BROACHING THE SPIRE

 

The Hampshire Churches map has come on a long way.  Time to start modelling again, maybe in parallel with upgrading the map.  So where to start.  I didn’t want to get bogged down with complete churches. There are so many of them anyway… a danger of feeling overwhelmed by the task.

So I thought of tackling common elements and where better to start than bell towers and spires. I want to make these as parametric families that can be used in a modular approach to massing models of the churches.  That way a daunting task could be reduced to a much simpler assembly of adjustable parts. I’m not going to get it right with the first try but all the same it’s best to just jump in and follow my instincts (with a bit of self-reflection on the way)

Based on past work in my “pumpkin phase” I decided to have one parameter that sets the overall scale and several “factors” that adjust the proportions of sub-components.  The first example has three parts: a cuboid (box) an octagonal pyramid (blend of two octagons) and in between a blend between a square and an octagon.

 

More standard/modular families for nesting into my massing models of churches. I use the term nesting because the massing models of the churches are themselves Revit families.  This makes them much more lightweight than linked Revit projects, easier to mover around, display in schedules within the overall “map”,  copy and edit to create new churches. Lots of advantages as long as you don’t try to add too much detail.

So I have another kind of spire. Is this still a broach spire, or does it have some other name?  In any case, “Broach” originally means something pointed. As a verb it meant pierce and came to also mean introduce as in broaching a subject in a conversation. So it’s not clear to me how it came to mean a spire that transitions from square to octagonal part-way up.  But words are like that. Their meaning changes over time, often quite radically.

 

 

I also made several recess families of different shapes.  “Face based” to represent doors, windows and archways.  They will be hosted on extrusions for the most part, sometimes on nested “tower” families with the “cut when loaded” parameter checked.  While I'm at it let's add a spike to the spire. Makes a huge difference in my opinion.  No scaling on this at the moment, but we'll add that if I come across a situation where it is needed, or maybe I will just open up that nested instance and adjust the height directly, probably less trouble. 

 

You have to remain flexible in your approach to families.  No need to add parameters (still less formulas) unless they add significant value. 

 

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There is a third type of broach spire, like the second but with the upper octagon rotated 22.5 degrees.  But before investing time in that and developing more families, I decided to try using the ones I had.  You never really know if you have made the right decisions until you use the content in a couple of different situations.

 

So I picked some churches not too far from Basingstoke, and started assembling massing models. In the case of St Peter Linkenholt, designed by William White in 1871, I have an original floor plan from the Lambeth online archives. St Mary Laverstoke (1896 by JL Pearson) is a church that I did visit in June 2024 when I first took possession of my retirement flat. Here I rely on a historical image from Google Earth to estimate the length of the building and the relationship of the parts.  The third church is the St James the Less, Litchfield, a Norman church extensively remodelled in Victorian times, architect unknown (at present)

I’m trying to “move fast and break things” ... for maximum learning.  Don't get bogged down, there are 400 of these things in the sample set 😕

 

FRIDAY NIGHTS IN DUBAI

 Relishing my weekends in Dubai. They won’t last forever.  I’ve known Bayt as Wakeel for almost twenty years I guess.  Used to be a favourite meeting place when visitors came to Dubai.  It’s not  quite as exciting as it use to be. That’s mostly me I think. The Abra rides have changed a bit as well.  I prefer the newer version now that I am less steady on my feet, but so many happy times, crossing the creek on those old boats in the open evening air. Coloured lights reflecting in the water.

 

On the Deira side of the Creek.  Haven’t wandered through these alleyways for many a year. Colourful displays of goods on a humid evening. Crammed with atmosphere and memories.  Salesmen shouting out their wares.  It’s good that Dubai still has places like these to contrast with the ultra-slick modern tourism that has expanded exponentially since I arrived in 2004.  Dubai has been good to me.  I was rescued from the desperation from Zimbabwe in political and economic turmoil. Hyperinflation and shortages of basic goods.  In those days I still had great respect for newspapers like the Guardian and the Independent, but friends from the UK sent my links to articles about Dubai which were so negative, scornful and frankly racist, that I started to question the way that things has changed since I left UK 25 years earlier.

 

Now I am on the point of returning to a country that is the same but different. No longer will I drive on six lane highways past megaprojects that spring up overnight.  Britain used to be the most vibrant and innovative country in the world.  In my teenage years the music from  Merseyside took the rock and roll of American origins and transformed it into a message of hope for mankind.  Swinging London led the world in style.   I am still immensely proud to be English and British, European even. But do we have the vigour of places like Dubai and Singapore?  Definitely not, for better or for worse.

These are cities that have tapped into the cultural energy and financial capital of immigrants from all over the world while retaining tight control over citizenship and even permanent residence.  You come here to contribute and to prosper, as long as you are able. Make trouble of fail to pay your own way and you are out.  No endless appeals or special pleading. It can be harsh, but it works and Europe as a whole seems to be slowly waking up to this more muscular approach to an open society.

