James Taite
@James_Taite
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Stonemason. Don't know ass from entasis.
Ottawa, Canada
Joined September 2020
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The art of persuasion with a 3-pound hammer, or stonecutting…
a thread:
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Love the pics posted by
@ArchMaher
of historic stone construction in Jordan, these stairs in particular. The two photos seem to show similar constructions, though the structural principles are very different:
short thread on the cantilever v the pencheck stair
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A thread on building with stone.
Particularly, the way stones are arranged in the wall, or ‘bond’.
Specifically, that bond called sneck, or Scotch.
A stone wall is a stone wall, right? Look at these two: rubble (L) and sneck bond (R). Just stone walls.
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when Lutyens commits he goes balls out doesn’t he
Grosvenor Estate, Westminster
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my father in law is a builder and I asked him once why we don't build cathedrals anymore we can't he said we don't know how blah blah
Cheers to all those working on Notre Dame, and thanks for proving those trad fucks wrong...
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“Modernism is decadent because no popcorn ceilings” has gotta be the death-rattle of the marble statue accounts right? Right?
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There’s an old story I just made up about a mason, spending his days piling stone on top of stone. Raising a church.
He’s asked by the abbot: “We build for the glory of God; how do you intend to keep the stones standing through years of wind and frost?”
A thread…
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those duckbill reflectors gathering the light from the lower windows…
St Martin-in-the-fields, James Gibbs
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The considered opinion of someone who actually works with stone:
Bullshit. This man and his father-in-law are talking out of their asses.
Their whole grift depends on cultivating a sense of a world in decline, a modern culture degenerate in comparison with the past.
Bullshit.
My father-in-law is a builder. It is difficult to get his attention in a magnificent space because he is lost in wonder. We were in a cathedral together years ago and I asked him what it would cost to build it today. I will never forget his answer…
“We can’t, we don’t know how
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Here’s the view of Soane’s house you don’t often see, with glimpses of monitors and skylights.
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There’s something fucked about the fascination with trabeated stone. For millennia it’s been chewed at, chased to abstraction. Repeatedly exhumed and revived, even after Roman concrete, even after Gothic vaults, after Rundbogenstil. Still keeps coming back from the dead,
a thread
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Lutyens the carnival conjurer: disappearing columns with base and cap and nothing between
85 Fleet St
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jesus the weight of that lower storey the vertical impulse of the Tuscan denied by that rustication those lights struggling to reach half-round those pendant triglyphs pushing down on the window below did anyone do it better than Hawksmoor?
St. Mary Woolnoth
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Gorgeous little chunker, a standout even in this distinguished company…
Berkeley Library, Trinity College Dublin, 1967, Ahrends Burton Koralek
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finally able to get my nose right up to the incomparable 15 Clerkenwell Close by
@groupwork
; what a fantastic building! That stone frame—that gap—that use of the found textures of stone off the bed! Rustication come full circle from nature through artifice and back.
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basket-weave, 1880s and 1930s(?)
former Mimico Asylum, Toronto
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Somerset House
pumpkin-guts vermiculation and decorative broaching
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A rather boring thread about old ways of cutting stone, which is redeemed in the end with a story about an anarchist bricklayer, and in which I also reveal the secret of the practically god-like powers of the stonemason (me).
#stonecutting
#stonemasonry
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well Mr Scarpa I see your thoughtful articulation of the corner junction at a Vicenzan apartment block and raise you the hastily rigged steel shoring for a temporary loading dock
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Nice meme and all, but a couple of things:
1/Even assuming that none of that stone is machine-cut, you’re romanticizing the actual process of cutting ashlar and classical mouldings on the banker. Spoiler, it’s drudgery… the kind you can take pride in, but drudgery nonetheless…
Built by a craftsman //
built by a Pritzker-prize winning architect
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tumbled-in weatherings
the Assembly Hall, former Mimico Asylum, Toronto, 1898
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Morphology of column chamfer-stops in an early 19th century mill:
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what a beaut of a lintel: mass and grace and that tease of a false bifurcation; and the punctuating marks to either side suggesting that this is a quote, an apt decorative motif for an essay in stylistic revivalism
1925 addition to former Dominion Archives, Ottawa
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My guilty pleasure? Oh that would be ye olde-timey high-tech…
60 Queen Victoria St., 1999, Foggo Associates
Bracken House addition, 1988-92, Michael Hopkins & Partners
Portcullis House, 1998-2001, Michael Hopkins & Partners
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A general rule of stonemasonry: lay (sedimentary) stone on its natural bed. Don’t fuck around. Lay it the way it was formed. A thread.
