HARD SLUG

Yesterday was a meetup with my cousin after far too long. He took me to Bucklers Hard, a village on the Beaulieu River which used to build warships back in the days of Lord Nelson. Fascinating to see how such a modest place could be producing cutting edge naval technology 250 years ago, just around the time that the industrial revolution was starting to get a grip on cotton spinning much further north.

Looking at the scale model it becomes easier to understand the wide space between the houses. Of course it's an imaginative reconstruction, but it makes a lot of sense, sets the brain to working. Which a museum should do.

 

It's sad for such a busy working centre of skilled craft to be reduced to a tourist attraction, but that's how things go.  All the same, I do hope that there will be a resurgence of new buildings built by hand with time-worn skills comparable to those that were omnipresent even a hundred years ago.  Maybe the long-promised emergence of universal plenty will unlock that potential? Or maybe not.  Could just as easily be that doing drugs and playing online games/ scrolling TikTok will be the dominant way of life.

 

The other pics are from before I went to UK. Exercises in curtain-paneling-by-pattern that I upgraded and uploaded to ACC.  I called this “the slug” and it was inspired by Zach Kron. If you divide a torus with rectangular panels, each ring around the donut contains identical components. You can then slice that torus in a way that makes it look more “nurbsy” than it really is.  There will be a bunch of on-offs at the cuts of course but still a substantial amount of repetition, giving a nod towards affordability.

 

Of course I then went ahead and introduced pyramids of different heights, once again reducing the repetition factor. I was exploring Revit schedule to Excel workflows in those days to automate the randomizing. You can control it so there are only 3 or 4 different heights.  Anyway, that was a brief interlude in my overall history and I haven’t done this kind of thing for a long time. I’m sure the younger guys are using a completely different approach to achieve these whacky concepts now.

My hope is that by packaging up 15 years of blog explorations into the cloud, Daniel and perhaps a few other close friends, can help me to pass this work on to future generations. I know that a few students have been inspired by my blog over the years, so it would be nice to keep that going. Not necessarily the most amazing work Revit/BIM work out there, but I think I have followed an unusual path.  What did Frank say?

I did it my way.