FAREWELL DEAR FRIEND

I found this old photo on the Internet. I don't remember where so I can't give credit. In any case the photo itself long predates the digital era.

What can be said?

Battersea power station, in use, running on coal and powering London, an essential force in the modern world and the long process of innovation and industrialisation that has made so many people's lives longer and more comfortable.

It was part of a transition, constrained by both demand and supply factors in a complex world. Notice three chimneys. Previously there were two, and subsequently 4. Change has to follow an economically viable route. Ideology rarely helps.

Giles Gilbert Scott. Grandson of a giant of Victorian Gothic was brought in as a facade consultant. His work on Liverpool Anglican Cathedral is different but equally impressive, handling monumental scale and expressing the mood of a society with one foot in tradition and the other in modernity.

 

 

Alfredo and I pretty much split the duties between us when it came to the vaults of Notre Dame. Our approaches were very different but that's a good thing right? Speaking for myself, I was in it for the learning experience, and I learned a lot from the other team members.

It's surprising how many different types of vault there are in just one building. To be honest I wasn't quite satisfied with any of our solutions. But they did a pretty good job in the context of the model as a whole.

One of the biggest surprises for me was the vaults that are higher on one side than the other. That's how flexible the ribbed vault with pointed arches is. A revolutionary technology in its day.

Will it ever come back? Who knows? Load bearing natural stone is making a bid for low-carbon, dark horse, material of the future.

 

 

Six part vaults mediate between the large span across the nave and the smaller spans from column to column, running down the sides of this glorious space. It's done without any fuss. Most people would hardly notice the transition taking place above their heads. The cleverness is overwhelmed by the drama, the breathtaking scale

In later work the ribs soar from the floor plane to the apex of the vaults, eliminating the squat round columns seen here. Which he is better? A foolish question perhaps. Glory in the striving of each generation of master masons to explore new possibilities while maintaining a sense of unity in buildings completed over centuries by immense human effort.

Yes we achieve miracles with our modern technologies. But can we claim the unity of purpose, the clarity of vision of the medieval world? In some ways, diversity is our strength, but in others it begins to resemble our "tower of babel"

Let's pray for a happy resolution to the paradoxes of modernity, as seamless and inspiring as the great vaults of Notre Dame de Paris

 

Former colleague, long time friend, drummer in my Dubai office band "GAJ rocks", Architect, father, all round good guy, Bernhard Ott. It was an honour to know you.

Attending his wedding was a wonderful experience, my first time in Bavaria. The music, the buildings, the culture. Two more memorable visits, staying at the house he designed for his family, being driven around to pursue my passion for different "ways of building"... then being presented with a guitar and bottle of whisky so we could relive our joint passion for live music for yet another evening.

He is gone too soon. Living with cancer for many years I knew, but still it was a shock. He enriched my life without any doubt. Generous, dependable, with a quiet but wicked sense of humour. Bernhard, I salute you.

 

 

Some of my earliest work in Revit. This must be 17 years ago. A house on the palm for a rather famous person. Not our design, we were engaged to modify.

This was one of a series of challenges thrown at me that forced me to learn to use Revit, effectively and artistically. I was starting to take shaded views and rendered views from Revit and combine them in Photoshop. This is long before realistic view became a thing. It was a way of getting a Sketchup feel out of Revit

I ought to dig this model out and see how crude my skills were. I wonder how well it would upgrade for that matter. I can clearly remember the excitement at what Revit could do, punctuated by periods of despair as I struggled with limitations both in myself, and in the software.

How long ago that was..

 

 

This project went on for years and never moved beyond concept stage. It was passed around to different architects in the hope of breathing life into the carcase.

I carried the baby for a couple of years in the hope of demonstrating that Revit could be used for concept work. I think that struggle is familiar to many firms.

Be that as it may, I had a lot of fun with this project. It was challenging and I learned a lot about using the software. This is the old rendering engine, before Mental Ray came along. Lots of shortcomings, but the palm trees were great. Convincingly volumetric..

In summary, I have been keeping my BIM pencil sharp for 17 years and counting. There are many different ways to "be an architect" and I have taken my own particular journey down the BIM road.

Hugely rewarding.

 

 

TWENTY YEARS IN DUBAI

 

I guess most of us inhabit multiple parallel universes: places we live in, places we used to live in for many years, places our close friends and relatives live in, places that dominate news headlines.

Sunrise is getting later in Dubai, so my early morning walk gets prettier. Tree planting underway on the central reservations of minor roads in International City. Will I stay here long enough to see them blossom?

A restaurant menu from Zimbabwe shows parallel currencies drifting apart as they did for several years before I left. "Perverse Incentives" for the power elite to keep this going because they can game the system to accumulate wealth. Tragic for the vast majority of citizens.

Sitting on my balcony, sipping Ginseng tea, taking my meds, recording a video message for close family in the US. Four decades of living in warm climates and counting. One day it will be a distant memory, an interlude between youth and old age.

How fortunate I am.

 

 

Here's a railing type that I made this week. Opinions will vary, but I wanted it to be in the railings category, and I wanted it to be lightweight.

The design concept source is Sketchup file. Lots of detail, representing some kind of traditional "areesh" woven mat of split cane or similar with sturdy wooden posts.