Sandstone bedrock, Portland Ont.
Fort Henry, Kingston, Ont.
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…The masons were pairs of hands working to precise instruction, with zero latitude for free expression.
2/You’re understating the skill involved in forming and finishing good concrete like we see here, and that’s a disservice to the people in that trade.
Fixed it for you:
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yup checks out before 1922 every building was a pyramid and traditional builders never performed virtuoso displays of structural sleight-of-hand pushing their material and technique to an impossible feeling of slenderness weightlessness
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Goats Tongue. Nice way to terminate a chamfer or revealed corner.
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I was momentarily angry at the characterization of construction workers like myself as uneducated brutes, then I thought “naw, why get fussed by the bloviating gawps of an ignorant fucking twit?”
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Hands
look at their hands; they knew to keep their fingers tucked, away from the stone as it was landed on the wall
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standard linear measures set into the wall of Dublin City Hall
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the unfussy perfection of smalltown Romanesque Revival… those springers, keys, sills… just raw, pecked blocks of local sandstone
Portland, Ontario
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@richmondie
Absolutely! Don’t mean in the least to disparage American contribution to the arts… but if you’re looking for American art that ain’t it!
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saddle or weather joint between individual granite sills, Guinness Storehouse, Dublin
raising the joint above the weathering surface minimizes water infiltration
same, in a cornice; from E.G. Warland’s ‘Modern Practical Masonry’, 1929, p.43
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So much of the charm of carpenter gothic is the imperfect translation of the idiom of one material/construction to another. An architecture of misunderstanding. Like these little gablets along the eaves, spaced evenly between the windows: vestiges of buttresses that never were.
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So shitty architecture in the modernist idiom is the fault of an entrenched ideological elite, pushing modernism…
…and shitty architecture in the classical idiom is also the fault of that same modernist elite?
Are the shitty trad architects going to take any responsibility?
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Trinity United, Ottawa, 1963, James Strutt architect
just a beaut
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love these Giacometti-ass cast-iron columns at Covent Garden stood up beside the monolithic granite; I assume they're original since they preserve the spacing but anyone know?
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…the hidden key. Hide the radial joints inside the stone and make the visible perps vertical. Artful ruses.
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silly me I thought it was the modernists obsessed with buildings that seem to defy gravity, and the requisite structural gymnastics
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Entrance to the Kilmainham Gaol:
the vermiculation a seething tangle, crossing from stone to stone defying joints, out of which the serpents of the tympanum emerge
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kinda love when a repair to historic fabric becomes itself hallowed, and worthy of preservation or repair rather than replacement, so you get dutchmen in dutchmen; hate it but love it I mean
St. Magnus the Martyr
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Jesusfuckingchrist not this again…
still gets under my skin though I know it’s all just a grift to stir up engagement.
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corbelled brick construction of slit window, ponte scaligeri, verona
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Surely, taking this fellow's own profile banner as an example, we can acknowledge that even 'good' architects often omitted water shedding details and resigned themselves to staining for aesthetic reasons.
The irony is that often architects pride themselves on agonising over the *visual* details but completely ignore the basics of drip details. A simple plinth, for example, would have prevented the unsightly staining along the ground. They’re not just “nice to have”
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vermiculation, intended and unintended
Chéticamp; stone from La Pointe Enragée on Chéticamp Island
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Love this adaptation of vault-making to modern process: instead of the labour-intensive stereotomy of carefully fitted voussoirs the cross-vaults are made from saw-cut slabs of uniform thicknesses, propped into place with stone wedges; the gaps can then be filled with mortar.
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And to that end, after having taken the trouble to lay all this out at tedious length, I want to emphasize that sometimes you throw the fucking rulebook off the fucking scaffold.
(all photos mine unless noted)
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All Souls, John Nash, jesus what a spire that attenuated cone emerging from the open drum christ
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don’t stop can’t stop won’t stop uh oh chamfer stop
Allied Irish Bank, Thomas Deane, 1870-7, Dublin
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An old rule of thumb for stable corbelled masonry is two-thirds of the mass in the wall and one-third projecting. This pic looks less impossible than it actually is: given the real wall-line here (in red), the stones of this cornice come close to satisfying this dictum
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The stunted understanding of the function of building elements here makes me dyspeptic; labels and drips don't 'prevent' the action of water on structure. Sometimes they throw water clear but, more often, they merely channel it from more to less vulnerable places. e.g. Wren:
I’m sharing these less as a critique of the architecture itself (Alison Brooks is one of the better modern architects) but more to reiterate the importance of detailing. Modernists hate cornices and sills but they would have prevented the staining on this 3 year old building.
