FROM MENDELSOHN TO BORROMINI

De La Warr pavilion.

Fleshing out the East Wing. Restaurant, Bar, Kitchen, Toilets, storerooms, terraces.  Stairs at the end of the long thin wing.  In the process I dug out more old library files, mostly furniture.

 

Over the past 15 years of using Revit, my strategy for maintaining a content library has evolved. Early on I was collecting anything and everything I could find. I soon decided to organise them in "collections"... Revit projects with a whole bunch of families organised by similarity.

Within these project files I could agonise about naming conventions, set up plan, front and side elevations... Do some basic quality control.

 

At some point it became clear to me that simple generic geometry was the way to go. Add layers of information as it becomes available and organise using schedules. It depends on the project type and the remit of your company, but for us this made sense.

So I created a new set of generic collections and gradually sidelined the other more cumbersome and complex collections as the new, simpler, more consistent library files developed. It's those older collections that I am now reviewing, upgrading and filtering for content that may be usable for historical studies.

 

I've been sorting through twenty years worth of digital backups, filtering out the good from the bad and gradually putting the good stuff into places where I can find it. It's not that my filing system is disorganised, but over that length of time there are bound to be periodic bottlenecks in the months preceding a laptop upgrade.

This video is five years old, but the model dates back much further. The Chapel of Sant'Ivo alla Sapienza, by Francesco Borromini is at one end of the long courtyard. He was always one of my favourites as a young man who reveled in complexity. Here it's the geometry of the floor plan and the dome that intrigues, based on intersecting triangles and circles.

Of course it would take months for one person to attempt a detailed treatment of this gem in Revit, so my version is highly simplified and abstracted. But that has always fascinated me. How to convey the essence of a complex and subtle form with simple means? The primary goal, as usual was to engage in a hands-on, immersive learning process and emerge a little wiser as a result.

 

BEXHILL FITOUT

I'm working on the two main stairs at Bexhill. Both sit inside bold glass cylinders that mark entrance positions, a typical Mendelsohn device. On the street side the glass is faceted, reserving the expense of larger, curved panes to tbe sea - facing version.

This faceted curtain wall is cantilevered out over the pavement. Where it meets the slim concrete canopy there is a shadow-gap detail in steel, emphasising the effect of lightness. A transparent prism hovering in space. I have used an in-place modeled sweep for this element in the Revit model.

 

It's not always easy to remember the location of photos taken a decade ago. There is a small landing at ground level. Three steps up, then three steps back down to a fire exit. I had this rift at first, then changed it. All part of the learning process.

It's neither possible, nor desirable to think everything out before modelling. This is my BIM pencil, an extension of my hand and brain. The thinking takes place beyond my body in the extended phenotype of laptop and software. I love this work.

Quite magical. "It's the process, cupid"

 

 De La Warr auditorium seating. I had to open up some old library files to find an arrayed seating family. Not perfect but it will do. I reduced the size of the nested seat family a bit, otherwise it works fine. Instance parameter for length of run. Number of seats is computed. No idea where I got this from.

 

I bought a book about the pavilion when I visited it in 2014. There are as-built floor plans from 1936. Between these and the photos I took it's easy enough to decide how I want to model the layout. The current layout leaves a section of flat flooring next to the stage for loose seats, dancing or whatever.

Next I moved on to the balcony. Interesting to note that the entrances come in at an intermediate level.

This session concludes with the internal layouts of the toilets and cloakrooms. All fairly straightforward but really helps to bring the building to life as a set of functional spaces.

 

BEXHILL BIRTHDAY

Bexhill-on-Sea has long been a sedate English seaside town on the South-East coast. Land ownership was dominated by the Earls De La Warr who were also connected to colonial ventures in the New World, lending their name to the Delaware River.

Recently I have been updating my model of the De La Warr pavilion, designed by Eric Mendelsohn and Serge Chermayeff and one of the first manifestations of Modernism in the UK. The site context was knocked together hastily in 2014 and in need of a serious overhaul.

 

Sadly we can no longer edit toposurfaces with all the tricks and devices I had acquired over the years, so I tried updating to a toposolid. It soon became obvious that I needed better reference information. At this point I remembered Forma.

This online tool has also changed since last I used it, but with a bit of a struggle I managed to acquire a suitable portion of the map with contours, roads and buildings. This exported to OBJ and linked to Revit. It's no use as a permanent feature of my model, but is a great reference for rebuilding the site context.

 

Still a very rough approximation, but it holds together well enough and the relative levels are the right order of magnitude. I'm mostly using sloping floors now. Plus crude building masses modelled in-place. Sweeps for the most part.

It's hard to imagine what a local family, (or holiday makers, in those tense years leading up to the second world war,) would have made of this alien, white, abstract sculpture washed up on the beach like a whale, ... as they went to watch a show, eat a meal, or attend a dance.

Hard to imagine but fascinating to try. "Recreating history with BIM."

