technē and poiēsis

How does material acquire value? This question has informed many of the explorations on this website. It is a difficult question because value can have so many meanings. Leaving the definition of value aside for a moment, we can say that material can have value in its substance and/or in its craft. Gold has value in its substance; even a pile of raw dust will be worth something. Many materials, however, have little or no value in their substance, and must be transformed and worked in some fashion. This transformation allows the material to become useful, beautiful, or ideally, both. Due to efficiency and disinterest we often make generic products fit specific needs. Not many people stop to ask if their home, their furniture, or their clothes are actually what they want, or if they were simply the easiest to access or the best of the limited options. Think about it. Is your desk actually the right height for you? Is your chair the perfect fit for your body? Is the window where you...

J'ai eu l'occasion de passer une semaine à Montréal. Ayant déjà visité plusieurs fois la ville, je tentais cette fois de découvrir un peu son côté industriel en visitant une usine de contreplaqué. Ce qui m'étonnait c'était la quantité de main-d'oeuvre nécéssaire. Chaque étape du procès reqiert une inspection visuelle et qualitative, qui ne s'effectue que par des oeils humains. Malgré l'automatisation et l'optimisation qui existe dans n'importe quelle usine, je dirais que la fabrication du contreplaqué est plutôt un art qu'un procès industriel. Je n'avais pas le droit de prendre des photos. J'ai alors tenté de faire des petites illustrations pour que vous pouvez comprendre les étapes, mais je ne vante surtout pas mes abilités de dessin... Les billots qui arrivent à l'usine sont coupés pour faire des longueurs d'exactement neuf pieds. Ils sont cuits à la vapeur pour 24 heures pour qu'ils sont saturés d'eau. Ensu...

It works. I feel like the cave person who discovered fire. After all these months, now I finally see it come together. One of the decisions I made recently was to have a stovepipe instead of a brick chimney. I am very glad I did. The black metal contrasts nicely with the brick and it leaves the point open for the view to the field. The other part I am working on is the door to the fireplace. Here I have it in place, but it fell apart when I tried to lift it back.  What you can't see from the photo is the smoke coming out of the chimney. It draws the air through, under the floor. I spotted some small smoke leaks but I can fix those with mortar. Next step- sleep in it! It has been so warm here these days that I barely need the fire though.

Do something 1300 times, and you will definitely do it differently at the end than at the beginning. I just picked up a brick from my very first batch in July 2012 and compared it with the last batch I made a couple weeks ago. The difference in quality is amazing. I learned, as I was making, how best to scrape the mold so the edge stayed crisp. I learned how to use sand sparingly but effectively to keep the clay from sticking. I learned not to put so much sand in the mix, because the less sand, the stronger the brick. I learned to pack the mold so that the sides come out smooth and even. The latest bricks are still not perfect, but they are many times better than before.

I was recently at a symposium on "The Meaning of Concrete". During the introduction, an excerpt from Peter Schjeldahl's book Columns and Catalogues was shown: Concrete is the most careless, promiscuous stuff until it is committed, when it becomes fanatically adamant. Liquid rock, concrete is born under a sign of paradox and does not care. It doesn't care about anything, lazy and in love with gravity but only half in love [...] Promiscuous, doing what anyone wants if the person is strong enough to hold it, concrete is a slut, a gigolo, of materials. Every other material - wood, clay, metal, even plastic - has self-respect, a limit to what it will suffer to have done with it, and at the same time is responsive within that limit, supple in the ways it consents to be used. Not concrete. I'm not sure if this is actually true or if the author is simply indulging in metaphor... I've found that the amount of water and the nature of aggregate can change the behavi...

I vacuumed (or Hoovered, as they say here) the floor today, and it is looking a bit cleaner. My entire construction site is a big mess. Mon chantier est un bordel, as they say in French. But there was some really nice sun today. You can see it peeking through the gaps in in the photo above.

When I work on design projects, I normally rely heavily on physical modelling to test design ideas. With this project, the model is scale 1:1... I was trying to figure out the end of the floor. I knew I wanted it to be higher in the middle, where the fireplace door is going to be. I tried first the bricks laid simply in common bond: After stepping back and looking at it for a bit, I decided that the 'bowtie' orientation just wasn't doing it for me. As well, the joint from the end to the floor pattern becomes a problem.  I knocked the wall down and tried them in the other orientation: I was then trying to figure out the rest of the floor, when I realized that the best solution for the end would actually be to use the pillar design I had developed for the floor. For the floor, the pillars are offset in plan (right), which allows them to lock together. If I instead offset them in elevation (left), they also lock together. It just doesn't work if they are offset...

  I went biking to High Wycombe and en route there is a really amazing brick arch bridge. The train line and the road cross at a non-right angle. To solve the geometry, the builders built a series of straight vaults, each offset slightly with respect to its neighbours. The brickwork is also really interesting- lots of different bonding patterns.

For the floor system I had found a way of using the 'belly' of the brick to make bridges between pillars of 3. In the best cases, the brick just simply sits exactly where it needs to go, and all I have to do is fill in the gap with mortar. The wedge shape created between the vertical and horizontal bricks even allows me to fill in the mortar without using plugs from the underside. When it works, it works really well. It's hard to get the exact right spacing over the entire floor, though, so I often end up having to adjust the distances. After I had thought of this, I thought of offsetting rows of these bridges to make diagonal channels through the floor. This also worked well, because a pillar is about the same length as a horizontal brick. I came to a problem when I realized that all the channels need to reach the chimney somehow. I somehow needed to make bridges between channels.  Another reason I wanted to get rid of some pillars was that I don't have to...

I've had to change the design of the floor slightly, but I have a system now that mostly works. I still need clay plugs sometimes. I'll write more about it later.

I seem to be constantly trying to plug gaps between things. If I had to start over I would do many things differently, and one of them is to design the first two courses of the walls without gaps. That is where the hypocaust system is passing, and it would be kind of useless if all the hot air escaped through the walls. So instead I have to plug the holes. This time, I used pieces of broken bricks and tiles. The bricks on these bottom courses are already looking weathered. I want to see what they're like in 100 years...

Should the intersection determine the layout of the wall? For Wall 2, I was interested in creating an interference pattern between the two layers. Maybe I should have made sure the number of bricks was the same as the roof, like I did for Wall 1. Instead, I found I had to make a flat surface before joining the roof to the wall, because the courses didn't line up. For this, I used some bricks sliced lengthwise before firing. Also, I used some half-bricks to finish the roof in the same pattern.  When I was mortaring the sun came out and I realized that I liked the shadow line that I get on the roof bricks when the joint is slightly recessed. So I went back over them all again!

Today was a moment of pride- I have succeeded in making a brick roof! I was only going to take a little bit of the formwork out, but then I realized that it was all loose anyways. I pulled it out amidst a shower of dried clay bits (the plugs I used). And a cloudy morning turned into a sunny afternoon, so it was a pretty good day. and the In the above photo you can see the test system for the hypocaust. Some of the prefabricated pillars are there. The late afternoon sun comes through the wall.