TRACING ST LAURENCE

 

It’s time to look at tracery.  Let’s start with another drafting view and a real-life example from Blomfield’s churches.  It’s still a massing model so I don’t want to get too deep into the weeds. St Laurence, West Woodhay, up there close to Hungerford in the NW corner of my study area. It’s a very cute little village church, flint with Bath stone dressings. Typically for Blomfield most of the windows are Early English style lancets with no tracery.  So faithful to the spirit of Gothic and realistically cost effective for a small Victorian church.  Britannia was a wealthy society, but villages didn’t have unlimited budgets. My sketch aims to capture the principles but not necessarily the proportions. It's easy enough to stretch the sill down. I may well be using this basic configuration several times on different churches beyond the world of Arthur Blomfield.

 

St Mary, Sheet is almost identical to West Woodhay in it’s overall massing. The spire is different and the tracery more elaborate. Possibly the budget was more generous. It’s even more obvious that this one is not going to be parametric. Once again you can drop the sill easily enough, but probably be opening up in Family Editor rather than trying to get the tracery geometry to respond predictably to the Height parameter. Let’s keep things simple here. I’m perfectly happy to take a copy of a nested family and adapt it “by hand” to suite another context if that is less effort than making it super parametric so that it adapts to every possible use case simply be typing into the Properties dialogue. It comes down to a judgement call, which is not too hard to make when the geometry reaches this level of complexity.

 

Trying out tracery on an actual church model. All the windows are face-based families. I brought a couple of reference images into plan view for guidance. It may seem perverse to model the tracery as a very short sweep. Basically it’s a way of freezing the shape so it doesn’t distort when the width and height parameters change. Unlike extrusions.

The different sizes of windows, doors and louvred are all types of the same family. Only one type needs tracery. That’s why one fixed size of tracery geometry will do the job. All we need is a visibility parameter to hide it in all the other types.

Reload into the host family. Orbit around the model selecting the types one by one and switching off the tracery. You can see from this view of the East end that the sweep geometry is stable.

 

Inevitably when reloading the family into the project, I start to notice minor issues with proportions, roof slope etc. So there are several other enhancements here. In fact there is another window in the centre of the West End that has tracery. I chose to have two sweeps in the model with slightly different profiles to suit the dimensions of the family type. Both have visibility controls, so they are switched of selectively for the various types. 

This church now has a higher level of detail than I originally imagined, much more than most of the other models in my study. Will I go back and lift the level of all the others? I don’t know, let’s take it one step at a time, and trust my instincts. This is supposed to be a fun project for my retirement from Godwin Austen Johnson. Real buildings with a deep sense of history all within striking distance of the retirement flat which will be my primary residence from April 2026.

 

POINTY VARIANTS

 

I started to look at the original group of church models (not by Blomfield) and saw several that needed another pass.  These two are in the top left corner of the group, a conventional place to start for the Western mind.  I added timber detail to both bell chambers and the one porch.  Fascination how a light touch here and there can bring the character of a model to life. These are both ancient churches, that is to say several hundred years old, with features dating to various times within that lifespan.

Quite probably they both began as single cell structures with no bell chamber, porch or chancel extensions. Saxon or Norman in style. That was my assumption. On checking I find that St Peter, Linkenholt was rebuilt in Victorian times. But with some Norman features reused.  St Mary Mapledurwell is a restoration rather than a rebuild, with features dating back to the 13^th and 15^th centuries.

 

Switch of focus. It’s time to revisit my Gothic arches. I happen to be using face-based families at present but the same principles can be applied to wall-hosted versions. Perhaps I could even nest the face-based families into wall-hosted templates? Might take a performance hit though.

Here is the basic pointed arch with a POINTYness parameter to… make it more or less pointy.

 

Next comes an intermediate shape.  Pointed arch that doesn’t blend into the vertical jambs but meets them at a sharp angle.  This is not very common, but as it happens is used in the church closes to my retirement flat. All Saints, by Temple More, a Victorian church that I haven’t yet started to model.

I added a “Drop” parameter here and used Pythagoras to derive the Radius of the curve. I decided to hide the Drop parameter from the end user to keep things simple. No doubt you can find flatter and pointy-er versions of this type if you look hard enough but for the LOD100 work I am engaged in at present, I think a fixed proportion is less trouble. Just vary the Height and Width and forget about POINTYness.

 

So that was an intermediate step towards the tudor arch, common in Perpendicular Gothic the late style in England before the advent of Renaissance styles from Italy. Here the geometry is much trickier with two radii and two centre points. Once again I have chosen to freeze the proportions of the arch to minimise the chances of the family breaking. 

The hypothetical meeting point of the primary radius and the vertical jamb is derived from a 45 degree triangle keeping the formula simple. Then we need two offsets to locate the centre of the small radius. (H2 and R2)  H2 is dependent on R2, so we only have to set R2 and in practice I will freeze this as a quarter of the width.

 

These are drafting views that I used to develop my strategy. The setting out and the formulae have been transferred to face-based window/recess families and flexed. They seem to work well enough but there will probably be further evolution when I apply them to real churches.

 

 

 

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.

Needless to say this view would be quite a bit less responsive if the individual churches were full Revit project rather than RFA files. One of the reasons for my choice. 

 

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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?