People are impressed by our model of the ceiling at St Anne’s Limehouse, but actually it’s a highly simplified abstraction of reality. There is something about our system of perception that picks up simple cues and links them to memory traces, to “see” the complexity of life “in our mind’s eye”.
In many ways that is the true challenge of BIM. Come to think of it, that has been the challenge of drawing “for ever”. What level of simplification is appropriate in the current situation? The process we are following in our historical studies with BIM involves mapping out the building as quickly and simply as possible, then gradually adding layers of detail as we search to understand : what? why? how?
So this post is about the modillions (similar to Dentils, but scrolls rather than boxes) Why are these “rows of teeth” so effective at articulating the junctions between horizontal and vertical surfaces? One answer is that they are memories of the rafter ends…