Shades of Grey

Counting down to submission and as always there is not enough time to do pursue all the ideas that jostle for my attention. It's been another roller coaster ride and immensely rewarding for me. Thanks again to Zach for hosting this competition.

I must also thank Arezoo who has been helping me to assemble a design report, to package up my adventure in the form of a book which will form the main part of my submission. For this post I will be taking snapshots from that report. I don't have time to continue recording my process step-by-step. Something had to give. So let's cut to the chase.

Our brief calls for a Museum of Urbanisation & Domesticated Species (MUDS), to be built deep amongst the virgin desert dunes of the UAE. Here we will celebrate, contemplate, cogitate the solemn mystery of how we gave up our wanderings and settled in mud brick boxes, packed together beneath the sun.

The pumpkin is a domesticated vegetable species, belonging to a family that ranges from tiny "patty-pans" to sagging giants, transported to competitive events by tractor & trailer. It provides a suitable symbol for the way we have made ourselves dependent upon agriculture, co-evolving with plant and animal species to the extent that neither we nor they can survive without the agri-business conglomerate which holds the world's ecosystems in its vice-like grip.

And so, in the tradition of Boullee and Ledoux, our building is built around a set of representational symbols: firstly the bulging lobes of a giant pumpkin, bursting with fertility, pregnant with the seeds of uncontrolled growth; secondly the crescent, a slice of forbidden fruit cut out to satisfy our bottomless appetites by the mother-goddess eve. (Environment Virtually Engulfed)

The importance of the inbuilt layout capabilities of BIM software is often overlooked. Two dimensional “design spaces” have enormous potential that is constantly exploited in every architect or engineers’ office around the world. It is hard to imagine design professionals holding a conversation without pencil and paper to hand.

Combining images with orthographic views. Rapidly scaling to life size and drafting over with notes and construction lines. These collage techniques, reminiscent of the early work of Picasso and Braque, can be immensely informative and save a good deal of abortive work if conducted at an early stage. 2d BIM. All good.

The gallery floors form a cascading sequence of curves sliding down next to an inclined plane of glass. (Solar treatment to be considered later but probably inspired by the musharabiya concept) A staggered array of escalators links the floors together in a continuous sequence

The appendices normally contain the latest set of drawing sheets, a coordinated set of plans, elevations and sections as required by the contract for the stage in question. In this case the drawing sheets date from the time when the massing family was fully parametric, just before the pumpkin eyebrows and other “modernizing” elements were added.

Primarily they record a staged exercise in comparative design options. Nine versions of the design are laid out and systematically analysed in a 3x3 matrix.

On one axis: Number of segments 8, 9 & 10

On the other: Overall size Small, Medium & Large

Time to turn the dome into a pumpkin. We will consider the parametrics involved in this exercise during the next section. Here we focus on the double dome strategy. There are multiple justifications for this. It is in fact a time honoured way of resolving the conflict between internal and external requirements that occurs in almost all domed buildings.

Structurally this approach is very beneficial creating adequate depth for a well triangulated supporting framework. Thermal performance will be enhanced, and voids always come in handy wherever mechanical services are involved as they surely will be here.

Our software tools can generate camera views quite effortlessly. For someone who has been through the process of laboriously constructing perspectives by hand it is embarrassingly easy. But blending digital outputs and processes to create an evocative image requires the human touch: experience, skill and a fair sprinkling of intuition.

Technical wizardry is only as good as the creative thinking that it enables.

This perspective image is helping us to think about the spatial relationship between the research facilities in the basement, and the display and event space above, between the ground plane and the underside of the bowl.

Moving on. How does the building feel at closer quarters, a visitors approach? What is the drama of the welcome experience ? We envisage planting: crop research beds, fruit trees, date palms; perhaps a series of long slow ramps leading down to the basement (not modelled) Parking and transport facilities have yet to be considered.

On reflection though we decided that our building was developing a case of schizophrenia. The lower levels have a decidedly modern feel. Dressing up the dome with traditional frills just isn’t going to work.

Also, we don’t have a face

If we want that face, it will have to be highly abstracted. Think African masks. These made a major impact on modern artists like Picasso. Perhaps we can kill two birds with one stone. (Modernity & Facial Recognition)

In the hands of renaissance men like Durer and Leonardo the pencil was a potent tool of discovery that allowed them to range freely between domains that we now call science, art and technology. The ability to construct virtual worlds using lines that converge at points on the horizon line must have been as game-changing in its day as the advent of BIM has been for us.

On this page we display some of the parametric gubbins working behind the scenes to create alternate versions of the auditorium bowl, plus a larger image of the world beneath that bowl. This is not a final presentation image, but rather a tool for thinking. In that sense it is no different from the dialogue boxes next to it.

The cable cars that take our visitors from the rim of the bowl to the syringe-like viewing capsule have not been modelled. They remain in the flat world of 2d drafting and paste-up: “sketched in outline”. But the capsule itself is lofted from doric-pumpkin profiles, a throw-back to the original 2011 submission. Welcome back old friend, appearing for the first time as a 9-pointed star and gratifyingly easy to recreate from scratch.

So much for the report extracts. If you want more you'll have to buy the book ... or maybe just download it for free in a couple of days :-)

I'm going to sign off now with a rather strange image. I think I have been pushing the boundaries of what conceptual massing can handle. For example I started to get messages about "too many edges". Even more strange, in some of my camera views strange artefacts appear. The repeater components for my double-dome truss loom like apparaitions, displaced from their proper location in 3 dimensional space. You can see several of these skeletal ghosts in the image below. Interestingly enought, it only happens in realistic mode.

So that's it. I will be submitting later today. Hope you enjoyed the ride half as much as I did. Downloads of the final product will become available some time soon.

Cheers guys.

First of all, a big thank you to Zach for some very kind words, for running his inimitable competition and for motivating me to get carried away again.

I intended to clean up my Desert Pumpkin families for upload during the course of last week, BUT work just got too hectic. Towards the end of the week I got wrapped up in an exercise which I thought worth sharing.

It's a design and build project for a hotel with prefabricated bathroom pods. The exercise involved enlarging the pods while maintaining the minimum area requirement for the guest rooms, which happens to be 24 sq m. There are several different permutations of pod type and bedroom type.

We had to come up with a drawing that explains our proposal in order to achieve client sign-off before committing changes to the model. A classic case for 2d BIM, which is my nickname for "drafting over model views" It would be possible to make a second copy of the model and implement changes in 3d. But it seemed to me this would require more effort, and it would be difficult to show existing and proposed as overlays in the same view.

We are familiar with the concept of 2d BIM as a detailing technique, but I believe that it has many other analagous uses, and as such it is a method that deserves much more attention and respect. It is particularly useful in a situation where you are exploring planning options, where it is directly analagous to laying sheets of tracing paper over hardcopies and sketching as you talk during a design workshop.

So I created a parametric detail item with 3 types, representing the 3 main pod types. There are a number of dimension strings that lock various fixed relationships in place, plus 3 variable parameters (also one visibility control).

Overlay this on a plan callout and dimension it up. I'm using two colours of dimension for existing and proposed. The resulting diagram is quite busy, but for team members who know these pods inside out by now, it's immensely informative. Also you can go on generating variations until the cows come home, either by duplicating views with detailing, or by simply swapping out family types and printing off the sheet.

These same detail items are placed in a key plan, and used as guides for the edges of filled regions, one for each of the permutations of guest room/pod (we have six at present) The edges of the filled region are stretched to align with the outer edges of the detail item and give a readout of the resultant area. Unfortunately we can't tag the area of a filled region (seems like an unnecessary limitation) but it's no biggie.

So we have a key plan which summarises all the different situations and together with the various callouts for the pod types tells a very rich story. Furthermore, the 2d world represented by this sheet is a very productive design space. It's a great place in which to work while grappling with the problem at hand. 2d BIM is a very powerful tool for thinking out problems, analysing and abstracting, defining the critical issues, staying fluid and flexible. We should use it more often.

So there you go: a nice, short, practical post to contrast against the epics of the past few weeks. Call me schyzo if you like, but I enjoy using Revit to range all the way from drafting techniques to the conundrum that we call art. That's why I call it my BIM pencil.

Why do I care what a toilet looks like ? It's just a functional object ... right ? An interesting question from various points of view. Freud would have something to say I'm sure. But it's clear that we do care a great deal about the appearance of our bathrooms. Check out the websites of Duravit, Hansgrohe, Ideal Standard ... The whole "health & wellbeing" thing is very big when it comes to toilets. People want to feel like they are going into an oriental spa to cleanse their spirit.

But we are just putting toilets on our drawings, aren't we ? All we need is a symbol to say "put the toilet here" and a code to say "find more details under this spec reference". Wrong again. We have always cared what our drawings look like. They should be crisp & clean with just a dash of style & verve. It's been that way ever since we drew by hand, we cared about drawing style when we switched to CAD & we still care now that we are using BIM.

So this is (another) appeal for better sanitary ware families. Where is the good looking BIM content to help us sell our bathroom designs to our clients ? We could moan at Autodesk for not providing better generic families. And I have shown before that this is not so hard.

http://grevity.blogspot.ae/2012/05/plumbing-blockage.html

http://grevity.blogspot.ae/2012/04/my-weekend-on-toilet.html

But ultimately content is up to the end users. Not just the designers, I'm talking about the global construction industry. Architects & Interior Designers can set the direction, Clients & Contractors can create the demand. Manufacturers & Suppliers are beginning to grasp how they can participate in the BIM initiative.

Take a look at office furniture. People like Haworth, Steelcase & Herman Miller have been working on their Revit families for a while now. They are into the second & third generation versions of their content, listening to feedback, improving quality & thinking hard about how best to deliver this. Just check out their websites. I'm not saying they have achieved perfection. Some will say that they want more lightweight content (2.5d perhaps) but you can't deny that they are trying hard.

Over a year ago I took a look at some plumbing families available on the internet. (link)

Now we don't really use American Standard in our work. Clients tend to go for the European brands. But I looked at their stuff because, unlike Duravit or Roca, they do have BIM content for download. I was hoping that by now they would have added more content & corrected some of the obvious shortcomings in their collection, but sadly no. It seems that someone at American Standard took an interest in BIM 4 or 5 years ago, got a few families made and then lost interest.

That's probably our fault. Has anyone been giving them feedback or sending in requests ?

So here is my "open letter" to them. It is offered in a spirit of positive criticism as a "neutral observer". I believe it would be quite easy for American Standard to offer really good Revit content and I hope to motivate them to do so. They are on the bus, but they need to start talking to the other passengers, maybe get a bit of a party going, turn it into a magic bus.

Point 1. Please use symbolic representation in plan views. This is an abstraction, like any other graphic symbol. We need just enough detail to capture the spirit of the design and to look good at a variety of scales.

Point 2 Please think carefully about the origin. This is done by setting 3 reference planes to "defines origin". If the fitting is wall mounted, the "centre front/back" should be the face of the wall. The "centre left/right" is usually straightforward. The horizontal origin plane could be finished floor level, or it could be the rim in the case of a sink. It should not be the underside of a sink where the waste connects. When the family is placed in a project, it

Point 3. The 3d CAD inserts that occur in about half your current content can now be exploded to native Revit geometry. This is a feature of Revit 2014. I have tested this, and it so happens that it works really well with your existing families. The advantage of this is that you can now assign a material parameter and subcategory directly to that geometry. Also many end users object to embedded CAD objects within Revit, so you will make those people happy.

As an added bonus, exploding the geometry removes many unwanted edges & seams, giving a smoother appearance in shaded views. Revit users will be now able to create very nice visuals for their clients.

Point 4. Create collections. You could load all your sinks into a single Revit project and make this available for download. End users open the collection and select the product they want based on user-friendly visual information. Copy-paste and you're done. Let people know when the collection has been updated and they can download the whole thing again to stay current. Easy.

