SUNNY HAMPSHIRE

 

The healing power of the sun. Or not. I had a skin cancer removed about a month ago. No drama. Local anaesthetic. In and out. Nice doctor as usual, I have become very fond of the American Hospital Dubai. Definitely private health care has an upside.

What role did a couple of decades gardening in shorts every weekend in Zimbabwe play? Difficult to say. People are much more clued-in about sun-block these days. But old age surely plays a big role. My body feels increasingly like the 1963 Vauxhall that I kept on the roads in Zimbabwe for far too long, never knowing what part would give way next.

I should exercise more. This morning I did get up early enough to take a stroll around the block. Lots of mist and a pale watery sun. We get these kinds of morning in Dubai. Not so great for driving to work, but I like them, just as I like the rain. A break in the monotony of cloudless heat-haze.

You can still see ridges from the stitches, but the healing process is well advanced. They got it all, so that's two kinds of cancer I have under control. A little ray of sunshine to lift my spirits. Motivation for the ongoing transition to some kind of retirement phase in the twists and turns of my life.

 

 

The research on Hampshire Churches is getting a bit out of hand. There are so many. Who knew?

Like most of my "BIM pencil" studies, it just blunders along. Blindly in the dark at first, naive in it's expectations, but gathering momentum and competence as it trundle along. Google Earth, Google Maps, Wikipedia, a church near you. Small clusters of churches crammed into folders with provisional labels.

This week I stumbled on an arcgis map online with church locations and boundaries for benefice, deanery, archdeacon, diocese. Two sheets. Basingstoke is my epicentre, in theory, but then I extended down to the south coast. Of course it overlaps into Berkshire, a tiny bit of Surrey... The modern counties are not so relevant. This is deeper history reaching back to Saxon times at least.

The doomsday book comes to mind. That was an epic piece of research. No folders and subfolders. No laptops, Internet, cloud storage. Did they even have maps?

Anyway. I continue to scratch away at the surface. Still in the data gathering stage really, although I did start to model one of the Meon Bridge churches a couple of years ago.

Think of the Saxons coming up the rivers. Test, Itchen, Hamble, Meon. Setting up their little fiefdoms. Converting to Christianity. Building churches, plowing the land, naming fields and villages. Tangible history. The Way We Build.

 

 

September 2019. The world before covid, before cancer, at the height of Project Notre Dame. By chance, a weekend with all 3 of my children. Last minute opportunities. Grab them while you can.

I wanted to visit three Saxon churches, close to our Air BnB. Some resistance from those less obsessed with old buildings but I got my way and it was worth it.

This one is St Andrew, Meonstoke. I thought it was exceptional, but it turns out there are dozens of these old village churches with wooden bellcotes scattered across Hampshire.

So now, almost 5 years later, I find myself cataloguing them. And what then? I really don't know. Like the "Revit Map" I'm using to structure the data for my visual cortex to absorb and contemplate... The challenge involves setting the right level of abstraction. Like the tube map. Boil it down to essentials.

How many massing models? How many more detailed studies? How much time do I have?

Intuition is the only guide that can help me here.

 

A pencil is the archetypal thinking tool. It takes thoughts from your brain (words, shapes, connections) and abstracts them onto paper where they can be manipulated in powerful ways. Like having multiple desktops for your internal working memory. Shopping lists, back napkin sketches.

My "BIM pencil" is like that. Revit is the organiser. "Thoughts" come from diverse sources and acquire structure as I abstract them into intelligent objects. Diagrams upon diagrams.

I am building a map of Hampshire Churches. There is a great Arcgis-powered site for C+E churches. You can change backgrounds and toggle boundary visibility in the heirarchchy from Archdiocese down to Parish.

I use screen grabs as backgrounds in Revit working views. Green property boundaries are Deaneries. Floors are Benefices with colours that aid legibility. Churches are generic models with nested detail items : coloured circles. Mostly green now but will be coded laterfor period /style.

The dataset is vastly bigger than I anticipated, but the strategy is holding up well. Evolving of course. BIM is an iterative process if it is anything at all. An interactive journey of discovery. Lots of sources: Wikipedia, Google Earth, a-church-near-you, English Heritage. Today I rediscovered a Lambeth database of floor plans. Patchy but mindblowing.

 

Using schedules to organise, filter, query and ultimately structure my work process. The interaction between object, schedule and tag is fundamental. Always searching for visual clarity, explanatory power.

I have a working schedule that I filtered by "Mark begins with WW65" Then typed "Overton" into the "Group" field. It's a time-saver but also stepping stone to future developments. Comparative analysis sheets. Colour coding.

This Revit project is not a building. But just as the time spent modelling a building generates a wonderful mental map and familiarity. This exercise offers the promise of getting my head around a huge dataset.

Then comes the hope of weaving a story in space and time. Normans and Saxons, Tudors and Stuarts, brick and stone, farms and palaces.