technē and poiēsis

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.