Point 5. Set up sheets in your collections. Make it easy for the end user to see what your families look like: in plan, front elevation, side elevation, 3d shaded view, 3d rendered view. By setting up these views you can also do some basic Quality Control. Are you happy with the way they look ? Maybe you can also provide some examples of how your fittings can be tagged and scheduled. Make people aware of the wealth of information in your BIM content. Check that this is coming out the way you want it to.

So that's my open letter, ostensibly to American Standard, but potentially to any Sanitary Ware manufacturer/supplier in the whole wide world. Some hits on how to "do better" on the BIM front.

In the next post I'll take a look at Duravit who don't do BIM content, but do have some very tasty products up their sleeves.

My last post took a look at some manufacturer BIM content and suggested that it could be improved considerably with a little extra effort: probably much less effort than it took to create the content in the first place. One of my readers pointed out that there is some well-modelled content on the BIM Object website. It's certainly worth a look. Probably over-modelled for some people's taste, and if you are going to aim for that level of accuracy you should consider using symbolic work in elevation views as well as plans. But that's nit-picking. Keep up the good work guys, we love you.

It was interesting to review the American Standard families, but I doubt that we will get to use thme here at GAJ. Duravit is a different case. They are quite popular in the Dubai market and when we use them there is probably an ID component in our scope, so it's worth having decent families.

Over the years I have made several families based on downloads from their website. They have very good 3d & 2d symbols, but no BIM content. Sadly the 3d geometry often loses a face or 2 when loaded into Revit. I'm not sure why.

Also there is often extra detail that we don't really want. We don't section plumbing fixtures in Revit so we don't want to model hidden detail in 3d. It creates an unnecessary load on the processor, especially on large projects.

Now that we can explode CAD geometry, there is a workflow that could be used to create smooth flowing forms in plumbing fixtures. Model it in conceptual massing. Export to .sat. Bring into a standard plumbing template. Explode
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So I decided to try this out on the Starck WC & Bidet that I had previously worked up using CAD imports from the Duravit web site. It helps to have 3d CAD geometry as a guide when making these forms in conceptual massing.

Set up a series of profiles. Create form. That's the basic bowl done. Now for the rim.

Create form from one profile, gives an extrusion. Make another extrusion crossing this horizontally. Change to void. Voila. But we are left with sharp edges and it's not so easy to round these off in Revit. Where plane surfaces meet at right angles you can use a void sweep, but curved surfaces are tricky, especially when they curve in 2 directions.

Fortunately we are going to export to CAD anyway, and AutoCAD has solid modelling tools that eat this kind of task for breakfast. Fillet edge, click on a set of edges, type in a radius, enter, enter ... done.

I went through a couple of iterations on this, going back into Revit and adding the recesses for the fixing bolts and cutting out a bowl for the bidet.

This is the original Revit geometry, so I will have to round off all the edges again. Export to SAT, open in Autocad, find the solid editing tools, Fillet Edge. I used a soft curve to remove the edges on the underside also. Probably you would never notice these, but it's easy to soften them out, so why not? Softening the sharp corners does make a huge difference to rendered images.

Actually I discovered later on that those fillets bump up the file size fairly quickly, so don't get too carried away.

Bring the SAT back into Revit and explode. No problem. Apply materials and subcategories. I modelled the seat directly in Revit using a void sweep to round off the edges. Added a tap for the bidet (based on the CAD import from the original Duravit download) Set up visibility controls to swap between WC & Bidet (one family, 2 types).

I already had the symbolic representation for plans & elevations from my previous efforts. So that was that. Half a day's work, divided by 1000 architects world wide ... has to be worth it. Please, please Mr Duravit, give us some BIM content.

The image above shows my current collection of Duravit families. I started by dropping all the cad downloads into one family. That way I can copy paste them into individual families whenever I get time. So far I've only converted a handful of these. I probably need 3 or 4 weekends to do the rest. Just imagine if all this was available as nicely crafted native Revit families. It's an impressive range, and you have to admit their styling is really cool.

There's another post to come yet in this series. After that I will try to bundle some of the best / most useful families up and make them available. Maybe I can even persuade some of you to chip in and convert a couple. Many hands make light work.

This post is no three of a series on sanitary ware familes. Last time we modelled a Duravit toilet and bidet. Here are 2 more of their bidets, which are available as 3d CAD downloads. Nicely modelled, but as usual they contain seam lines that spoil our 3d shaded views, and of course you can't apply material parameters without resorting to nasty workarounds. The Puravida also has a missing face.

These two bidets are quite easy to model using the techniques described in the previous post. The D code is intact, so we could CAD import it into a Revit family. We would need to separate out the metal fittings so they can pick up a different material for rendering purposes. (If you are specifying Duravit you probably want to be able to render) We also need masking regions and symbolic lines in plan & elevation.

But once we've gone to that much trouble, why not go the extra mile and create native Revit geometry ? It is possible to assign materials to the CAD layers via Object Styles, assuming the different materials are on different layers. But really it would be so nice if we could just download well-made Revit families with all the metadata etc all nicely set up.

So here's how I would make the Puravida. Drop the CAD family into a GMA or massing family. I find it useful to set Reference Lines to thick red under Object Styles.

Draw the base profile. You need to change the scale of the views you are working in so the line weights are manageable. I'm using 1:5.
In a side elevation, create some horizontal reference planes and name them (I just used 1,2,3,4) Select the base profile and copy multiple. You have to keep unchecking "constrain" for each new instance.

Now we need to adjust the shape of each profile. I started by selecting the whole thing (6 segments) Then I use shift-window to deselect that straight segment at the far left. Now I can nudge the rest to the right and this will adjust the length without spoiling the smooth tangential curves.

Keep on like this until you have a series of profiles that hug the CAD object quite closely. Now select them all and "create form". Looks pretty good.

The void inside the bowl is done in a similar way. I call this "freehand" work because you are drawing profiles directly on ref planes instead of creating a separate parametric profile family. I don't have any fixed rules about which method to use, just treat each case on its merits. This one was definitely much easier with the freehand method. I don't need the parametrics, just making one fixed shape

Now we can export as SAT and load into Autocad. Sparing use of the solid fillet command to soften the sharp edges. You will notice that we have very similar seams to those in the original CAD file, interestingly though most of them disappear later when you explode the geometry back in Revit.

The tap / faucet in the CAD download is quite an interesting shape so I accepted this as a modelling challenge. The tricky part is in making a transition from a circle to a rectangle with rounded corners. Ultimately I realised that the key to a smooth transition was having the same number of segments in each profile. So I just broke the circle into 8 arcs.

The finished article has 3 parts: extrusion, loft and revolve. Don't try to make the body all as one loft, the cylindrical portion will never come out quite straight because you are telling Revit to create a continuous curve connecting all the profiles.

I usually use both material parameters and subcategories. Most of the time the subcategory will control the materials for all the sanitary ware in the project, but just in case one fitting needs to be a different material (gold plated perhaps) ... well you get the idea.

Introducing TIM, my Toilet Information Model. Nice clean symbolic work in all 3 directions. The 2d world of orthographic is very important in my view. By all means let's do away with hard copies, but the conceptual clarity of plans and sections is invaluable. It helps us to think, to make decisions, to understand problems. Don't knock 2d. Be inclusive. It's a free world.
Oh yes, nearly forgot. Look how much cleaner my version is than the original CAD download.

Once you have that one made (floor standing) it's relatively simple to backtrack a bit and adapt it to make the wall hung version. Adjust the profiles, export to SAT again, round the corners, back into Revit, explode ...

After that I went on to make the matching WC. Same methodology. Cut across with a sideways void extrusion (like we did in the last post) Round the edges in Autocad once more. I don't bother cutting out the bowl for toilets. Going to show them with the lids down, much simpler.

Turning now to some wash basins. It turns out that the Happy D basin downloads are in SAT format and can be exploded in Revit. Whoopee, no need for me to do lots of lofting, just remove the chrome bits and replace them with separate families for easier control.

I decided to use visibility controls to permit swapping of the half pedestal and full pedestal versions. These are slightly heavyweight families (welterweight ?) so I figured that it was better to combine two in one.

Anyway that was a fun weekend, some time about a year ago I think. It's embarassing how long it takes to convert some of my work into a presentable format for sharing with the world. But I do have a day job. That being so, why am I spending my precious time fiddling with toilet families that should be available for download ?

The short answer is that ... they aren't. The slightly longer answer ? I enjoy making good quality content and somewhere deep inside I am kind of hoping that I might eventually motivate others to contribute. Who knows, Duravit themselves might eventually come tho the party.

I'm going to put some of these families up for download. I am appealing to the many experienced users out there who follow my blog to test them out and give feedback. What improvements can you suggest ? By all means make some changes and send them back. And please lobby your contacts in the supply chain to make more BIM content available. In the end it's up to us.

This work was done about 18 months ago. You might think that urinals are fairly disgusting objects, (in practice they quite often are) but is that an excuse for the pathetic state of current Revit content for this very useful piece of equipment ? That's roughly what I was thinking when I set about the task of creating some urinals that could sit proudly alongside my classy toilet content (like peas in a pod)
The first one is generic. I didn't have a particular model in mind, but the general shape and size is very common. I had previously tried to tackle this in Point World with little success. After that, almost every time I took a walk down the corridor my mind would drift to puzzling out the geometry ... it can't be that hard, surely ?

One solid half-revolve cut by two voids gets us pretty close. The extrusion cuts across sideways, and the void revolve hollows out the bowl. In reality there are usually more subtleties than this, but I'm not looking for an exact replica. Families aren't instructions for making things ... plumbing families certainly aren't. They are there to represent an object. I want them to be roughly the right size and shape, look good in orthographic views, not offend the eye in 3d shaded views, and render up fairly convincingly.

The basic form is almost there, but the sharp edges offend my eyes. So we export in a solid format (ACIS / SAT) so we can do some rounding off of complex curves in another application. I notice that I was using Inventor Fusion at first. This is probably the only time I ventured into that territory. Later on I realised that the same operation was available in Autocad.

Back in Revit you can explode the geometry to create a free-form solid that accepts material parameters. Hide this in orthographic views and replace with symbolics. (masking regions and symbolic lines) I think it is important to do all 3 views (top, side, front) We often do internal elevations of washrooms with tile setting out etc etc. Nothing like clean crisp symbolics to make these look good. If your geometry has sharp edges and is fairly simple, then you may not need symbolics (a table for example) But rounded, nurbs-like forms are unlikely to show up well in a hidden line elevation.

My next peapod is based on the Duravit Arc. I didn't have a 3d download for this, just working from dimensioned jpegs. That's more than adequate for what I want to do.

Actually this one is not very difficult. Looks a bit scary if you select all the geometry: solids and voids all over the place.

But it's not hard to figure out for anyone with a bit of experience with family editor. (Vanilla this time) Important to set up a named work plane for the angled cylinder

Once again the secret to making rendered views convincing is the softening of the edges so that they pick up the right kind of reflections.

Excited by my progress I went on to set up a rendered view on a tiled background. This is a fairly low-res version by it gets the message across. As far as I am concerned, this is a huge improvement on the urinal families that I have found on the web. I even got excited enough to model a towel draped over a towel rail. Nothing difficult in that, just a sweep, but taking care to shape both the path and the profile as gentle curves.

I'm not going to describe all these fittings in great detail. I went on to make the Vero, McDry, Bill and Starc 1 (all Duravit) Other manufacturers have similar looking models so they could be useful even when you are not specifying Duravit.

The Vero is a fairly straightforward modelling exercise in Vanilla mode. Later on I adapted this to create a "Series" urinal & screen by RAK ceramics. RAK are our local UAE manufacturers of ceramics producing good quality sanitary ware and tiles that are very competitive in the regional market.

