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.