tripped up

A subtle spatial relationship we take for granted is the regularity of stairs. The brain and legs rely on a predictable pattern of treads and risers to take us to the next level. To blow that rhythm might imply foul play on the part of builder, user or owner! In overcrowded 17th c. Edinburgh, William Grey had that in mind when he built his new home on the fashionable Royal Mile. Grey had his carpenters build stairs with an abnormally high riser in each run. His precious family would know where the beat changed, but an intruder would stumble; the clatter would warn the occupants that danger was afoot -- or that their drunken friend had arrived. The building, steps unchanged, now belongs to the city and is home to the Writers' Museum. I wonder if children who grew up in that home often tripped on the nearby Playfair Steps because the rhythm was not like that of home.

I will not be moved

The 15th c. Rosslyn Chapel has dozens of platforms created to support statuary, inside and out (see orange blobs), but no one's home! Some theorize that 17th c. parishioners of one sect, anticipating plunder by a reforming sect, spirited away the occupants of the niches and hid them --too well! Since the chapel was not completed before the death of the man who funded it, it's possible some niches were never occupied. An added insult to the building, Scots complain, was that Cromwell used the building as a stable.
What's interesting is the stones that were not removed: the carved support stones for the statuary and stone members of arches that support openings. They had been carved into figures of a secular or pagan nature, or events any flavor of plunderer might fear or respect. Being structurally riskier to knock down, that green man or the bagpipe-playing figure remain in place today. Because they were like motherhood and apple pie are to Americans, might masons have preserved deeper-seated subject matter according to the structural role a stone played? Did these icons' deeper cultural roots make them structurally safer?
Possibly a worst offense to the building took place in the 1950's. In a preservation attempt gone-wrong, a thin coat of cement was applied to the entire structure, inadvertently cloaking and suffocating the colorful, living rock within its own grey baggie. In what some say is perpetuating another false image,  Hollywood is providing funds to repair.

iron age real estate

Double-wall masonry is sometimes thought of as cheap, because it uses fewer bricks for wall area, but it can be quite strong, since the walls are usually connected at intervals with a tie-stone that spans both walls. My first lesson in the durability of double-wall masonry was during additions to a building by idiosyncratic engineer-builder, Carr Jones. What? Masonry, in earthquake territory? Garden-variety double-wall construction is referred to as rat-trap masonry, a bond popular for its insulating properties and economy of materials. Jones' California walls used steel ties, and his early 20c. homes are real estate manna. Pictured above is one example of the QUEEN of double-wall masonry, unique to Scotland: the broch. They're dry masonry: no mortar. They take the idea of tie stones and insulating cavities to another level! Given the severity of Scotland's environment, one appreciates the need for insulation, but the cavities in broch walls are unusual enough to provoke speculation about additional functionality. To get an idea of the technical sophistication of these dry-stone, iron-age structures, check out this trailer for a recent broch-umentary.

round house

How many creatures make their nests in rectilinear form? Earth-form circles large or small don't seem so mysterious if we look at the nesting methods of our furry and feathered kin. Whether to enclose real or imagined occupants, dead or alive, arranging earth in circular form seems like standard M.O! How'd so many of us get to thinking right angles were top choice? Most early people's constructed homes appear to have been round. Before aerial photography, the sure clue to an ancient site was leftover stones, depressions and berms. Today, hi-res satellite imagery can suggest previously overlooked sites to ANY amateur. Here is a Edin's Hall, one of supposedly few similar structures in the southern Scottish borderlands. But really? Look for yourself on Google Earth. This amateur sees similar scars nearby.

you ain't seen nothin' yet

Systems theorist Fritjof Capra, in his book on the science of Leonardo da Vinci, argues that our most creative insights emerge from states of uncertainty and confusion according to a process of "emergence", the creation of new forms of order out of chaos and confusion. So our pals at the Albany Bulb may be at the cusp of a life-changing insight, about to radically alter their beings. Or not. 
Earthquakes changing landforms changing waterways finds a parallel to hair growth patterns where the skin has scarred, or the way a form is perceived in a drawing after a lost period of erasures and scribbling. Leonardo had an ear for the harmony of these orders; he documented and compared phenomena throughout his life. Conceding our wisp of consequence on the celestial time line, he wrote "nature is full of infinite causes that have never occurred in experience."

road memoir#3

Leaving Arizona on US 93 brought us down to Black Canyon, an area that, save for the Colorado River at its bottom, is seemingly all rock and bereft of water. It's so close to the expanding basin-and-range province that one is easily disoriented by the pull of seismically-warped gravity. It just feels different there. We crossed over the Hoover Dam, an ambitious engineering design built under extraordinarily brutal economic and climatic circumstances. In this desolate corner, how celebrated can such a structure be? Can something requiring such calculation and cooperation be an unembellished industrial object? Or is it crafted to make our spirits soar? We crossed over and sketched for a while from a pullout halfway up from the dam road. I was a goner! I made this drawing and swore to come back and draw the whole thing, inside and out. The next year I did.