McDry was modelled in point world. As the name implies, this is a waterless type of urinal. I haven't got around to exporting to SAT and rounding the edges on this yet.

The Bill is a slightly more elaborate modelling task, so I opted for using a CAD import for the moment and used my time to create the symbolic work in plan and elevation. (This is DWG, not SAT, so everything vanishes if you try to explode it) It's interesting to note that the orthographic views provided as downloads don't match the 3d file. The boundaries are pretty much the same, but the internal lines (intended to represent 3d curves) are quite different. I've noticed this before with downloads from other sources. It doesn't matter much to me. As long as the "footprint" is accurate and the overall impression is convincing, that's all I really want.

So I have at least 4 different strategies to choose from when modelling sanitary ware depending on my source material.

I can use a 3d CAD import and apply materials via Object Styles/imports in families.
I can explode the CAD import (if it's a true solid, like SAT format)
I can model in vanilla Revit
I can model in Point World, export to SAT, re-import and explode

Option 3 is first choice: small file sizes and directly applied material parameters

Option 4 is good for curvaceous shapes, but go easy on the edge fillets and expect file sizes of between 1 and 2mb

Option 2 is fast and easy, but only possible if the right kind of download is available (rare)

Option 1 is also fast, but end users need to understand how the materials assignments work and you will have undesirable seams in shaded views.

In my view they are all useful methods which can help us to assemble a much better library of Plumbing Fixture content.

More to come, including access to my work-in-progress Duravit families. Stay tuned :-)

I will return to my obsession with toilets shortly (didn't get time to finish the next post) In the interim, let's change the subject entirely.

My youngest son now lives in Limehouse. July was my first time to visit him since he moved, and my first time to visit Limehouse for 30 years. In 1980, I stayed there for several weeks, living & working with friends who had conceived a project for a book called "Squatting: the real story". We had all been involved in the squatting movement which blossomed forth in London during the 60s and 70s, part of a wider phenomenon of rebellious creativity that infected a whole generation of young people, from the Aldermaston marches to John & Yoko's bed-in.

I was credited as "Illustrator" of the Squatting Book and had a wonderful time generating all kinds of visual enhancements to the various chapters. It's a wonderful experience to look back on, and I will ever be grateful for Nick Wates & Caroline Lwin for roping me in. In another life I might have been a graphic artist, but here I am a BIM-crazy architect.

While visiting Tom, I was determined to visit St Anne's, a church by Nicholas Hawksmoor right next door to the converted Seaman's Mission that I stayed in with Nick & Caroline. I was fortunate to choose a Sunday morning to walk down and take some photographs. I caught the tail end of a service and was allowed to sneak inside for a few interior shots before they closed the doors.

Back home I slotted these pics into my database of British classical architecture (part of a larger archive that sits on my laptop and has been accumulating for about 15 years now) I was motivated to spend a weekend re-structuring this section and it occurred to me that Hawksmoor's six London churches would make a very interesting topic for a "BIM study" using some of the techniques I developed while working on my Urban Design presentation for this year's Revit Technology Conference in Chicago.

Hawksmoor is an interesting character, something of an architect's architect, partly because of his willingness to challenge convention (he remains difficult to classify, standing slight apart from the mainstream) and partly because of his tendency to simplify, to strip away ornament and work with stark, geometric masses.

If you wanted to be really adventurous, you might try to trace a sinuous strand linking Hawksmoor to Soane, via Voysey perhaps & Lubetkin to Foster & Rogers. That would be a somewhat fanciful response to European accusations that English Architecture has always been tame, conservative and unadventurous. (A stupid accusation in the first place, History is not a competition)

So I made simple massing models of the 6 churches, using the scalable primitives that I had developed. I had already modelled 2 London churches for my presentation. (by Wren & Gibbs, representing the generation before & after Hawksmoor, both people he knew as colleagues.) so these provide useful comparisons.

The idea here is to develop buildings in simplified form as families. In principle these can be taken as generic buildings and scaled up or down (depending on context) for use in Urban Design studies. In this case we are no using the scaling facility, but it is handy to have lightweight models that can be set in context and/or lined up in a row and compared.

We have services like Google Earth and Wikipedia these days, so it was easy to find reference information for the sites, old maps, photographs, plans. I already had a book on Hawksmoor that I purchased several years ago. The site contexts are also modelled in a highly simplified, abstract style. I want to focus on fundamentals & I want to achieve my goals within a reasonable time frame.
I found this to be a really great way to get to grips with a really diverse collection of source material and form ideas about the historical period and geographical locations for these 6 churches. I had to fight the natural tendency to model the context in too much detail. It's important to find the right level of abstraction in order to convey the general tone of a building in its setting. The locations are very different, and this has affected both the orientation and planning of the churches.

The churches result from a commission established in 1711, when Hawksmoor was 50 and a well established and respected architect. Both Wren and Vanbrugh were on this commission. Wren had employed Hawksmoor during his twenties and thirties, watched him grow from a promising teenager to a mature architect. Vanbrugh had been collaborating with Hawksmoor throughout the previous decade on various Stately Home projects. Not surprising that they chose him to lead an ambitious programme to build 50 churches. (Far too ambitious. Only 12 were built, half by Hawksmoor)
The churches were built in parallel, with the starting dates slightly staggered. Roughly speaking they follow an East to West sequence which is a convenient way to organise my comments. So we start with St Alphege, Greenwich, on a bend in the River opposite the Isle of Dogs.

This is the most traditional of the 6 designs. It's tempting to imagine that he became progressively more adventurous as he went along, but that's pure speculation and there are also practical explanations for the different approaches. In any case, he starts with a cruciform plan with a tower at the west end. This tower is deliberately set away from the main mass with a small linking element.
The church is aligned just slightly off an East-West axis, probably a response to the site which is on a bend in the road. In order to maintain the traditional orientation with the altar to the East, the church has to put it's back to the road. As a result, the east façade is rather different from the other 5 churches, more like an entrance façade in fact, with a grandiose broken pediment and deeply recessed "venetian arch".

Greenwich was a small town, sandwiched between the busy dockyards at Deptford and the vast royal estates of Greenwich Park. These estates contain an architectural gem by Inigo Jones, England's first, great classical architect. The queen's house defines two grand axes which order the composition of the Greenwich Hospital designed by Wren, with significant contributions by Hawksmoor, who was therefore returning to familiar territory. Wren was also the Astronomer Royal and designed the observatory on the hill behind the Queen's House, which is of course the setting out point for the zero meridian.

So here we have a resting place for old and injured sailors from the Royal Navy, a dockyard which built many famous ships for that navy as it rose to become the world's dominant sea power, and the origin point for the lines of longitude which were the key to long distance navigation. The locksmith for this key was John Harrison, whose chronometers still reside in the observatory museum. The accuracy of these time pieces allowed ships to calculate their position with much greater precision.

20 years earlier, the battle of Beachy Head resulted in a shock defeat by France. The hospital at Greenwich can be seen as part of the reaction to this as the King & Queen strove to rebuild the strength & prestige of the navy. In order to do this they had to borrow large amounts of money which involved negotiating with Parliament and had two significant side effects. Firstly parliament further strengthened it's position as a counterbalance to royal power, in contrast to the absolute monarch of catholic France. Secondly it led directly to the creation of the Bank of England which was set up to manage this loan and played a key role as London rose to become the financial capital of a world dominated by long distance trade.

Greenwich lies opposite the Isle of Dogs. From 1800 to 1960 this was the heart of Dockland, providing deep water anchorage for the sharp increase in shipping resulting from the Industrial Revolution. In Hawksmoor's day, the East & West India Companies operated from wharves along the river edge further up stream towards the city. These wharves had been spreading steadily eastwards and Limehouse represented the extreme limit of this expansion.

Here Hawksmoor had the benefit of a large churchyard and was able to orient his church exactly East-West with the West tower and entrance facing directly down a short side-street. At Greenwich he had placed the transepts in the middle, as far back as he could reasonably place them. The transepts act as side entrances, reasonably close to the street, and give direct access to the galleries. In short he had a logical circulation strategy for a public meeting place.

At Limehouse the congregation approaches from the West and the transepts are brought right up to that end, transforming themselves to side buttresses for the tower. They have a triple role: entrance, structural support, vertical circulation.

The vertical circulation at the back corners is played down, with two square turrets acting like symbolic tent pegs, to counteract the weight of the tower with its buttressing transepts.

There is still a short group of river-side houses in Limehouse that date back to the 18th Century. Narrow street includes "The Grapes" public house which is well worth a visit if you are in the neighbourhood and want to step back in time. So that brings us back to where we started: St Anne's Limehouse and a wonderful nostalgic Sunday morning, part of my trip back home from RTC Chicago.

I think that's enough for one post. We'll take a closer look at the other 4 churches next time.

We are continuing where we left off last time. Six London churches from the early 1700s, all designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor using his very personal vision of the English Baroque. We started in Greenwich and have been moving inland. Last stop was Limehouse.

Moving further west we arrive at Shadwell & Wapping. Around 1720 there would have been wharves & warehouses all along the river front, with open ground behind, some of it devoted to gardens. A little further inland was the main road heading towards Limehouse (Ratcliff Highway) which hosted a ribbon of residential development. Here Hawksmoor built St George in the East.

The site was the interior of a large residential block, with houses backing on to it most of the way around. Some of this housing was flattened during the blitz and the south side has been left open. Once again the site pushes the orientation slight off an ideal E/W alignment and the circulation strategy changes once again.

This time we have four entrances at the four corners of the main mass. The vertical circulation is by spiral stairs placed just inboard of these entrances and expressed as towers with pepper pot domes aloft. These stairs also have doors at ground level, so that galleries and nave seating have separate but interconnected circulation routes.

Was Hawksmoor dissatisfied with his previous circulation schemes, and looking for ways to get people in and out of the building more fluently ? Or is he just playing games, ringing the changes ?

By now I am developing a version of the massing model that stands up to closer inspection. Not yet ready to switch to project mode, but I do want my family to support a more detailed study of the building's composition. For plan views at a finer scale I am using an embedded detail component. Not BIM, do you say ? I beg to differ. For urban design studies this is an entirely appropriate lightweight method for representing signature buildings within a broader scheme.

The tower is a compromise between the two previous schemes: partially separated from the building but still supported with side buttressing. In the next image you can also see the detailed model side by side with the simpler version.

If St George is due East from the City, Spitalfields is North East, and slightly closer in. This is a suburb based on textiles, which were the mainstay of the English economy right through the middle ages and into the first half of the Industrial Revolution.

Once again we touch upon the antagonism between Catholic/Absolutist France and Protestant/Parliamentary England. Spitalfields was home to thousands of Huguenot silk weavers: refugees fleeing from sectarian violence (sound familiar?) France's loss was England's gain. Traditionally England had specialised in coarser textiles: wool and linen. The Spitalfields weavers added a finer product to the portfolio, often decorated with fancy needlework: a luxury product.

The site is different once again: a corner plot diagonally opposite a large open market square that was covered over in the nineteenth century and still flourishes today. It has to be a long thin church and luckily the west end is towards the square, so nice opportunity for a grand entrance frontage. But was it luck ? Were the sites predetermined or could Hawksmoor/and or the commission negotiate. I've no idea, let's stick with the notion that the buildings were designed to suit a given site.

This time there are no galleries. The church is very directional, rows of columns striding down the nave. There are 2 doors tucked away at the back corners, but the main circulation routes are clearly at the front end: 3 doors entered via a grand portico.

To my eyes, the tower and portico are decidedly odd: something about the proportions perhaps. Once again there are side buttresses to the tower. I get the impression that they started as pillars like St George, then got wider to allow for a grand portico and created an opportunity for a concave, linking sweep. To crown it all is a pyramid, which ends up being more of a gothic spire.

