PHASE TWO COMPLETE? WHAT NEXT?

 

Preston Candover, St Mary the Virgin. Got to love the names of these old Hampshire Villages. This is Sir Arthur Blomfield  of course, still working my way through the ten churches attributed to him in my study area. (nine original designs plus one restoration project)  Here the tower is on the North-West corner and doubles up as an entrance porch, using a little lean-to passage-way to lead the faithful through to an archway on-axis.

Quite a nice spatial sequence to prepare the mind and body for worship. Also makes for a satisfying external massing with the tower breaking symmetry when viewed from any angle. Once again I was lucky enough to find a floor plan in the Lambeth Online Archive. I’m starting to think about making these models (Revit families) read nicely in a horizontal section view. Not too much detail, but enough to set up assembly views for summary sheets as I move towards rounding out the Blomfield phase of my study.

 

I must admit I’m very fond of the worm’s eye view that has often been used as a way of combing plan and 3d massing in a single image. There’s a bit of cheating here. A section box doesn’t behave in the normal way withing Family Editor so resorted to painting the bottom surfaces with “Poche” material. This view also reveals the shortcomings of my simplified approach to representing windows. Although from the outside they appear to be transparent to the interior, from the inside they don’t show up at all.  At what point do I give up on this simplified massing families approach?

 

 

The church of St Mary, Fratton is by far the biggest structure in this group of ten Blomfield churches. The change in scale also leads him away from his customary Early English style (for village churches) and into the realm of the Perpendicular with its much larger windows and elaborate stone tracery. The size here was a deliberate attempt to outdo the catholics who had built a cathedral church close by in red-brick gothic just a few years earlier.

I have created a GIF to give an idea of the iterative nature of this work. Adding the vestry and other ancillary spaces around the East end during a third pass development of this model.

 

 

So I now have two groups of church models within this study.  The first set is mostly churches that I have visited and photographed. They need another round of editing to bring them up to the standard I have been achieving recently, but it’s quite and interesting and diverse collection in terms of age, style and materials. Eighteen churches in this group. Perhaps I should tackle another two to complete the grid.

 

The second group consists of my most recent studies of the work of Sir Arthur William Blomfield, an architect that had not previously caught my eye.  He just happens to be the designer whose name crops up most frequently within the whole study group.  It’s been a really rewarding exercise to do a deep dive into these nine churches. Deeper insights into the world of Victorian Gothic Revival and a chance to refine my approach to quickly modelling the basic massing of a building using the Generic Model family template.

Twenty seven churches now roughed out in this manner.  It feels like quite a good moment to pause and reflect. Maybe a bit of clean-up first, but then what is next on the agenda for this study?  Do I take another named architect?  Are there churches that I have visited but not modeled?  Or should I open up a new aspect of the work?

 

SEQUENCE UPGRADE

This is from a few days ago. Adding another layer of detail to this Gosport church (St John the Evangelist, Forton). It’s difficult to see the side elevations clearly in modern photographs, but there is a historic image available online. Windows of the aisles and clerestory are contained within recesses in the face-brick.

 

Now I’m using face-based families within a master family representing the whole church. Turns out that if you add the windows first, they lose their ability to cut the host once the recess is added. So the recesses come first, creating a new face which can now host the windows. Just as in real construction, the order of events is critical.  GSR (get the sequence right)

 

Also available online is a floor plan of the church, created when the new chancel etc was added to the east. This has been very helpful in adjusting the size and proportions of the various elements and gaining some insight into the design logic. It looks like Blomfield used a different bay spacing for the aisles outer wall and the clerestory windows. I’ve seen this on a couple different projects now. My guess is that it’s based on the structural timber supporting the respective roofs.

 

 

I’ve been having problems posting images to LinkedIn from my phone. I tried to post about this Revit upgrade at the time but it aborted and I was already in bed. Anyway GAJ head office has transitioned from 2024 to 2026. I’m not currently working on any commercial projects but I remain available to the office if required and I would like to stay in touch with Dubai after I move to UK. So makes sense to be on the same version.