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Train station = outdoor platforms = generous eaves = opportunity for embellishment
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porches not blurring boundaries between ext and int but redrawing them sharp thru your body, verandahs a kind of vivisection, your eyes and ears and finer hairs outside and the rest of your body in, your head roofed over, your shoulder safe against a wall
a thread about porches…
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This guy nails it though. He’s right, we don’t believe the same things they did, and I’m ok with that.
Which is why, despite devoting my working life to the care of old buildings, I’ll never find myself on the that side of this conversation.
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drip and no drip
St. Giles-in-the-Fields and St. Bride's Fleet Street
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former Mimico Asylum repurposed as campus for Humber College, Toronto
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Stone is rock given purpose, picked up with an intention in mind. Rubble is closest to that primal purposeless state. Unsquared and relatively unworked it expresses an economy of effort. The worst knobs are knocked off. The stone is turned over to determine how it will sit…
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When you’re emotionally and ideologically invested in a narrative of societal decline…
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love the back-to-front ambiguity of St. Paul’s Covent Garden; love that the monumental bit, the “handsomest barn” bit, the loggia pushing into the market, is not the entrance but the ass end, serving the profane space of commerce. But also shelters the altar.
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concrete and raking light
War Museum, Ottawa, Moriyama & Teshima architects
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Postscript:
Look at these beauties; they function as unrebated penchecks even though built of multiple stones. The thinness of some of those treads confirms that they aren’t subject to the bending of the cantilever, but the torsion of the pencheck.
@James_Taite
I just spotted these in a walking tour video and was shocked that they depended on stone cantilever like that.
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Sills should be hollow-bedded, or laid with mortar beds only under those points which support a load. Like their ends, where jambs bear. The rest of the bed joint should be empty, so less likely to crack in half with a little movement in the wall. Here’s one I exposed this week:
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great space-saving game with the letter-cutting here; the text contracts with the articles and conjunctions you're going to rush over anyway and takes a deep breath at the proper names being commemorated.
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@adcedere
Things last if we want them to last, if we maintain and repair them. There are plenty of 100-yr-old stone buildings falling down because we haven’t done that. And there are buildings of wood and wattle that are 1000 years old, in great shape, because we have.
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Corb can have his machine for living I want a machine for shooting gothic sculpture to the moon
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Sneck bond is made up of 3 sorts of stone, distinguished by the role they play: jumpers, runners, and snecks.
A jumper is a tall stone; one that rises through the height of 2 smaller stones (a runner and a sneck).
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mocking-up the cornice for MM&W’s Boston Public Library
in plaster, on-site, at the actual elevation…
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In a pencheck stair, weight at the nose of the tread (where it will most often be applied by a person climbing stairs) produces torsion, or twisting, primarily resisted by the wall at the end of the tread…
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THIS. Instead of futzing around with stone as high-end ornament we should be *building* with stone, both in the manner we have been for 1000s of years and in the new ways being worked out right now by
@stonemasonryco
. Ornament will take care of itself.
@mspringut
@James_Taite
@_Aesthetic_City
We want people understand the
#lowcarbonfootprint
of stone. Stone was never a luxury but a commodity. The thicker the better so that it can be reused again & again like in Europe for the last 1000 years ! See enclosed 60 meter tower build using 40 mpa stone in 1950. 1 ft thick.
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bit fussy for my taste but goddam I love that constructive polychromy
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paying some respect to these old Dutchmen, nicely cut and nicely weathered in; weathered enough that I suspect they fixed mistakes made at the time of building, stonecutter muttering about the fucking fixer masons the whole time
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Cantilevers rely on weight at the tailed-in end to keep them from tipping out, and on the (generally low) strength of stone to resist the tension produced in its upper surface. Too great a load, the stone will fail, and the tread will snap. Stone doesn’t like tension.
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stuck in hospital need to get some stupid twitter beefs going
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Pencheck stairs, on the other hand, aren’t cantilevers. They’re supported at one end by a wall, but they don’t depend on weight at that tailed-in end to keep them stable; and neither do they have the same tensile forces acting on them.
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portrait of boy sceptical that a 1282’ long covered bridge was worth a 15 minute detour
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