ON THE SHELF

 

Facade development. The project was known as "plot 14" We actually did this one using Revit Server. All sorts of issues, but we pulled through somehow. Persuading management to fully commit to BIM360 as it then was took some time. It's easy enough to scoff as a BIM specialist, but there are people who have to keep the company cash flow going from month to month. Hard choices.

I am more suited to grappling with the nitty gritty issues of how something is built. How to translate the pure vision of the concept design team into a well-coordinated set of construction documents. The detailing, seen in real life is very impressive. Crisp and clean with just enough inflection and nuance to keep the flittering gaze interested.

I am a big believer in sketch sheets for internal use. Sometimes you can just take screenshots and drop them into Slack or MS teams. But sometimes you need to put four or five views together, carefully framed, juxtaposed and annotated to convey an issue well enough to focus minds on solutions.

 

Plan, Elevation, Section, Axo, Perspective, Schedule. All the view types have a role to play in directing attention to the day-to-day problems. As a day-to-day Revit user, I have to get to grips with what the problems really are. Solve what I can and convey the rest quickly and clearly to those discipline heads who spend much of their lives sitting in meetings, sending and receiving emails. Writing up minutes.

I've done my share of that stuff and I prefer the hands-on role. It takes a large team to design, build and operate a project like this one. A team that changes radically over time. Tools and process that enhance clear communication are vital.

Enter the BIM pencil.

 

I am going through my bookshelves in Dubai, sorting into one's I might realistically take to UK, and ones that I probably won't. Along the way I came upon these two "possibles" which were text books for courses I took during my first Architecture degree 1969-72 at UCL.

They have some sentimental value, and it might be interesting to review the content to reassess the value of the material for my later career in Zimbabwe and Dubai. But they are a bit bulky and probably of little practical use to me as I transition to some kind of retirement mode. Perhaps I will scan selected pages.

 

The interesting thing is that I attended very few of the lectures at the time, and like many of the students regarded the courses as unnecessarily dull. But within a year or so of finishing my degree, when I had abandoned architecture and plunged myself into working with my hands on building sites, the subject matter started to become much more interesting and I realised that I had absorbed enough to pursue it further through private study.

When we are young (under 30?) we tend to classify things rather crudely into "good" and "bad". I know it's fashionable to offer political power to ever younger age groups, and to prolong the years of formal education. In my case it took several years of working for a living and mixing with people from very different backgrounds to knock some sense into my head.

Bottom line: I'm definitely a fan of apprentice type systems, be it for building trades or professions.

 

Letting go of books is a strange thing. Sometimes you get this feeling that a book really opened your eyes, but can't remember the details at all well. The temptation has been to hang on to these and come back later to read them again. Or perhaps to take notes and distil the main points in no my own words.

But ten years and more passes. I'm faced with "to ship or not to ship"... I seriously doubt that rereading some of these books will ever come back to the top of my to do list. So was it all a waste of effort? Maybe, but perhaps the ideas I grapple with on first reading have become fused into my subconscious and become subtle alterings of my world view. Even if I can't trot out a coherent precis of the main argument, the shadow of it may drift across my future musings.

I have to be brutal. The limits of space and time in my pending retirement dictate this. Condense your memories down. Free the mind. Aim for a simple healthy life. Don't dwell on tasks not completed.

 

 

I have tried to develop my own views on genetic and cultural evolution. Richard Dawkins' grand tale inspired by Chaucer. He rubs some people up the wrong way, but this is not that kind of book. It's a clever way of conveying the grand sweep of time, reaching Bach from Humans to the earliest and simplest life forms. I love it.

'Your Inner Fish' was a chance find, bought in New York, 15 years ago. Strangely enough it helped to inspire on of my entries to the Parametric Pumpkin competition, many years ago. Metamorphosis (in a word) and very well written. 'Catching Fire' was another random find, in Dubai. More recently I have heard Richard Wrangham speak (on YouTube) and his later ideas about human self-domestication.

The fourth book is one of those I find difficult to recall in sharp detail. But the topic of how human brains and human culture co-evolved over the past several hundred thousand years is endlessly fascinating.

All four of these books appealed to me as I was extrapolating back from Renaissance to Gothic to Greek and Roman architecture, then beyond. Studying "The Way We Build" across time and space is an obsession of mine. It's a way of penetrating the human story and it has taken me into wider reading of ancient history, archaeology, and evolution. So I record the covers of these books as part of the process of distilling down to the few that I really want to take back to UK.

Ultimately what matters are my own inner thought structures and how they emerge and crystalise into commentary as I visit, sketch, model, photograph in this never ending quest.

It's the journey.