WINDOWS ON REALITY

I think I’m going to coin another word, or maybe an acronym. BDYBRN …

It represents the Body-Brain symbiont.  Most animals are BDYBRNs. Sponges are an exception, but crucially the body doesn’t move about.  There are some wormy things that have nervous systems but no real CPU.  Then you get to the BDYBRNs.  The idea is that our thinking is rooted in physical actions of our bodies.  We think by doing.  

My "doing" usually involves BIM, but in this case it’s a combination of hand drawing and image processing (Sketchbook Pro & PIXLR) all “done” on my phone.  What a strange word that is to give to that ubiquitous extension to our BDYBRN.  I guess a lot of people still do use the auditory channel (Phon-) but for me it’s very rare.  Text and images dominate entirely in my use of a mobile device.

This 4x-tiych image dates back to sketching I did a couple of years ago when I got back from my first Voterra workshop.  My second visit is coming up in April. We will be scanning various built elements that have survived from past ages… anything up to 3000 years ago. Personally I am also interested in current vernacular building trades, which clearly evolved from a deep past history.

The windows are especially fascinating.  Side hung casements with a variety of configurations involving louvres, glass and solid panels, opening in or out.  The louvres commonly have a top-hung element hinging outwards, nested inside a larger side-hung panel.  The complex profiles on the edges of the framing, and the varieties of metal hardware used, are quite fascinating.  

Carved stone surrounds were once a very common feature, and I would like to capture a number of examples of these as mesh objects.  Photo-textured meshes would be great suitable for viewing on a web page.  Then I would like to extract “typical elements” from the mesh to incorporate into Revit families.  This would allow us to represent shapes that are very difficult to model with native Revit geometry, typically resulting in very heavy files.  It would also capture some of the textured irregularity of a heritage building.  These things were not built yesterday, and that sense of insight into a bygone age is a large part of the fascination we have for old structures.

I assembled these sketches after an online meetup with other members of the group who will be attending this year.  It was a way of revitalizing my memory of that intense experience, two years ago.  Scanning through folders, selecting images that “jump forward” in my BDYBRN awareness system.  Then processing those selected images, spending time “doing stuff,” drawing lines to highlight aspects of the geometry, filling regions, applying filters … all the time following my subconscious urges to simplify and condense the image into an eye-catching essence.  


All the time while working my BDYBRN is going “how was this actually built?” “why do they do it like that?” “when was glass introduced” and similar speculations, sometimes pausing occasionally to wave my arms around and other bodily thinking motions.


Thinking by doing.

STEPPING STONES

We see what we expect to see.  There are lots of psychology experiments that play off this reality.  The famous gorilla suit guy waltzing through the basketball players is particularly dramatic.  I’ve been reading and watching discussions in the world of neuroscience and cognition.  We are engaged in a “learning by doing” exercise as we recreate Notre Dame.  The “embodied mind” and “predictive cognition” are academic variations on this theme.  We understand the world by acting upon it.  We act by predicting what will happen when we do X, noting any prediction errors and adjusting our actions accordingly.  

All our ideas are metaphors deriving from the ways our bodies interact with the world.  I am “falling behind” with my blog posts.  This weekend, Francois shared images from a book he had acquired.  It’s full of drawings of Notre Dame, but it’s not altogether clear who made the drawings and how accurate they are.  This is discussed in the foreword of the book.  Certainly, there are many discrepancies between the drawings and the cathedral as it was a year ago.  

Difficult to interpret.

• Mistakes by the artist?  
• Changes made to the building by Viollet le Duc and others?  
• How will we ever know? 

The only way I know is to “do stuff”.  If you want to understand something, try to draw it.  That was my mantra as I was growing up.  We learn by acting upon the world and picking up on anomalies.  

Among the drawings are the two end elevations of the transepts: North and South.  Every time we have set about making a family for these locations, we have quickly discovered that they are quite different.  And yet, at a glance we see them as twins.  This delusion persists despite the discovery of multiple differences.  This weekend I realized that the horizontal elements on the North façade are systematically lower than those on the South.  

There are fascinating little flights of steps leading “nowhere” at the ends of the Triforium galleries where they meet the transepts and turn the corner.  I have looked at these on the TruView site many, many times.  Actually, they don’t go nowhere, one of them leads to an access door.  Maybe they both did, originally.  There are small access doors below the steps in both cases.  

Looking is not seeing.  As soon as I thought about “making” these steps I noticed something new.  There is a zig-zag pattern.  It’s almost as if they are straight versions of the spiral stairs that lead up to the roof.

