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Shades of Grey: LOTHBURY

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    Shades of Grey: LOTHBURY

    OK, so the plan this weekend was to do a serious upgrade on the Lothbury facade. It's
    taken me a while to really get to grips with all the source material and understand
    how the building works, but by now it feels like an old friend so it's a good time to
    start filling in the detail.


    I started on Thursday night by turning the various sections of the facade into links.
    There are pros and cons to this of course by I decided to bite the bullet. One of the
    benefits is that different people can check out different portions for a couple of
    days and work them up. On the down side it means that internal walls will not join to
    the perimeter. It's not a problem when junctions are square, but in our case there
    are lots of odd angles at work. I came up with a solution that I had never thought of
    before. Probably it's old hat, but I was quite chuffed with it at the time.


    Basically I created a new wall type, very thin, maybe half an inch, formed a join at
    the right angle, then pulled my thin wall right back to the internal angle. You get a
    sharp point one side and a little splay in the internal corner. I guess in some
    circumstances you could use a different material and make it look like an isolation
    joint.


    So when I started on Project Soane, I had no idea about the "secret passage" around
    the top of the screen wall and the troop of 30 soldiers who would turn up every night
    to patrol the battlements. Now it is all falling into place, and what seemed to be
    rather eccentric parapet embellishments turn out to be sentry boxes, placed at
    convenient intervals to give the guys a bit of shelter on a rainy night. Not that
    I've read about this anywhere, but it's perfectly obvious once you model things in
    detail and pore over the drawings in the online archive.



    My first challenge was the tradesmen's entrance, which is where the guardsmen would
    enter the premises each evening. This was built as part of the NW extension somewhere
    around 1805 and opened into a courtyard where Soane built a new barracks to replace
    the one he had built more than a decade earlier when the Bank's backyard was much
    further south. This is an almost identical copy of the bullion gateway he had
    designed for the NE extension. Flanking the gate are two Antae (columned recesses)
    Above each of these is a sentry box with an elaborately scrolled roof, and between
    these a high wall at the back. This is necessary in the bullion gate to hide the
    upper storey of the Porter's lodge, but in the tradesmen's entrance it's just there
    for the sake of symmetry.

    So I've set all this up, and you can see the route where the soldiers patrol, but it's
    all a bit crudely modelled. No point in getting into detail until you understand
    what's going on. For example, it's only this weekend that I understood that the
    scrolls were extended back over the full width of the walkway to form roofs over
    sentry boxes, and that there were archways passing through, all the way along. You
    can actually see these arched openings in a couple of Soane's sections, but I didn't
    grasp the significance at first.


    The corners of the sentry boxes have pilasters and there is a detail showing the
    moulding profile. So I scaled up this image and traced over the profile. Notice the
    undercut below the overhang to get the rainwater to drip clear of the wall face. You
    can see Soane's trademark abstraction of classical form in the parallel ribs and
    grooves.



    The scrolls themselves were donated by Sheikh Uduman some time ago and have done
    excellent service, but I've made some adjustments to the curves based on a more
    careful reading of the source images. And of course they project back much further
    and I've added some ribs in the depth of the section. I only have the grainiest of
    photos to go on for this so it's pretty schematic.



    Either side of each sentry box is an antefix. These are normally placed on the eaves
    as if to stop tiles from sliding off. Previously I had just placed another of Soane's
    "telephone box" items that march around the parapet at intervals, usually aligned
    above a column or a blind window. The antefix is a bit similar but more pointy, and
    directional. Also the plinth it stands on is more elaborate.


    One family that was really fun to make is a recess with a moulding around the edge,
    sort of like a picture frame. This is used many times: sometimes projected sometimes
    flush, once as part of a pilaster. It's a simple, parametric, face-based family, that
    works a treat; very satisfying economy of effort.

    So we move on to the gateway itself. I did the fanlight first. Wrought iron, quite
    delicate looking but simple enough. To me it reflects Soane's debt to the Adam
    brothers whose work he admired. Here of course, Revit's dynamic radial arrays come
    into play. They really helped me to fine tune the setting out without having to keep
    drawing thing again from scratch.


