CHURCH CRAWLING

 

Rotherwick Church, visited today with two of my dearest friends. It dates back 800 years, with alterations and improvements at regular intervals ever since. Not spectacularly beautiful, but full of character, craftsmanship and texture.

There is wonderful, warm red brickwork. There is magnificent structural oak framing. There are areas of flint cobble facing with limestone ashlar trim. I love the scissor-trusses with the subtle curves at the end, supporting the nave roof.

 

So much beauty accumulated over centuries. It must reflect something valuable in the culture that spawned it. We can't just go back. Secular modernity has brought many wonderful gifts. But when I visit these churches, atheist that I am, I feel a sadness for something we have lost, but also great pride in my British cultural heritage.

 

It was splendid sunny day, ending at a country pub in Rotherwick. Typical old-style English country pub with good food and a picture of Winston Churchill over a rustic fireplace. Cliché perhaps, flawed character (like me) But that's not the point. Travelling through the villages and farms to see three old churches, take photos, discuss the experience with two dear friends. What a privelege.

 

Hartley Wespall. What wonderful names. Inside it's a Saxon Barn but with a wild flourish of artistic flair. Lavish curves playing with the tension between negative and positive space. On the outside it has been careful curated by GG Scott, the architect of St Pancras Station Hotel.

 

I am left to marvel at the fact that one of the first large commercial practices in Britain could blend respect for tradition/craft with bold intervention, on such a tiny project. It's a beautiful little church and I couldn't care less that the tower was altered dramatically in Victorian times. It holds together as an integrated whole and maintains a chain of connection to the distant past.

Etymology. Parish. Para-wick. Near the clan. Village lands. Saxon settlements walked their boundaries in a ceremonial procession.

 

ZIMBABWE CALLING

 

End of the month. I have a new system where I keep all my current images in a root folder of my OneDrive cloud storage. When the month ends, I move them into a more deeply nested folder in a hierarchy that organises everything in a structured way.

So all the diary images are about three levels deep, in groups of several years at a time, then folders for individual years, then months. For the early part of my life there aren't many images, so I just have a folder for early years, one for primary, one for secondary. Even my university years are quite sparse.

While moving my August images from the more easily accessible root folder to the correct slot in the nested hierarchy, I inevitably go down the "let's clean things up a bit" rabbit hole. This morning that took me to 1998, a year of great optimism, before Zimbabwe started to implode.

Top left uses Autocad 3d tools and a semi-render DOS package called Autovision. This was the core of a 20 storey office block, my biggest project to date and under construction in 1998. I was planning the interior decor of the core.

Top right is a project for a house extension, using a pirated copy of Archicad, which offered a faster way to produce those semi-render images, but not yet a serious contender for construction drawing packages.

Then below we have a cluster housing project that was built in Harare. 2d Autocad in which I was highly fluent. Every view separately drawn and updated in case of changes, but still a quick way to knock out this kind of project. Site photo of the same project after completion.

 

 

1999 and the biggest project of my career as principal designer. This is in the very centre of Harare and was intended to read as one in a series of office blocks by Clinton and Evans on the same short stretch of Samora Machel Avenue. The black granite and flush glazing were trademark materials.

I wanted to give this one a Zimbabwean identity, hence the chevrons and different colours of glass. I wouldn't claim that it has great architectural merit, but it works and in some way catches the spirit of the time, when the early optimism of independence was beginning to fade.

I took this project from inception to completion, almost single handedly. Autocad (DOS version) was my main tool throughout. Some use of Photoshop and MS Word to compose these pages from the letting brochure which we created for the client as part of our standard service.

I was not an experienced architect when handed this project, having taken a 16 year detour via bricklaying and teaching: finally registering as an architect at the end of 1995. So I have mixed feelings about the design . But it's part of my story and I never aspired to be an "Architect's Architect"

However, I do wonder what might have been if Zimbabwe had not imploded and I had continued to lead projects from concept design onwards. I did that for my first two small projects in Dubai, then found myself in the "production" team. On the positive side I got to be the BIM guru for almost 20 years but that's another story.

 

 

 

PUDDLE IN MIND

 

On my way back from the dentist. I need to sort my teeth out after decades of neglect: at least salvage a bit of dignity, give a semi-respectable impression in photos. 👀

Anyway, on the way back I noticed some slightly different angles on my local church and the adjacent school. In some ways this was a high point of English confidence and cultural projection. We can come at it with a moralistic attitude as if we would have been so much better if we had been around a century ago or so ago. And yes, the happenstance of history played a massive role. It's no credit to me. I just happen to have been born on these islands in 1951,when things were starting to unravel, though we didn't realise it at the time.

It's not "great" Architecture, but it's competent, coherent, & versatile urban design by an emerging profession with an impressive command of scale and detail. It connects seamlessly with the past and adapts well to New functions and rapid growth.

I'm sorry, but the developers, local government and professions of my lifetime cannot claim to have maintained that standard. There have been flashes of brilliance, yes. But overall a mish-mash of either trying too hard to "innovate" or just going through the motions, building to a budget.

At least we have these reminders of what we could be.

 

This is part of the front boundary of the block of retirement flats where I now live. Lots to see. Moss and lichen which connect to my renewed interest in plant taxonomy and evolution. Lichen is a symbiont, not a plant, but still connected to the evolutionary story of early plants and their cyanobacteria precursor.

Brick on edge coping, holding up better than some of the stretchers below. Could indicate careful selection of bricks to use on the coping?

At the bottom, a course of headers. Kind of makes sense. Maybe English Bond was used for all the below-ground work. But how to incorporate the weep-holes? The way it's done here just throws the bonding out and leads to straight joints. Not a train smash, and I can't think of a better solution offhand 🤔

The main body is Flemish Garden Wall. Which looks good, provides enough headers to tie the two leaves together, and is easier to handle than Flemish itself. The main point of Garden Wall bonds is to allow a fair face on both sides. Or something close.

 

 

Almost 50 years ago my dad gave me a framed picture to hang up in the run down terraced house in Sheffield he had lent me money to buy. It put my foot on the first rung of the property ladder, and although I didn't climb to any great height, owning my own home all these years has had a huge impact. Altogether I've owned seven different homes, switching up and down according to my circumstances, but mostly quite modest.

I wish I was able to tell my dad now how much that picture means to me. It's one of Escher's more subtle works. At the time I'm afraid I may have betrayed my disappointment at not getting a reproduction of one of his more mind-bending compositions. But this simple portrait of a puddle says so much about the nature of perception and the problem of making marks on a flat surface to convey that subtle inner world of eye and brain.

 

What is real? The wheels and shoes that passed by? The sky and trees reflected in the water? The flat surface of the water itself, or the gooey texture of the mud? Or is it the paper, the ink, the wood block meticulously carved by Escher, the master of print technique?

The art work speaks of memory traces and the elusive reality beyond them. The images here speak of my memories. A wall in Zimbabwe, of a house I used to own. All the pictures on it lost in various ways but their complex meanings still alive in me. A still life painted by my dad. Degas ballet dancers. We both loved those.

 

Then there's the puddle in the park after the first decent rain for a couple of months. I let AI turn it into an oil painting to emphasise the plane of the image. It's not a patch on Escher of course, but at least I had a go. Maybe I will find a way of doing a real painting, inspired by Escher but my own take. That's a big ask.