craft skills are valued at least as highly as "college degrees"

Collection two shows details of the "french doors" to the room I slept in. I love the nested curves of the meeting styles. How to represent this "Level of Detail" in Revit? Could we have a family fit for 1:50 scale that hyperlinks to a model targeted at the woodworking shop? Would the coarser scale model automatically update as the specialist trades refined the design?

It's a pipe dream perhaps, but these are important issues for the seamless workings of the BIM promise. Or so it seems to me.

 

 

Nine months ago, and how life has changed. This was just a few days before I was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Like all bad news, this has turned out to have a silver lining. The cancer is under control, I have started to work out how to transition my life into some kind of retirement phase where I see more of my family and friends around the world.

I recently shared images of the "seedy side" of Dubai. Nothing sinister, just the slightly shabby dormitory suburb where I live with thousands of others from around the world who have seized the opportunities that the UAE has to offer. Let's be honest, I belong to the global elite (just about) But I have tried to retain a connection to working class roots and have often lived in mixed and messy neighbourhoods. 

 

 

But it's good to balance that picture with these idyllic images of the Dubai tourist experience. This is what helps to make my lifestyle possible. You can scoff if you want, but Dubai has been good to me and I embrace it's complex, multi-faceted nature.

At some point I will move on, and leave this flawed paradise behind, but oh what memories!

 

When did Lake McIlwaine become Lake Chivero? I don't quite remember but it was somewhere around the time when I was thrust into this fanciful scheme for a 'lost world' resort on the fringes of that man-made water body, a short drive from Harare.

I was in over my head, for sure with a matter of days to produce an A3 brochure. The font settings are all wrong, but the titles and subtitles were placed above the section for manual cut and paste. Body text may well have come from an electric typewriter.

Once again I created bare-bones 3d volumes to trace over, giving a false impression of a worked out scheme. Smoke and mirrors was all that was needed at such an early stage to entice a board of directors into exploring the idea further.

They didn't. But for me, (trying to catch up with an architecture career that I had set aside for almost two decades...) it was a learning experience, a chance to blend hand-sketching skills with photo montage techniques I had picked up at University and with my new-found enthusiasm for computers.

 

 

Exiting through St Pancras after my trip to Paris, these are snapshots of the walk from Eurostar to Underground. I just think the splicing of modernity into a Victorian context has been handled splendidly.

The original programme came in 3 parts:

• Trainshed
• Hotel
• Beer Cellar

The economics of the Midland Line was based on a mix of passenger transport and beer supply to London's vast market from breweries further north.

The hotel has been restored after a period like dereliction. Barlow's train shed is now magnificent in pale blue against Scott's red brick Gothic. AND...

The beer cellars were opened up magnificently, to create a double-storey concourse with shopping mall, ticket sales, passport control etc, all benefitting from the soaring arches above.

I could go on, but for now just note how well the new steel lintels and stone bearing blocks blend in with Scott's Gothic, while retaining a modern sensibility.

I was in a rush to catch a train at Waterloo, but one day perhaps I will study this subterranean world of old-meets-new in more detail.