Sept 11th Stone Foundation Arch Collaboration at Barre Vermont

Yesterday we nearly completed the Gothic arch at the Granite Museum in Barre Vermont. There was a good turnout. The guys did a great job 'collaborating' to build it. It was far better than a walling 'competition' which was what was planned originally.

In Memory

Reusing the Barre Arch Form

I travelled to Barre Vermont for the Rocknockers Rendezvous. There are six of us so far from Canada this year. Today Saturday we may see even more wallers coming in from up north. Last time I was here was to teach a workshop back in 2008 there were quite a few Canadians.

See Stone Symposium DSWAC Dry Stone Workshop

We built free-standing walls that year which made up three sides to a 80 foot rectangular bocce court. After the workshop we moved some really big Barre grey granite cubes into position and just for fun I helped the students fashion a funky gothic arch with some leftover stone. I was delighted to see the arch was still looking good three years later. I was also surprised to see the arch form we used was still there sitting off in the field.



Patty Meriam, who runs the Barre Granite Museum, asked us to build another arch at this year's Stone Foundation mini symposium weekend event, to create a second entranceway to the round fire pit structure that was the focus of an exciting dry stone wall competition Tomas Lipps organized for the 2008 symposium. Above is a photo of one of the big granite blocks that we have just split and spaced so that we can straddle it to form a gothic arch opening using the old arch form to support the stone.

We are using a lot of donated random quarried granite grout and a lot more of the left over rusty brown schisty dry stone wall material. All we need is a good sized 'keystone' now. This one (above) which is one of the new installations in the small Art Park that we visited during our lunch break in Barre, might do the trick.

Gapping The Bridge

For a bridge to stay together structurally it needs to be able to move. Rather than be so rigid that temperature changes or high winds or severe frost create pressure enough to cause it to crack, a bridge has 'expansion joints' built into it to accommodate the pressure allowing a certain amount of controlled movement.

A dry stone wall works the same way. It stays together like a basket. The stones in the wall create thousands of expansion joints. Each joint can move a fraction of inch if it needs to. The unsightly cracks one sees in a concrete or masonry block wall do not occur in a dry stone wall. It is engineered more like a bridge and will be less likely to become compromised structurally .

Assorted Chocolate Stones.

I visited Kay's bridge last Tuesday on the way back from the walling demonstration we did in Ottawa on the Labour Day weekend. This is the dry stone bridge we built during the four day 2010 Rocktoberfest near Rockport Canada. The unusual 'chocolate limestone' material we used for much of the bridge construction including the walkway, was supplied by Upper Canada Minerals. It is much browner than most dolomite limestone.

It was great to see how sweet everything looked on this visit. The bridge looked yummy. The walking surface particularly, was dancing in colour. The pitched stones were picking up the dappled rays of the early afternoon September sunlight. It was looking very much like something out of a children's fairy tale. The individual stones could have been assorted candy-coated chocolates arranged along the curved top of a giant stick of licorice . It all looked good enough to eat.

Out of Balance.

Got a text message yesterday from my friend Eric Landman who is a very good waller and also our DSWAC field director. With the text there was a picture of a very creative wall feature he and Ryan Stannought just completed. The text read "It's hard to work with stone on this scale."

Comparison

We finished the Kingsmere dry stone wall demonstration yesterday. Monday was supposed to be rainy but it ended up being dry and comfortably cooler than Saturday and Sunday and there were more people around. The length of fieldstone wall we repaired could be fully appreciated by several visitors nearer the end of the day who noted how much more ordered it looked compared to the other long piles of stone that border much of the NCC property. These walls which were commissioned by Mackenzie King originally were not very well built to begin with. Though he loved the look of dry stone walls, the walls at his estate were mostly done as a make work scheme by men who had probably never built mortarless walls before. You can see the difference in the walling style just beyond the cheekend we completed in the photo below..

Rockinspiel

Not many people came out to see the dry stone wall demonstration at Kingsmere yesterday. It was too wet. Most of the visitors who did come to the park walked right past, hardly glancing over to see what was going on. I think people felt awkward watching someone working with heavy dirty rocks on a holiday, and chose to politely look the other way as they passed.

I still think of walling as not just a mundane work activity but a bit of a spectator sport, especially in a setting like this where it is supposed to be a walling demonstration. I think of it as something of a performance, as if I were playing an instrument.

For those few people who do stop to ask questions, I always take a break from working (playing?) and give them a full rundown on what dry stone walling is all about and explain what I am doing. I have got it down to a pretty good 'spiel' now. I call it my 'Rockinspiel'.

