Whenever in history there was a shortage of building materials, creativity was needed and often a circular approach was the answer. In the 16th century, the French Philibert de l’Orme invented a new building method, the so-called “à petit bois”, in which large roof spans were made of small pieces of wood. I was struck by the beauty and the genius who designed it, visiting the barn of the chateau Maurier in France. This method could be one of the first intended circular construction solutions ?
France in the 16th century was a place and a time where big wooden beams were expensive and barely available (*). The classical way of building, with big wooden trusses, was not an option anymore. In his book «Nouvelles Inventions Pour Bien Bastir Et a Petits Fraiz» (Ed.1561), Philibert de l’Orme described an alternative way of building, which is as simple as effective.
With still affordable and available short wooden battens, about 1.30m long, he managed to make huge roof spans, by a very clever “meccano” method of “nailing” them together with dowels. This is a solution which can be seen as the precursor of modern glulam beams. Scarcity of materials as a driver for a circular economy.
Only two types of these battens were needed. Prefabrication of thousand exactly similar wooden pieces could take place in a very cost-efficient way. Modularity as a characteristic of a circular economy.
Illustration : Ph. De l’ Orme, dans «Nouvelles Inventions Pour Bien Bastir Et a Petits Fraiz» (Ed.1561) ; only two types of prefabricated battens are used.
Whenever a piece of wood was infected or broken, it could easily be replaced by a similar one, without the need of breaking down a whole structure. Interchangeability and reversible joints as a characteristic of a circular economy.
Above all, by designing the roof in a form of an arch, or in the form of two arches (like an inverted boat-hull), the material is optimally used. There is no material underperforming its maximal strength. A clever design and a dematerialisation are the first steps in, and the key-factors of a circular economy.
Even though aesthetics were surely not considered to be important in the design of barn roofs in the 16th century, they do play a role in giving a building or building materials multiple lives. And this is what circularity in the design and construction is about.
The barn of Chateau de Maurier, Fontaine-Saint-Martin (F) , architect unknown, inspired by Philibert de l’ Orme, photo : BLIEBERG Architects of a circular economy
Philibert de l’Orme, once a famous architect on the court of Henri II (who designed e.g. the ballroom of the castle of Fontainebleau), fell in disgrace after the death of the monarch. Two years later, he wrote an appendix to his written chef-d’œuvre in which he gave a solution for people who could not afford expensive methods of building.
I came across a new type of guy. Crown molding factory owner, Brent Hull, who is doing some real “gee wiz” style commentary on traditional building. I’ve performed a critique on his design. Of course we’re using real stone, and timber frame right Brent? Why reinvent the wheel?
Brent’s design changes don’t offer much structurally. It’s still a suburb tract house sneering at the real thing. Brents design features a lot of consumption of millwork and products to produce “fashion”.
Rather than implying “French” with factory products stuck to a spec house…. Why not build French, and fitting the region.
Typical “French” stone house.
These building methods have worked for thousands of years. This style is also specific to the region. French, German, Dutch, and Spanish colonial era builders used this means and method exactly to make their structures in Texas.
Mass walls, a “big tent” roof, and excellent cross ventilation, keeps the interior cool in the blazing heat.
The changes here are: real materials for structure and sash. I didn’t change the “size” of the house just imagined it as a real one. Stone first floor, timber upper. Corbeled dormer over entry. The millwork entry is gone. Instead the structure of the stone wall and arch provides the punctuation.
What’s the point of the structure? 14 courses of 8”x12” stone. Thats the whole thing. Inside you plaster. On the exterior there is no need for appliqué or trim, the structure itself is beautiful. Instead of punching up the millwork and tack ons, everything we see here is doing a function. The arch stone set-back for the entryway gives it plenty of punctuation, and will convey importance and mass by simply being an impressive stone arch, in contrast to the spindly glazing of the French casement doors. It does what it says on the face.
Instead of the “extra” doors that go nowhere, we fit steel casements with leaded glass transom. The only “decorations” that are not serving function.
The second floor is post and beam structure with full joinery. Brick in-filled and stucco give the wall mass and provide backing for full plaster inside. We’ve avoided manufactured products for every thing but the glass and steel hardware for the steel sashes.
Standing on businessCraven, Jackie. “Guide to Colonial American House Styles From 1600 to 1800.” ThoughtCo, Apr. 5, 2023, thoughtco.com/guide-to-colonial-american-house-styles-178049.Sparrows and carpenters cry in the corner of the roof. The lady in the hat points to the origin of the roof cutter’s sorrow.The corbeled dormer on the entry features a bent hip roof with raking eaves.Example of real stone fancy house in “French” almost devoid of decoration, or appliqué. Material reality is doing all the aesthetic work.French colonial laborers doing roof work.
Heavy machinery has always been not required. We inherit these legacies from Victorian era industrial engineering.
