I recently received a message from Robin Deurloo, who lives in the Netherlands and is one of those who made an effort to contribute to the modelling stage of Project Soane. He had received a request to model a fireplace design which is in a vaguely classical style and was struggling a bit with one element. He thought of me, and reached out.
I guess lots of people who find themselves “modelling” on the basis of someone else’s “design” face these kind of issues. The sketches he was working from are somewhat tentative/ambiguous. That’s in the nature of quick design sketches really. In this case there are inherent contradictions between the different orthographic views, and quite frankly, it suggests a fairly shallow understanding of classical principles… But the general intentions are clear enough, and both Robin and his client have made genuine requests for help, so I decided to have a go.
The problem area is the scroll. My own feeling is that you would never use a scroll quite…