Fortunately my Way We Build work is all in the ACC cloud so upgrade is a breeze. Initiate, leave it to do it’s thing, come back a couple of hours later and dozens of Revit files have been upgraded with all the links intact. Just to think how many hours I spent on upgrades from 2005 up to 2019 when we pretty much gave up on working over the local network. 

 

 

 

SECOND PASS MARY

 

Persistence pays off. Proud to have been associated with these guys. Wish I had the energy to contribute more.  First came Covid, then hitting 70 and meeting Mr Cancer. But it is what it is. Volterra was a wonderful experience and the ongoing connection with some great people. I may have slowed down a bit, but still doing my thing.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/touf-hassoun-88370114/

 

Second pass modelling of St Mary, Liss and St Mary Fratton this morning. Maybe that should be third pass. It usually takes me three goes to muster the stamina to see these massing models through to a reasonable standard. Better to come back with a fresh eye than just blunder on. Ten years ago I could have managed the blundering, but these days I need to work in short bursts. Probably a good thing on balance.

 

I now have 9 our of 10 Blomfield churches in fairly good shape, representing a fairly diverse sample of his Gothic Revival work and an interesting survey of different arrangements of the required volumes for a church layout. (Nave, Chancel, Tower, Vestry, Entrance Porch etc) By the way, the small bell turret at the junction of Nave and Chancel on St Mary Liss is there because the large,squat bell tower is a later addition, as mentioned yesterday. Always nice to figure out a reason of these oddities of a design.

 

St Mary Fratton is by far the biggest in this group. Fratton is a suburb of Portsmouth, and he was consciously competing with the catholic cathedral of 1882 which dwarfs the much earlier Anglican Cathedral. I am not modelling catholic churches in this exercise, not for any prejudice against that religion and its architecture in England, but just out of need to limit the size of my selection set which is already much larger than I had anticipated. Of course many of the older churches were Catholic when first built and switched to Church of England during the Reformation when Henry VIII implemented his own take on the movement started by Luther, Calvin et al.

 

SEVEN UP - ST MARY LISS

 

Four Blomfield churches grouped around Petersfield. St Peter’s on Froxfield Green is the smallest, a Tee-Shaped form with Nave and Chancel under a single roof, with entrance porch and Vestry either side of the West end. A cute little, sharply pointed Bell turret completes the composition.  Funded by William Nicholson a London Gin Distiller

 

  

I have extended the grid of model lines to keep the Blomfield churches in good order, with model text labels to jog my memory. With some 400 churches in my study area, there’s no way I will be able to keep them all in my head.  So those four churches in the middle of my study area have been added to the two in the top-left corner near Hungerford, and the one in Gosport on the South coast.

 

Holy Trinity Privett is at the other end of the scale. Oversized for its community it’s now “redundant” but in good condition. Also funded by Nicholson, balancing the celestial books perhaps. Probably an element of showing off also, having bought the nearby Basing Park, a decent sized country estate. Apart from inheriting the Gin business, he was a gentleman cricketer, President and benefactor of the MCC and a Member of Parliament for Petersfield.

 

I’m using face-based “recess” families to represent windows and doors, then painting on a material parameter for glass, wood, louvres etc.  Variable depth so I can push right through the extrusion that represents a wall within the master family. (a church)  It’s a quick and lightweight approach to producing a basic massing model of a series of churches for comparison purposes.

 

Church number seven is St Mary Liss. The Nave and chancel are by Blomfield, but the tower was added later by and interesting architect of the early 20^th century.  Working in the style that is sometimes called the New Tradition, (think Lutyens or the younger Scott who did the power stations in London and the red phone box)  Edward Maufe also designed St John the Evangelist in Hook, which I visited in August 2024.  There’s a blog post here.  https://grevity.blogspot.com/2024/08/church-house-school.html