This is a fascinating variation on the “cantilever stair” beloved by Soane, and more correctly called a Torsion Stair because each tread is supported on two edges, although the whole stair appears to cantilever from the wall.  It also reminds me of those kinds of ladder that have different rungs for left and right legs.  Clearly you have to predict which step is intended for which leg before attempting to climb these stepping-stones.  I imagine that most of us would do this quite subconsciously.  


Amazing how often our body does the thinking for us, and our brains just go along for the ride.

It has been a weekend of small insights.  We started to unravel the access routes that weave their way through gothic cathedrals quite early on in our modelling activities, but they are very complex and varied.  I had assumed that there were spiral stairs at all four corners of the transepts, simply because there are external projections that climb all the way up to the eaves.  I knew that those to the west didn’t extend to ground level, but so what?


Well it seems that they don’t exist at all.  Why then the splayed projections?  As far as I can tell these allow for narrow passageways within the thickness of the wall, leading to the “bridges” that cross below the rose windows.  There must be small flights of steps within these passages to handle the different levels, but not continuous spirals like there are on the East side.

When I first tackled the Bell Towers, I tried to make them square. Couldn’t quite manage it, and it’s clear now that it was a mistake. They are markedly rectangular in plain. Wider in the North – South direction. So I’ve started to correct this.  On the right a sketch that I did on my phone while mulling over how the stepping-stones worked.  It’s quite staggering the extent to which the Note 8 has become an extension of my brain-body amalgam.  I guess it started with clay tablets and cuneiform, invaded my childhood in the form of pencil & paper, then mutated into this all-purpose device that allows me to collect and/or originate dozens of images per day.

It connects me to hundreds of people around the world who share an interest in buildings.  We exchange selected items from our daily encounters with this domain.  Recent among these was drone captured geometry of a rose window.  Alfredo commented on this and I was motivate to find the source, a private school in West Sussex, not far from where my parents once lived.  

This got me thinking about a comparative study of Rose Window Geometry.  Revit’s drafting tools suit this task better than hand sketching.  I need at least another 5 of these to make it worthy of the name “study”.

Nader joined our team recently and has been looking at stained glass material textures.  I think it may be difficult to create materials that render equally well in different applications, but some good progress is being made.  There are at least three different styles of stained glass:  

• Richly coloured medieval style pictures, 
• “grisaille” patterns in more muted colours and 
• “modern” abstract designs created in the 1960s … which is what I am showing below.

Project Notre Dame is quite an intense group experience, with a common goal and regular interactions.   More diffusely this interweaves with other networks, notably LinkedIn and YouTube.  There are seemingly endless communities of enthusiasts out there.  Last weekend I watched some time-lapse drawings of decorative scroll-work and foliage.  

This reminded me of work I was doing just before Notre Dame invaded my consciousness.  I was working through classical motifs (rosettes, acanthus leaves) with a combination of Revit modelling and digital sketching.  At that stage I was just mostly sketching over photographic images, often simplifying and abstracting, but not inventing from scratch.  The videos helped me to believe that freestyle improvisation was achievable.  


My first attempt is very loose and quirky, but quite lively.  No guides or source, I just started drawing and made it up as I went along.  I am loving the contrast between this quick flight of fancy, and the long haul of recreating a cathedral.  Geometrical precision of the rose window geometry versus free-flowing lines and wash effects.

TASKINATING

First a seductive shot of the east end with Ryan’s choir stalls in place.

Maybe I should start to invent new words.  Human beings have a remarkable capacity to combine unrelated ideas and imbue the result with fresh meaning.  This is the basis of metaphor which is absolutely fundamental to language.  Time “runs out” because we have bodies that jogged across the African savannah for thousands of generations.  Abstract concepts evolve from physical interactions.  Language is “outside my sphere” of expertise, but I do find it “fascinating”.  Interestingly, spell-check offers this as a correction to my invented word and adds the synonym “captivating”.


This weekend I will be “taskinating” for Project Notre Dame, “capturing” tasks and connecting them to relevant reference images.  We have a couple of new recruits who have yet to discover their niche within our endeavours.  (my mind conjures an image of drawing back a curtain covering a gothic recess). So let’s “get down” to it.

RUNNING ORNAMENT


This could take the form of line-based families, or perhaps railings.  The individual elements which repeat at regular intervals could start life as standalone GM families or they could be generated by other software packages as mesh objects or maybe ACIS solids.  The native Revit route is an interesting one to me: how to capture the essence of a complex form using the simple geometry tools available to the family editor.  This implies the kind of simplification and abstraction that architects love, witness the “thumbnail” sketch.  But if we eventually want to capture some of the finer detail we will need to look at mesh modeling packages like 3ds Max.

