BIM PENCIL PROCESS

 Can we use BIM to sketch ideas out, like we do with pencil and paper?  Quick sketches, exploratory diagrams, analytical studies?  That’s part of the motivation between my invented term “the BIM pencil”.

My second slogan. “the way we build” tries to capture the idea of using a wide range of tools and techniques to understand a crucial element of human culture.  We have been building shelters for tens of thousands of years.  Cities go back perhaps 10 thousand.  There is a rich story that can be told around those different ways of building.  I am a great believer in “learning by doing” and a proud tradition of architects who studied the glories of the past using the tools and methods of their profession. 

I read and I collect books. I take photographs and store them in digital archives that I have maintained for a couple of decades now.  But I also use this source material to sketch and model.  I puzzle things out for myself.   

·         “How does this thing work?” 

·         “Why was it built like that?”  

·         “What was the construction sequence?”

St Anne’s Limehouse is my current obsession.  I started about 3 weekends back and I’ve been sharing my progress on LinkedIn as mentioned in a previous post.  In this piece I want to describe my process, which is a question a couple of people have asked.  It’s not that different from the way I approach any Revit model.  Perhaps you will find it useful.

I start with Primary Elements: walls/floors/roofs.  Just roughing out the main masses.  Actually, I always add some grids at this stage.  They will probably evolve over time but it’s good to have something that extends through all levels that you can measure back to.  This early stage is very rewarding as you start to develop a memory-map of the building, as we all do with buildings we live in, or use regularly. 

Secondary elements require loadable families.  Sometimes, (reluctantly), I opt for in-place modelling.  I learnt long ago that the system tool “Wall Sweep” doesn’t work well for classical cornices.  The problem comes at the junctions and wraparounds.  These always tend to lose their mitres as the walls that host them inevitably change.  So in-place sweeps are more stable in that regard.

I have a library of starter families for windows and doors that I have built up over the years.  Some of them are all-purpose placeholder families that can stand in for any rectangular or round-headed window at an early stage.  To be replaced by more detailed representations later on.  St Anne’s is an interesting composition.  The articulation of the main volume is achieved by recessing the walls slightly in both plan and section.  This simple, stark approach to form is typical of Hawksmoor. 

The quoins at major corners provide a linking element between the flat bands at the base and top of the walls, while also offering some finer scale detail.  I have a library of modular columns which allow me to produce something roughly the right size and style for most classical buildings.  We can do fine tuning later. 

It’s a bit like painting.  Start by blocking out the main forms with a broad brush, and gradually build up the composition, layer by layer.  Don’t get hung up on the details.  They will come to the fore later on.  Keep everything in balance, at more or less the same level of development.

 

The tower at the West End is obviously a focus of attention and the most complex geometric form.  So it’s worth putting in a little effort to develop this next.  I haven’t spent much time on the top portion with its octagonal array of clustered columns. But we needed a clock, an elaborate cornice and a wall-hosted family for the belfry louvres with nested classical columns (square and round)

Are these Corinthian?  Mine are … but on closer inspection, Hawksmoor omits the scrolls and cauliculi.  Just the two rows of acanthus leaves topped by an abacus.  I think there’s a hint of egg & dart there, at least in the square versions.  But that’s detail, which I promised to ignore for now, so I just used my bog-standard Corinthian.  It can be updated later.

When Rufus showed me around a year ago, we ascended a spiral staircase within the thickness of the wall.  I was completely disoriented of course, but in hindsight I realise this stair is on the South side of the tower, marked by a vertical row of slit windows. 

Then we get into a phase of tackling some more composite families, with nested pilasters, recesses,, mouldings.  I’m just doing enough to represent Hawksmoor’s scheme at this stage.  They will all need a second pass, and probably a third … if I ever get there.

How about some site context?

I did an urban study of Hawksmoor’s six churches some years ago, so I just linked this into my church file and moved it to the right position.  These buildings and their very different settings make such a wonderful group for comparison purposes.  I’m so glad that I got around to hunting them all out, and researching the likely nature of their surroundings 300 years ago.  I wonder if there is a Hawksmoor society? 

The internal organization of the building needs to catch up a bit next.  There are stairs leading up to the upper galleries on both sides of the main entrance.  There is a linking passage on the ground floor, at right angles to the main axis, and I think another just above this.  I am looking to Rufus to give me some feedback on that, and maybe some dimensions also.