Church no 5. Now we dive right into the heart of the city. St Mary Woolnoth is close by the Royal Exchange an open cloister where business deals had been made since tudor times. Like most of the city, it had been rebuilt 40 years previously following the great fire of London. The previous church had also been patched up (by Wren) but by 1711 was deemed unsafe and demolished. Apparently the name does not derive from the wood trade, which by now was dominated by the London merchants. All the same there was an open market close by, called The Wool Church Market, which would soon make way for the Mansion House, home of the Lord Mayor of London. The closely packed streets and alleys behind the church were packed with coffee houses, all the rage now as places to meet and make deals.

So this is a different kind of site, and Hawsksmoor designed a very compact church, a cubic volume with a rather unusual rectangular tower ending in two square turrents. The church is twisted off axis, clockwise by about 30 degrees. The circulation is very simple, as befits such a small church. One entrance and two small spiral stairs buried in the splay of the front corners giving access to the galleries (sadly removed in the C19).

Finally we come to St George Bloomsbury. The site is in the newly fashionable "West End" amongst streets of townhouses, developed on Land owned by aristocrats like the Duke of Devonshire. At this stage they still maintained their own large mansions, but they would soon move further out and demolish their grand houses to make way for more streets and houses for the nouveau riche. London was on its way up, rising on a tide of business deals made in the city, financial institutions such as the Bank of England, and joint stock companies like the East India Company (EIC) which had been importing ever increasing volumes of Calicos (printed cotton) from India over the previous century.

The wool merchants in the city, and silk weavers of Spitalfields were not amused. Cheap, lightweight printed textiles threatened to undercut their markets. They lobbied parliament and a series of Calico acts followed, around the time that Hawksmoor was building his churches. The import of printed cloth was banned. People imported plain cloth and printed it in England. Then plain cloth was banned leading to the import of cotton thread in large quantities and stimulating the growth of a substantial cotton weaving industry.

The lesson: trade restrictions have unintended consequences, in this case (ultimately) the Industrial Revolution. First of all there was a very lucrative business spinning, weaving and printing raw cotton. The weavers couldn't keep up. Kay's flying shuttle fixed this around 1740. Now the spinners were under pressure.

Fortunately England had been fertile soil for artisans and entrepreneurs for several generations (witness the silk weavers). Many minds set to work and ultimately Mr Arkwright, a former wig salesman from Lancashire, came up with his Water Frame in the 1760s and pioneered the idea of a Cotton Mill (His first mill was in Cromford, Derbyshire). It caught on big and initiated the chain reaction we now call the Industrial Revolution. All because people living and working in areas where churches 4 & 5 were going up, lobbied against the cotton trade. Well, partly because.

Back to church 6. Here we have a challenging site. Twisted about 30 degrees counter-clockwise and hemmed in tightly to east and west. Hawksmoor's solution is deceptively simple. Tower to the west, apse to the East, grand portico converts the south transept into an imposing entrance with no less than 5 sets of double doors.

Vertical circulation is by open, geometric wooden stairs, spiralling up to the balconies. These were removed, but have been restored. In real estate, location is everything. St George Bloomsbury has been lavishly restored, where St George in the East makes do with a small concrete framed, modern enclosure within its bombed-out shell.

Hawksmoor's solution to an awkward site (whose purchase he had negotiated) was clever, but apparently did not impress the fashionable parishioners who took down the north gallery in 1781 and moved the altar to the north wall (north-west) this gave them a conventional layout, more like Spitalfields, with a tower to one side and an apsaidal transept to the other.

Now that the church is as much an architectural museum as church, the original scheme has been restored, along with the writhing mythical beasts clinging to the corners of the steeple.

Six fascinating churches, giving us a glimpse into six different locations in London, with a shared history dating back to 1700 and beyond. England was on the edge of a transformation that would shake the world, but looking back at the two images of the technology involved (hand weaving and the water frame) it struck me how similar they are in general construction. It may have set off the industrial revolution, but the water frame is basically bits of hardwood joined together with mortice and tenon joints plus a few smaller metallic moving parts.

It's not that it's a huge conceptual breakthrough. Arkwright saw a challenge and used existing knowledge to turn it into an opportunity. At that moment the cherries on the slot machine happened to line up. The market for cotton cloth had already been primed, the Calico Acts had built up pressure in the system, London had financial systems, a thriving port and a growing middle class, James Watt and Matthew Boulton had semi-effective steam engines largely confined to mining but as it turned out capable of meeting the challenge when the rivers and streams of Derbyshire maxed out.

And so the explosion of fossil fuel usage began and the London that Hawksmoor knew was unrecongnisable within a hundred years. Soane was busy expanding the Bank of England, deep water docks were being constructed on the Isle of Dogs, at Shadwell and Wapping. The primary engine of this growth was Cottonopolis (otherwise known as Manchester) In 1800 Liverpool was the busiest port in the world, handling more than a third of global trade, primarily raw cotton heading into Manchester, and finished cloth coming out. The canal system couldn't handle it. Neither rail tracks, nor steam engines were new technologies but the race to put them together in a cost-effective manner now had a motivation.

About 9 months ago while working on my Urban Design presentation for RTC chicago I did a study of the Dessau Bauhaus in context. Just a simple massing model of the famous building itself, and lots of schematic mapping out of the surrounding landscape.

For some reason my BIM pencil seems to like drawing maps. Who am I to argue ? But what an intense piece of history lurks beneath this landscape. All these avant-garde artists and social dreamers cooking up their recipes while Adolf and his cronies sneak their way into power, perfecting propaganda as an art form along the way.

I'm not going to go any further into that right now, but while doing the research I stumbled across a Bauhaus Chess Set which struck me as a wonderfull little exercise in Vanilla parametrics.

I love the way this chess set is abstracted down to the simplest of geometric forms. Classic Bauhaus design: break things apart, analyse them, rebuild from first principles.

My initial analysis suggested that I needed 3 families to cover all the pieces. The Knight and the Bishop are basically one-offs. They don't have to be, but I wanted to keep things fairly simple. The other 4 pieces are covered by a family with 4 types and some visibility controls.

The plan is to make everything fully scalable. Mostly this is done by equalisation constraints and simple formulae linking everything back to a module (usually the width parameter) For example in the Bishop family the thickness of the cross (T) is expressed as Width/3.

The knight is a big solid cube with two half-sized void cubes biting away diagonally opposite corners. I guess this is an abstraction of the dog-leg manner in which knights move across the chess board.

The multi-purpose chess piece is very simple. Notice the use of root 2 for the diagonally placed crown, and of course the visibility controls that I mentioned before. And that completes the chess pieces.

Let's go ahead and place them on a board. Lots of equality constraints here to make our 8x8 grid. We need 4 material parameters: 2 for the board and 2 for the pieces. Also 2 parameters will suffice to control all the pieces: one for the pawns, the other for all the rest. Everything is now expressed as a fraction of the board width.

So of course the whole thing scales endlessly. Well not quite. We still have Revit's built in aversion for the extremely small and the ridiculously large. It's optimised for buildings, stop complaining. But I do feel able to complain about the lack of intelligent symbols for North Points and Scale Bars. I once came up with a workaround for scale bars that uses ordinate dimensions referencing a detail component. Maybe the logic is that drawing sheets will become obsolete so why waste the energy ? I like drawings (you probably know that) Whether we print them or not is another issue, but orthographic views arranged on sheets are very powerful means of communication. You can't figure out how a building works just by doing a walkabout.

We have to get past this illusion that BIM is about making everything realistic. The tension between realism and abstraction is as old as the hills and will be with us until we drive ourselves extinct. The paradox of visualising reality on 2 dimensional surfaces has informed art for 30 thousand years. Let's not fool ourselves with this nonsense about the end of history. The end of history is armageddon. Trust me, you don't want to go there.

So I'm happy to shift in and out of 1d/2d/3d space, exploring ideas, shuffling data, imagining impossible worlds. Piet Mondrian took a journey around the time that the Bauhaus was built that has always blown my mind. He started out with still lifes and landscapes that were partially abstracted, a bit like Cezanne. Then he just went on flattening out and abstracting, form-finding in a way ... endless variations until all that remained was shape and colour.

Bauhaus students were also encouraged to simplify and abstract, but the logic now was to create forms that reflected the realities of industrial production. These seem like trivial ideas now, but 90 years ago they were much more revolutionary than all the little consumer toys we label as "disruptive technology" today. For that matter, the minimalism that Mr Jobs tried to copyright was really plagiarised from people like Mondriaan, Picasso, Gropius, Mies. (It's OK I'm just being provocatively naughty)

But be careful what you wish for. The 1920s and 1930s were stirring times. Everything seemed to be changing. Technology was something to love or hate, worship or despise. Bauhaus masters like Johannes Itten reacted by immersing themselves in meditation and the mystical pull of ancient religions. Dear old Adolf had a different plan in mind. Technical solutions and aesthetic movements are wonderful in their way but hard economic realities and political turbulence have a knack for sweeping all that away overnight. The Bauhaus was closed down. Many creative minds fled Germany. I have experienced hyper-inflation first hand. It changes everything. It drove me into the desert in search of gold.

Just a few reflections on History, Art, Politics ... and of course the game of chess.

While preparing the previous post, I was motivated to dash off the basic modelling for a Starc 2 urinal. Simplicity itself, which is the charm of this particular model. I haven't tackled the symbolic views yet. In fact this is almost able to stand up without symbolic work, but for the tendency of rounded edges to dissapear in orthographic views

So that's where I stand with my urinal collection. A nice row of peas in a pod. The image below shows the original cad versions alongside the natively modeled "improvements". Still 2 or 3 to be tackled here, and strategies to be chosen: vanilla, point world, exploded CAD or CAD import. Plus some cleaning up to be done in other cases.

A couple of posts ago I dodged the question of file sizes. Time to address this now. For some freeform shapes I have been modelling in Point World, exporting to SAT, rounding off edges, importing to Vanilla and exploding. Looking at some of the SAT files, it is clear that rounding of sharp edges is an expensive operation, purely in terms of kilobytes.

Of course this doesn't necessarily translate into performance issues, or even larger project files. Interestingly enough, 5mb worth of SAT files when collected into a single RFA end up at less than half that size. Don't ask me how.

Received wisdom suggests that nesting, constraints and formulae impact performance more than megabytes. This is good news for sanitaryware because although the geometry is often demanding, the shapes are fixed. We might nest the taps and add a couple of visibility parameters but that shouldn't be a worry.

When I did the Puravida series, the nested taps on the bidet turned out to be very heavy when made in point world. It was an interesting modelling exercise, but I managed something close enough in Vanilla at one twentieth of the size. For a small item like this I think the nurbs version isn't really justified. Cut your losses (or perhaps it's "cut the suit according to the cloth")

So I ended up with 4 Puravida families weighing in at around 1 to 2mb each. That's complete with symbolic plans and elevations, material parameters and chrome fittings, but no connectors as yet. Not being an MEP engineer I rarely get around to adding connectors to families. (my bad)

One more example of the unpredictability of file sizes. I discovered that the downloaded SAT files for Happy D washbasins explode nicely inside Vanilla Revit. Now the shapes may be fairly simple, but they do include a number of rounded edges. My family has nested taps, visibility controls and 3 items of exploded geometry (1 basin plus 2 pedestals) The whole thing weights in at less than 750 kb.

This family also includes symbolics in all 3 directions and for both types. I don't know what software they used for the modelling, or even if that has any impact on the file size issue. Would be interested to know if anyone has workflows for generating explodable 3d CAD more simply that my Point World methods. You can see from the next image that exploding the geometry and adding symbolics results in a much better family. (but read Aaron's comment below)

Here is a view of my current Duravit collection. I'm about ready to share this, and to invite people to contribute to the process of completing the collection. Who knows, maybe we can even persuade Duravit to come to the party.

