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.