SALTY STUFF

1982 or 3 and I was embarking on family life, although still a volunteer teacher and the only white face in a community of 1000 souls.

There were no alphabet books with an African theme to my knowledge. I was toying with the idea of a dual language picture book. It didn't go much further than this. I've always been much better at starting projects than completing them.

Shona and English, for those who don't recognise the mother tongue of most Zimbabweans. I was just thinking aloud about the concept here, doodling in my pocket notebook, much as I type these notes into my phone right now.

Filling out an idle moment with hopes, dreams and memories of this fleeting life. This one is for my daughter Wendy and for her cousins Cathy and Kundai, who stayed with us as young girls.

 

 

Titus Salt was a man of business in the Yorkshire mould. "Salt preserves" and his family dealt in the business of preservatives, chemicals of various kinds. Yorkshire was of course sheep rearing country and no doubt they supplied chemicals for treatment of fleeces.

At some point his father moved sideways into the wool business itself. As the industrial revolution took off there was a voracious appetite for more raw wool. Father and son explored new sources of fibre including Russia and South America.

Titus cut his teeth as a middle man, buying and selling, but frustrated by lack of vision among his clients, decided to set up his own factory. He chose a location some distance from the grime and congestion of Bradford, but with excellent transport links.

Here he built Salts Mill, and the model village of Saltaire. Specialising in Alpaca, a luxury cloth made with wool that others rejected. Setting standards for treating his workforce with respect. Working class housing with a hint of italianate style and all the mod cons of the 1850s.

It's an interesting story and a worthy topic for a BIM pencil study.

 

Fred Slag was a name we found on a gravestone somewhere on the outskirts of Sheffield. Was Etty his wife or his sister? Did they die in childhood as so many others? Can't remember.

But the names appealed. A stage name perhaps, or a character in some graphic novel that I could write. Partly modelled on Noddy Holder of the Slade. Briefly one of my favourite bands as I leaned in to my northern working class roots.

Now I've brought them back again as something closer to their original selves. Simple Yorkshire folk from the Victorian era. Characters to breathe some life into my BIM pencil studies of terraced housing.

 

Saltaire, the monument that Titus built to Victorian philanthropy. I'm not sure there are any deep secrets here. Ordered design with a hint of classical detail. A variety of house types, arranged sensibly with the slightly larger ones as bookends.

It must have been a hard life by our standards. Long working hours, washing clothes by hand, heating and cooking with coal. Bring in a new bucket from the shed, clean out the grate each morning, constant tending with poker, fireguard and scuttle. The pot calling the kettle black through a thick coating of soot.

I'm just old enough to remember the yearly visits of the chimney sweep. Covering all the furniture with sheets while he fed his brush up with its cane extensions, screwed in one by one.

Don't knock gas. It's a good clean fuel to help with the complex energy transition process that started during my teenage years and will continue until my grandchildren are old and grey like me. Hurry up and go slow. More haste less speed.

No shortage of ancient wisdom condensed into little nuggets. How did I get onto this? 🤣🤣🤣

Blame the BIM pencil.

 

 

Work in progress.

The corner block as originally built had two homes in an interlocking arrangement. The wings were cut back in modern times to create a single unit plan.

Along the street front the height drops to two floors, with a cellar (not yet modelled) Four houses at one level, then taking up the street slope at another 3 story unit, which also projects forward.

Simple "palace front" devices to give some extra gravitas to the main streets. It's very effective, and the more I study Saltaire, the more I see what a significant achievement it was 170 years ago.

So glad I was able to do all that data gathering back in 2007. Is it really that long? My how time slips away!

 

SKETCHING MEMORIES

 This Caricature is from 1974, sketched in my little pocket notebook from memory. I was trying to capture characters from a few months earlier, aware that my life was moving on. Shortly after that I started on the road to bricklaying via government retraining courses.

I think this guy was called Arnold. He pitched up every night in a pub called The Signpost, in Pitsmoor, Sheffield. They said his hands were locked into place from holding big heavy tongues in the steel foundries. A man of few words. Steady as a rock.

Scary to think I might be older than he was at the time I drew this. We lived in different worlds for sure, but rubbed shoulders for a while, and he made an impression on me.

Colorising done on my phone just now. How I wish I could sketch like that now. Maybe I can but I would struggle to find that easy fluid manner, AND ... it looks like him, feels like him.

Time

 

Late 70s, towards the end of my bricklaying days, a couple of years before I volunteered to work in Zimbabwe. Standing next to the dragon gate

This was my pilgrimage to Barcelona to see the work of Antoni Gaudi. Not quite so famous as he is now. There were no queues to get in. But he had been my hero since before I went to university, based on a book from Barnsley public library.

We studied history of architecture in art classes during my last couple of years at school. That's where I learnt about the classical orders and the different phases of Gothic. I got to know who Mies and Wright and Corb were.

But Gaudi is the one who really captured my imagination. Books are all very well, but that visit, after several years of manual building work, really made me think again about what he was up to.

It's not very clear in this grainy snapshot, but I was wearing red and green shoes, plus a red and green zig-zag belt. I had two pairs of those shoes made, with the colours reversed. It was more economical to cut the leather that way. And of course I wore them as mismatched pairs.