Woodworking tools are a great example. The benchmark of a “quality” production woodshop have always been planing, and profile shaping. A good shop produces quality with heavy iron backstops and machining. And man hours. Raw power in the axis and feed and heavy mass to resist the “assumed” forces
And to do these at scale and keep the humans safe according to the millwright union you gotta have a lot of industrial infrastructure…. Vacuums system, heavy floor, electrical services, safety and ergonomics.. etc. all these things installed and planned for just to give the millwright a job and keep the crown molding or fancy flooring coming off the line. All of this centered around a high speed axis and small special tooling that the wood is fed into, creating sawdust and noise. All this precision machining and heavy plates intended to produce repeatable quality….
The whole system need not exist.
Consider the trad version of both these activities, hand plane and molding plane. And the downforce that a human body walking can produce…. To drive the plane. You need only two fingers worth of force back n forth, and 120lbs on a feather spring of downforce
Now consider a solid table with clamping and a lightweight track frame system that attaches to the table. You load the board. You load your appropriate plane. You activate the motion control and very low power drill motors run the plane back n forth to save the labor of the millwright and cut or plane the piece. You get the same precision and quality and ease of operation…. You have clean shavings with no dust as your waste product. No noise. No infrastructure needed other than a solid table 16’ long, and frame to hold the motion control. All infrastructure (the table and frame) could be hand assembled by one person on site and packed in the back of a truck in 8’ sections.
The same process goes for sheet metal fabrication: there is no need for a heavy floor break. You need a roller dolly, 10’ track system and back n forth motion control. Combined with profile-specific roller dies that mount to the trolley.
Automate this instead of building 4 ton factory equipment and robotics.
The same can be said for heavy offroad cranes and lifts. For a residential building you can erect a stage/tent truss first, which can handle all lifting and placing with low power electric motors and motion control. We never needed a lull or man lift industry.
Ruff lads, window gals covered in sarco. You might look at all these stereotomy lessons we practice and think: “right, I’m not working on a cathedral, I’ll never use that” but we find intersecting forms needing the same pattern work all over construction. Inspired by this photo of a crudely mitered tile ridge cap, I decided to set off this task model: Gothic arch groin vault intersecting on 7:12 pitch.
*update: this is the third board. I’m using neubecker roof cutting bible as my main guide for the methods here. His book shows the development for the intersection of irregular hip intersecting a ridge….thats the first thing different about this, you have to draw the elongated form of the profile first (just like doing a crown mold on raking pediment) and it generates the plane for all the other cuts.
notes on the tedious debate of how to cut up a circle or generate an ellipse: it doesn’t matter. You can use tangents to find your centers and approximate with arcs that’s what they all did. long as you create the proper surface dev and hip oblique view as a checksum, you have your true length of the curve, and you have the coordinates in the oblique view, you have a full suite of information needed to generate the cut.
in real life when you cut on the material you will be using a spline to average the coordinates so it doesn’t matter how well you generated perfection with your circle dividing method.
In real life, on the most serious of stone cutting or timber shaping: I guarantee you, whatever “mazerole magic” they did on task model will be proved and checked with direct measure on the scribing floor. Those true lengths will become no longer theoretical but actual pieces of string or a spline. to find that curved surface it will be translated by the material properties of the tramel, the spline, and the action of the mechanic.
who “owns” the history of building? is it mathematician/engineers and royal society professionals from the 19th century? do scholars and academics have a claim to the history of building culture?
The professional institutions have been with us less than 200 years. Before their introduction the culture and history of building was mostly by laborers, for laborers.
Most architects and philosophers want to start this prompt, by asking: where does medieval architecture “come from”?. I have a wild proposal, you made up the whole framework. In the material world: There is no such thing as architecture. There are building methods, materials, and the descriptive geometry used to create forms or intersect surfaces. And the human effort involved.
“Architecture” is the application of ideology about building, after the fact usually by those not involved in the practice of labor. Put another way: Architecture is fashion. ”Building culture” is garment construction.
To that end the specifier and speculative classes fail themselves, and they have failed their brother humans as an institution and practice. Left unchecked, they will continue to make busy work for their class: inventing another debate on the origins of form that reminds us of the bozos looking for dark matter.
Where is the practice? Arguing over fashion and teaching people to think it’s ok to behave this way…. Digging in even harder in historicism on the other end of the pool. The practice is lost as it ever was.
I want to scream.
We start our timeline the location of modern Prague: 500 bc. Celtic boii scribing floor showing the development of a cone. They have mass walls and timber frame roofs., a fully developed recognizable cannon of human scale home “architecture”, similar to china and the levant. many cultures did it. Nobody did it like the boiis. The speculative “masons” on wet island will come to fetishize this building culture but improperly attribute their achievements and origins to Greek and Egyptian traditions, even though writers of the time differentiate them as “not Sicilians, not Greek”. They are “othered” by the writers of their time. They are noted to build villages and fortifications, by Cesar himself.