 

Another contrast.  Al Boom Tourist Village. Feels like a throw-back to the Dubai of 20 or 30 years ago.  We went to look at possible dinner cruises on the creek by Dhow.  Almost went for that option, but looked around and chose the Egyptian restaurant on land, but with a nautical theme.   The young band was great. A successful fusion of traditional and modern.  Food, service, ambience, value … It was wonderful to discover this little gem hiding in plain sight for all these years.

 

I have been to Souq Madinat so many times, but not in recent years.  We even played here for three or four years in a row at Fete de la Musique when I had my three piece band: "Out of the Blue."  Seems so long ago now.  We dropped off at the hotel by mistake, happy accident really.  So much of my work with Godwin Austen Johnson has been on hospitality projects. This is not one of our projects but it almost could have been. I like to think we would have done it slightly better but it’s pretty good as a balance between design integrity and serving the tourism market it targets. 

 

The souq itself is an interesting comparison to the old souq area in Deira.  Much pricier shops of course and somewhat sanitised atmosphere, but those are givens of the brief.  You have to acknowledge the ability of Dubai to keep diversifying its tourist appeal.  The recognition that water is a key element. Abu Dhabi has more of that just naturally but Dubai has been able to engineer a huge increase in waterfront property over the past two or three decades. 

Nice glimpse of the Burj Al Arab next door.  I has been eclipsed to some extent by later “modern marvels” but still a memorable sight in its own right. To repeat, I’m really enjoying getting out on a Friday night and taking advantage of this amazing city that has been my home for 21 years, and counting.

 

 

 

SHEET DATA +AI

The upper half of my Hampshire Churches study area.  The two kilometre grid is clear without becoming obtrusive (Revit Halftone) Major roads are prominent and minor roads subdued. Thick orange denotes modern highways and town bypass roads. One obvious mistake on this export is the M3 from London to Southampton, (which skims the S.E. edge of Basingstoke) is shown as a minor road.  Still a work in progress.

Also showing Rivers and streams which obviously affect village placement. And starting to show country estates which are still quite common, but much more so in 1900.  I’m showing the 19^th century versions because along with the railways this makes a fascinating record of a turning point in British history.  There are also straight lines in dark red which represent Roman roads.  Lots of these, giving time depth along with some thick red ellipses to represent Hill Forts, presumably dating to pre-Roman times.

 

A section of the schedule which occupies the far right edge of the sheet displays basic date embedded in the church objects.  Colour coded circles for Saxon/Norman, Medieval, Georgian, Victorian and Modern.  I will probably adjust the classification system and the data fields later on, but it’s a good starting point.  Names of Architects only really apply from the post-Medieval era, and I haven’t sourced all this data yet, but making steady progress.

The point is that I’m increasing my conscious and sub-conscious grasp of the history of this area which will become the context for my retirement and is already me second home.  More and more visits, days out on the bus, hijacking of friends and relatives with cars to come. 

Two Grok.  My prompts were for Notre Dame and the Bank of England, with a bit of context as to how I wanted them presented.  The Notre dame shot suffered contamination from earlier requests.  I had asked for a landscape with a watercolour effect. My first attempt to generate an image in Grok and partially using the suggestions it gave me for first use of this feature.  Obviously you need to clear the prompts completely, perhaps restart the app.

The Bank of England is a less convincing representation of the building but better interpretation of the context.  I asked for late 18^th century London and the Bank as designed by John Soane.  The people and other props are kind of OK.  Is that a horse? Maybe. Not sure about the mountains in the background and the building is a strange amalgam. Some reference to Herbert Baker’s 1930s central feature which is the image you are most likely to see of the Bank as it is today. There is a bit of what could be Tivoli Corner stuck on the end.  Totally the wrong place and what’s with the dome?  That’s just a hallucination replacing the attic storey that Soane designed and Baker retained. 

AI can now speed up the process of finding out who designed a church and pointing to relevant web sites.  Also open sources like this book about church plans on project Gutenberg.

In fact Grok wrote me a few useful paragraphs about an architect I hadn’t notice before (Beazley) who worked for G.E.Street. Pointed me to a deanery map. Gave me some information about and interesting prefabricated church in Southampton. All this is grift to the mill as I tap into a database of some 400 churches to inform my understanding of how “Wessex” has evolved over the centuries.

It’s a very rich story and an essential one in my view as we grapple with the ever increasing fragmentation of society and knowledge, the whirlwind of competing narratives bombarding us each day, the erosion of confidence and social cohesion.  I can’t change these things in any significant way, but I do hope to keep a sense of perspective, and a reverence for the cultural heritage of my ancestors.