 

 

Friday night was a bit like my life. Lots of happy accidents and a few unintended consequences that turned out for the best eventually. Celebrating 74 years old, way down on Jumeirah Beach (not City Walk as originally intended 🙄)

I opted for a Jason Statham movie, not realising it was co-writen by Sylvester Stallone. It's taken me 50 years to realise that Stallone is worthy of respect. Not the deepest movie, but non-stop action and wry humour make for a fun evening.

 

 

Following up with a meal at the Bombay Bungalow. Superb food and a great view of the Dubai Eye out on the terrace. As we were leaving the owner /manager asked me how we had enjoyed our evening. I said it was a great way to celebrate my birthday. 

 

Of course he dragged us back in. I would have missed the interior decor had I asked for the birthday treatment up front. Rather special all round. And then the taxi back to International City. Just a pang of regret that I don't live somewhere like JBR, but the thing is... Would I appreciate it quite so much if it had the familiarity of "home"?

Living in International City and venturing out to much more stylish places at the weekend is a bit like plunging your feet alternately into hot water and the ice bucket. Great way to get blood flowing.

 

BIM-MUSIC-LIFE

Six weeks ago I was working on the Red House, home of William Morris and a response to the Industrial Revolution which was turning life inside out across Europe.

Since then I have upgraded the models of two Modernist buildings from the 1930s, attempts to embrace the new technologies and the social transformations that came with them. Links to ideologies well to the left and right.

 

Artistically they represent attempts to sweep everything away and start afresh, repeating cycles of innovation and disruption. Looking back we can see the beginnings of the art scene of today, where conceptual statements and shock value have largely replaced the search for beauty. Shock value trumps gradual evolution of traditions that stretch back hundreds of years.

To be clear, I am not pointing the finger or suggesting I know "the solution". Seems to me it's just a feature of the pace of change in society and technology, the dominance of consumerism and fashion.

I don't have the answers but I am interested in exploring the cultural history leading up to the mid twentieth century when I was born.

 

 

This is pretty raw. Trying to sing and play along to an old cakewalk backing track. It's too fast for my current skill levels, but it was fun to have a go.

Leaving Trunk was an old Taj Mahal number that really caught my imagination. I have tried very hard to "do it my way" many times with different bands, in different countries, at different stages of my life. Rarely felt that I was doing it justice.

Will I find time to do more of this kind of thing and ramp up my musical fluency again? Difficult to say. I'm trying to balance competing claims on my diminishing energy levels.

But I do plan to carry on sharing whatever I can that at least seems interesting.

 

Friday night out. My old Crocs had fallen apart so I wanted to get some new ones. Nearest dedicated shop is in Festival City. After that we found a place called Eataly with a terrace overlooking the creek and the Laser Light Show.

It's a pretty spectacular view with Al Jaddaf on the opposite bank and Burj Khalifa in the distance. We timed our arrival pretty well to get a full range of sky colours. It's been a while since I came here and I think perhaps the first time to come for an evening meal.

 

Many of my previous visits to Festival City were to kit out my apartment. Walking around the IKEA superstore. That was before I discovered online shopping. Before I even had a smartphone, in fact my visits to Festival City span almost 20 years. From the time whem Burj Khalifa was just coming out of the ground, driving around using a physical map book to calling up a ride with the Careem app.

Dubai seemed like a science fiction theme park even then. It took me a long time to adapt, moving from Africa. Now it's been my home for so long, I tend to forget how crazy the pace of change has been. A night out at Festival City helps to remind me.

 

 

WHAT DID DE LA WARR ?

In 2014 I was given a guided tour of the recently renovated De La Warr pavilion in Bexhill, a seaside town on the South-East coast of England. It's another classic of early Modernism, with a dash of Expressionism thrown in for good luck. 

Eric Mendelsohn was a German Jew who fled for England in 1933. Both he and his client were sympathetic to Soviet Russia in those heady days, and to some extent the building was intended to be a "palace for the people. The client was both Mayor of Bexhill and a member of the aristocracy.

I started building a Revit model as soon as I got back to Dubai, but it hasn't moved forward very much in the last ten years. So I decided to have another little go. The photos on these sheets were taken during that 2014 visit. And I've claimed the model up a bit.

The intention is to spend a few more days, then move on to another neglected building from my BIM pencil studies of architectural history. There is no way I can tie up all the loose ends in the time that is left to me but I do hope I can hand these models on in a usable state with some educational value.

 

De La Warr pavilion. First pass at the glazing was mostly LOD100. "there is a window here of about this size". You just need a single family, fixed glazing in a frame, no internal subdivisions.

Moving on to second pass, the sides of the auditorium have three sets of double doors with fanlights for each of the original rough openings. I have a ready-made family for the double doors with fanlight in my library. So fastest way to move forward goes like this.

Swap the fixed glazing family out for an empty opening. Place a glass wall within that space. (disallow joins) Place three double door families in that thin glass wall. Make a group. Copy around. Use new group types for raised sill conditions. Update the glass wall to a "subframe" wall type using the same material as the door framing.

The results are not 100%. That is left for another iteration. But it does the job quickly and effectively to move my study forward. Note also that the curtain walling on the rest of the building is represented by that same plain glass wall on first pass.