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.