After all, other European manufacturers have started to make the effort. Here are some families downloaded from the BIM object website. Don't ask me why the thumbnails have a black background. Maybe they were made my MEP engineers :-)

I decided to open these families up and take a good look. This is all modeled directly in vanilla. Quite a tour-de-force in some ways. But for my money, there is a certain amount of wasted effort. I wouldn't have bothered with all that hidden detail around the back of the basins for example.
There may come a time when BIM is used by the plumbers who install the fittings on site to help them visualise the whole process, but we are not there yet by a long way and if we do ever get there, I am not sure that they will be using the same objects that are used by the architects to position all the fittings in a 300 bedroom hotel (for example) Perhaps there will be a hyperlink in the family that takes you to a place in the cloud where all those finer installation details are modeled

Put more simply I am saying "let's model the parts that show in an interior rendering to an acceptable level, but don't get too carried away with unnecessary detail" which abbreviates to KISS.
So I simplified the basin considerably, cleaned the geometry up a bit so as to eliminate most of the seams, left out some of the finer detail on the bottle trap and generally felt like I had created a somewhat better family at the end of the day.

I also added symbolics to the elevations and a masking region in plan view. My approach to symbolics is to use them selectively. With rectangular objects / sharp-edged objects I would tend to let the 3d geometry do the work, but if the shapes are "blobby" or there are too many edges/seams showing up in plan or elevation, symbolics are worth considering. Sanitary ware is a classic case because the shapes are "blobby" and the sizes are fixed. (no struggling to get the 2d and 3d to flex in harmony)

Just out of interest, this family started at around 560kb, dropped to around 350 after I simplified (not immediately after, but 2 or 3 saves later) Then it went back up to around 470 with the additional symbolics. Lean and mean.

By the way, none of the above is intended as a criticism of BIM object or the manufacturer Jika, or whoever modeled the original family. I think they have all made significant contributions to the global BIM effort and I enjoyed building on the platform they provided. I hope they can also accept my suggestions in the positive spirit intended.

Almost ready to share my Duravit collection now. Hope it's been worth the wait :-)

This was my presentation for AUX Dubai 2014 last week. It's partially based on my rigs & profiles session at RTC Chicago, but with some new stuff ... mostly about using rigs in form-finding studies for high-rise towers. Two slides to introduce myself. Day job ...

Blog persona ...

Then we get to the observation that there are now 2 ways to make stuff in Revit: the "traditional family editor" and the "conceptual massing environment" which for simplicity I like to refer to as "Vanilla" and "Point World"

Cue for a quick demo of basic concepts: Hosting points on lines, Normalised Curve Parameter, Show ref planes always, loaded Mass families that act as profiles, rehosting points, global scale parameters.

And this leads us straight into the "Straight Line Rig" which is a simple device for maintaining relationships between a series of profiles that define a lofted form (or in some cases 2 or 3 forms)

I usually use an ellipse as my first mass profile example. Nice and simple but good for illustrating the concepts of an "Input" value, a Global "Scale" Factor (via parameter linking) and a "Depth Ratio". These concepts will then transfer smoothly to a whole range of more complex profiles.

So we move on to the first of our tower examples, adding a rectangular profile into the mix. Basically there are two components to the form finding process. You set out several instances of your family in a matrix, using different heights and varying other parameters like "slenderness" and "flatness". These are properties that are exposed as instance parameters within the project environment. The second component involves opening the family up and varying the relative size, shape and position of the various profiles via their input values and normalised curve parameters.

Reload into project and all your towers update to a new set of shapes. If you want to preserve these experiments, you just keep saving the project under different names. To make this more valuable it is useful to set up your views and sheets at an early stage so that the experiments can be compared in a common format.

My first set of towers comrised 4 different profiles, each coming in 3 different sizes.

Once you have made a few of these profiles, it's relatively easy to come up with more variations. These explorations contain a new idea that I stumbled across while preparing my talk. Because the input values are all instance parameters, they are lost when you swap out the profiles for another family. The subtle curves of your tower revert to a crude extrusion.

But this can be solved by having a "generic profile.rfa" container and nesting the different profiles inside. Not these different profiles appear to Revit as types of the same profile. You can swap new shapes in while preserving the relative sizes and shapes that you so carefully set up.

This technique also makes it quite easy to add in a rotation parameter so that you can make those twisty towers that seem to have become popular these days. Ah the follies of youth :-)
I opened up one of my towers files at this point to give people a better feel for the families than a set of images ever can.

And then we move on to the Rectangular Rig. Historically speaking this was my first big "Rig Moment", dating from the 2012 pumpkin papers, when I did an Arcimboldo take on Snow White. It was only some time later that I realised that the Doric Pumpkins I had made the year before were really crying out for a Straight Line Rig. Be that as it may, the Rectangular Rig allows you to bend the straight line rig into curves and "S" shapes as well as having 2 or more lines held in a constant relationship to each other.

I used a wave-shaped building to illustrate the basic concept in action. This is vaguely inspired by the Jumeirah Beach Hotel, which is next to the Burj Al Arab, just down the road from where I work. You can use the rig to straighten out the curvature, or emphasise it. I call this parameter "Flatness"

There are many possible applications for the Rectangular Rig. One of my favourites is Oscar Niemeyers cathedral in Brasilia which uses an adaptive version of the rig, hooked into a circular repeater.

For RTC Chicago I made a funny little desk lamp family which can be pushed and pulled into a variety of shapes.

Line, Rectangle, Box ... seems to be some kind of sequence there maybe. This time the rig is an extrusion with visibility turned off. We could have made a box from 12 reference lines (one for each edge) but the extrusion is easier to make, and less confusing to use. An extra bonus which I haven't exploited very much as yet, is the ability to place points of the faces of the box.

For Chicago I made a whole range of comfy seats. Sofas are not the easiest things to make with Vanilla Revit. Point World takes us a step or two nearer, but still baulks at some of the lumpy, bumpy forms I tried to throw at it. It's more forgiving if you stick to surfaces, but for these examples I used solid forms.

Actually I did do one based on surfaces. It's a wall-mounted uplight. 3 profiles, each comprising 3 arcs. These are not loaded profile families, just reference lines drawn directly in the family. You can vary the proportions quite alarmingly, and by changing the position of the middle profile switch between concave and convex versions.

The box rig can also be used for form-finding studies of high-rise towers. In this example the box is kept visible and forms the central mass of the building. There are secondary projections to front and rear whose size and proportions are defined relative to the main mass. In this way the height once more controls all other dimensions. You can generate any number of alternate version and all of them will remain scalable, simply by typing in a new height value.

In the developed version, I have 12 instances, with independently configurable front and rear projections. In one case, a bow-fronted profile has been used for the front projection.

I finished off with a variey of examples, some of them using a combination of rig types, some of them informed by the ideas behind the rigs, but drawn "freehand" so to speak. It all depends on what you are trying to achieve. Sometimes scalability and parametric control are very important, sometimes less so, sometimes not at all.

My approach is to build up a repertoire of techniques and principles, then take each case on its merits and try to develop an instinctive feel for the most appropriate way to tackle each new challenge as it arises.

The spout of the jug is a classic case. I've come across this type of situation a couple of times now. If you are using profiles to loft a form and there is a transition from a profile with say 5 segments to another with say 8 ... consider making both profiles with the higher number. That way the various surfaces with join together in a more predictable fashion. Otherwise you are likely to end up with a form that appears to have its knickers in a twist.

The Brancusi birds don't really need to use a box rig. You could make a reasonable version based on a rectangle, but the box allows the extra subtlety of a slight spiral twist, a bird twisting its head slightly to one side perhaps. When I have time I will go back to these and develop some of my own sculptural ideas taking Brancusi as a point of departure.

The stone flowerpots one the other hand are good examples of the virtues of "freehand" profiles. Sometimes it's much more effective to draw profiles directly in the family as reference lines, That way it's easy to nudge them around and massage the form into shape, more like clay modelling. Typing numbers into dialogue boxes can be very effective, but it's not always the best solution.

Nothing to say about the toilets in this post. Plenty of other recent posts to refer to if that's what turns you on.

I'm very proud of the cushion I made for Chicago. It's quite simple really, but with just enough variation and subtlety to come across as an irregular, "natural" form. Not 100% photoreal, still a little stylised, but perhaps that's the true nature of BIM.

And now we're into more territory that I have been exploring in recent posts. Whole buildings as families. This time simplification has to be taken much further. That's the whole point. Don't get drawn into the fine detail. Get a feel for the building as a whole composition. Try to tease out it's inner essence. That way we can make useful comparisons between buildings of a similar type perhaps. I would love to do an analysis of the French Gothic Cathedral using these techniques. Anyone care to sponsor me for a six month sabbatical, including a six week tour of the sites ? Dream on !

I finished with this years pumpkin. Lots of posts about this, just go to October if you missed them first time around. But the point here is that I made use of all 3 rig types to support a design process. Yes folks, Rigs can be design tools, they're not just for geeks.

Returning to the theme of London, viewed through the lens of Hawksmoor's six churches, but stepping aside from Revit for a moment and using photographs I have taken over the past few years, rediscovering the city that I lived in for 4 years as a student some 4 decades ago.

This post is dedicated to Caroline Lwin who I knew in those far off days of youthful discovery. I spent several weeks staying with her and Nick in Limehouse to help out with the Squatting Book they were putting together in 1980. This in itself was something of a rediscovery as we had gone our separate ways around 1973 when I moved back north. It was great to become close again, just as it was wonderful to spend a couple of hours with Caroline last December, not long before she floated out of this world, as graceful as ever, still questioning the world around her.

Nick now lives with Jane in Hastings and it has been a great pleasure to spend some quality time with them over the last 2 or 3 years. Wonderful hosts, living in a fascinating town. Jane worked at the De la Warr pavilion during its refurbishment period and laid on a fantastic behind-the-scenes tour for me back in July. More on that in future posts when I get time to "finish" the Revit model of Mendelsohn's seaside classic.

Here is the house where we did the Squatting Book. It's an old seaman's mission built next to the Limehouse Cut, a canal linking the river lea to the river thames, cutting out a long detour around the isle of dogs. This was built a little before the Regent's Canal and the Limehouse Basin which connected with the cut to form a primary hub linking the canal system with the wharves of the Thames.

And that was the new mission house, built on the other side of the Commercial Road which became the main artery out to London's Docklands which sprang up in rapid succession in the early 1800s. It's an odd building, kind of a stripped down gothic, in dingy yellow brick and pale grey faience tile. What can it have been like, having spent your life roaming the seven seas, to eke out your final years in a place like this?

There is a bridge that carries the Commercial Road over the Limheouse Cut, a fine example of victorian brickwork sweeping over the canal in an elliptical barrel vault. No ponies on the tow-path these days, just cyclists and joggers. Water wheels and canals were critical to the early stages of the industrial revolution, but quickly gave way to steam power as the demands for power and transport grew too rapidly to be met by sustainable means. So the canal building period came and went in the blink of a metaphorical eye, rather like the 5 1/4 inch floppy disks that I used to carry around with me with their massive 350k storage capacity. I seem to remember an AutoCAD installation set comprising a full box of floppies. That would be almost 25 years ago.

Today Limehouse is a fascinating, mixed community. Still home to many genuine "east enders" living in old terraces or newer council estates, it also boasts a growing proportion of upwardly mobile professionals who have moved in to waterside developments conveniently positioned both for the old financial centre in the City, and the new one around Canary Wharf. In the image above, St Anne's Limehouse floats above new riversite apartments. Notice the old dockside cranes, now acting as monumental pieces of urban sculpture.

