CRICKET IN ALDERSHOT

 

For all my Zimbabwean friends on here. A proud moment to savour. 🏏 🇿🇼 😂

Further progress on my study of St Michael the Archangel, Aldershot. Named after the warrior of God appropriately for a town historically tied to the adjacent army camp.

Working up the interior (work in progress) and making a start on a context file exported from Forma (an online application that is part of the AEC collection that comes with most Revit subscriptions. The wider aisle is of course the original nave, hence the twin gable roofs, one steeper than the other. The Victorian extension to the North is broadly speaking perpendicular in style. Lots of interesting contingencies of its historical development. Doubled up columns/walls in a couple of places.

A stair that begins in the west end of the nave and makes a tricky shift across the diagonal into the bell tower. This last part is subject to confirmation on site, but it's the best I can do on current data. The site is sloping from West to East, but by how much? Forma suggests quite steep, photographs not quite so dramatic. Site visit needed.

All good fun.

 

Context file for St Michael's, Aldershot. Not sure if this is effective use of my time, but I generally justify these kinds of efforts by telling myself that all the painstaking work in the foreground is allowing my subconscious brain to chug away in the background thinking more deeply about the project.

To put it more simply I'm getting to know a place by cobbling together a model as best I can and constantly thinking about the simplest level of detail that will give me something I can use. I could have paid for a more accurate online model of Aldershot, but would that be good enough? ... and it's not like I'm earning money any more.

 

It's a BIG file also, even after reducing the number of points quite drastically. Toposolids are great, but for some purposes I would like to go back to the topo-surface workflow. Anyway, some of it is a matter of cleaning things up, then there is the business of making little families for some of the buildings.

I came to realise that this part of Aldershot tends to have Victorian/Edwardian terraces along the older, distributor roads, and 1930s style semis filling out the interior blocks. I tend to stop at arbitrary points in the process of changing a model like this. There's no way I will ever replace all the clunky grey blocks. Basically I shop around here and there, locking for repeating units. Make a family. Populate a couple of streets. Get bored. Move on.

Probably I will do some more after I set up some views and see where the weakest bits are.

 

BANKING ON ALDERSHOT

 

Red for Sampson, Pink for Taylor Cyan, Orange, Green and Teal for successive phases of John Soane’s work at the Bank of England. This is from a study I did during the Covid madness. To be clear, I benefited from the lockdowns (I had savings, and a good salary to return to after a year or so of close to zero income)  The work I did in that year prepared me for the retirement plan that I have been working on ever since, almost in place now.

 

 

The second image is part of a context file, which expanded into a map of London, absorbing my earlier work on Hawksmoor’s six churches, Soane’s Board of Trade project at the corner of Whitehall and Downing street, and his church in Walworth, south London. That map is still a bit of a mess, particularly around the bank where the immediate surroundings need to be separate from the larger “map” to allow for memory management through selective loading.

I did some restoration work on the file and it’s links, necessitated by the move of my WWB project to a new hub two or three years ago. Things get lost, but often there is an older version lurking somewhere in my backups. The bank as shown here is pretty much the present version, a 1930s rebuild by Herbert Baker.

 

Back to St Michael’s Aldershot. A fair bit of guesswork here, but that can be corrected when I have better information. Difficult to know what is missing until you model to some level of completion. I have two main sheets now and have begun to flesh out the interior. This church would make an interesting “evolution” project also, with medieval and Victorian work here plus a modern café/meeting room not yet included.

In my view, it’s not just about the model and the data. Placing views on sheets is also a very effective way of developing an understanding of the building, whether it’s a new design or a historical study. This may be an archaic skill, and I certainly benefit from some years of composing sheets by hand, but it’s contribution is sometimes undervalued.

Even from a simple day-to-day working perspective in Revit, having multiple entry points into the model grouped together in a sensible way enhances the fluidity of model development. Chasing down views in the project browser, and switching tabs with ten views open is not the most effective use of my time.

 

 

TRACING THE BIM PENCIL

 Something I’ve been working on for two or three days now. Strictly speaking it’s just off the edge of my Hampshire Churches map, but it’s in Hampshire as currently defined. From the church Diocese standpoint it’s in Guildford, Surrey but there is a a possible collaboration here, so I decided to go for it.

Unlike most of my recent church models, this is a full-blown Revit project. That makes it a bit heavier and harder to set up comparison sets with data schedules, but it’s good to question assumptions from time to time. Moving to a different methodology then back again sparks fresh insights. A bit like switching between piano and guitar when working on a song.

