FLASHBACK TO PORTO

This is another dormant post.  (dating from November 2016)  It's fun for me to look back on what I wrote a few months ago and finish my sentences, so I hope it's also of some interest to other beings out there. Flashback begins here:

I'm back at work now, but still reflecting on a very stimulating two weeks wandering across Europe.  Previous posts dealt with my weekend in Bavaria and the build up to RTC in Porto.  Of course I fell in love with Porto, and though some complained about the venue (distance to hotels, poor wifi) I was more than happy to trade convenience for ambience.  Conferences are primarily about people, so the mood of the moment is critical.  Here is a shot from the riverside terrace of the old customs hall where RTC took place.

There are two beautifully engineered bridges here: one high, soaring concrete curve, spanning the steep banks of the Duoro; one low, sweeping steel curve, skimming over the water. The view is downstream, towards the sea, and behind the chimney (top right) lies a hidden gem of modernist architecture, built in the late 1980s. 

I first became aware of the Faculty of Architecture by Alvaro Siza when I was a mature student, completing my architecture qualifications in Joburg, 25 years ago.  It's a deceptively complex composition, resulting from the careful placement of rectan))gular blocks on a triangular site.  From ground level it seems to be far more irregular than it really is.

The Alfandega Conference Centre is an impressive combination of Metal and Granite, generally vey hard and tough but with the occasional extravagant decorative flourish.  There are tram lines everywhere which were used to transport inported goods on low trolleys to their temporary resting places, awaiting customs clearance.  The floors formed of shallow brick jack-arches spanning between steel joists are typical of fire-proof construction across Europe in the nineteenth century, as are the cast-iron columns.  Everyone I spoke to was intrigued by the little round turntables wherever the tram-lines crossed.

Porto itself is full of tall, narrow houses and steep, cobbled alleyways.  Granite is the predominant material, sometimes plain and square, sometimes intricately carved and curvaceous.  Everywhere there are balcony railings and ceramic tiles, both with infinite variations on decorative themes.  The moorish influence is immediately apparent. 

I had one day to walkabout the old town with an umbrella before plunging into the BCS, a one day event focusing on "content", and bringing together manufacturers, designers and content providers.  This is another little hobby-horse of mine.  I think we should not be focussing on CONTENT as such, but rather on the role of manufacturers in BIM processes, and more particularly on how to enhance existing collaborations between designers and manufacturers using digital tools.  Stefan Larsson of BIM Object gave a very lively keynote address, and the morning sessions generated some heated debate.  It was my second time to meet Stefan, and I do think that BIM Object has made a tremendous impact in terms of alerting manufacturers to BIM.  The BIM Supply initiative that they are about to launch looks especially promising to me and I really do hope it develops into a robust platform for interactive collaboration and data flow.

My contribution was a short "rebuttal" and I used the opportunity to press my case for collaboration platforms, rather than object repositories.  I think it was well received, even though I was denied the use of slides :)  You can see the full version, complete with visuals at my docs.com site here

LINK

The afternoon workshops were a bit of an anticlimax in my view.  I'm not sure why.  Perhaps the initial vision of using a forum like this to develop standards and protocols for object creation is a bit unrealistic.  It's very valuable to bring people together and thrash ideas around, but moving on to formulat concrete proposals may be premature. 

My own position is that we have to get the collaboration processes right first, and that once manufacturers are using BIM-like environments to collaborate with designers they will see the value in continuously refining "BIM objects", in standardising datasets, improving interoperability, etc etc.  As long as BIM objects are just another marketing gimmick they are providing to designers for free, we are not going to make substantial progress.  But if they were to become essential tools for their own Specifications Advisors on the ground in every major city around the world, then I think they would become really motivated to ensure that they were really effective.

So what about RTC ... the last ever RTC as it happens.  Well it's only a name change really, but hopefully will continue the trend of opening up the conference to the wider BIM community.  Personally I find the new BiLT acronym a little clumsy, and the logo ... well it's better than the old one, but I still shudder to think what my good friend Ian (a proper logo designer) would think. 