 

With that in mind, I prepared a study sheet with questions and assumptions for him to comment on.  The door to the spiral definitely leads off to the side, half way up a flight of steps, I remember that, and I have a blurry photo to confirm.  Just how the spiral relates to the cross passage at the upper level is pure conjecture.  There is definitely a window overlooking the circular entrance lobby, so I guess that is located on the upper passage.  But I’m sure there are subtleties that I’m missing. 

The organ is backed by a giant niche, (or apse) that extends to ground floor level, forming another lobby space: half-round this time.  There is a timber screen separating this area from the nave, with half-glazed doors.  For the moment I have represented this using a curtain wall. 

I love the way this timber work echoes the organ above, and spreads out horizontally, via the galleries to embrace the whole church.  Balance of materials.  Very nice. 

That’s enough for one post. To be continued

MISSING LINK

For a couple of years now I’ve been telling myself I need to do shorter posts and get them out twice a week.  More immediacy.  I get a bit frustrated by how long it takes to do some serious modelling, assemble the pictures, write the text, review & post ….

Problem is that long thoughtful posts are my trademark and I really enjoy having ten years worth of carefully documented explorations to look back upon.  Then last weekend I stumbled across a solution by accident. While working, share a single image and a couple of sentences directly to LinkedIn.  I think of it as my version of “Live Streaming”.  Give people a sense of what’s happening in real time when I start using my BIM pencil to look more carefully at one of the hundreds of buildings that have caught my attention over the years.

St Mary’s Limehouse by Nicholas Hawksmoor 1713.  I lived almost next door to this church for a few weeks some 40 years ago, and I did an “urban design study” of all six of Hawksmoor’s London churches … when was that?  2014 apparently.  So that must have been inspired by visiting my son who had recently moved into the area. 

https://grevity.blogspot.com/2014/11/six-of-best.html

7000 views is not going to make me a celebrity, but it’s wonderful thing to have these global interactions.  More conversations over the past few days than I normally have.  I don’t want to get swamped by people wanting to chat on line, but the interactive nature of this process is absolutely crucial.  BIM is inherently collaborative.  That’s one of the reasons that it’s such a powerful research tool.  Far too much “art history” is dry, academic, text-focused stuff.  I really think that a bottom-up action-research programme could shake up the field and democratize our heritage. 

That’s what the “BIM pencil” and “the Way We Build” are all about.  We live in the age of slogans, and those are my two big contributions to the genre.

For me, BIM is an outgrowth of “drawing”, an activity with a very deep history which engages our subconscious brain and our physical bodies. That’s part of what the “BIM pencil” metaphor evokes, and it’s important to me that I include the activity of hand-sketching in my workflow.  You might say “that’s not BIM” but I might respond, “that’s a very narrow-minded view”.  At the moment I am mostly doing the hand sketching “in parallel” with my BIM work, but there is a back and forth, AND … I am super keen to see hand-sketching better integrated into the core of BIM.

At the end of the first weekend, I produced a sheet set, which I really want to do more often.  That was my first time to drop it directly into LinkedIn.  Seems like a great way to share my work in the spirit of “lean & agile”.

This work on St Anne’s is only happening because I visited London a year ago and trekked around all six Hawksmoor churches, ending up with a tour of St Anne’s, graciously offered to me, via LinkedIn by Rufus Frampton.  He is one of several people from a building trades background with passion for built heritage who I had met online and who agreed to meet up during my visit.  Those friendships have continued to blossom, and become extremely important to me.  We cannot allow BIM to become trapped in a nerdy tech bubble.  It must belong to the entire range of activities that contribute to making buildings, from Stone Masons to Ironmongery manufacturers, to Surveyors.

 

I was struck, during that visit, by the richness and variety of Stone Carving on display in the centre of London.  Beautiful creative studies that build upon ancient traditions, and offered building workers an opportunity for artistic expression.  I include one piece in the Art Deco style, even though it is rather stiff and flat compared to the others, because it seems like that was the last vestiges of original stone carving applied to new buildings.  We still have stone carvers, I met some on that visit, but their commissions are coming from the “heritage” industry, or the “art objects” industry.  That’s my impression, at least.

It makes me sad, but I don’t think there are any easy answers.  Industrialization is a wonderful thing.  It has dragged billions of people out of poverty.  BIM and off-site manufacture are going to play a crucial role in dragging the last 20% out of their poverty traps.