 

Windows for St Michael’s Aldershot. I’m using very short sweeps for the tracery so the pattern is drawn as a profile sketch. This guards against the whole thing breaking if I have to adjust height and width parameters later, when I get more information.  Think of them as "stabilised extrusions"

 

So I'm using two pieces of flat geometry with a simple step in level. It’s a gross simplification, viewed close up, but I’m good with it. The best interpretation of a Gothic style window I have managed so far,and unless you are studying a single window in isolation, perfectly adequate for the job.  What I like about this approach is that it makes a clear distinction between the "framework" and the "elaboration"  Definitely a method you could use to design your own Gothic tracery.

 

I should have posted more about the upgrade of my BIM pencil files on ACC from 2024 to 2026. Not really the upgrade itself which is thankfully child’s play these days (links intact etc)

But working through the folders and refreshing my memory on stages of completion (nothing is complete in this world of personal exploration spanning 20+ years) Fixing some of the more obvious issues. Hunting down some missing files in mysterious corners of my hard drive.

 

 

 

That was all quite revealing. The collaborative effort called Project Soane is more complete than most, but the site context files and the timeline work from architect Sampson to Taylor to Soane... These elements were left hanging, so I’m starting to tidy that up a bit.

Images here show the bank just before Soane entered the scene. 

 

 

 

2025 WINDING UP DUBAI

 

Having cast my thoughts back on fifteen years of blogging, and being January, I decided to remind myself of the past 12 months, a final transition from commercial work to full time BIM pencil warrior.

Xmas 2025 was spent in Dubai with two thirds of my progeny in a rented flat, downtown. By contrast, Marsa Al Seef has the feel of an old souq, best seen at night. It’s a project that I was involved in, mostly as a developer of custom families to capture the traditional architecture in Revit. I had an operation for colon cancer in January. Still clear a year later. While recuperating I started scanning old papers and throwing away the detritus of 20 years in Dubai. Almost complete now.

I bought a new electric guitar, hoping to bring music back into the mainstream of my life. Still working on that. Revisited William Morris’s Red House, a Revit model I started long, long ago. That was part of a determined effort to move all my “Way We Build” work into the cloud. Scanning included the Building Books we wrote in Zimbabwe and the History projects from my second architecture degree in Joburg. I started to feel nostalgic about International City CBD where I live. And continued to scan sketches and Revit work from the early Dubai period.

I visited Zimbabwe to sell my old house there, brought back cassette tapes and digitised them. Some were uploaded to YouTube. Must get back to that also. Casa del Fascio is an intriguing Italian Modernist building that I modelled for a conference presentation in New Zealand (more scanning and uploading to the ACC cloud)  Then in March, an office Iftar at One Zaabeel. Typical Dubai audacity of design and development.

 

My last full year in Dubai has been spent mostly inside my flat. So going out on Friday nights became an important routine, including my birthday celebration in April. Packaging up my extra-curricular BIM work for the cloud included the De La Warr pavilion model, Revit content collections, and Parametric Pumpkin competition entries. Then in May,  a visit to my retirement flat in the UK, meeting up with my old friend Rufus at St Annes, Limehouse by Nicholas Hawksmoor. Also visiting some Hampshire Churches with more old friends. Then back in Dubai I had another dabble with AI. It’s fast but I can’t really get it to do what I want.

Inspired by the church visits my Hampshire Churches map entered a new phase with data analysis and case studies. There are over 400 churches in my study area, so enough work here for several lifetimes. Hopefully I can do enough in the time I have left to inspire some younger minds to use BIM tools and processes to study human history through the lens of “the Way We Build” Meanwhile, visits to UK getting shorter and closer together now. Can’t help myself looking around at building work in progress, like the porch in the last picture.

 

Having mapped out “Hampshire Churches” as a Revit project file, with basic data assigned to each church, and created massing models for a random selection of these buildings, I looked at the schedule and selected 10 Victoria churches by A.W.Blomfield for a deeper dive. This phase of the larger scheme is still in progress, but I am really pleased with progress made to date. I have been importing toposolids via Autodesk Forma and setting up a summary sheet for each church.  Then there was the GAJ xmas party, and an outing for my electric guitar setup, followed by a fantastic xmas trip to UK. That will be the last visit before moving.

 

On return to Dubai I have been going through the ACC project that now contains almost all the “private study” files created since I began working with Revit and set up a blog 15-20 years ago. I will be looking for new ways to make this available to anyone who might be interested.  I have never thought of myself as a Revit specialist. I am an architect and enthusiastic student of building history. Revit just happens to be one of the major tools in my bag of tricks.  The work on Victor Horta’s Maison Hallet is from the height of the Covid craziness, February 2021. I wanted to have a go at that because I had been looking at challenging door families, but also because he is one Art Nouveau practitioner who maintained a relatively planar approach. By definition this is easier to tackle in Revit than say Gaudi.