Socially I was very shy, but I had this quiet, rebellious streak. Go figure. 🤔

 

My little notebook from 1974. A period of transition. The illusion that somehow my rebellion against convention would transform the world was fading into a journey full of twists and turns, a willingness to learn about the world.

I spent a few weeks on a barge. Picking up loads in Hull docks, down the humber to Goole then south. Unloading sacks of butterbeans that brought my forearms out in a rash. Hard physical labour can teach a quiet, sheltered boya few things about reality.

But my head was still in the clouds to some extent, as I scribbled away in my little pocket book. Recording thoughts and images in my own naive way. Life in the raw, spiral bound and red felt tip pen.

 

 This must be from 1993 when I was fresh back from Joburg where I completed my architecture studies (years 5 & 6) This project was drawn up by hand, but I did these perspective studies using Autocad.

There were only 3 computers in the office and as the new recruit I didn't get one of my own. I did have a PC at home, so these may have been done there, memory fails.

Not long after this I became the office "computer guy", introducing a customized menu file for Acad and use of Xtree for file management. We didn't have windows at this stage. You had to type in the full file path to open a file. I used a batch file at startup to create substitute drives, so we could have a "J:drive" for all the jobs, and a "K:drive for standard blocks.

Thirty years ago and full of naive hope for the digital world. No networks or Internet, just floppy disks. A dial up modem with primitive email followed soon after, and all those big heavy, stand-up drawing boards disappeared one by one.

 

 

FORMA SALTAIRE

 Fred and Etty Slagg came from farming stock. They lived, on the edge of the peak district, open moorland where sheep had roamed for centuries.

The monasteries were long gone, broken shells of disused buildings, piles of stone that spoke of an earlier way of life that organised the rhythm of life, gathering wool, spinning and weaving, growing flax.

Fred hired himself out on a seasonal basis. Sometimes farm work, sometimes hod carrying on building sites, sometimes loading and unloading barges. Etty kept the home fires burning, sitting next to the coal-fired Yorkshire range and darning socks.

She also had a spinning wheel and could take in piece work from local jobbers who acted as middle-men for the wool merchants. But there was plenty to do in their little two up/two down.

 

 

Just woke up to the fact that Forma /Spacemaker is now part of the AEC collection. Training session cancelled at short notice so let's do a bit of exploring.

Choose a location. I've been taking another look at terraced housing, so what about Saltaire? Model housing estate from 1850. I started a Revit model after a visit in 2007. Got a bit stuck on trying to set up a context model, but... "Not never no more "

Took about 20 minutes with Forma. Texture mapped toposolid, 3d building blocks. Street names. Probably not super accurate but it's great for the kind of studies I want to do.

I had the slope wrong, and the setting out grid needed a tweak. Great feedback. Starting to understand the logic of the street layout. Where to next with this new box of toys?

 

I've been struggling with a cold/virus for almost two weeks now. One week to recover 90% then another to get over general fatigue/lethargy.

It's partly to do with being over 70, partly that I've always been susceptible, partly to do with hormone therapy that I've been on for six months now.

But this morning I got up early, went for a short walk and settled down to make this Revit family for my terraced housing studies. Feels good. Life is precious.

Not super parametric, just materials and a height control. Didn't want to get bogged down. First priority is to convert the 4 typologies that I sketched on my phone a while back into Revit projects. Stay focused.

 

 

Fred and Etty lived in Leeds for a while in a rented back-to-back. Etty found cleaning work with the rising class of mill owners, supervisors and merchants who were building rambling mansions in a Gothic revival style.

There was a small communal wash house in the yard at the back where she could catch up with local gossip while waiting her turn.

Fred could still pick up work on building sites as the city grew rapidly, pulling in labour from villages and small towns. There was also loading and unloading work to be had at the canal basin, plus he grew vegetables on a small plot of waste land and helped Etty with jobs like fetching up coal from the cellar to fill the scuttle.

Of course he reckoned himself the best at banking up the fire and damping it down for the night. Etty knew better than to argue such petty issues.

 

It may look simple, but this roof took some figuring out. The two short returns on the main pyramid don't line up, so you inevitably get a difference in eaves height. Adjusting the eaves level and pitch of the secondary roof takes a little patience, but I'm OK with the result.

This is how it was originally built. More recently the return was cut back and two units merged into one. My friends live in this house in Saltaire, so I was able to study the tell-tale scars and fudges from the inside.

I also have a floor plan from the public library in Bradford. Always sobering to see how little information builders needed to get the job done 150 years ago. Are we making progress? or just proliferating red tape and blame shifting?

 

Sitting out on my balcony for the first time in some weeks. It's been too hot, then I got a bit of a flu virus. I'm using my phone to work/think. Not so much for the day job, but for the BIM pencil/way-we-build persona I assume on LinkedIn, the "phone" is a huge part of my process.

Of course it's totally reliant on 50+ years experience being in love with buildings. almost 40 using computers. 25 with a laptop, approaching 20 as a Revit/BIM addict. But the immediacy of this handheld brain extension, tethered to my back-catalogue in the sky... The fact that I can walk away from my desk for a cup of coffee and some sideways thinking... that's given me a daily routine: greater directness and spontaneity.

I use two core apps on my Samsung Note to collect images and text in a chronological stream. Not all for LinkedIn, but that's a significant part of it. This image, compiled with Pixlr, while sitting out here in my shorts and sweating profusely, seeks to capture the ecosystem.