BUT

We also need to attend to quality of life. Obesity is a product of affluence.  Sitting down at a laptop all day as I often do, is not a great future for humanity. At some point we need to engage more humans in creative, manual work.  Ideally we should all balance our activities out with something like stone carving.  That’s why I have been trying to do some physical, sculptural work during this Covid hiatus … in a very small way.

I went “up north” where I grew up and stayed with my cousin for a few days.  While there, I met up with a couple of master plasterers.  The great thing about social media is that once you have a couple of connections in a particular sphere, you start to see activity by others.  Over the past year I have learnt a lot about the techniques used in the plastering trade.  I have been fascinated since 2014 with the Corinthian capitals on the inside of St George, Bloomsbury. They are wonderfully delicate and sculptural.

I was pretty sure this was plaster work, but were the leaves separately cast and assembled?  I wasn’t sure, but by now I’m quite confident.  The approach is modular.  The materials used in plastering are almost unique in allowing solid castings to be stuck to a backing using essentially the same stuff. 

 

The entablature above those internal columns, contains enrichments (assembled in a similar modular way) that echo the ones I sketched on my phone a week ago, found on the outside of St Anne’s Limehouse, carved in stone … a very different kind of process.  There is one row of Egg & Dart plus three variations on Leaf & Dart ( I guess). 

I have explore ways of representing these kids of elements with my BIM pencil.  There are computational load issues for sure.  We surely need ways to digitally connect low res and high res versions of details like this so that they can be seen withing the context of the model without blowing up our laptops, and  detailed out for close-up shots and for passing on to specialist trades.  I have yet to see a robust proposal for those kinds of phase shifts. 

How can BIM workflows connect together the data between joinery details, complete building models, urban planning studies, whole city models.  Could we do bi-directional updates between these different scales in the same way that we do within a Revit model (for example) ?

I started with an Enscape-derived image, and I will finish with another.  The site context is linked in from that urban context study that I did in 2014, so that stuff in the background is St George in the East with Christchurch Spitalfields beyond.  They are much closer here that in real life, but it creates quite an effective image, giving the impression of the East End of London 300 years ago … basically a string of villages along the Commercial Road with a mixture of market gardens and shipping related activity like rope making sloping down to the river. The docks came much later, in the 19^th century as the Industrial Revolution came into full flow.  Up to that time the river itself was able to handle all the shipping, with wharves and warehouses up against the edge. 

 

AU 2019. 01

I flew in to Tampa, via London & Miami. 24 hours from take off to landing. Still managed a quality weekend with my daughter Wendy. We met up with Alfredo at a great little Colombian restaurant and later on Wendy and Michael tried out the VR experience of Notre Dame via the Enscape3d executable, and the Oculus Rift S. The cathedral is a 19th century neogothic design in the city where the restaurant owners come from. Manizales, look it up on wikipedia like I did.

Five hour direct flight on a budget ticket. Despite some turbulence i was able to do some sketching on my Samsung Note 8 with Sketchbook Pro. It’s basically a trace over, but I’m letting decisions float up from my subconscious about how loose or precise to be in different areas. Ultimately its an opportunity to engage with the form in a different way and see what thoughts drift across my brain in the process. 

Vegas is not my favourite city in the world but it’s an interesting place to see at least once. Like Dubai it has a penchant for taking wonderful historic places and blowing them out of all proportion in the copying process. But it’s a fantasy world so no need to get all pedantic. 

There is a message from Francois saying he has done some work on the “triangular” windows that bring some light into the triforium galleries that overlook the nave. I got an error message and the glass disappeared, so I loaded it again, this time overwriting the parameters with the ones in the family. That fixed it so I was able to refresh the Enscape3d executable in time for my afternoon presentation. It’s so cool that we can access the model over a conference WiFi, make a few changes and synchronise

The night shot from Enscape was an accident really, not sure why it is illuminated like that, but it really looks cool.  Big old buildings are always really atmospheric at night time, spooky perhaps.

Meanwhile Alfredo was adding a small rose window modelled by his friend Marc. That’s up in the transept gable and must bring light into the roof void. Things are moving forward nicely. 