This shot is a little further to the right, from the same vantage point. Investment banking now dominates the skyline of London, where once the church steeples of Wren and others rose alone above the rooftops.

Those shots were taken from the balconies at the back of the Prospect of Whitby. Tom and I had lunch there on Wimbledon finals day. It's another little trip back in time, much like the Grapes in Limehouse, but the Prospect is a little further upstream near the Shadwell Basin.

This shoreline shot shows the riverbank at low tide with the steeple of St Anne's in the background. In Hawksmoor's day their would have been a lot more boats and activity.

At the entry to Shadwell Basin there is a counterbalanced swing bridge (there's another one of the same design opposite the Prospect on the south bank also) This probably dates from the Victorian era. I include this here because it is so evocative of the industrial revolution which crept up on England in the decades following Hawksmoor's death.

This shot of a large engine house next to the Shadwell Basin also captures the industrial era, with just a hint of the modern intrusions in the background.

This one is not mine. I plucked it from the internet. I like it because it shows the glazed roof over spitalfields market in the foreground, the post-modern towers of canary wharf in the background and Hawksmoor's spire centre stage.

Back to my own photos and the interior of the market. In Hawksmoor's day the market was a large open square and the recently built streets around were home to Huguenot silk weavers who had come over en masse from France. As dissenting protestants the weavers would not have worshipped in Hawksmoor's church which represented the power of the English establishment. Towards the end of Hawksmoor's life, Irish weavers were also moving into the area motivated more by economic necessity than religious persecution. In victorian times, as hand silk-weaving went into decline, a new wave of Jewish migrants moved in, predominantly tailors.

During my life time, Bangladeshi migrants have moved in, and operate a thriving restaurant trade in Brick Lane which defines the western boundary of the block where Christchurch was built. In Hawksmoor's day, much of the land behind brick lane would have been open fields. Spittle Field market iself had been open ground outside the developed area of the city just a generation or two earlier. And yet it is just a stone's throw from the financial heart of England.

This photo, looking back from the edges of modern spitalfields, shows just how close it is to the city, represented here by the Gherkin. So let's move on towards the old lady of Threadneedle Street.

When St Mary Woolnoth was built, the Bank of England was still operating in rented offices. Soon afterwards, a portion of its present site was procured and the first permanent building opened in 1734. Gradually neighbouring plots were acquired and around the turn of the century Sir John Soane built the enclosing wall which is almost all that remains of his extensive work at the bank between 1788 and 1833. I photographed his statue in a niche of that wall in 2007.

Parallels can be drawn between Hawksmoor & Soane: a certain idiosyncracy, a tendency towards stark simplicity, the minimalists of their day. Both rose from relatively humble backgrounds to become consumate professionals. St Mary Woolnoth is a small church squeezed into the angle between converging streets. The overall composition is rigidly cubic, but there are niches on one side that are overtly baroque in their spatial complexity.

The Nat West tower was the first skyscraper in the City of London. It was begun while I was a student, and the architect's son was in the year ahead of me at the Barlett School. Colonel Seiffert also designed Centre Point which features at the beginning of the first post in this series. It was a symbol of rapacious, profiteering development to us at the time, standing empty as it did at a time when many were homeless or living in slums. The power of money. Seeds sown way back in Hawksmoor's youth when the Bank of England was first established. Extensions of the trade in stocks and bonds that took place in the coffee houses of the narrow streets around St Mary Woolnoth 300 years ago.

Architecture serves the needs of the ruling class. That would be a strict marxist reading. I am not so strict, but still ... Seiffert's classy facade detailing combined with clever manipulation of building codes delivered ROI to the shareholders, boosted the profits of pension funds. The middle class were not complaining even if their pampered offspring were using the new freedoms of the swinging sixties to make rebellious noises. (That's me folks, only borderline middle class perhaps, but full of youthful idealism all the same) It so happens that Centre Point looks down upon the suburb of Bloomsbury.

Back to 1710. Bloomsbury was the rising suburb of the upper middle class. Land didn't belong to pension funds in those days. The aristocracy was cashing in: building townhouses on their London estates, eventually demolishing their grand houses and moving further out of town. The squares built by the Duke of Bedford in and around Bloomsbury are now famous and symbols of cultured urban life.

Generations of professionals and intellectuals built celebrated careers while living here. Lots of blue plaques proclaiming the importance of lives gone by. Robert Willan was a Yorkshireman like me, but born 200 years earlier. He was one of the founders of dermatology, describing and classifying skin diseases in a systematic manner. So he represents the rise of professionalism and the scientific method, key elements (along with the joint stock company) in England's sudden surge to dominate the world.

There are many traces of Regency style here, that period when John Nash was the favourite architect of Royalty and a thorn in John Soane's side. Equal and opposite perhaps. While Soane was doing serious architectural business in the City, Nash was playfully transforming the West End. But different though they were, both were developing an individual style and pursuing the desire to innovate that still dominates the thinking of the western tradition. I grew up believing that innovation was "all good" and of course I am still motivated by the drive to do "something original", but as I grow older and read more widely, I can't help wondering whether homo sapiens, as a species, isn't innovating itself into oblivion. Innovation and growth are the twin pillars of the global economy, driving each other recklessly forward. But like Alice in Wonderland, we may find that we grow so big that our head hits the ceiling and we can no longer fit through the exit door. Perhaps someone will invent a "drink me" potion to shrink us back to a sustainable size.

I took this photo in 2009. I had to double-check, because it's hard to believe that 5 years have gone by so quickly. That was my last trip to the UK before my father died. Seems like yesterday. It shows the balcony that was removed by the parishioners of Bloomsbury, now faithfully restored. You can see the 5 sets of double doors that open up the side of the nave quite alarmingly, or so the parishioners obviously thought. The altar is to the left and the tower to the right. But the proud people of Bloomsbury relocated the altar behind the gallery that I stood on when I took this photo, so that late-comers would enter discreetly from the back and not disturb the faithful. The elliptical arches say "baroque" but in other ways the bold simplicity and regularity of the composition looks forward to the "neo-classical" mood that was about to come into vogue. (Burlington, Campbell, Kent)

Perhaps the culmination of that trend, the British Museum stands almost next door to Hawksmoor's church. It was designed by Rober Smirke at a time when industrialisation had taken a firm grip and England was fast becoming the dominant power in the world (Napolean having been recently defeated) It provides a suitable end point for this little photographic essay, and for my mini-series on Hawksmoor's six churches. We have taken an urban design perspective, and tried to imagine London as it was when the Bank of London was founded, the calico acts were being passed and the mass production of cotton cloth in and around Manchester was yet to come.

Hopefully we can zoom in a little closer and examine the churches from an architectural perspective at some point in the future. But for now, I'd just like to say thankyou all for visiting this blog during 2014. A very happy new year to you all, and I do hope your wishes come true in 2015.

Recently I've been making some families for "traditional" Gulf architecture. I don't want to get too deep into a discussion of what is "correct" and "incorrect" when following a traditional style. Traditions are always works in progress, subject to change, influenced by other cultures. Societies are living, breathing, messy groupings that share certain things in common but also embrace conflicting forces.

Here is a picture of the Shindaga district at the mouth of Dubai creek. It has been refurbished quite recently and not everyone will be happy with the way that has been done, but it gives an impression of some of the main qualities that we try to capture when working in the "local style".

Streets are narrow and irregular, walls are rough plastered with mostly square niches. Roofs are flat, often acting as terraces with timber balustrades in places and drained by timber gargoyles. Rainfall is a rare event but can he quite heavy when it comes. Beneath the plaster, walls are often built from roughly coursed coral blocks.

There are carved or moulded gypsum screens that offer a mix of privacy and air movement. The ones shown here are geometric, but floral designs are also common. The next picture illustrates the living, breathing mish-mash concept I posited earlier. It was taken this christmas and that's my son Joe enjoying a break from the Austrian winter. The camels are laid on for the tourists and in the background you can see plastic water tanks, satelite dishes and air conditioning equipment: a typical Dubai roofscape.

Below are some quick families I made for more decorative recesses. The ones on the left have a fixed width and variable height. It would be possible to make them more parametric, but I don't see the point. It's easier to duplicate the family and scale the decorative motif up or down manually to create a new size. In reality these will probably be GRC mouldings so you want 2 or 3 discreet sizes, not an infinitely variable range. The floral motif is fixed in both width and height of course and would be virtually impossible to parametrically. (perhaps with a ridiculously heavy Point-World family ?)

Windows were generally quite small, barred and shuttered, no glass. Today we have air conditioning so there will be a sheet of glass somewhere. It's quite common to have a fixed pane between the shutters and the bars.

We are considering having two sets of shutters, the first layer glazed, and the inner layer blank. The ones shown here don't yet have the inner shutters.

For a while I considered the possibility of a window family with multiple options for parametric recesses that can be swapped in and out. The advantage here is that the recesses would automatically move and resize with the windows. The disadvantages include daunting complexity for end users, a tendency for embedded detail to show up in plan views when not wanted, and most importantly the difficulty of scheduling the windows and recesses separately. Yes we could use shared families, but that would negate the linking of width parameters. Anyway I opted for separate families.

Arabic doors can be very beautiful: chunky, richly carved and embellished with metal studs (nails really) One day I will model one of these in greater detail, but for a project we need simplified representations to keep model performance within reason while conveying the design intent and making the different types recognisable in an elevation.

The basic concept features two leaves, inward opening, with a vertical bar attached to one leaf, forming a rebate. This is often notched & ornamented, even if the rest of the door is plain.
While working on this post I added shutters to the window family. I've placed these in the open position, which is how they will normally be during the day.

If I was doing this family for a historical study or educational exercise, I would consider having a choice of shutter position perhaps using instance visibility parameters. It would be nice to take a shot from the outside with the shutters closed. But for a fee earning project with some 50 buildings all linked to a central model ... I'm already worried about overmodelling. Better limit the file sizes, constraints & parameters.

While we're talking practicalities, there is the question of how a detailed family will look in the General Arrangement plans. What do you show and what do you hide ? What appears in symbolic form ? Everyone will have different ideas, but in this case I have turned off the shutters and the glazed panels in plan views. The inward opening mechanism is show with dashed symbolic lines. Strictly speaking there should be two sets, but I think this would get far too busy, especially at 1:100.

The next image zooms in on a section at 1:50. On the left the glass is turned on which results in a rather ugly thick black line. So I chose to switch the glass off in left/right views. If we do callouts at 1:10 or 1:5 we will need to do some drafting over in any case, so we can pick up the glass with a detail item.

Something rather strange cropped up while working on this family. I had never tried to activate a section box in family editor before. Strange behaviour. It works on nested components, but not on geometry made directly in the family. It does work on host walls (the placeholder walls within family editor) Also you may have noticed that object styles has very limited capabilities in family editor mode. You can't change the appearance of section boxes for example. Also they don't hide properly, which is to say that they don't hide at all, but remain stubbornly in the foreground.

Strange how you can use a programme on a daily basis for 10 years and still keep discovering things. Maybe I'm just a slow learner. I prefer to see myself as a tortoise:-)

So we have an interesting window, updated from a type that was common in the gulf region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I'm not sure if it goes back further than that, possibly. There are three distinct layers dealing with security, air seal & privacy respectively. The air seal layer is a modern innovation. "Traditionally" if you wanted an air seal (unlikely without A/C) you had to forego light and vision also.

I would very much like to take this study one level deeper and put it into the context of traditional wall and roof construction, show the oil lamps that hung between the windows internally. Time is the eternal enemy. But I do have the beginnings of a techno-historical exploration to stand alongside my previous work on timber sliding sashes and standard steel windows.

