UP THE MALACCA STRAITS

Soane operated at the tipping point of the industrial revolution, witnessed the birth pangs of the modern world. He began his career seeking the favour of aristocratic patrons, but through his work with the directors of The Bank helped to define the modern conception of the commercial / professional architect. The RIBA was founded shortly after his retirement and received it's royal charter in the year of his death.

It has taken me 40 years longer than my contemporaries (from the class of '72) to get around to joining this club, which to be fair is no longer quite the elitist institution it was once felt to be.  Still feels a bit odd, to be honest, I guess I will never quite shake off those anti-establishment blues.

Soane was under constant pressure to design more economically and in some ways this drove him to develop the innovative simplifications and abstractions that we tend to value in his work.  I guess it has become one of the obsessions of the modern architect to somehow cut through the fog of tradition, revealing solutions that increase functionality while reducing cost. 

Measurement as currency is an interesting idea: systems of common units that allow us to compare and exchange disparate elements, modular components like bricks, getting paid by the hour, coins and bank notes.  These are fundamental to civilisation, urban life, that whole giant progress trap with all its mixed blessings.  Do we want to continue down this road, constantly measuring our worth in dollars and cents? Can we really compute the value of life?  Do we like Soane's round-arched brick mode because it's cheap (ROI), or because ... well it's HOT!

I am fresh from a weekend in George Town on the island of Penang, hence the images.  It's named after King George III, the ruling monarch for much of Soane's life.  It was founded by the East India Company, a private corporation, like the Bank of England which also acted as a proxy for the state in many ways.  That was 1786, two years before Soane's appointment by the Bank and the beginnings of England's successful bid to challenge the Dutch dominance of the Spice Trade.  This was a company that had already made vast profits from the cotton trade, tapping into ancient traditions of urbanism and long-distance trade all across South East Asia, the Indian Ocean, and up the Arabian Gulf.

All across this region there is a hybrid urban culture: Chinese building forms fused with the classical traditions so dear to Soane, and blending over time into Art Deco and ultimately mainstream modernism. Soane loved to collect, measure, catalog, compare.  Perhaps his rise to prominence from a humble background was only possible because of England's aggressive policy of commercial and military expansion.  Francis Light, who founded George Town was the illegitimate son of an English aristocrat, as were so many of Europe's colonial adventurers.  It's fascinating that the ruling elite was so adept at incorporating talented commoners like Soane, and tainted offspring like Light, into its schemes.

So I turned 66 the other day.  Two thirds of the way to 99, (on the off-chance that I make it.)  Eating healthy has become an obsession and I am horrified by the food that gets dished up at conferences like BiLT Asia that followed on from my Penang visit.  It's nobody's fault in particular.  The hotel offers healthier food, but at a cost. The conference organisers work to a tight budget.  You can get healthy if you ask for it, but that's not really solving the problem.  More like bribing off the more vocal protesters so as not to have to change the system for the masses.  It's no secret, obesity is one of our biggest health problems. Sugar is far worse than tobacco, but we let supermarkets sell it aggressively to the under fives, right by the till.

George Town offers a taste of times gone by: simpler, more communal, messier, more open, less sanitised, less politically correct, looser.  Are we headed for a world beyond work?  What will "competitive edge" and "goal driven" mean in the age of driverless cars and robot factories when we get paid a basic living wage for two days of "community service" per week?  And what will that mean for BIM?  Why are we so focused on production, production, production, when we have a thinking tool at our disposal that combines visual richness with embedded intelligence and structured information?  Why can't we use it to think about the lost values encoded in our urban histories?

What if the world beyond work is the age of the BIM pencil?

That's the kind of future I want to see: a world where Return on Investment is measured in Insights per Week, rather than Dollars per Hour.

So anyone out there want to do an open-source collaboration modelling Chinese Shop Houses in Revit?

INSOMNIA

I set up a Slack account for Project Soane and so far there are 3 of us exchanging thoughts merrily on the General feed.  Nathalie and Matthew (henceforth Nat & Matt) are young aspiring architects in the UK.  I've never met them but they got inspired by Project Soane and I enjoy sharing ideas with enthusiastic young people (and older ones for that matter)

I've been awake pretty much all night (thanks Nat) looking into the Privy Council Chamber that Soane designed in the 1820s when he was around the age that I am now, a little older by the time he finished.  Not sure what actually got built, but I do know that it was swept away within a decade or so by further alterations by Barry (the houses of Parliament guy) 

I made this quick model in Family Editor with model lines and a couple of glass extrusions.  It captures the essential geometry, and it was pretty quick to set up.  There's a groin vault formed where a segmental barrel vault meets another barrel vault based on a partial ellipse.  The critical factor is to have a common centre of curvature between the two vaults.  That way they intersect nicely forming straight diagonals in a plan view.  Here's a 3 dimensional version of that principle from a study I did a couple of months ago.

And another snapshot from my first attempts to model the vault used for waiting rooms A & B between the Court Room and the Governor's Office.  This shows how he converts a groin vault into his signature "Starfish" ceiling treatment.  You have to shave off the corners at the intersection to create the arms of the starfish, culminating in a shape at the apex.  In this case a circular hole for a skylight, but often a diamond shaped feature in the centre of the ceiling.