Where “architecture” comes from? the myth of the dark ages started in the 19th century to sell “class” and “art”.
The supposed “dark ages” 700 years of brick and stone, hot mixed mortars, timber joinery.
It’s called the dark ages because they could only get brown filters for the video cameras back then, and a bunch of 19th century weirdos in an institution said so.
Forms of all imaginable construction both regional and imperial. All mass wall or timber frame, all based on this continental corpus of structural integrity, in pursuit of interior comfort. The “architects” from enlightenment and victorian eras focus on the churches and high examples of cultural expression. All of them are exploiting similar geometric tricks to generate impressive forms. This is where the field has been lost for 200 years, myth making and hyper-analyzing the “origins” of something that is simply a rule of triangles or circles, exploited well by craft laborers .
But what about the regular folk on the continent? Most of the population didn’t live in cathedrals or think of their buildings and labor in the same way a 19th century intellectual would. The humans who lived within these structures have cherished words for comfort and warmth. In the indo-european root Buh: It means “we’re sick of living in caves and real happy these folks showed up”. They value textiles, and human effort to create comfort. Their homes were warm and dry. They have many words to describe the creators of comfortable places, Maestro is the Latin root. Techton in Greek. The people of ancient times described the laborers who provided comfort and warmth, from their own culture and language as “masters” and “builders”.
There was nothing dark about this time, if the people are to believed by their own words. They were obsessed with being roman, no matter where they were, and so they would favor classical sources in their “library” and throw out their own periodicals and contemporary works often. We see this bias running all the way thru the cultural curation right up to the reformation.
Roman’s who? They used the building cultures of their enslaved people: impressive only for scale and administration. We had concrete of the same chemistry in turkey and china. The forms are all stolen from Greeks jacking it about how you can make big stone blocks look like a boob if you squint real hard and the sun is just right.
Aachen 800ad: (the stadium glam rock era for crafts and building history): founding of coppersmiths for tailoring and joinery and glass making “studies”. With the patronage of Chalamange, crafts in building arts become established institutions within the monasteries. The palace at Aachen becomes the “Jay Lenos garage” of medieval Europe.
Aww Charles.. bless his little king Heart. he just loved him some workers and sciences and all the cool things they made. He would have been a Joe Rogan style guy today. Kinda dumb, loyal like an inbred dog, surrounding himself with cool wizards and “smart guys”. You do, unfortunately kinda have to hand it to “him” for the patronage to the building arts.
16th century: Del’orme: Europe’s father of master builders. A retired stone cutter in his sundown years produces the first books of architecture for the modern world. His declarations Made builders, architects, and mathematicians mad for 400 years. Shout out to a master poster and troll. Taught us how to make a stone ceiling look like a smashed trumpet, with circles and witty math.
16th-17th century Compangnon is made French military secret; the march of imperial power shakes the world. On wet island: laws are passed to stop unions of laborers forming. Machine breakers fight back. Police invented to stop laborers revolts.
Quick rewind to the 15th century to look at the dome in Florence. The guy Brunelesci was a master, but not because of “the Renaissance”. It is claimed he “went to Rome” to study the masters of antiquity. What he actually did was humble himself to seasoned military carpenters, and his laborers. He stood on the scaffold with them for each new step of the dome. He produced all the stereotomy. Like Toyota and Paul Akers: Bruno designed the work around the worker, he put himself in their shoes for every step. This is why the dome was completed in his lifetime. It must have been. He came to the junket with science, power and glory.
All the renaissance is stolen valor of his master achievements bringing real worldly culture to Italians. Please feel free to bully these weird pasta hicks, they couldn’t even invent a tomato. The juicy, red food they are known for arrives from the new world later this century: to much rejoicing by spaghetti chefs.
1660: wet guys: English merchants and striver class wigs establish mystery guilds in the model of Compagnon, because they are mad jealous of how cool and free master builders are. They will come to own pickleball courts and hamburger restaurants in America. Real uncut Calvinist shit.
18th century: professional class and civil engineering established. American revolution: timber rights. French Revolution: Compagnon made illegal along with other labor guilds. The birth of the corporation, the specifier as a class.
19th century: newly minted professional class dismantles craft practices, invents myths about history, fully establishes its authority to speak on building and labor. Industrial practice and unchecked extraction capitalism keep the economy line “proofs” coming up green.
At the end of the 19th century everything is crashing. All the prophets are made liars, the lofty dreams of the charismatics and lumpen alike cut up for tenements. Paper for balance sheets and newspapers ordered on speculation for the next year. The world feels the grip of apocalypse in all cultures, then oil is plumbed.
20th century. Dark ages. We don’t know what happened can someone with a degree tell us? Did yall see that? Did you see what they did there?