And so to the keynote. Thousands of people sitting in a rock concert atmosphere with big screens and coloured light beams. Several impressive case studies. Airbus factory layouts optimised using algorithms to cycle through thousands of options. High Rise hotel using factory built modular rooms. Probably the stand out for me was Build Change using Revit and Dynamo to speed up the design of retrofitted strengthening of homes in earthquake prone areas. 

Possibly the most amusing was Autodesk and VW teaming up to reinvent the wheel. It’s for the new “electric combi” not sure about the clean ability of those orange spiders webs, but they are supposed to be  strength to weight optimised. Time will tell. 

Before I knew it 4.30 came around and I had to stop obsessing about the first few sentences and just blunder into my presentation. The audience was fantastic. Very few empty seats, and lots of enthusiasm afterwards. But I was tired.

I woke in the early hours of this morning and started organising images for this blog post. I had fallen asleep quite early and missed out on the evening party BIM track had invited me to. Not as young as I used to be. Lying in a hotel bed using PIXLR on my phone to create some atmospheric images of those triangular windows. 

SPIRAL LADY

 Picking up from the previous Notre Dame post.

During the week I had assisted one of our architects with a tricky stair detail. The only way I could get the curved glass balustrade to reflect the design intent moderately well was to create multiple in-place swept blends. A bit of a hack, like the photoshop-compiled image shown here, but I quite enjoyed doing it. 

It brought back memories of the spiral stair family that I developed in 2012, and I decided to try using this for the spiral stone stairs that occur in several places at Notre Dame. I guess these are the equivalent of the modern service lift. 


The upgrade from 2012 to 2020 went smoothly enough, but it is a bit sluggish to respond to changes in parameters. Not all that surprising given that the treads are generic models nested into curtain panels on a divided spiral surface. 

At the sides of the Bell Towers, I think I have the levels of the landings more or less right now. Had to drop the upper vault down so that you can squeeze a door in under the little sloping roofs.

But the 4 stairs at the outer corners of the Transepts are much more challenging in figure out. There are doors leading off in different directions at various intermediate levels, and they don’t all connect to the triforium gallery. I had to make do with a placeholder spiral from top to bottom and a few indicative doors. 

A screenshot from the Revizto model we exported for BiLT EU. 


I’ve been watching videos on YouTube about different French cathedrals. At some point it brought back the idea of doing comparative studies of different apse geometries. Clearly many different solutions have been tried.  Here are 4 variations on apse geometry. Different numbers of half-round chapels clustered around the curve, two cases where the central one is different.

I created two more visuals from my wooden block model. One breaks down the inner core, so it comes before the other six I created, building up the aisles, buttresses and chapels around this core.

The lower portion is an RCP view, showing the distribution of 4, 6 & 8 part vaults. (Red C means Chapel.)  Around the edges, photos of various vault types.   The more I study ribbed vault technology, the more impressed I am.  800 years ago takes us about halfway back to the fall of Rome.  Was that collapse the “reset button” that paved the way for modernity?  Medieval Europe, emerging nation states, the “freedoms” of city life, the stirrings of technological innovation?

Ribbed vaults are vey different from the plain vaults that preceded them. They allow complex and highly varied geometries to be built, but at any stage in the process you only need to support one row of voussoirs with a wooden form shaped to a simple radius.  You can start with a four part groin vault, then subdivide one side into two vaults, or choose any of the outer arches and raise it higher or drop it lower.  It’s a very impressive technology: structurally, aesthetically, methodologically.

It’s interesting to compare the current model with the one I produced in that first weekend 7 months ago. Certainly, we have come a long way in that time. And what a journey, each team member finding a different area that catches their interest and pursuing it with passion. 


The other cathedral in that image is, of course, Winchester. The one-day massing study that kicked this whole thing off. 


I have been telling myself since I got back from UK that it would be useful to do a comparison of the 4 cathedral towns that I visited: Winchester, Salisbury, York and Chichester. So far, I have managed one town map, drawn with the stylus of my Samsung Note 8, using Autodesk SketchBook Pro, and tweaked a bit using PIXLR. 

 

Classic Roman town layout, rotated slightly to be parallel to the river. North/South axis is displaced from the centre by the cathedral, which occupies most of one quadrant, as cathedrals often do.  The main street is East/West, perhaps reflecting the fact that London is to the East and Salisbury to the West (roughly speaking)

We have two grotesques in the model now, thanks to Ryan. The "Edge-Hiding" trick is doing good service (using MAX), and of course, the CAD mesh needs to be “bylayer” so as to pick up the material assignment under object styles (Imports in Families)  CAD layers become subcategories which can be renamed within family editor.  I'm using the subcategory "Statue" for this purpose, the same one used for the row of kings, lower down on the West Front.

