I have embarked on a second pass of the bell towers: starting with my first tentative roughing out and taking it to the next level. This involves a lot of estimation and intelligent guesswork. We don’t have access to a point cloud or to measured drawings. Personally I find this a good thing. The experience is enjoyable, a game of discovery, and I am honing important skills, that tend to be neglected in the BIM world: judging proportions by eye, “winging it”, taking imaginative leaps into the unknown.
These are the kinds of skills you employ when sketching from life, or engaging in the early stages of design. You have to trust your instincts, make bold decisions, employ simplifying assumptions. And it’s a physical process, training hand, eye and brain to work together fluently. This was unavoidable when we drew by…