Let’s reiterate what this jumbled drawing proves…. In order to lay out the curve for a groin vault, you only needed to know the surface development of its inverse, the dome vault in square, and produce that net in the scribing floor. All cuts derived from tangents of that net line. This has been unfolded but I could have done it all within the original crossing section. There is no radius “off the sheet” required to produce the curve.
The knowledge needed to cut up a circle and project rafter lengths is building culture. it was known to all building cultures. The knowledge to refine clay and burn limestone, also a human building culture technology. Not roman. Never Lost. There are no mysteries or elusive building “dark arts”. Just service to duty and a lot of hard work.
We, the historic and traditional building laborers, recognize the importance of preserving and restoring our architectural heritage. We understand that our work requires specialized skills and knowledge to ensure the integrity and authenticity of these structures. Therefore, we hereby establish the Organization of Historic and Traditional Building Laborers International (OHTBLI) to promote and protect the interests of workers in this field.
Article 1: Name and Purpose
1.1 Name: The organization shall be known as the Organization of Historic and Traditional Building Laborers International (OHTBLI).
1.2 Purpose: The purpose of OHTBLI is to unite historic and traditional building laborers from around the world, advocating for their rights, promoting their professional development, and safeguarding the preservation of our architectural heritage.
Article 2: Membership
2.1 Eligibility: Membership in OHTBLI shall be open to all workers involved in historic and traditional building labor, including but not limited to masons, carpenters, plasterers, and painters.
2.2 Rights and Responsibilities: Members of OHTBLI shall have the right to participate in the organization’s activities, access its resources, and receive support and representation in matters concerning their profession. Members shall also be responsible for upholding the values and principles of OHTBLI and actively contributing to its objectives.
2.3 Non-Discrimination: OHTBLI shall not discriminate against individuals based on race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, age, or disability. The organization shall promote equality and inclusivity among its members.
Article 3: Objectives
3.1 Professional Development: OHTBLI shall strive to enhance the professional skills and knowledge of its members through training programs, workshops, and educational resources. The organization shall collaborate with academic institutions, experts, and industry professionals to provide opportunities for continuous learning and growth.
3.2 Advocacy and Representation: OHTBLI shall advocate for the rights, welfare, and fair treatment of historic and traditional building laborers. The organization shall engage in collective bargaining, negotiate fair wages and working conditions, and represent its members in disputes or conflicts.
3.3 Preservation of Architectural Heritage: OHTBLI shall promote the preservation and restoration of historic and traditional buildings worldwide. The organization shall work closely with preservation societies, government agencies, and other stakeholders to ensure the proper conservation and maintenance of these structures.
3.4 Outreach and Collaboration: OHTBLI shall actively engage with other labor unions, professional associations, and organizations involved in historic preservation and construction industries. The organization shall seek partnerships, share best practices, and collaborate on projects that contribute to the advancement of our profession.
Article 4: Governance
4.1 General Assembly: The General Assembly shall be the highest decision-making body of OHTBLI, consisting of all members. It shall convene periodically to discuss and decide on important matters, including the election of officers, approval of budgets, and formulation of policies.
4.2 Executive Committee: The Executive Committee shall be responsible for the day-to-day operations of OHTBLI. It shall be elected by the General Assembly and shall consist of a President, Vice President, Secretary, Treasurer, and other positions as deemed necessary. The Executive Committee shall ensure the implementation of the organization’s objectives and the efficient management of its resources.
4.3 Local Chapters: OHTBLI may establish local chapters or branches to facilitate regional activities and provide localized support to members. Local chapters shall operate under the guidance and supervision of the Executive Committee.
Article 5: Finances
5.1 Funding: OHTBLI shall rely on membership dues, donations, grants, and other lawful means to finance its activities. The organization shall maintain transparency and accountability in its financial management.
5.2 Budget and Auditing: The Executive Committee shall prepare an annual budget, subject to approval by the General Assembly. OHTBLI’s financial records shall be audited regularly to ensure compliance with financial regulations and transparency.
Article 6: Amendments
6.1 Amendment Process: Amendments to this charter may be proposed by the Executive Committee or by a majority vote of the General Assembly. Proposed amendments shall be circulated among the members for review, and a vote shall be conducted to approve or reject the proposed changes.
6.2 Ratification: Amendments to this charter shall require a two-thirds majority vote of the General Assembly for ratification.
Article 7: Dissolution
7.1 Dissolution Process: In the event of the dissolution of OHTBLI, the assets and remaining funds shall be distributed in a manner consistent with the organization’s objectives, as determined by the General Assembly.
7.2 Transfer of Responsibilities: Upon dissolution, the Executive Committee shall ensure a smooth transition of any ongoing projects, records, and responsibilities to appropriate organizations or entities involved in historic
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