I  adjusted heights based on the TruView coordinates tool. You have to adjust the zero which is derived from the scanner position at the first survey point, tripod height above the triforium gallery. Generally everything was stretched up a bit vertically. Maybe it would be better if we were just slavishly following a point cloud. Or maybe it’s good to be forced to look carefully and to practice judging proportions by eye. 


I generally take the role of impetuous pioneer, rushing ahead and clearing the undergrowth. After dropping the clerestory windows I had to adjust roof slopes in the dropped section along the nave.  Lots of little adjustments actually, and zipping around the model with my new VR setup.

The zig-zag vaults on the upper level were missing and I had been thinking about my pumpkin adventures. I decided to revive my box rig and have a go. This is Alfredos territory really, but he’s  not going to get around to it until after AU. Maybe it will be interesting to approach things from a slightly different angle. 


The box provides a framework for reference lines and points which define geometry. Vary the XYZ of the box and everything adjusts accordingly. So this is my version of a triangular vault, made from three surfaces. Each surface is lofted from 3 arcs. That’s my interpretation. 


There are offsets to vary the skew. Mid triangles in a group of 3 are symmetrical. The two sides are skewed. 

The sexapartite vaults were pretty crap at the sides.  These are skewed triangles, but just two surfaces. So I developed a box rig for these also and exported SAT surfaces to nest into the family, replacing the ones I had before.
  

The vault next to the organ has unequal side arches. It’s as if one is squashed to make way for the heavy ribbed columns that flank the organ loft.

Jumping around now trying to fix the more obvious shortcomings of the model.  The steps leading up from the triforium galleries to the bell ringing chambers start out as wood, but the last few risers are in stone, formed within the thickness of the wall. So I roughed these out.  Then I switched to the choir area and fleshed this out some.  I had forgotten who made the altar.  Turns out it was John Wehmer, back in August.  Thanks John, finally brought it into the main model.

Behind the high altar is a pieta.  I placed a plinth and a crucifix, we can add some statuary later.  There are statues of kings at the sides.  I used cut-down versions of one of the figures from the west front.  Somebody could adopt this area and develop it further.  I’ve just done the minimum to give some ambience.  Not happy with the floor materials though.  There are raised floors in the whole of the east end with extra height around the altars.  I hadn’t really taken note of this before.  I made a start on representing these changes in level.  I have to say the space still looks a bit empty.  The railings are far too plain at present, and the gates are not indicated, either in plan or 3d

The sheet set is a bit spruced up now.  I cleaned up my sheets and added a few annotations.  Alfredo added three splendid sheets to the set. 

I think that's it for today.  I wish I understood the middle ages better.  So many fascinating questions.

OLD PROJECTS : NEW LOOK

It's always interesting to turn the clock back half a dozen years.  How crap were my Revit skills in 2008?  I was quite proud of myself of course, but it's revealing to open a file that's been lying dormant since then.  One such project is the William Morris's house in Bexley Heath ... the famous Red House designed by Phillip Web.

I didn't get very far with it really, just the bare outlines of the shell, and I haven't taken it much further this weekend.  The idea was to open a bunch of old files in Enscape and see how quickly I could generate some interesting images.  It's a continuation of what I started last weekend.  Part of the motivation is to try out some of the planting families I have been working up for my presentation in Arhus.  Put them through their paces.

So I just threw a whole bunch of trees on the site, made a couple of small tweaks to the roof and fired up Enscape3d.  This gives you a pretty decent render quality in a live window, with some useful settings sliders to help you find a suitable ambience for the image in question.  Then you can take screenshopts, or export panoramas if you like.  In practice I can generate useable images in less that a quarter of a time it would have taken using Revit's internal render engine.

In this case I'm not using RPC trees so Enscape is not substituting them with its own 3 dimenionsal versions.  Instead I have families that incorporate 3d CAD mesh geometry, picked up here and there on my travels.  These come out surprisingly well in Enscape and as a bonus I can export black and white images with sketchy outlines to merge with shaded views to create images that match the Enscape renders.  That wouldn't really work with RPC content.