MATERIAL TEXTURES


We have an improved stone texture now, but probably not “final”. Stained glass is an ongoing challenge.  Perhaps we can start with a translucent material based on the abstract patterns installed in some windows in the 1960s.   


https://www.ina.fr/contenus-editoriaux/articles-editoriaux/1965-la-restauration-des-vitraux-de-notre-dame-de-paris/


How should we represent standing seam lead roofing?  Can a material texture be combined with simplified geometry to give the illusion of complex carved detail?  What about the flooring materials?  Is the current black & white checkerboard good enough? How should we handle the patterned marbles of the choir?  How about the rich painted colours of the chapels?

DORMERS


These come in 3 main sizes.  The smallest ones, I think are for light & ventilation. The middle size ones may well be access doors, and the largest ones have clock faces and probably some glazing, below and to the sides.

RIBBED PILASTERS


Along the triforium galleries there are little clusters of three colonettes between the bays.  These are currently represented by a placeholder family that could do with a little more development.  There are other taller clusters along the sides of the nave and transepts.  

RECESSES


Along the outer walls of the triforium galleries there are recesses and behind these, store-rooms.  Some of the recesses are blank, some have small paired windows, and some also have a door below this glazing.  We need to add the doors and glazing.  Should they be nested families, or separately placed?  Looking at the Leica Tru-View site these niches seem to be plastered.  So once again it’s a matter of developing the current placeholder families a bit further.

METAL RAILINGS


There is a guard rail at the edge of the triforium where it overlooks the nave.  I think this is a relatively modern addition.  Elaborately scrolled railings and gates separate the choir from the aisles around the apse (the ambulatory)   What level of complexity (LOD) should we employ here?  Again I suspect these are 18^th or 19^th century features.  The railings separating the chapels from the aisles seem more medieval in flavor but rather modern in construction.  I wonder if there are any metalwork designs in Viollet le Duc’s dictionary that we could use?

So I didn’t get around to doing a picture for the railings.  Just used some shots of the East End with Ryan’s choirs stalls, secondary altars etc in place.  There are railings in this area, and a fat, low, curved stone balustrade on either side of the steps up to the high altar.  But the weekend is almost done, so I need to finish this post.  

“I have been trying to draw in my phone while preparing to sleep.”  It got me to thinking “I’m that guy”  … the one who sees his hand while riding the train and thinks “that would be an interesting picture.”  Then several months later gets around to working on it in a few stolen spare moments.  It reminds me of paintings I used to do over 50 years ago when I was hanging out in the 5th form art studio all the time.

But Ryan is the guy who knows about organs, and constructs things precisely.  Maybe.  That was the thought that popped into my head.  I’m dashing ahead, throwing out ideas, diving into unexplored territory.  Guys like Ryan are grabbing hold of a more defined task and bringing a real richness to the model.  Fleshing things out in detail.

By the way I'm quite sure that all this fitout work is from a later era.  Probably a mix of "improvements" from 16th to 19th century.  I wonder what the original medieval chancel fitout looked like?  Should they try to go back to a more authentic medieval treatment of this area for the renovation?  or should they go all modern?

If you watch that clip is seems clear that stained glass is made up in metal frames and then fixed in place behind the stone tracery.  It would be interesting to do a “construction study” of this.  I am guessing that there are two or three different approaches.  Meanwhile I was messing about with a drawing of another type of window, one that was common here in the gulf region some years ago.  This is actually based on a photo of a project we designed so that’s a digital sketch of a digital photo of a real window made from drawings exported from Revit.  And I guess that I made that family based on hand sketches and reference images provided by the design team.  Circles within circles.  People collaborating by weaving together disparate skills and aptitudes.

So I will finish with two shots of Ryan’s contributions in context.  Choir stalls in the foreground, organ in the distance.  One reason I didn’t get further with my list of tasks is that I started adjusting the model to a new grid, based on an image from Tallon’s point cloud.  It’s something we’ve been talking about for some time, and holding off, just in case we go our hands on an “actual” point cloud.  Anyway, I ran out of patience, so right now the model is a bit of a mess as I make hundreds of little adjustments to the setting out.


It’s not easy because the actual building plan is quite distorted, bent out of square as it twists through the crossing from the nave and into the chancel.  I don’t think this is intentional so it’s not worth the infinite heartache of trying to replicate those irregularities in Revit. (which loves to correct human error and straighten things up … a positive feature in my opinion)

So it will take another weekend to sort that out and package up a few more tasks.