It would also be nice to look at some other aspects of Gulf Architecture, the well known Wind Towers, the occasional use of elaborate decorative arches & corbels, the ceiling treatments and timber gargoyles. These days there are far more fake wind towers than real ones, I'm not sure if there are any that are truly operational in inhabited buildings. It would take a brave soul to do without air-conditioning in this climate. Perhaps they could come back as devices to bring cooling breezes to external terraces during the hot season. Would make a nice change from the electric fans you see sometimes at pavement cafes.

In the information age the air has become a medium for electronic communication. In Dubai we live in the fast lane. We drive too fast, we crave the latest toys, we wish to be the biggest and the best, we consume too much. I guess the same can be said of North America and much of Europe. We speak of underdeveloped countries, but rarely of overdeveloped societies, and yet we also yearn for simpler times, for the real, the honest and the natural. We feel that we have lost something elusive that can be glimpsed in old buildings and vacations to exotic, "untouched" regions.

Perhaps we have put too much faith in "progress".

This is a 25 minute talk I gave at the 3rd Dubai BIM Breakfast in November. I'm going to split it into parts because it does rather go on a bit :-)

I think we should treat BIM like a pencil. Anyone can pick up a pencil and adapt it to their needs. It's a very flexible tool. We can use it to write a shopping list, to draw a map, to write poetry. It is equally at home in a board room, on a building site, in a classroom or a research laboratory.

But if we want BIM to be as flexible and inclusive as a pencil, we might have to cast off our business blinkers. Much of the discussion about BIM is dominated by business jargon: ROI, competitive edge, BIM protocols & execution plans, risk management ... all that bureaucratic stuff. I'm not saying that it's wrong or unimportant, just that the focus can get a little too narrow. Beware of tunnel vision.

I grew up with a pencil in my hand. My dad was an art teacher and he introduced me to the grand tradition of visual thinking that stretches back thousands & thousands of years. When I use the word pencil, I'm really referring to that grand tradition. There is a special synergy that takes place between hand, eye and brain when we draw or paint. I believe there is much to gain from connecting BIM processes to that intuitive, visual, problem-solving side of our brain.

When we used pencils to design buildings we didn't feel the need to go round saying "I've just bought these new pencils, they're really going to help us grow the bottom line" We might say "I've got this new pencil, it really feels great and the quality of the line it produces is superb."

So I'm going to invite you to take off the business blinkers for a few minutes and imagine that BIM is part of the age old tradition of visual thinking.

Let's start by reflecting on the age of hand drafting for a moment. It was slower of course. For all but the very earliest stages of design thinking it can't compete any more. But were there any advantages ? Can we learn something from the past ?

First of all, it was a much pleasanter way to spend your day and rather healthier in my view. When we worked at drawing boards could vary our posture more, stretch our limbs, stand up for a while. There was a craft element to the work. You could take a pride in the quality of your linework, the rhythm of your hand written notes. There were little rituals to do with maintaining your drawing tools and keeping the paper clean.

It was much easier and more natural to take a step back and review your work from a distance, both literally and metaphorically. Every time you went for a cup of coffee you could pause a couple of metres away from your board and cogitate while you sipped away.

These days it's as if we have our heads stuck inside a box. Put the earphones on, get into the zone. We tend to leave our work behind when we step away. Back then you would stand back a couple of metres with your cup of copy and get a fresh perspective.

And this same pauses acted as an invitation for your neighbours to sidle up and throw in a comment or two. Casual sharing was just built in. These days you have to print out a few sheets and invite people over to a breakout space. Or you might have big screens installed, perhaps even expensive digital white boards. All good stuff but just a trifle forced compared to the olden days.

It's often said that your weaknesses are also your strengths. The lack of an undo button was a major pain. Lots of workarounds: scratch away with razor blades, battery powered erasers with thin metal shields to mask out the stuff you wanted to keep. The positive side of all that was that we had to be decisive. No second chances. Get it right ! And clients couldn't get away with changing their minds they way they do today. Just wasn't possible if you wanted to get your building built. And I am constanly struck by how much more is demanded in terms of output with each passing decade.

Hundreds of sheets where we used to be satisfied with a couple of dozen. 20 or 30 photorealistic renders where you would have been lucky to get one hand drawn perspective.
Fine, but are the resulting buildings any better as a result ? I'm not sure they are to be honest.

This one is beyond dispute. We may have touch screens and tablets but nothing yet comes close to the tactile fluency of pencil and paper. Sit around a table with sheets of tracing paper and ideas flow thick and fast. That hand-eye-brain thing has been going on for thousands of years. It's a bit like body language or eye contact. You can't beat it for rapid effective communication, brainstorming, problem-solving.

Yes there are wonderful things that BIM can do for us, insights that were unavailable before, but we still lag on the fluency side. I hope that will change.

I'm not sure why people tend to overlook this, but it's hugely important. All drawing, all modelling involves simplification. You have to be selective, to abstract the essentials. When working by hand this is perfectly obvious. You are constantly aware that the pencil lines you draw are simplified abstractions. Sadly when creating a digital model we can fool ourselves that it

I just talked about standing back from the drawing board. What I want to do now is stand back and look at the history of drawing, very briefly. This first slide shows some of the drawing tools that have come and gone in my lifetime. Rotring pens were actually invented when I was a teenager and I did once own a set of the caliper-like devices that preceded them.

The next segment is a short history of drawing over the past 30 thousand years. Highly selective, simplified, abstract. Here are some drawing technologies that have come and gone in my lifetime. I wasn't around in 1860, but I'm almost old enough to have witnessed the transition from blueprints to diazo.

These are some of the oldest drawings we know about. They are about 5 times older than the oldest writing, so visual thinking is rather more fundamental to the human brain than verbal thinking.
These are drawings from Lascaux & Altamira, Chauvet. We may think that we are much more advanced than cave men, but I challenge you to draw something that stands up alongside these remarkable images. We may not understand what they were for, but they were surely full of meaning and information content for the people that made them.

So those were the oldest drawings we know of and this is some of the first writing. The drawings are five times as old. Visual thinking is much more ancient than verbal thought. Here we have software, (the idea of symbols that represend sounds, syllables or words) hardware (clay tablet & stylus) reprographics (roll the cylinder over wet clay to make multiple copies) Nothing much has changed since the first cities turned up in Iraq.

Here is some of the earliest writing. It's also a kind of visual thinking, and ultimately it will become the data in our BIM models, so it belongs in this historical overview. I'm introducting the idea of software, hardware & reprographics here. Sofware is the idea of symbols that represent sonds and words, hardware is the clay and the stylus, reprographics is a cylinder that is rolled over wet clay to create multiple copies. Nothing new under the sun-dried-clay.

Short of time, so a huge leap forward in time now to the renaissance. Theory of perspective is the software breakthrough, equally as important as the personal computer in my view, a huge conceptual leap. Hardware is represented by the device the artist is using to figure out how perspective works. We could also cite the scientific method under the software heading here: systematic gathering of data by the method shown to test out the theory of horizon lines and vanishing points.
This drawing is by Albrecht Durer and it's actually a wood engraving. You can see the way he uses grooves cut into the wood to simulate the textures of different materials.
Now we jump from 5000 years ago to 500 years ago. Software is represented by the theory of perspective. Hardware is the device the artist is using to decode the conundrum of how perspective works. Reprographics is the art of wood engraving that Durer exploited with such skill and flair

Durer also made use of orthographic projection as shown in this fascinating study of the 3 dimensionality of a human foot. It almost looks like a recipe for a parametric digital model. An important point to note here is the way that drawing crosses the boundaries between art and science.

The pendulum clock also uses orthographic, but in combination with 3d projections and a fair amount of embedded data. This clock was a conceptual breakthrough that ranks high on the software scale and of course it became an item of hardware with a huge impact on peoples lives.

Just as the pendulum clock improved accuracy in timekeeping, copper plate engraving enabled a finer line in printmaking. It also opened up the possibility of acid etching.
I'm going to break off there, and pick up the BIM pencil story again in another post.

This is part 2 of a BIM Breakfast talk given on 24th November in Dubai.

You don't have to be a gifted artist to gain benefits from visual thinking. This example is from Newton's scientific notes. Even with his relatively crude drawing technique the idea of light being split into a spectrum of colours as it passes through a prism is conveyed much more vividly than would be possible with a purely verbal description.

You don't have to be a super-geek to do great things with BIM. It's the thought that counts. Newton used drawing to clarify his understanding of optics, the relationship between white light and the rainbow colours of the spectrum. Clumsy technique but ground breaking ideas.

More examples from non artists. Now we are entering the age of the industrial revolution, an explosion of software and hardware that ultimately led to today's digital world.
Stephenson's rocket converted fossil fuel into forward motion and enabled the first railway line that carried cotton cloth from Manchester Mills to the port of Liverpool. Darwin was also interested in fossils, but for different reasons. Notice the phrase "I think" at the top right. Here he is thinking aloud by means of a diagram. Once again, the technique is crude, but the power of visual thought is crystal clear.

Looking back for a moment to Durer and a pencil drawing of the great Humanist thinker Erasmus. The technology he is using to capture his thoughts before they slip from memory dates back to ancient Egypt: a reed cut by a knife and split at it's end to allow the ink to flow. Notice how he holds the ink pot in one hand to allow regular dipping of the pen.

Here is a piece of hardware that lasted 3000 years, from ancient egyptian times to the beginning of the 19th century. Then we started to burn fossil fuels, using up capital that had sat in the ground for 200 million years in the space of 200. Eating up a million years every 12 months. Certainly we are the cleverest animals that ever lived.

The industrial revolution swept swept ancient traditions away overnight. Mass produced steel nibs poured out of Birmingham in their thousands. No more reeds or goose feathers.
And here it is, now a museum piece. It's just a reed pen made of thin steel sheet, but you can make them by the thousand and ship them out in small boxes. They last longer, create thinner and more consistent lines.

All this was made possible by digging up coal. Fossil fuels that had taken hundreds of millions of years to form, burned away in a few decades. Only recently have we started to understand how rapidly we are consuming our natural capital. And yet we continue to behave as if continuous growth and innovation was the answer to all our dreams.

Bigger, better, faster has become an end in itself. We all know that it is not sustainable, but we continue to put on our business blinkers and gallop off into the future.

And so to the twentieth century and technology has mushroomed. Human population has exploded and we now dominate the earth like no species has ever done before. The most successful species the world has ever seen. But for how long? We all know that it can't last for ever? We have become addicted to growth and change. Bigger, better, faster. It's like a drug. We don't know how to stop.
Don't get me wrong, I love computers. I can't wait for the latest version of Revit to come out each year. And I enjoy using BIM to deliver projects for GAJ. But at the back of my mind I know there's an elephant in the room. And in my spare time, I try to use BIM in unusual ways, to connect back to the ancient tradition of visual thinking and artistic expression.
So here are some of my attempts to use BIM as a pencil.

I don't have an answer to all our problems, but I do have a suggestion. Take off the business blinkers, stand back and take a broader view. Take a cue from great artists of the past. Use BIM like a pencil. Don't limit it's use to the narrow confines of business contracts. Treat it as a medium that can range across the whole gamut of human thought, from art to science to education, from historical research to idle doodling and optical illusions.

Let me give some examples from my own work.

Lever House is a modern movement classic, built when I was a toddler. Abstraction & simplification. How far can you boil down the idea behind a design concept without losing its essence ? How would you tackle this challenge in a BIM way ?

Drawing/modelling to understand how a building works. Asking questions, probing the finer details. Understanding the kit of parts, sequence of trades. What can a sixty year old building teach us ? BIM is a terrific way to find out.

Casa del Fascio, a controversial tour de force by a young Italian idealist, carried away by nationalist rhetoric. I used a Chess board analogy to illustrate the sequence of moves by which a regular grid becomes inflected to create a more complex functional arrangement of spaces. Note the interplay of structural frame and infill panels, transforming a box into a sculptural form that changes as you walk around it. One of the few 1930s buildings that looks as if it could have been designed yesterday.