These families have some other tricks up their sleeves with I will explain in my session and post here soon after.  Embedded plan symbols, instance scaling etc.  I was quite impressed by the shadows that some of them cast.  I'm not trying to do away with RPC trees.  I think they are great (That's why I took the time to make my own customised versions).  But it's also good to have other options up your sleeve.

Another project that's been lying dormant for many years is the Tunendhat house by Mies van der Rohe, featuring his famous "cross-section" columns.  I guess this is one of the very first houses to feature a wall of glass occupying the entire length of an open-plan living space.  Actually this one was motorised and retracted into the basement when the weather was suitable.  The house was built on a steep slope, so the view would have been quite spectacular.  Still is I imagine.  I really must find the time to push these two research projects further.  What an incredibly contrast in design approach.

In 2013 I attempted something rather ambitious for the RTC in Auckland.  I took 3 memorable 20th century office developments, modelled them in Revit and used those the models to present a comparative analysis, attempting to set each within its social and political context.  I had a mixed response, ranging from intense enthusiasm to total bewilderment.  It was an immensely rewarding project for my personally on so many levels.  One of the buildings was Lever House in New York.  This model was developed in some detail, but I haven't done much with it since 2013.  Comes out nicely in Enscape though.  I've done a bit of post-processing here, just for fun

I showed some images of Casa del Fascio, not long ago.  So I won't show that again here.  But the third office was the Gherkin, which I did develop further for a while, trying to turn it into a tutorial for architecture students who wanted to build the model for themselves.  That was also lots of fun, but after three lengthy posts I ran out of steam.  The model as it stands is a bit like a semi-peeled onion, revealing the underlying structure.  My intention, in all this work is educational: to use BIM as a tool for understanding our built history.  So it's not always necessary to create a complete replica of the original.  It's all about the thought processes that kick in while you are modelling.   Learning by doing.

ENSCAPE MEETS RONCHAMP

In finalising my preparations for the BiLT Europe conference coming up in Denmark shortly, I opened up some of my old projects with Enscape3d active and saved a few screenshots.  It's amazing what you can do in just half an hour with almost no editing at all, just selecting viewpoints and sliding the shadow angle around to different times of day.

There are other controls of course and I made some use of the white mode and the black outlines slider.  Depth of field has some potential but I couldn't get it to do anything particularly interesting in this case.

The model is le Corbusier's famous chapel at the top of a hill of course.  The roof is a hollow ferro-cement shell, inspired by aircraft wing construction techniques.  There are blog posts from several years ago that go into these issues in a bit more depth, but I have never really got around to taking this work to a reasonable conclusion. 

I do have a plan to follow up my Project Soane website with something more general which features analysis of a wide variety of buildings in the context of the societies that gave birth to them.  It will be called "The Way We Build" and it's a project that's been at the back of my mind for at least 20 years.  I thought it was going to be a book, but that never happened.  A website is easier to start up in a small way and gradually enhance so let's hope I can find the time and energy to do it well.
I am open to collaboration of course.  It would be wonderful if students of building /architecture /history, the old and the young, could work together to create an open resource of models and analytical diagrams, available over the internet. 

I think this is one of the great missed opportunities of BIM: using the technology for education and research.  There are lots of courses ABOUT BIM, but far too little use of BIM to actually DO education and research.  Why aren't students and teachers of architecture bowled over by the incredible power of the BIM pencil to reveal how buildings work?

By the way, that last image shows the village church at the bottom of the hill in relation to the chapel of "Our Lady up top" Not the kind of image you normally expect to get from Revit (sadly) but as an architect, and a student of the history of buildings I do like to use my favourite "drawing tool" to convey these kinds of relationship.  Ultimately it becomes boring to talk about technique all the time instead of just using BIM software as if it was a pencil, in a natural, uncomplicated way to explore and express ideas.

So this is just a tribute to Enscape3d, and another thankyou to the guys for letting me use it for educational purposes, plus a bit of a teaser for what I am planning to do, moving forward.  I have modelled lots of interesting buildings over the past few years: Robey House, bits and pieces of Gaudi, Casa del Fascio, the Gherkin, Lever House, Newari houses of Kathmandu, Temple of Poseidon, Pantheon, Borromini, Soane of course, Hawksmoor churches, Palladio (the last 2 as urban design studies)  I will try to generate some more Enscape images from these models and share them here.

Maybe you will get inspired to join my mission.