Anyway, the proof is in the pudding, meaning the quality of the sessions, attendees and interactions.  On that score, RTC Porto was excellent.  You can never entirely predict how the sessions you select will turn out.  I always look for variety, to dabble in areas I might not otherwise consider.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.  This time I found a couple of the labs really stimulating.  The plenary sessions on day one were good, and the evening events were excellent.  Here's a snip from the keynote address: digital fabrication research.based in Zurich

LINK

People complained about the internet, but for me the ambience more than compensated.  Early evening breakouts by the riverside were just magical.  These conferences are all about the people.  Tips and tricks are svery well, but you can pick those up on the internet.  The value of a really good conference is in the sense of being part of a dynamic community, converging from a wide variety of cultural backgrounds to indulge a shared passion.  The North American conferences are great, but the European flavour is subtly different and I really enjoyed the experience.

I had two sessions to lead, a whistlestop tour of Project Soane, and a Modular Doors Lab.  I enjoyed them both in their different ways and received good feedback.  I'm doing all this for my own benifit, primarily, and at 65 I'm not really looking to enhance my resume or gain international exposure.  But it's nice to be part of a community and to feel that you are contributing something useful.  Obviously I share some common ground with the European BIM/Revit croud, despite having spend more than half my life in Africa and the Middle East.  It's a home-coming of sorts for a self-confessed global citizen.

And of course the gala dinner was a fitting climax, followed by a visit to a little classic of modern architecture the next morning.  Thanks again Porto, see you in Singapore next month, and perhaps in Arhus later in the year.

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CURTAINS FOR AARHUS

I don't know much about Aarhus.  Didn't know anything until it was announced as the next venue at the conclusion of RTC Europe in Porto.  I won some free accommodation in a not-very-serious quiz at the end of the Building Content Summit (if they remember) which has enticed me into submitting a couple of abstracts.  More to the point, I really enjoyed the atmosphere at my first European version of the event and made some good friends.  No longer RTC of course, this will be the first BiLT Europe, rebranding to reflect a broadening audience, with a somewhat improved logo.

Arhus means "River Mouth" apparently and the town has Viking origins. Turns out to be Denmark's second largest city, with Scandinavia's largest University and a massive container port. I'm looking forward to drinking in some Scandinavian atmosphere, assuming it works out.  Perhaps I will manage a day or two in Copenhagen also, some buildings there I would love to see.  And of course every culture has its own quirks in terms of building techniques and styles: the way these have been expressed over the years.  Always inspiring to visit a new city with a few hundred years of cultural history behind it.

Conferences give me a motivation to explore something more thoroughly and in more depth than I might otherwise do, and I usually try to do something significantly different each time. Over the past year or so I have had some interesting challenges using Revit's Curtain Wall tool, and I realise that I would like to undertake a more systematic review of its capabilities and quirks.

Overlaying an element of randomness onto a regular grid is a simple but effective architectural maneuver, with obvious relevance to the Curtain Wall tool.  I've really enjoyed trying out different approaches to this, and look forward to sharing my experiences.  Nothing fancy, just basic Family Editor stuff with a sprinkling of lateral thinking. 

Revisiting a project to prepare a presentation usually throws up new ideas. 
You wouldn't expect to use curtain walls on Project Soane, but there are many internal areas where he used a finish that imitates stone courses with recessed joints, so I've been experimenting with curtain panels that mimic various tiling patterns.  Fill patterns with matching render appearances are all very well, but sometimes you want to express the 3 dimensionality of the joints in shaded views.

I've had several goes at the Mushrabiya Screen in the past, with varying degrees of success.  Last week I put a couple of ideas together with a slightly different twist.  The result is a very flexible modular system for generating new scalable patterns, rapidly and reliably. It's my best attempt so far, and subject to further development over the next few months.