For cross-discipline coordination and detail design we just need a fairly simple representation in the model showing accurate size and position of the fence. There will be a typical detail and specification item to guide the contactor.

The "panel" is actually a rail in Revit terms, using a profile 2m high x 20 mm wide and a semi-transparent material, with a custom fill pattern. The only other little trick relates to the balusters.

Automatic placement of posts can be a pain. You can end up with two, close together at a corner for example. I opted for automated end and corner posts only, then edited the sketch to manually for the intermediate posts, using the "split" tool.

It's a bit of extra work but in this case there are only 4 or 5 posts in each length of fence, and a handful of fences in the project. Nothing special, but I enjoy making these judgment calls to make life easier for the team.

 

 

Why did this pop into my head? Photos taken just a few weeks after moving to Dubai. I know nothing about the history of this derelict house in Ras Al Khaima, a little way up the coast from Dubai.

The lower openings would have had hardwood frames, vertical iron bars and inward opening shutters. The smaller squares above, for ventilation, decorative gypsum grilles, floral or geometric patterns.

Palm trunks, split in half form the primary roof structure. The rest is speculative, but smaller branches running at right angles, then maybe woven mats, before pouring a slurry sand/mud/lime/dung, (choose your recipe) maybe small stones and fibres to reduce shrinkage cracks. Top surface sloping to long, projecting wooden spouts.

Then comes a brief period of modernising before the dereliction and total replacement. Plaster everything over with a strong cement mix. Not sure why. It hardly ever rains here.

So that was almost 20 years ago. Cast into the desert in search of money. Hoping that the madness in Zimbabwe would come to an end so I could go back after a few years. Fascinated by differences of climate, culture, technology.

Random memories.

 

 

Not another balcony shot🙄!!

Sorry guys but it's my main time to unwind and catch a bit of beauty. Not so much the building, but the colours and the moon (of course) The arbitrary mix of flush glazing and punched windows is very Dubai. Quite like the corner pavilions though. Makes a change from fake wind towers. There is a gentle breeze, plus we are definitely past peak summer now.

Sit back and reflect on the day. Morning at home on content development. Afternoon at the office talking to people and collecting some reference files from the server. A good mix. Tomorrow should be at home preparing for more training /mentoring.

Pass the baton along, very important. Nothing better than working with a group of eager young interns who are full of questions. Beauty and the BIMster? Did I tell you how these hormone blockers change the texture of my skin?

Good night then.

 

DISSECTING NOTRE DAME

 Why is the layout of Notre Dame out of square?

I tend to think it was cumulative error, perhaps exacerbated by building around older buildings that had not been fully demolished when the foundations were set out. That would have made the traditional methods of sight lines, tight string and pythagoras, difficult to implement.

A second problem for us was inadequate and inconsistent source data. There are hand drawn plans and a very low resolution horizontal slice through Andrew Tallon's point cloud. We tried to get higher resolution point cloud data but it's a high profile government project, so a bunch of BIM enthusiasts didn't carry much clout.

Revit despises small angular deviations. In any case it makes dimensions difficult and you face the prospect of custom making the arches and vaults for every single bay.

The compromise we made was to make almost everything orthogonal with repetitive bay sizes, but to make the north aisles of the nave wide than the south, and the north tower, wider still. That reflects reality. I think Ryan was the first to notice that there are more statues on the left side of the gallery of kings than the right, when viewed from the plaza in front of the west end.

 

The other half of the grid setting out sheet for Project Notre Dame.

2d drafting that I call a "skew" grid, trying to follow the point cloud footprint, allowing deviations from 90 degrees, but aiming for a modicum of regularity. I took this seriously enough to work it through, but on reflection it didn't make any sense for our purposes.

You might call our model a "didactic" project. We accepted a level of abstraction and simplification so as to better see the big picture issues. The regularities of the model allow us to pose questions, explore possibilities, seek understanding.

It was a fascinating struggle to understand by drawing, modelling, gathering material, questioning.

It. The global cooperation called Project Notre Dame.

 

Two old photos found on the Internet and marked up on one of the sheets in our model of Notre Dame de Paris.

19th Century renovations were very extensive and included things like a new sacristy building between the chancel and the river and linked to the main building by a pair of corridors.

Viollet-le-Duc was not afraid to add new features in the Gothic style whereas today we would make a clear distinction between what has been preserved/reconstructed and new work in a "modern" style.

Who was right? I don't know. Maybe both. Received wisdom will probably change again. I'm certainly glad that the roof and spire are being restored back to how they were before the fire.

 

Drafting views to show the nave as originally built, and as modified about a century later. Early Gothic featured relatively small windows, similar to the preceding Romanesque, but with pointed arches

Gradually builders became bolder. Larger windows, structural drama, flying buttresses. At Notre Dame, the six middle bays of the nave were opened up, but the end bays were not disturbed, presumably for fear of affecting the stability of the spire and the bell towers.

This seems like a simple story, but figuring it out took several weeks of poring over the source material. For me, these kinds of "Sherlock Holmes" moments are fundamental to the work. They justify the time spent building a Revit model "just for fun".

Learning by doing. Learning through play. Lifelong learning. What could be better?