Going back to the model line version I did tonight you can see that there are semi-circles at the ends, and half elipses at the sides.  What Soane did then was to create narrow slots along the sides that shoot up to skylights bringing in light from above. (the blue extrusions in my earlier image)  The plane of the centres of curvature for all 4 arches is shown as dashed lines.  The geometry on which the actual vault is based is highlighted in red: much flatter than the waiting rooms version above.

He used this same general idea many times in different contexts and to quite different effect, which is typical Soane really.  Once he got interested in an idea or a form, he would rework it endlessly to see how far it could be pushed.  The next shot is a quick study I did earlier this year to capture the ceiling of the breakfast room he designed for his own house (now the Soane Museum)  This was painted to look like a trellis feature in a garden with the sky peeping through

I'm starting to call him a Romantic in Workaholic's clothing.  He worried away at his designs, going through multiple options before hitting on the right idea, in some ways he seems like a stubborn plodder almost, but he could be so fanciful, and many of his final designs are just stunning, especially in their treatment of light. 

I'm going to close with a shot of where those waiting rooms are.  It's a section through both of them, looking North towards Tivoli Corner.. You can see the high level windows that bring light into the rooms, They show here as black shapes above black door openings.  And just beyond is a high level window that brings light into the Governor's Room, just squeezing in below the red loop.

The space on the right is by Taylor, the main entrance lobby leading to the Court Suite/Directors Parlours.  It's a domed space with a circular lantern.  In fact, I might as well add one more image now. (It's morning and I'm editing the published post to correct a couple of typos) 

Here is the current state of the model.  It's fairly basic but you can get the idea of how the spaces work.  Feel free to volunteer to join our group and help to add more detail.

  

MIXED MEDIA

I have started publishing short pieces on Linked In.  Gives me a chance to adopt a slightly different persona, perhaps.  Here's a link to the latest

LINKED IN

It was sparked by a response to my previous post, which was about my dad and some of the paintings he did over the course of his long life.  They provide fascinating insights into the cultural life of the industrial north of England ,where I grew up. Jo wondered how I would set about depicting the social setting I live in today, as a guest-worker in Dubai.  Here's my dad's work

Actually these are all early works of his, from my childhood days.  I get very nostalgic looking at these.  I wonder if my children will get nostalgic about my Dubai pictures, 40 years from now.

About a month ago, I took some pictures of the mish-mash of low-grade shops and apartment balconies that I see on my walk to buy some local fruit and veg.  I live in International City, in fact I'm one of the pioneers who moved into this tacky/vibrant district while it was still under construction.  Actually it's Dubai, so it's still under construction ... but it was barely half built when I moved in ten years ago.  Lots of lorry drivers and nurses, receptionists, shop assistants, etc living here.  It's not very stylish, but it's kind of "real" which is difficult to find in a theme park city.

Here's what I did with one of the images.

So what is this about?  Is it art?  WTF is art anyway? ....

Exactly.  Those are the kinds of questions I'm exploring.  Trying to get more physical and intuitive, to reconnect with my submerged "drawing self", which used to be one of my primary identities.  At the same time I want to integrate this with the digital tools and processes I've been using the last couple of decades.  So you've go digital photography; hand sketching; layers, filters, transparency ... all mixed up together in a semi-accidental way while I focus my attention mainly on how to create an image that captures how I feel about this environment I live in.

In a way it's not much different from Georges Braque mixing oil paint and newspaper clippings etc ,,, except a lot less innovative and significant of course.  No big ambitions here, just me amusing myself as usual.  One of the things about art, for me, is always the interaction between form an content.  You keep flipping between the quality of the paint as "stuff on a flat surface", pure abstraction if you like, and the meaning: the emotions, the magical conjuring up of 3 dimensional reality, memories, social commentary.  So I'm absorbed in technique: how to get the digital and manual working together convincingly.  And I'm also deeply intrigued by what kinds of images I can use to capture the last 13 years of my life as an alien in the desert.

Here's the view from my desk at work, if I turn my head sideways (more or less)

I like the layers here.  A series of stripes really.  And it's kind of receding but it's also kind of flat and abstract.  I've tried to create some kind of tension between the way different stripes are treated ... the blurring in the foreground (which is kind of a cheat) the rather sloppy line drawing of the second hand car lot, overlaid with the slightly more painstaking and mechanical cross hatching of the wire fence.  Then there's the somewhat palette knife feel of the orange box vans, jumping forward from the background.  The cardboard cutout effect that emerged when I was working on the skyscraper skyline.

Anyway I'm not trying to get all pretentious here.  Just giving a feel for the stuff that flows across my consciousness as I struggle to get to grips with this activity.  It's very different from building BIM models, and I really like that.  Watch out for the next phase, when I start to sketch over Revit renders. 

"What's BIM about that ?" you may ask.  Well if BIM is about gaining deeper insights and making informed decisions, then a different perspective might just help.  If we have started to realise that BIM is really about connecting different software packages together in agile ways, so the "data flows".  And if we also know that the hard part of BIM is the people, the human interactions, the deeply embedded behaviours ... maybe we need to integrate the more physical and intuitive type activities into the BIM loop.

More to come.