I worked on a project last year which is just coming back to life again.  Not going to reveal any specific details, but it involves insulated panel walls that slope and curve.  All this is half-hidden behind a slatted screen which is not yet modelled, our scope is the interior fit-out, so I've been modelling someone else's design as context for ours.  It was an interesting challenge and I'll be sharing my solution for what it's worth.  Something of a hybrid, but it does the job.

I've also been giving some support to teams doing concept designs for residential developments.  My contribution has mostly been to develop families that facilitate rapid mocking-up of external façade ideas.  One of the techniques I am playing with involves using the curtain wall tool to model both structural frame and infill treatments.  It shows some potential, at early concept stage, when things are still very fluid. 

I've also done some work, at the request of another colleague, on ways to model junctions of mullions with shaped sections that give better close-up results than the
default "square cut-off".  Again, it's early days and I will be exploring this further before venturing towards the land of the Vikings.

And to conclude this post, I have also been exploring the use of curtain walls to represent timber panelling.  Not so sure about this one.  I think it will only really pay off where there is a lot of regularity and repetition.  Shaping and cutting around doorways, windows, fireplaces etc. is a bit of a nightmare.  Still it's an interesting challenge to stretch the capabilities of the tool.

My second abstract also involves an in-depth study of a particular Revit category: Planting.  But that will be another post.

DURABILITY

Konigsplatz in Munich is a set piece of Neoclassical urban design by Leo von Klenze, court architect to the king of Bavaria.  I stopped off there, pretty much straight from the airport.  I thought it would be interesting to compare this rather formal, academic style with Soane's more idiosyncratic interpretation of the classical orders.  My first shot illustrates the endless variation that is possible within the classical idiom.  Notice the frieze running around the neck of the column, somewhat unusual for an Ionic capital.

This is really a continuation of my previous post where I shared my "tips and tricks" from Washington.  The next one is from my second session. This is me on one of my hobby-horses, pushing the idea that we shouldn't restrict BIM to our day jobs.  I like to think of the "BIM pencil" as an all-purpose thinking tool that can be used in any context where buildings are involved.  My current focus is historical research, but I've long thought that it would be interesting to use BIM tools to develop a reference work like Neufert, or AJ Metric Handbook.  Could be in book format, could be a website, could be really good, what do you think?

Back to von Klenze, and some running ornament. Not sure what this is called, but it's a flattened out version of something that Soane also used.  The flower motif that pops up between the "tongues" must be honeysuckle, also known as woodbine.  That also features quite a bit in the Bank of England.  The abstraction of this Bavarian version reminds me of Soane in his "inventive simplification" mood, which seems to have come and gone depending on the budget available and what the critics had been saying about him recently.

How about a bit of Corinthian?  This one is for Paul Aubin, currently playing with drones in Tuscanny.  It's "light and curly" feel is similar to the one Paul created as a virtuoso exercise in "Point World" geometry.  This also features honeysuckle, a rather unusual choice for the flower motif, and the whole thing has a completely different feel when compared to Soane's version at the bank, which I modelled in a very clunky but surprisingly effective way about a year ago.

Next tip, and this one is from the lab I held in Porto last week.  It's also a fairly conventional tip, and a rework of one I gave in a post I did earlier this year when I was starting off on my "modular doors" idea.

Now for a building by Paul Troost, who was one of Hitler's favoured architects.  Like Albert Speer he used a kind of "stripped classicism" which could be interpreted as taking the simpification that Soane & von Klenze explored and taking it much further so that you get a kind of hybrid between Modernism and Classicism.  There were lots of people who did this in the first half of the twentieth century, but as a style it has become rather tainted by it's association with Hitler (and Mussolini)  This building operated as a Music School for many years, but appears to be empty at the moment.

Another doors tip next.  Seems very obvious, but it's something I missed when I first started making doors, and talking to others at the conference in Porto I found that I wasn't the only on who found the default orientation of doors rather illogical.  But however logical it may seem to "correct" the default template, sooner or later it will get you into trouble when you swap out one of your doors with one made "the default way".

