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.