Balancing Fact

We have been asked to do a walling demonstration during the Labour Day weekend festivities at the Kingsmere Estate in the Gatineau Hills in Quebec. Yesterday a bad section of original wall was taken down and rebuilt. The fact is the work we did on the wall didn't attract anywhere near as much attention as the simple stack of stones I balanced at lunch break. All sorts of people stopped and and marveled, taking pictures of it as if it were way more difficult to do than building a structural dry stone wall with random chunks of round granite. Quel fromage, quel pamplemousse.

The Rubble Helix is going Up.

Working our way up the rubble helix

It isn't very often we have to dry stack stone standing on scaffolding.

Rockwalking

It is actually quite easy to move big stones by "rock-walking" them this way.

One angle on how to do it.

The pattern of dry stacking stones, vertically and at various angles, in a round free standing cairn shape is not as arbitrary as it might seem. Flattish boxy-shaped stones (the proper geometric name is rectangular prism) if laid flat in courses, leave big gaps on the outer surface of a curved structure because the stones only contact at their inner corner points and prevent their revealed outer edges from touching. Whereas stones laid vertically or at an angle take up less room inside the structure along the horizontal , fit closer and create a dynamic force between each other as well .

Yes the stones can all be shaped to be more triangular and then laid in courses, but this is not always possible or necessary.

Obviously the leftover stones we are using in our cairn are all random and different sizes. Many of them have broken, irregular, multi-angled, multi-faceted forms. But for the purpose of simplicity let's study a couple structural issues that arise with laying stones at an angle, using uniform brick shaped stones.

The trouble is what to do when patterns of angled stones meet.

The illustration above shows the problem more clearly. When the stones lean away from each other and they meet up too close to one another there is no purchase area for a stone to be laid in the valley that is created between them. Even a triangle stone may look fitted well but it will have to be short one and it will easily slide out with time.

One solution seems to be leaving a wider space between opposing angles so that a longer stone can be laid flat and further into the wall. Others can be stacked on top to create a kind of book end within the angled stones.

Be careful what you don't wish for.

A CBC pilot TV show called 'Wish List' is being fimed in our town this month.

Mary Walsh of This Hour Has 22 Minutes is in it.

The pilot, directed by Stuart Gillard, portrays a 30-something wife (and mother) who decides to reconnect with her daughter and her late husband's mother.

Port Hope plays the fictional southern Ontario town of Findley.

The homegrown drama follows the wife and daughter and mother-in-law on a road trip in which the three arrive in a small town where there is a wishing well in the park that they throw coins in to and make... you guessed it – wishes.

After Sam, the daughter, steals the coins, all three women are condemned to make amends by staying in the town, which might be bad enough except they are also required to grant wishes, no matter how big or small to the towns people. Lucky them.

As they attempt to realize the town's requests, the three women learn that their own dreams can be realized in the most unexpected ways and places.

My wish would be that instead of fabricating a temporary cardboard wishing well in the park they would have forseen a better looking less costly option – that of having us come and build them a nicer one out of real dry laid stone. Oh well.

Cairn Progress

The cairn that we have been building the last two weekends uses a pattern of fitting the stones together that involves a good deal of 'thinking with your hands'. Because we are using a lot of leftover stone from a big wall job there are lots of pieces with odd angles and not as many nice shapes left to work with. It turns out the pattern we've adopted for the project is working quite well, but it gets difficult when you accidentally work your way into a tricky spot.

There are styles which have been placed strategically around the cairn at various heights so the we can stand on them to build higher. Our client tells us their grandchildren will want to climb them too. Apparently they are very good climbers. They were helping us for a while with some of the smaller hearting last week.

Here they are standing waving.

Tomorrow it might be good to take a look at how to meet some of the challenges presented to anyone thinking of building in this random diagonal style.

Stones can look unsightly

The huge piles of gabion stones in this picture are piled this way to create a stone barrier between the road and the modern housing estate behind. I'm not sure what the big chunks of stacked armour stone are doing at the base of the tree. Perhaps they are retaining the soil where the roots are growing. I cant help but think that all this stone could have been used a better way.

Modern ruins

The two photos above show two very different masonry structures which visitors to our town might see if they walked around for a while. One is a phony stone concrete block building along the river that must have been a utility building of some sort at one time. The other is a dry stone folly built by wallers from Scotland, Switzerland, USA and Canada during our second Rocktoberfest back in 2005.

Both are relatively modern ruins. Both structures catch your eye. They both create a sense of place and a feeling of time. Neither of them serve any particular use, or do they?

Canada does not have anywhere near as many ruins as other European counties. Old buildings are what gives a place character.

We need to preserve ones that we have and if we can, tastefully create new ones, and of course be careful with new utilitarian buildings that we don't make a wreck of the countryside.