    The doors are typical Soane. Multiple panels, almost flush with lots of domed studs.
    I came across lots of variations on this design during my short tour of his London
    works. The current gate is very different (also in a different position by the way)
    Baker lacked Soane's restraint, very fluent designer and prolific, but a classicist in
    a different age, when modernism was already in full flower on the continent. I
    digress.



    This whole feature projects forward slightly. I managed to capture this fairly well
    in Revit. You can also see the archway into the Sentry Box here. Gives a sense of
    scale. Baker recreated these Antae fairly accurately and subsequent restoration of
    the stone has been pretty faithful over the years.


    See how the pilasters wrap around the corners. I've captured this now, but not the
    detail on the capitals. I think the recesses are shallower on Baker's wall. Probably
    the whole wall is thinner. No longer needs to support a walkway around the perimeter.
    So there isn't space for the base moulding at the back, which you can just see
    peeping through in one of the old photos.



    The other major feature I worked on is at the centre of Lothbury. This is placed at
    what used to be the Junction of Princes Street and Lothbury. It's the hinge point
    where Soane had to duplicate his facade, doubling the length to take hime to Tivoli
    Corner. There are many surviving studies where Soane struggled over how to do this.
    Some of them show a slight change of angle. In the end the solution is quite simple
    and he managed to persuade his client to keep the whole frontage straight. A few
    square metres lost, but ultimately a much more satisfactory layout.



    There is a drawing in the archive of a moulding that is described as "The working
    drawing is for the base of a column, probably that of the blind portico on Princes
    Street." going on to suggest that the note on the drawing itself must be wrong. It
    wasn't till this weekend that the penny dropped. This is the moulding for the base of
    the centre feature on Lothbury, drawn at the time when the street junction was here,
    not where it moved to AFTER the wall was built. So I'm rather confident that the title on
    the drawing is quite correct. "Base & Surbase to the Pedestals at the end of Princes
    Street & Lothbury." It matches up perfectly, which becomes obvious once you model it
    in Revit.


    It's not always possible to draw something in one context in Revit and copy paste it
    straight into another. To trace over this image in the project where I was modelling
    and get it into a a profile family I had to use a masking region as an intermediary.
    Not sure why we have to use these obscure work-arounds. Can be off-putting for the
    beginner.


    One side effect of turning the screen wall into a series of links was that whenever I
    did an "open and unload" it revealed unexected views of the interior. Here is a
    glimpse of his last two Transfer Halls from an unusual angle. I love this project.
    It's a never ending series of revelations and challenges. I'm rather fond of the "Dolls House" effect of this particular image. Open the façade and look inside, see what all the imaginary people are doing.



    So this hinge point has the one Sentry Box on top, starting out as a simple box with 4
    walls and the archways passing through. Then you add pilasters at the corners. These
    are the ones with my recess family embedded. Also more recesses placed on the walls.
    Add in a furter variation on the acroterion theme, and a few moulding profiles ...


    To polish off the weekend, I had a quick go at the Bartholomew Way facade. Once more
    the battlements and sentry boxes suddenly fell into place. Mystery became common
    sense and I had time to add my recess family in groups of 3.


    By now, Paul Aubin had uploaded his new-improved Corinthian column. Quite a
    heavyweight piece of stuff, created in the wonderful world of reference points. It's
    based on the Generic Model Adaptive template, but changed to Column category, so
    (mirabilis dictu) it just swaps out with my very simple placeholder using the type
    selector. Flip of a switch. Magic. So in a few minutes I was able to update all the
    links with detailed columns.



    One of the drawbacks of point world geometry is that it is "adaptive" (also a great
    strength of course) so it doesn't have a fixed location. In short, the new column is
    not level-aware. It won't report what level it's on. Strange really, because the
    moment you swap it back to my placeholder it remembers again. Another quirk is that
    it gets very confused when mirrored and tends to stand on its head. So take your time
    and copy things sideways instead of mirroring them.



    That's about it. Couple more people working on bits and pieces for the exterior
    facade. Thankyou guys, and you will be featured in an upcoming post. Crowd sauce is
    beginning to spice things up a bit, I'm thrilled to announce. You can view the
    current state of things by logging in to Project Soane. And of course there's lots of
    room for more volunteers to contribute. If you're not sure where to start, just let
    me know and I'll point you in the right direction.

    We will prevail.



    Click here to view the entire blog post.

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