TWENTY-TWENTY

 

How recent it is that we've had these little devices in our pockets that take snapshots of our daily lives, on the fly. Juxtapose them to bring out new reflections. Of course there is still space for creating images much more slowly, the old way with colours that squeeze out of a tube. Different ways of looking. Really looking. Then looking again.

Early morning walk once more, with the gas-fired energy factory on the hazy horizon. Chimneys straight and true, like the lamp posts. Attempts to plant trees, second time around looking quite drunk. It's a harsh environment, but successful by many measures.

Then there's Middle Eastern Breakfast after physio for my back and injections for my runaway prostate. Well not so runaway now. Stopped in its tracks by those hormone blockers. The body of my youth is not coming back, but I can find some acceptable compromises, ways to glory in this gift of life. Day by day. Too much food though.

Travels coming up very soon.

 

Quite an emotional little ceremony in the office today to celebrate my two decades at GAJ. Seen some changes in that time but still a few faces from day one.

I don't know how many faces have passed through the office in that period, but I'm guessing it could be in the order of 500 or so. One of the joys of working is the pay cheque, of course, but the camaraderie is way up there in my opinion and experience. Ultimately we are social animals who build vast cultural networks across the generations.

I'm heading to UK on Friday to take occupation of my retirement flat. There will be a period of overlap, but the plan is still evolving. I expect the transition to be rewarding as the juxtaposition of cultures stimulates memories from my meandering journey through life.

New friends and old, family at the centre. I'm greatly blessed.

 

Two decades ago I was offered a lifeline by this company which has come to mean so much to me. (GAJ) I had been in Zimbabwe for 23 years, a fantastic experience but one that turned sour with hyperinflation and rampant corruption.

I came to GAJ on a three month trial when there were two dozen staff members in a first floor office close to Lamcy Plaza. Coming from Africa, everything about Dubai was a bit of a challenge. A complete change of pace, living apart from my family and my beautiful shady garden.

My first project was a spa extension at Jebel Ali Hotel. I took it from concept to completion using Autocad and Sketchup. How times have changed. That first 3 months sped by. Brian offered me a permanent job. I went back for my daughter's wedding then witnessed a period of rapid expansion. Ricus joined the firm, then Jason Taverner and several younger architects. Cedric, Eduard, Christine... Too many to name here. Bab Al Shams was on site and The Business Village on the drawing board.

2004. Episode One

 

Sitting on a wooden bench, on raised ground set back from a junction corner. About two thirds of the way through my first morning walk from my new home. What a contrast with International City Dubai. I hope I can keep both places going for a while, just to experience the parallel worlds effect. It's mind blowing.

 

Basingstoke is definitely the healthier of the two when it comes to fresh air and exercise. I was up at dawn. It's dry but overcast and chilly. Cold fingers as I tap this out on my Samsung Note. Lichen on the old bench. So much natural beauty. I set off without a clear plan but it's been great.

Pedestrian underpasses keep me away from fast moving cars. The local park is a big open space, so green. Love the old bandstand. Houses of various styles, sizes and eras. Quite picturesque. Contrast the rather contrived way that International City is divided into clusters named after countries from Morocco and Persian to Italy and France.

 

The styling is so clumsy as to be quite amusing. It's been my home for so long and I love it for all it's faults. Going to be two-timing for a while now. Should be fun.

Such changeable weather. Will have to readjust to that. But oh the greenery!

 

SUNNY HAMPSHIRE

 

The healing power of the sun. Or not. I had a skin cancer removed about a month ago. No drama. Local anaesthetic. In and out. Nice doctor as usual, I have become very fond of the American Hospital Dubai. Definitely private health care has an upside.

What role did a couple of decades gardening in shorts every weekend in Zimbabwe play? Difficult to say. People are much more clued-in about sun-block these days. But old age surely plays a big role. My body feels increasingly like the 1963 Vauxhall that I kept on the roads in Zimbabwe for far too long, never knowing what part would give way next.

