BUILDING STONE COLD MEMORIES

I’m trying to post several times a week on Linked In.  These are mostly sets of images from my timeline, dating back anything up to 20 years (when I first acquired digital photography.)  The theme as always is the way buildings reflect the culture they spring from (time and place)  Ways of life can be very different around the world. 

 

There are a few little tricks to help convert snapshots like these into seamless textures using bitmap editing software like photoshop.

Offsets that bring the edges into the centre and back again. Clone brushes to soften out the hard edges along those crosshairs. It takes effort and judgment to do a decent job but I quite enjoy the challenge from time to time.

These images are from my visit to Porto in 2016. Three walls and a floor. Stone is such a wonderful material. Sadly neglected and treated too clinically in much modern work.

The old guys knew how to create surfaces that aged with majesty and grace, embracing the ravages of nature and entering into a symbiosis with the plant kingdom.

 

 

This is a follow up to a post by Silviu Stoian which reminded me of some Revit studies I did soon after getting back from Volterra 2018 (the Reality Capture workshop.)

"Cap and Pan" roof tile system which has an amazing ability to adapt to different roof widths and "not quite square" shapes.

You can vary the gap between pans, you can let the gap increase course by course, you can even use an upside down pan instead of a barrel cap.

All the tiles have a built-in taper, so that they fit together at the overlap. You can’t help but admire the deceptive simplicity.

The last image is my interpretation of a wood and brick flooring system, using the typical roman brick proportions so loved by Frank Lloyd Wright. A cross between a brick and a tile really.

You can see the under side of these floors if you look up when passing through some of the narrow alley ways that cut across between streets in Volterra.

 

 

Mutare Club, photographed in 2003. Capital of Manicaland Province, along the Eastern border with Mozambique. This was towards the end of my stay in Zimbabwe.

Hyperinflation was ramping up and the politics was becoming toxic. I still didn't know how I was going to get out of that frying pan but I was certainly starting to worry.

All the same I was deeply impressed by the history and technology of the buildings around me and building up a library of images with my new digital camera.

Is colonial architecture a source of shame? An opportunity to display your inner resentments? We seem to be tempted by these follies in recent years.

As a response to climate, an exercise in proportions, a balancing of solid and void, surface and line... I have always found this building rather charming.

 

 

A staircase by Le Corbusier in Boston, Massachusetts

‘Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts’

Winter of 2008/2009... Visiting my daughter. We drove up from New York to Boston one weekend. Also saw the Lion King on Broadway.

 

 

 

 

Western Uganda, 2009. Off the beaten track, heading towards gorilla country (the mountains that mark the border with D.R. Congo.) We didn't actually get that far. But we did pass through Kilembe, a semi-derelict copper mine town.

Perhaps many of the former workers stuck around and carved out a subsistence living on the steep slopes. The carving metaphor is apt. Must be hugely labour intensive. First of all digging out a shelf for the house, then hauling up water and everything else on a daily basis from the valley below.

Wikipedia suggests the mining activity has been resuscitated. So what's the better life?

Regular money and living in barracks-like company housing.
Backbreaking subsistence farming in direct contact with nature.
Chained to a home-office laptop with Netflix and deliveroo for company.

Who can say?

 

 

Two of these are undersides of roof assemblies. Tuscan roofs tend to be quite shallow. Is this partly because they often use the same basic support system as many floors? The third pic (with the arch) is a floor.

The common factor: square section timbers, spaced one brick-length apart, supporting rows of headers. There is enough free play in the system for it to follow a slow curve and accommodate odd angles. This approach also results in a fairly high thermal mass, "flattening the curve" across a 24 hour temperature cycle.

Those three pics were taken in Volterra in 2018. The fourth is from a bit further south: a slightly different tradition, where both cap and pan use the same barrel tile.

I love this eaves detail, where the last tile in each valley is projected slightly, delivering water into the gutter while leaving it relatively open for cleaning. Elegance and function combined.

Solutions like this emerge from generations of artisans learning from each other, trying things out, keeping what works. Cultural evolution working its magic at a subconscious level that self-conscious design professionals like me view with awe and envy. 🤔