NEW YEAR TWEAKS

 

Energised by a very special family gathering over Xmas and New Year, here are some of the tiny changes in my daily life since returning to Dubai, less than a week ago.

Put a pinch of salt in your cup of coffee to shade out the bitterness. Buy two new grey coffee mugs to counterbalance my proclivity for dropping things. Buy super glue to attempt a repair. Buy little plastic picture hooks to hang the calendar I got for Xmas, right next to my desk. (reminiscent of the woodcuts my father did when he was young)

Lost in the middle is a reminder of the Sukkery Dates I found. Distinctive taste at a very reasonable price.

Picture two illustrates a radical upgrade of my vision technology. The Melson Wingate glasses were bought in Sheffield, 45 years ago, when I was (belatedly) learning to drive. Cheap National Health frames. They didn't get much use until recently when I found that they worked well as computer glasses. Unfortunately they tend to slip off, and I had repurposed a covid mask as a device to keep them on. (probably the best use that mask was ever put to in my opinion) They now have little rubber hooks on the end. Much better 🙂

For longer distances I need stronger lenses now. I had some variable focus ones made about two years ago. Never got used to the disorienting fishbowl effect. Finally towards the end of my holiday one of the hinges broke. So I have much cheaper lenses and frame from the same local shop in International City. Fixed focus this time which is much better, but I need to slip them off when I use my phone.

Hence the chain.

These are the little bits of technology and culture that we adapt to our individual needs. It's not a competition or a race. Embrace the small enhancements when you stumble across them and exhult in every moment of this wonderful experience we call daily life.

 

 

Why do I do these kinds of pictures?

Windows are a fascinating phenomenon. I have been searching for a comprehensive and consistent approach to window families in Revit for more than 15 years now. With some success, but there are so many variables.

We have been devising ways to let light and air into our buildings for thousands of years. Sometimes this amounts to little more than gaps in the fabric. The archetypal round mud hut typically has a halo of light at eaves level. The eye adapts and this becomes sufficient for daily activities to proceed.

But back to my drawing. The source is Volterra in Tuscany. There is an ancient arched opening that has been bricked in to create a smaller "modern" window, with shutters. It is off centre, presumably for pragmatic reasons. But this pragmatism becomes picturesque, in a town that bears the mark of more than a hundred generations. Physical traces of change in the daily life of people as the years go by.

So I can make a Revit family and I can make a fanciful collage... It amounts to the same thing. Grappling with a human artifact that is vastly bigger than me in its history, its scope and emotional baggage. Never mind the panoply of technologies behind it.

Drawing is about understanding and there are many ways to draw a cat. (or skin a window 🤔)

 

 

Two quite unrelated images except that they both represent digital adaptations of my lifelong love of "drawing" in its widest sense. There is no sharp distinction between drawing, modelling and design. The etymology of the words in various languages bears testimony.

One image of a dog I spent some time with recently. In this kind of sketching activity I focus on marking quick instinctive decisions, being selective, messing with the colour scheme, aiming for some kind of emotional truth.

I used SketchBook Pro and Pixlr, two softwares that passed through Autodesk's hands in the days when they embraced the "cloud - mobile - social" mantra. I have them installed on both Samsung Note and IPad, but for various reasons the phone wins out in practice. That's the device I have to hand always. It's where I can sketch on the spur of the moment, when the spirit moves me.

 

The city model is Luzern /Lucerne modelled in Revit after a visit on the way back from Denmark. It's a wonderful city and I also did an acrylic painting that hangs on my wall. Revit was never intended for city modelling, but it's my "BIM pencil" so I use it to reflect on places that catch my imagination.

The sketching approach may strike some as odd, but I find value in "quick and dirty" Revit models. Not for commercial work, but for my own private studies. I do think it's unfortunate that BIM has become such a specialist domain, identified with technicians, coding, ROI etc.

Nothing wrong with those approaches, but I do wish there were equal numbers of intuitive artists, abstract visual thinkers and creative generalists using BIM tools. It's all about balance. Do we have balance in our increasingly polarised world?

Let's say it's a worry.