WEEKLY BULLETIN

 Couple of weeks really.  Summarising progress and picking out some highlights for comment. 

I’m calling this a weekly bulletin as opposed to the “live stream” which is the more spontaneous posts that go out direct to LinkedIn and give a flavour of the work I am doing on that particular day.  First thing to mention is the site context, a linked file that has massing models for the locations around of all six of Hawksmoor’s London churches.  I did a bit of an update to this to clean things up and sort out some odd levels, plus extend a green surface down to the river.  I actually added a few building blocks in that area, dotted around so it doesn’t look so empty. 

I’m showing the canal (the Limehouse cut) but not the Limehouse Basin, because all those man-made docks were built much later. The wharfs and warehouses were directly on the river during the 18^th century.  There is a small creek at Limehouse which would have been a handy docking location in Hawksmoor’s day.  That’s down past Narrow Street and a famous pub called “the grapes”.

Seems ages ago that I roughed out some timberwork in the roof.  I really don’t know what the roof structure was like when first built.  I think it’s been redone at least twice.  In particular, I am keen to understand what the four big columns are doing.  Are they providing a useful structural function?  If so, this implies that there are four main spans, all roughly equal and forming a rectangle around the circular centre piece of the plaster ceiling. 

The ceiling continues to impress me, the more I work on it.  I created a line-based family for the modillions: closely spaced, scroll-shaped brackets that emulate the ends of rafters.  I think that’s the origin of this as a decorative device: rafter ends carved shapes with scrolls and foliage.  I’m using a highly simplified abstraction of the archetypal form, but the overall effect is already quite rich.  I think there is a serious challenge here if we take the detail level any higher.  How to represent the richly decorated forms cleanly and convincingly at different scales (coarse, medium, fine)

Ryan has done a great job with the organ.  That’s his third (he did two for Notre Dame). I have roughed out the timber work of the galleries.  It’s not right, but it gives a good impression.  The pews are highly simplified and also not the right size and spacing.  We have new data so it’s on my list to give them a second pass.

Nick Fuller is a new volunteer on “the way we build”.  He’s started to tackle the windows, adding glazing bars and the triangular lay-lights that were added in modern times.  There was probably a more conventional opening section in this location before.  I guess the current design is a fire precaution, providing ventilation with a very simple self-closing mechanism in the case of fire to dampen down the air supply and give people time to escape.

While Nick is down to tackle most of the windows, I had to spend a little time improving the ones on the ground floor of the entrance elevation.  My first roughing out didn’t even have glass, and although there was a hint of a stone surround, with a semicircle over a smaller rectangle, I didn’t include a pediment.  So as reported to LinkedIn at the time I pushed this particular family up to the next level.  The timber sliding sashes I made for Project Soane came in handy for a bit of cannibalization.  These windows help to light double-storey stair-wells.  I made a first attempt at forming the south stair in wood.  The door to the spiral stair for the bell tower leads off the upper flight half-way up.  Started to think about how that works.

Every now and then I stop for half an hour or so and look around the model in the Enscape3d live window.  This is a great way of seeing your work with a fresh eye.  Also a good chance to take some screen shots.  You can slide the time of day around using the “U” & “I” keys.  I always keep a lookout for lighting effects that enhance the composition.  In this case a bit of a lens-flare/sun burst.  There are plaster ceilings below the timber of the galleries and the cross beams between columns and walls are boxed out in plaster also.  So we’ve got that happening in the model now.

It’s been an absolute pleasure having Rufus Frampton as a contact on the ground in Limehouse he has a long history with the church and to some extent with two more of Hawksmoor’s six.  He has provided very useful pictures of the stair halls.  Even better are the snapshots of plans drawn in the 1990s which give new insights into the spatial complexity of the spaces below the bell tower. 

I was able to bring jpegs into Revit views and scale them to match the model which is set to a blue-green wireframe representation.  These views were then arranged on a single sheet so it’s easy to jump between them and figure out what’s going on.  Some quite tricky half-levels and interconnections, solid sections of walling (the cores are modeled in place) and vaulted and domed spaces that interlock in section.  I had a great time figuring this out.

 

Rufus sent us some little video clips as a way to convey the narrow, curved spaces behind the organ that lead up short flights of stairs to an upper cross-passage that overlooks the circular entrance space (double height)  We don’t have those short stair flights yet, but the basic level changes are in the model now.  The overall size of this model is still a bit of a guesstimate, taken from Google Earth as shown in the previous post.  At some point, Rufus will give us some check dimensions.  To be honest I’m not in a big hurry to get these.  It will probably lead to a weekend of adjusting everything by a few percentage points. 

The North Stair was rebuilt after a fire around 1850 so it’s stone with cast iron balusters.  Instead of the door on to the spiral stair, there is an open archway and a stair up to the back of the organ.  Otherwise the layout is pretty much the same.

I hadn’t noticed before that the slot windows that show up on the outside of the bell tower reappear inside the stair lobby/ south porch.  Makes perfect sense of course, a bit of borrowed light definitely helps when climbing narrow stone stairs that seem to wind up endlessly.

I’m quite please with the way the two stair porches are shaping up in the model.  Much easier to understand their similarities and differences with a Revit model to hand.

 

We have no attempt to model the spiral stair treads yet.  I do have a family that we used on Notre Dame, just to give the impression without necessarily working out the exact runs and landing positions.  I would be intrigued to know if everything is built in stone, or if there is some brick fill in certain areas, maybe even rubble cores in the thicker portions.  The loft over the South Porch is entered via the spiral stair.  It seems that you go up a couple of treads on the stone stair, through a door onto a wooden landing, and down again to the loft floor level.  I have a vague memory of this, and it’s shown on one of the hand drawn plans.