I have been developing this one as an exercise for students of architecture who wish to aqcuire some software skills at the same time as investigating the subtleties of this deceptively simple office building with its triangular voids that spiral around the outside connecting office floors together and allowing light and air to penetrate and circulate.

Instead of teaching students about BIM, perhaps we would be better encouraging students to use BIM as a thinking tool via self-directed research and exploration.

Baroque architecture is known for its complex geometries. In this study I used the parametric modelling capabilities of the software to investigate the underlying relationships, searching for an appropriate level of simplification. I believe that hands-on exercises like this, where students use BIM tools to explore architecture of the past would have much more value than a series of lectures about "the role of BIM in the modern construction industry".

This is a place that I visited in the late 1970s and it was a fascinating experience to recreate it as a digital model. I discovered regularities in the setting out of the seats that had never been clear to me until I undertook this exercise, using BIM like a pencil to take me on a voyage of discovery.

I seriously need to start my weekend, and there's another BIM breakfast coming up that I have to prepare for, so I'll break it off there and finish this rambling rose off next week. I'm hoping some of this strikes a chord with somebody out there.

This is intended to be a very quick one (famous last words)

I had a request from a student of architecture in Dublin to share my model of St Ivo. I just got around to cleaning the file up quickly and purging it ... and I thought why not offer it up to all my readers.

So here's the link.

http://a360.co/1E91MAY

You can find a previous post on this fascinating building here.

http://grevity.blogspot.ae/2014/04/birth-of-baroque.html

But I couldn't resist throwing in a couple more images. Please do let me know if you use my research in any way and especially if you can contribute any further insights into how the building works in terms of design, construction, environmental response ... whatever.

Work has been really hectic of late, so I haven't been able to finish off all the stuff I want to post. Apologies for that but there will be another burst of activity in due course.

In case you're interested, the hybrid/rendered interior is cheated by using a section box to slice the lantern off the dome and let more light in. The effect is completely false of course, but I quite like the mood of the image, and it does rather show off the spatial games our young sculptor liked to play.

That will be the title of one of my presentations in Washington this July.

I am very proud to have been accepted once again as a speaker at RTC_NA, the North American version of the premier Revit Conference, "by users, for users". Really looking forward to spending time with old friends and new, visiting the capital city for the second time, and hanging out with my daughter Wendy both before and after.

This diagram that looks a bit like a mouldy growth, spreading across a cracked wall, is in fact a subway map of Washington DC, subjected to various digital distortions. This is one way to generate irregular, seemingly organic effects via the hexadecimal rigidity of the mindless machines that dominate our modern lives. My session will approach a similar topic from a different angle, using basic family editor techniques to conjure up an impression of the casual disorder that typifies vernacular buildings. You are most welcome to join me.

You may have noticed that my blog has been sadly neglected for several weeks now. We have been burning the midnight hours at GAJ, a sure sign that Dubai is starting to go somewhat bonkers again: projects coming out of our ears. Intense work experiences generate new ideas and I continue to reflect and learn as I stumble along with BIM pencil in hand. Hopefully I can find more time for digital sharing over the coming weeks and months.

Last weekend was a chance to do this, and to start working on my presentations. But I was side-tracked as I leapt (metaphorically) out of bed on Friday morning, by an idea for the RTC logo. I don't want to be rude because I have great respect for the guys and gals behind this wonderful event, but IMHO the graphics are due for a makeover ... a little dated, don't you think ?

Anyway, it set me off on a little journey based on "why don't I do this in family editor ?". I belong to that small band of fanatics who think that about almost anything. I had in mind those Bauhaus style typefaces that are highly abstracted into parallel bands of straight lines and arcs. Couldn't that be parametric ?

This is all sweeps. Just 3 of them in fact. The paths are constrained to reference planes, with a couple of reference LINES thrown in to keep the ends of the letter C to a 45 degree termination.

I'm using a loaded profile so that the width of the letters can easily be varied in a coordinated manner. The original motivation here is to be able to play with proportions parametrically, something that is harder to do using a graphics programme.
As a bonus I get the third dimension (which we will call thickness) I don't intend to use this in my primary branding graphics. I'm going for that very simple, flat look that dominates the world of touch and swipe right now. But maybe it will come in handy here and there, used very sparingly.

Having said that, of course I couldn't stop myself playing around with the possibilities. Lots of fun, and a good flexing exercise for my parametrics, but these are not graphic images I would actually consider using on letterheads, or presentation templates, or badges.

So let's get back to the flat logo. I placed my family on a floor, just a square, drawn with the radius option checked. Export this from a plan view and you have an image at whatever resolution you should choose and can now move on to conventional graphics programmes to play with colour combinations and add regular text.

I'm using the Calibri font that Microsoft commissioned in response to the accusation that Arial was boring (I think that's more or less what happened) This has the advantage that almost everyone has it on their machine, it's simple and bold, but with quite a lot of subtle character. My opinion, once again. Feel free to differ.

I've given a passing nod to the current RTC colours. Continuity is important in any re-branding exercise. And that's my contribution to the non-existent debate about the RTC logo. I hope I haven't offended anyone by doing this in public. It's just a bit of fun. But personally speaking, I do think this is a much crisper, cleaner, web-friendly graphic style than the existing logotype.

Just for fun I mocked up a PowerPoint template. Again this is just a personal opinion, but I dislike fussy graphics on these templates. I suppose the idea is to make a boring series of bullet-point pages look a bit more exciting, but that's pretty weedy. Shouldn't a speaker be able to come up with some compelling visual images that enhance his/her ideas ? Isn't that what we want to focus our attention on, as opposed to some background graphic frills ? So I prefer a simple, abstract template that isn't going to clash with the punchy images that a more imaginative presenter will surely put together.

At this point, I went back to Revit and punched in a couple of simple formulae to make the whole thing scale up and down based on a module. I like to hide the formula-driven parameters down in the "Other" box so the end user doesn't get confused.

Turns out that I needed one more constraint to get everything to scale properly. I had neglected to give the letter C a labelled radius, which is of course just the existing "Module" parameter.

And not I have a family that can be copied around and varied with consumate ease. Different sizes, different slenderness ratios, different thicknesses to brink colours to the front, or sent them to the back. Once again, this is not a graphic image that I would use regularly, but it is nice to have a logo that is simple enough to handle this kind of manipulation. You might want to generate a couple of these playful variations to use as accents at specific events or locations.

So that's it folks. Once again, it's just a bit of fun. I'm not trying to tread on the committee's toes or anything like that. But it's been an interesting opportunity to explore and illustrate the capabilities of Family Editor in a slightly unusual context.

And remember, if you want to recharge your Revit batteries, there's no better way than registering for RTC, now available on 4 continents. (Poor old mama Africa, left out once again)

How I love misleading titles:-)

The humble louvre, whether fixed or as a door, is a necessary evil in our designs. I blame the engineers. Seriously though, they are a classic case for the consideration of 2D v 3D. What level of detail should we model?

My standard approach is to use a material which includes horizontal lines as a fill pattern. This allows a single door family to serve for louvres, glazed aluminium or panelled wood. It's lightweight and flexible, and via a bump map can even do tolerable service in rendered views ... from a distance.

Recently I had to represent a variety of louvre types in a set of design proposals. I have a family that I've used for several years that uses an array of rectangular slats in a rectangular frame, so I decided to adapt this. I should explain that architects with "modern" sensibilities tend to prefer the purity of rectangular slats for screens that proviced a measure of privacy sun protection.

The slats in this family are a nested component with linked parameters (Width, Height & Length) So all I had to do was to modify the cross-section of this family. My first attempts, I must admit were quickly cobbled together and required some trial and error when adjusting the parameters. But they did the job at the time.

On reflection I came up with a plan for a louvre-slat with user-friendly parameters. Nothing spectacular here, but I thought it was worth sharing.

We already have width & height parameters inherited from the rectangular slat. The first thing I did was to add a diagonal in the form of a Reference Line. The great thing about Reference Lines is that (unlike planes) they have ENDS which can be locked in place. Just use ALIGN as you normally would when locking a line to a reference plane, then TAB through the possible selections until the end highlights.

The thickness of the louvre is then set out using the diagonal as a centre. Load this back into the original screen family and it works fairly well: lots of parametric control and quite convincing, even from close up.

At first I was happy to use the existing Height parameter to control the angle of the louvre, but eventually I decided that an Angle parameter would be simpler to use. This requires a bit of trigonometry.
50 years ago I learned the simple mnemonic "Tommy on a ship of his caught a Herring" Evidence to the curious workings of the human mind that this has stayed with me ever since. There have been times when many years past without me ever thinking of it, but when the need arises I can recall it instantly.

I want "Height" to be calculated using "Width" and "Angle". The relevant formula is Tangent = Opposite/Adjacent. A bit of manipulation leads me to Height = Tan(A) * Width
I was quite proud of this, but of course you can't set the angle to zero. Wouldn't it be nice to have a slat that could be either square or angled ? So I developed a second version. This time I didn't need the Reference Line and the calculations are slightly more complex (but still within the confines of the algebra I learnt as a 14 year old)

So now I have a slat component with 4 "user input" parameters and 2 calculated values that I tuck away under "Other". In practice of course the user input values are driven by parameters in the screen family that the slat lives inside.

Hook everything up and we have a pretty flexible set-up. It can look like a series of shelves, or louvred glazing, or an AC vent.

I've organised the parameters in groups to make it as user-friendly as possible. There's only one thing missing really and thats a "Spacing" parameter to be used in the formula that calculates the number of slats.

I got an error with this that's been puzzling me for some time. The message threw me off by talking about importing the correct table.

Eventually I realised that I had 3 types in the family and at least 1 of them had a zero value for "Spacing". That would generate an infinite number of slats, hence the error message. If only the message mentioned a zero value instead of asking me to change the formula or import a non-existent table. Anyway, it won't catch me out next time.

So that's it. Finishing with another rendered view of some of the families I made and pointing you to a link where you can download the basic screen family. Hope you find it useful.

Download The Family

OK, this is a first for me.

I've never used Revit Server, nor has anyone in our office ... until now. We suddenly find ourselves needing to do some work jointly with our UK office and have managed to get things basically working. It's not a hugely demanding situation, but the connection speeds are not that great, and it takes a LONG time to open the file in the morning. After that it gets better, but crashing is not too much fun.

So I'm just asking people out there if they would care to share a little experience and any hints they may have. How serious are latency issues ? Any dos and don'ts that are not in the documentation ? (I'm guessing that the documentation is like most Revit documentation ... not quite perfect)

What are the alternatives, for a medium size practice that will continue to do most of it's work on a local network ? When will C4R reach the Middle East ? (not expecting an answer to that one, but I'd love to know)

Share your experience, point me to a link. It's a genuine question. We are stumbling into new territory. Trying to get some input from our local reseller also, but it seems they also don't have much experience in this area.

So that's it. I've overheard people grumbling about Revit Server and I prefer not to fall over horrible latency issues and break my leg. Forewarned is four-legged (who said that recently)

No pictures, shock horror !

TICK TOCK (AKA THE LAST POST)

2D BIM

TOILET TRAINING

DURAVIT IN POINT WORLD

YET MORE TOILETS

PEAPODS

SIX OF THE BEST

MORE HAWKSMOOR CHURCHES

WOOL GATHERING

CHESS-HAUS

HOW BIG IS YOUR TOILET ?

RIGS & PROFILES

SOMETHING DIFFERENT

BRIDGING THE GULF

BIM PENCIL : TAKE ONE

MORE BIM PENCILS

IRISH BORROMINI

HIGHLY IRREGULAR

RE-VISITING THE LOUVRE

LATENT DEFECTS