I should exercise more. This morning I did get up early enough to take a stroll around the block. Lots of mist and a pale watery sun. We get these kinds of morning in Dubai. Not so great for driving to work, but I like them, just as I like the rain. A break in the monotony of cloudless heat-haze.

You can still see ridges from the stitches, but the healing process is well advanced. They got it all, so that's two kinds of cancer I have under control. A little ray of sunshine to lift my spirits. Motivation for the ongoing transition to some kind of retirement phase in the twists and turns of my life.

 

 

The research on Hampshire Churches is getting a bit out of hand. There are so many. Who knew?

Like most of my "BIM pencil" studies, it just blunders along. Blindly in the dark at first, naive in it's expectations, but gathering momentum and competence as it trundle along. Google Earth, Google Maps, Wikipedia, a church near you. Small clusters of churches crammed into folders with provisional labels.

This week I stumbled on an arcgis map online with church locations and boundaries for benefice, deanery, archdeacon, diocese. Two sheets. Basingstoke is my epicentre, in theory, but then I extended down to the south coast. Of course it overlaps into Berkshire, a tiny bit of Surrey... The modern counties are not so relevant. This is deeper history reaching back to Saxon times at least.

The doomsday book comes to mind. That was an epic piece of research. No folders and subfolders. No laptops, Internet, cloud storage. Did they even have maps?

Anyway. I continue to scratch away at the surface. Still in the data gathering stage really, although I did start to model one of the Meon Bridge churches a couple of years ago.

Think of the Saxons coming up the rivers. Test, Itchen, Hamble, Meon. Setting up their little fiefdoms. Converting to Christianity. Building churches, plowing the land, naming fields and villages. Tangible history. The Way We Build.

 

 

September 2019. The world before covid, before cancer, at the height of Project Notre Dame. By chance, a weekend with all 3 of my children. Last minute opportunities. Grab them while you can.

I wanted to visit three Saxon churches, close to our Air BnB. Some resistance from those less obsessed with old buildings but I got my way and it was worth it.

This one is St Andrew, Meonstoke. I thought it was exceptional, but it turns out there are dozens of these old village churches with wooden bellcotes scattered across Hampshire.

So now, almost 5 years later, I find myself cataloguing them. And what then? I really don't know. Like the "Revit Map" I'm using to structure the data for my visual cortex to absorb and contemplate... The challenge involves setting the right level of abstraction. Like the tube map. Boil it down to essentials.

How many massing models? How many more detailed studies? How much time do I have?

Intuition is the only guide that can help me here.

 

A pencil is the archetypal thinking tool. It takes thoughts from your brain (words, shapes, connections) and abstracts them onto paper where they can be manipulated in powerful ways. Like having multiple desktops for your internal working memory. Shopping lists, back napkin sketches.

My "BIM pencil" is like that. Revit is the organiser. "Thoughts" come from diverse sources and acquire structure as I abstract them into intelligent objects. Diagrams upon diagrams.

I am building a map of Hampshire Churches. There is a great Arcgis-powered site for C+E churches. You can change backgrounds and toggle boundary visibility in the heirarchchy from Archdiocese down to Parish.

I use screen grabs as backgrounds in Revit working views. Green property boundaries are Deaneries. Floors are Benefices with colours that aid legibility. Churches are generic models with nested detail items : coloured circles. Mostly green now but will be coded laterfor period /style.

The dataset is vastly bigger than I anticipated, but the strategy is holding up well. Evolving of course. BIM is an iterative process if it is anything at all. An interactive journey of discovery. Lots of sources: Wikipedia, Google Earth, a-church-near-you, English Heritage. Today I rediscovered a Lambeth database of floor plans. Patchy but mindblowing.

 

Using schedules to organise, filter, query and ultimately structure my work process. The interaction between object, schedule and tag is fundamental. Always searching for visual clarity, explanatory power.

I have a working schedule that I filtered by "Mark begins with WW65" Then typed "Overton" into the "Group" field. It's a time-saver but also stepping stone to future developments. Comparative analysis sheets. Colour coding.