Walls With Integrity

Thanks to the Dry Stone Conservancy for this image www.drystone.org

What are the principle elements that make a dry good stone wall?

Good stones for sure.

Then friction and gravity.

Then good bonding and fitting of contours.

Plus there's an assimilating thousands of years of history and tradition.

Then there are things like honesty and consistency throughout the construction process, including a thoroughness in hearting and the placing of all the stones that nobody will see.

This involves an integrity of character. That's part of a wall too.

This implies that the wall be built by someone who knows something about honesty, kindness and compassion.

A respect and appreciation for the principles of bonding includes a commitment to the maintaining of friendships.

Loyalty and fairness are important aspects of a wallers character and these traits will show in his or her work too.

Enjoying what you do, enjoying the work not just thinking of it as a job, is a key element of an above average wall.

Commitment to ethics, not just the minimum of civility, is essential.

Just because there is no mortar doesn't mean it's disconnected and has nothing actually holding it together

There is something in there.

It is invisible, but you can see it.

A respectable upright character is what you'll need if you want to have a good wall that stays together and isn't phony .

Meanness of spirit will cause the wall to look ugly, tense and unstable, even if it is built adhering to the other basic wall building principles.

A critical eye will not necessarily build a particularly good wall either.

Anyone can spot mistakes and point them out to people publicly.

But can you make stones sing, or construct walls that inspire or bring stones and people together so that they get along in a positive productive way?

Loan Circles

My daughter has been collecting lots of her ( and ours, that we lent her ) change over the last few years and yesterday she wrapped it all. She thinks it's hers now.

The brown paper tubes when they're neatly packed are remarkably heavy and feel like they want to be stacked somehow.

So I made a little free-standing coin circle. Or would that be a high priced one?

I will call it Coinhenge perhaps? I think that I had the Clonehenge site in mind when I made it.

It's not in mint condition I know but it still might be worth depositing inside a bank (a kind of monetary earthworks site?)

I wonder if the early builders of any kind of similar coinhenge ever 'with-druid' when ancient times got tough?

Anyway I got a note back from Nancy to say they would be posting the picture on their site sometime in the future, and that I was definitely "on a role".

Wood and Stone

We are Canadian. We have to keep warm in the winter. We know how to stack wood. We don't lay it along the line of the wood pile. We lay it into the pile. If you can't stack wood properly you shouldn't be allowed in this country. It's as patriotic as peameal bacon. It's as natural as maple syrup.

So why not apply all this natural, cultural, structural knowledge to stacking rocks? Why do Canadians still try to lay stones along a wall? Why do they insist on reinventing the wall? You would think that if it works for wood, if you don't need glue or cement to build long neat rows of firewood, then maybe the technique could be carried over to stacking rocks?

And yet, so often we fall short in our thinking and our walls fall short of being structural.

Most stones have some sort of length. So let's place them neatly and properly INTO the wall, long ways. Even mortared stonework would be more structural if masons did that, instead of laying them like vertical patio stones.

The photo above shows different piles of well stacked wood. The stonework on the other hand, is not that great, and is relying on mortar to keep the veneer stones from falling off the building. Go figure, eh?

Rubble Helix Progress

Yesterday we added one more rung to our Rubble Helix. This twisted free standing structure being built near Port Hope, Ontario uses no glue or cement! It will stand about 10 feet tall when it is finished and will be completely self supporting. The rungs, each weighing over 300 lbs are suspended 14 inches apart, above one-another. The two columns will eventually twist about 60 degrees over a central axis. The columns step out and around each other, well beyond their original foundation footprints. The structure looks impossibly unstable but it's completely rigid. (We have to climb all over it during the raising of each massive 4 inch thick ladder rung-stone)

The structure can best be interpreted as a whimsical allusion to the primal and essential connection that exists between rocks and people. Common limestone rocks are carefully stacked in this twisted configuration as an inorganic representation of the macromolecular realm of genes and proteins, which make up the basis of life.

All rocks are formed by complex combinations of crystal structures . All crystal configurations 'grow' according to some predetermined pattern based on the certain atom combinations present in the mix. This inorganic 'patterning' may well be the lithological counterpart of organic 'DNA patterning'.

The propensity for ordered reproduction within cells (living and non-living) explains how, and in what form, all structures occur on earth. The free-standing Rubble Helix utilizes the forces of gravity and friction, combined with principles of tensile strength and counterbalance in an otherwise inexplicable demonstration of bilateral order and balance. The spiraling columns of stone are held together and prevented from falling over, by through-bonds across the centre of the helix. Like the microscopic double helix which has all the basic elements of life raveled within its structure, this rising inorganic form explores the idea of coded mineral design on a larger scale.