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The “Classical Design” post

I really don’t care for it. but if we must, let’s imagine a single bay storefront on a Chicago 2 flat live/work unit. I did just that a few times when I lived there in 2011. “Practical” minimal classical design, specifying lots of millwork to reach a style. New urbanist would come to love this idiot catnip and specify it everywhere thinking commerce is the answer to social problems, and housing. Equity is the issue. If people own the structure they live and work in, it makes a lot more sense than if its knocked up out of plywood by a developer and made to look like this for “fashion”

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building culture belongs to everyone

Our boss was a 16 year old โ€œmasonโ€ with 3 kids who spoke Mayan but called himself Yer Mi. The dutch translator was a sex pervert. Welcome to “ethical tourism” via Habitat Guatemala 2007.. Livingston port of call.

Kyle was a master of langueโ€™s and worked out their Mayan roots for trowel and โ€œspoonโ€ were the same word.

At lunch they made fun of us for using spoons in their own language and it was their same word for trowel. Butch ala: But backwards hala is trowel or spoon and butch is action of placing material.

To prove his thesis Kyle made a joke with them about the trowel/spoon commonalityโ€ฆ. While we were placing block yer mi, he got frustrated and called out to his brothers aggressively in their slang โ€ฆ โ€œget the spoon, you fools and put the food inโ€ and my brother stopped the show by trying to eat mortar. The masons: They all fell off the scaffold laughing.

The masons were so enamored they showed us how to play with scorpions…

Building culture is a human technology. And a universal language spoken by all people. You cannot buy it or sell it.

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No good deeds

In a rare moment of grace and mercy, I let the pleadings of a man influence the Trad list. Ray Haas cried like a baby when I critiqued his work and asked questions any peer would ask, about process with one another. He did make some honest critiques about the site, it was true that i rarely updated my masterpiece with over 260 essays and how-to guides spanning 18 years on trad roofing and preservation… I was busy Ray, sorry for letting you down. In the process of being more online while editing this old tome, i ran across ray’s recent metalwork company advertisements, and well…

I took Ray’s advice and updated the site including the Trad List. Now I’m regretting it.

Size your vessel by performing stereotomy first.

Nope. This will flood >

The Children have let me down.

Brand new tailor… and it shows

There is no need to generate all this man hours… You really have to be creative to invent seam plans. It’s all about designing for the least amount of effort, unless you’re Ray.

Here Ray, this is how you correct the issue of seam close to corner. French/Russian reverse seam..
It’s easy to run the Valley seam next to the chim because we know the whole book of knots, and have experience planning seams tactfully.

Should Ray Hass

remain on The Trad List?

The Trad List

Example of the detail done correct:

Notice the small prism and flood routing. Makes all the difference.
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The book on “box gutters” never ends

My First day “on the job” in building, for Tom Boone, we were restoring a big wide cornice 60 feet up with a built in gutter. That was New Years day, 2007. It has been the most requested help item from the beginning of my career till, last week! The dang things seem to be so elusive for folks to understand without a historic preservation degree or decades in the field…

Allow me to share my attempts to capture the parts and pieces of the cornice gutter with some rude modeling..

The original book on box gutters:

http://quo-animo.blogspot.com/2008/10/book-on-box-gutters.html

simple box gutter with roof decking and gutter boards removed. the fascia is nailed up first to align all of the lookouts. once the fascia is aligned, and nailed all the lookouts are nailed into final position.
here with the “shelf” and crown molding added next. the trough is ready for pitching and gutter board.
an alternate arrangement for gable-end, showing a “yankee” gutter which is on the roof deck rather than a separate gutter on lookouts.
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Article from KIR blog 2009

I been cooking for a long timeโ€ฆ

http://quo-animo.blogspot.com

Stimulus bill offers incentives to cheapen buildings in the name of energy efficiency.

The energy star website was updated March 6, 2009 to include federal tax credits for energy efficiency.  These are only for existing homes, not for new construction.  What’s at the top of the list?  

Windows and doors.

Insulation.

Roofs (metal and asphalt).

