technē and poiēsis

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.

For the floor of the shelter I am building a kind of hypocaust system. I wanted to prefabricate some of the pillars because, as I know, bricks are much easier to join vertically than horizontally. I can make stacks of three bricks and then turn them upright once the mortar has cured. I realized once again the importance of having the right tools and equipment. I was using a scrap piece of MDF for the base, but it was very uneven when I placed it on the ground. I was cleaning up some of the mortar and I knocked over one stack...and the whole row fell like dominoes.  After being rather angry for a couple of minutes I decided to make some proper tools and start again the day after. I found a long board for the base, much stiffer than the sheet of MDF. I also made myself a guide so that I can line up one set of edges. The board and guide. I used clay again to support the first brick of the stack and to position it against the guide. Only the small ends of the bri...

I have commented before that bricks and bread have much in common. Tiles are perhaps more like cake or dessert. I want to try some glazes on this clay so I made some test tiles. On some of them I painted a layer of earthenware slip, to make a lighter background. Hopefully the two clays are compatible. As they were drying on the board they looked very edible, like some sort of brownie.

I've been considering the idea of using lime putty to finish the joints on the inside of the roof. This is for multiple reasons. 1) Lime-based substances are breathable, so if my joints on top aren't completely watertight (and I'm pretty sure I am fallible!) and some moisture gets past them, it can evaporate out through the lime. 2) A putty-like compound will be easier to work with on the ceiling. It is more likely to stick in place than a mortar. I will just have to wear safety glasses and be careful, though, because hydrated lime is extremely basic (pH of 12). 3) I've been curious about lime because up until the beginning of the 20th century all mortars were primarily lime-based. (See this post ) As well, Internet research has yielded confusing information on the merits of hydrated vs. hydraulic lime. So far, I've determined that hydrated lime does not cure, it sets by absorbing carbon dioxide from the air. This process is slow because the chemical reaction i...

Last year, when I was first designing the shelter, I wanted to use only whole bricks everywhere- not even halves. I have since realized that sometimes, half bricks are useful to finish a pattern. I've read that Swedish architect Sigurd Lewerentz refused to use half bricks. As a result, the bonding pattern and mortar joints were much looser. So I guess it's a trade-off- more mortar, or different bricks?