This Revit project is not a building. But just as the time spent modelling a building generates a wonderful mental map and familiarity. This exercise offers the promise of getting my head around a huge dataset.

Then comes the hope of weaving a story in space and time. Normans and Saxons, Tudors and Stuarts, brick and stone, farms and palaces.

 

 

CHURCH AND STATE

 

Sometimes I just stumble around the Internet from idea to idea. I guess we all do. I came across this digital archive of Lambeth palace library before, then forgot about it.

Anyway, now I have this big Rectangle of church locations mapped out, from Reading down to Southampton I can search more systematically and download floor plans where they exist, which is maybe about half of my dataset.

So there are going to be lots of gaps. And in any case I can't possibly model them all, even schematically. As for site visits, who knows? But sampling is a valid scientific technique, not that this is science. More of a rag-tag mixture methods.

The challenge will be to zoom in and out. Keep the big picture in mind. Sample the detail. Maintain some kind of coherence.

 

 

 

St Mary's, Mapledurwell. Zooming right in to create "first approximation" 3d geometry as a Revit family. Extrusions, solids and voids. No need for any parametric controls. Just the materials. It's a one off.

A few years ago I might have aspire to a "universal" family that could morph into just about any church in my dataset. I'm not ruling that out, but modelling them one-by-one seems a better way to start.

These are very simple little buildings, but still there is so much going on. How many have the entrance door in the west wall? More common to have a little porch just around the corner I think.

There's a story across time for sure. Maybe a simple Norman box. Chancel added later with fine east window. Gothic arch and tracer. The online plan shows a smaller vestry so that has been extended in modern times.

Wooden bell tower. No telling how many times that has been renewed and revised. But it remains a modest village church. Flint walls with limestone dressings. Plain tiles on the roof. When did these come into use? Was it thatched at one time perhaps?

Drawing = modelling = thinking... Asking questions. The stuff of life.

 

 

Playing with sheet layouts for typical churches. Assembly views for the Revit users out there. Location plan needs more work. Maybe zoom in to create a site plan

This little church is just a bus ride out of Basingstoke. Looking forward to seeing it "in the flesh" I think you have to try to imagine yourself as a member of the congregation 200 years ago. More than that would be a stretch, but maybe.

Back to a time when churches were still the glue that held society together. When they were built by hand with only the simplest of mechanical devices. Not because that was a better world. Not because it was worse. Both those things are true in some ways.

I just think we have to hang on to some kind of continuity with the past. To realise that all the "improvements" we make also come at a cost. We can't stand still but we can be less triumphant about "progress" Take it with a pinch of salt

This work is totally reliant on very recent digital technology. But it takes me back in imagination to times before steam power. Maybe I should read some Thomas Hardy.

 

Two opposing views on two consecutive days. My daily walk at something past six. Working hard to improve my mobility and agility. The problem is to do with getting tight. Muscles, not whisky.

A multi faceted treatment programme is working wonders. Some meds, some physio, topical gel, electric back warmer (made in China, shipped by Amazon) Focus on posture, stretching exercises. Try to bring some quality of life to my mid-to-late seventies. Lose some weight (I've done it before) Get ready for the eventual move from private health care to NHS queues.

Meanwhile, it appears that Dubai is finally getting around to installing a serious storm water network. It would be easy to get on our high horses with "about time" and "why not 20 years ago". But this would imply that I have the information, expertise and confidence to manage trillions of dollars, making the right trade-offs at the right time.

I don't. The ruling elites in the gulf have handled these kinds of decisions far better than I could. Yes they have made mistakes and their morality could be questioned here and there, but that's what humans do. It's not as if they are building upon a foundation of societies that went through the European enlightenment. 

 

Dubai is a beacon of openness in the Middle East. I am forever grateful to have spent two decades here, saving money and getting to know people from so many different backgrounds.

Looking forward and looking back. A time to reflect and a time to embark on the next chapter in the adventure of life.