We are going to see a lot of needless work done to our stock of traditionally constructed, pre-war homes in the coming years.  This is very disappointing because the systems these new products replace are often superior to the new units. If you account for embodied energy, operational energy, and life-cycle energy most traditional forms of construction come out on top over newer systems.  Especially systems that are already in-place.  Think twice before jumping on the bandwagon.  Remember the words: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Replacing a perfectly good system in the name of reduction in energy isn’t really a net reduction.  You can’t consume your way to sustainability.  

Now remember the architectural equivalent of this mantra: 

Maintain before repair. 

Repair before restore. 

Restore before replace. 

Replace only as a last resort.

Live it.

Who aged better grand buffet or Paul barman

Posted 6th April 2009 by Kurtis

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Corinthian order was invented to celebrate the sex bodies of Corinth

What are the โ€œoriginsโ€ of classicism? In the apostle Paulโ€™s letters: he writes of how slutty and filthy all the little fuckers are over in Corinth. Famous for its public gay sex parties and working girls! (call me, sounds like a great time)

Let me perform some intellectual honesty and give credit to the OG โ€œCuban Americanโ€ fancylad I stole this thought from. Victor Deupi gave a lecture at a โ€œtradโ€ architecture conference in 2007, in New Orleans. He merely whispered it, without performing any materialism and moved on quickly to being lost in the โ€œbeautyโ€ and some other dumb shit about how the order is like a sexy woman that you can โ€œjustโ€ captureโ€ฆ. Why are you capturing women?. Victor Identified the mode of production in Corinth was mostly sex work and port activities. He marched right up to the edge of perception and turned away, to sell art, he performed a fantasm to explain the order in his talk, rather than science of materials and conditions. Over at the adults historian table: we perform historical materialism bud.

Itโ€™s just duty and service to actually perform the stone carving. It takes athletic bodies and hard focus. That real uncut gym footage. Homo shit. Ripped chads bending, and flexing, and glistening. Rocky, be still!

Thereโ€™s no hidden mystery. Tectonics of stone give the structural form. Then you subdivide it and make it all โ€œgreibledโ€ with curves. Here Victor, let me complete your thesis for you, and say it with my chest: In Corinth since it was a party town, they had vulvas and twinkholes on their mind as much as plants. Itโ€™s a shrine to fucking and sucking. The good stuff.

Congratulations we just demystified your weird profession. Now, why do you need a retainer? Why are you valid?

Ring it
Victor you can suck me from the back, classically, anytime. Pick up the phone you nasty little boy.

Meanwhile in Corinth: grand buffet killed it last night every body got lit and forgot depressions.

Shirts off. Dudes on.

Tradbuilding

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Style is a myth

Wood

Classicism doesnโ€™t actually exist. I looked for it when I was building a molding plane to cut a raking cyma made out of wood from a tree that never should have been harvested.

Stone

I looked for classicism when I was dutifully carving task models of the orders out of Bedford limestone, I found myself laughed out of academia.

Metal/Form

I looked for classicism at Monticello and found a master tinsmith enslaved, rude notes from his owner about his โ€œperformanceโ€.

I canโ€™t actually find โ€œitโ€. Oh I looked in Delorme too, and Vitruvius. I went to conferences and attended molding theory lectures under halogen lights. I found salesmen in polo shirts with beach tans. And shashmaster Duffy Hoffman screaming into the void, the polished โ€œHistoricalโ€ crowd calling him a mean drunkโ€ฆ.

What I can find in the classical building literature is authors telling me what to do with stone, wood, or how to perform stereotomy, they talk about subdividing and proportions as manual steps performed. When I follow their rules, I find the academy of classicism hostile to the labor.

Where do the carves and joints come from? Who mixed the lime. Who did the stereotomy?

There are no elusive hidden properties, or lost arts. Just tedious steps on how to walk a compass out, subdivide space and stretch circles. Just tedious steps on how to construct elaborate patterns.

Carpenters and sparrows, alike. cry in the corners of the roof.

Itโ€™s all physical process you can follow step by step to please your masters and specifiers. I canโ€™t find any mysteries in the literature dang it, just a ton of hard work.

I just canโ€™t find it. Where did it come from?