The spiral seems to just keep going and the landings at doorways are placed outside the circle. Makes sense.

 

By coincidence one of my connections on LinkedIn shared some restoration work they have been doing which features classical columns.  There is a nice site photo of the brick core, as well as a shot of the in-situ silicone mould which they took in order to cast replacement capitals in the shop.  I guess these were done in two halves for fitting on site. 

This got me thinking again about the internal columns at St Anne’s which belong to the Composite Order and have plain shafts.  There are two basic types: round with entasis, and square pilasters which go straight up and down.

 

 

The shafts for the square pilasters are basic flat plastering jobs, but I’m intrigued to know how the round ones were done.  You can set up the profile in the workshop and “spin” a column casing in two halves.  But is there a way to spin a smooth shaft with entasis in-situ?  Seems like it would be quite cumbersome to set up, but what do I know?  I guess you would be able to tell by tapping the columns and listening for that “hollow” sound.  Can’t imagine that it would be possible to achieve a solid bedding throughout on such large castings.

 

 

 

 

SAUCE CODE … OR EMBODIED LEARNING?

This is actually a couple of weeks old.  Not sure why it didn't get posted before.

I am getting some good responses by sharing progress images on LinkedIn from my work on St Anne’s Limehouse.  Interesting discussions.

First of all a pretty picture.  Current work on the ceiling: tightening up the profiles of the main cornice and the flat-panel edge-mouldings.  Then adding some detail: modillians and roses.  All highly simplified and judged from low-res photos.  I’m learning a huge amount in the process of creating this intelligent digital model.  That’s the embodied learning part.  I am deeply engaged for several hours at a stretch, figuring this building out, and it’s hell of a rush.

 

 

One point that comes up repeatedly.  Am I using a point cloud? 

Well I would love to have point cloud data for every project I work on, but most of what I do is based on much more sketchy information.  Way back in the early 2000s I bought a book in London about Nicolas Hawksmoor.  It’s one of those Thames & Hudson art books covering his whole career and well-illustrated.

A decade later I decided to visit his six London churches and take photos along the way.  Then I did that again last year.  The difference was that I had a contact at the Limehouse church who had agreed to show me around. 

But NO.  I don’t have a point cloud.  The plan I have is hand drawn, digitized from that book using a cheap digital camera about 17 years ago, and has no scale bar.  I scaled this up using an estimated length from Google Earth.  So it’s a very rough approximation, but that’s OK.  It’s a digital model so you can adjust the model based on new information and the drawing automatically updates … pretty much.

 

 

The photos are very helpful, especially the external ones.  The internal pics are a bit grainy and blurred.  Some areas are not covered at all. So what it means is that I have to do things the old-school way. Hand-Eye-Brain: that amazing interactive feedback loop that we inherited from the great ape line and evolved to new levels with our opposable thumbs and super-social brains. 

Building on traditions from Leonardo to Piranesi to Francis Ching you can learn to judge proportions, to stand back and spot relationships that don’t look right, to keep improving and refining your model.  I love the problem-solving nature of this way of working.  New insights pop up all the time. It may be about ways of using Revit, it may be about the Classical tradition, could be about church design or what churches mean in the development of western culture. 

Learning by doing.

 

 

I like to start with a very “broad brush”.  Just get something down that we can reflect on and begin the process of asking questions and forming opinions about what this building means to me.  So the truth is that I took the work I did in 2014 on trust and scaled the plan based on a family I created then. 

Time to cross-check this against current google earth data.

Well it’s not bad.  I estimate it could be up to 5% smaller than real life.  It’s always difficult to tell because, apart from the fact that the scale bar is only approximate, the photograph is never quite from directly above the building.  Here you can see a bit of the west and south sides.  The effect is particularly noticeable on the tower of course.

MODULAR DOORS

 

When I talk about modular Revit families, I usually mean a system of nested components with consistent sets of parameters that can be “mixed and matched” to create a large variety of combinations.  For several years now, I have been using this approach for doors. 

The great thing about this, is that the system evolves over time.  This weekend I decided to expand its ability to handle doorways with arched heads.  Half-round heads are easy because of the way semi-circles “snap into place” in Revit.  Shallow curves are a bit harder.  You will need a couple of extra parameters and a formula or two.

This is the way that I do it.

 

 

Now I need to apply this to my nested modular system for doors.  In the host family, we have a wall and an Opening Cut.  In this case I added some loose geometry for the plaster surrounds.  It’s not totally loose, the extrusions are hosted on reference planes, and the sweeps are hosted on the extrusions, but it’s not a nested family.  I might do that later for additional stability.

First level of nesting gives two families called “Frame” & “Doorset”  These are linked back to width & height parameters in the host family.  Nested inside the Doorset are “Panel” & “Swing” families, also with linked parameter sets.  Because these are double doors there are two of each.  The Swing family is purely symbolic, so it’s only visible in plan views, and will not be affected by the shape of the door head.

 

 

The hard work here was setting up the formulas in the nested components (Frame, Doorset & Panel) and linking together the “Rise” parameters so they can be controlled from the top level.

There is an extra complication because the frame is bigger than the Doorset, based on the thickness of the jambs.  Fortunately all the curves are concentric, so it’s not too difficult to make the necessary adjustments and get everything to flex in harmony.

The good news is that, now I have set it all up, when I want a different door panel I can just dig down and edit that component.  Similarly I can vary the frame.  It will be fairly simple to adapt this into rectangular doors with an arched fanlight, for example.  Also quite easy to convert it into a single door.

For now, though I just have the door I need for this project, and if I need to adjust the width or the height … no problem.

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.