And back to Konigsplatz, this time a panorama of the whole thing, two buildings and a gateway.  Soane would have been really jealous of this kind of commission.  He longed to have a noble patron who would give him the task of devising a monumental civic work to ennoble the city.  For my money though, he was much better off hammering away at the thorny problems he was given to solve by the governors of the Bank of England.  Commercial clients represented the future of architectural patronage in an industrialising world and ultimately Soane helped to shape the modern profession based on his experience working with the governors of the Bank.

Now for a tip from my Project Soane session in Porto.  This addresses the thorny question of LOD and what represents good practice in family editor.  In my view there are very few hard and fast rules.  You have to asses the situation you are in and model accordingly.  Sometimes a really simple and elegant solution may fit the bill.  At other times you might have to compromise and accept something slightly "hacky" that captures the design intent by fooling the eye into seeing more detail than is actually there.

Many of the classical buildings in Munich use a type of stone that seems to have air bubbles in it, sort of a bit like travertine but without the marble quality.  I would love to know if this stone has a particular name and where it comes from.  I'm assuming it is local to the Munich area, but that's just a guess.  Was it used because architects liked the texture? or was it just because it was available?

On our day trip to Nuremberg we came across the house where Albrecht Durer lived.  We didn't have time to go inside.  Durer's father was a goldsmith who moved from Hungary to Nuremburg in early manhood, but the son showed such precocious talent in drawing as a teenager that he was apprenticed to an artist/printmaker.  I was first introduced to his work by my father, who taught me that one of the best ways to understand how something works is to draw it.  The act of drawing is a powerful tool for understanding how something works, what really makes it tick.  I like to think of BIM tools like Revit as "pencils with super powers".  I construct virtual models in order to gain a deeper understanding of a particular building, architect, style or technology.  In that sense I see my work as a continuation of the renaissance tradition established by master draughtsmen such as Durer

My final "triptix" follows on from this.  Masterful technique is essential to Durer's art, but it is not an end in itself.  Far too often we measure our worth by our technical skill, showing off and calling ourselves "guru" or "expert elite".  That's all well and good, but ultimately you either have something worthwhile to say or you don't and no amount of clever trickery will substitute for insight into the human condition, emotional impact, wisdom and compassion.  I would rather touch someone's heart than blow them away with my virtuosity.  Shakespeare was a master of language, but what really makes his plays immortal is his ability to make us see ourselves afresh, to identify with his characters and to be deeply moved  by the tragicomic poetry of life itself.

Love and lust are common themes in Shakespeare, but less obviously so in architecture, unless perhaps you count the voluptuous curves of a baroque church or a Gaudi roofscape.  I am not a great fan of phallic symbols, but if you are going to stray in that direction, do it with style and proportion, as in the image below: a stone buttress at the corner of Durer's house.  Debates about architectural style can often take on a moralistic tone.  Copying the modernism of 100 years ago is somehow more "honest" than taking inspiration from Soane's classicism of 200 years ago.  To me the issue is not so much about which precedents you choose to take as your starting point, but how well you handle the universals: proportion, rhythm, texture, light and shade ... and of course your ability to find a form that is appropriate to the project (its function and its setting)

And so we come back to Zepellin Field.  My final image shows one of the terraces that surround and define the space where thousands paid hommage to the Fuhrer who led the German people on a disastrous escapade, not long before I was born.  Albert Speer found a simple and effective solution: using precast planks and uprights to stabilise rammed earth steps.  Current "renovations" aim to reset these simple precast elements, plant a slow-growing species of grass, and mow them periodically.  It will cost money to stop them reverting to the jungle that you see as a diagonal green strip in the image below.  Is a "stabilised ruin" the appropriate form in which to preserve this shocking piece of human history.  Personally I don't think the city of Nuremberg carries any special burden of culpability.  There go I ... but for the grace of circumstance, the accident of birth.  I was impressed by the careful and considered way that they are going about the task of curating the National Socialist relics that they have interited.  If only we could all treat our histories with the same lack of bias, hubris, sentimentality.