Thinking with my hands sometimes starts with a drawing. Sometimes it starts with a design on paper or even a napkin, but in the case of this bake oven project we were asked to design the ideas flowed from experimenting doing a drawing first on sketchup.
Heritage masonry professor John Scott and I worked out some of the details based on our collective experience working on well proportioned stone buildings and knowing that bake ovens can and should look beautiful too. They don't have to look as utilitarian as they often do. Our aim was not to just build a good working oven but to wow people too when they see it.
Here is the design we came up with. We decided to give it the proportions of a small house and have two parapets, one of which the bake oven chimney was housed.
We have already changed a few things from this original design as we have had the opportunity to work out some of the design as we build. I'm hoping it will make an interesting post later this week to compare the finished structure to this drawing.
