Rustic Elegance or Whatever.

We stained the frigger white while we were briefly in Cape Breton in September.




The inside is still rough, but I already have some wallpapering ideas.

Postscript 2: A Word on Internal Consistency, Math and Architecture

One of the most important insights I’ve had about my own worst tendencies as a designer came to me in my third year of architecture school. During the end of term crits of our design projects, one of the professors pointed out some pretty obvious shortcomings in my design for a college campus. I was forced to admit that I had recognized the problem already but failed to fix it because doing so would have polluted what I saw as the purity of the concept, which was a fairly simpleminded assemblage of concrete shear walls and floating glassy structures around a quadrangle. My desire to preserve the internal consistency in terms of formal relationships had overridden my desire to make good, usable spaces.

Talking to this professor after the crit, I realized that this tendency of mine was related to my love of math, in which I had taken my undergrad degree. What I found pleasurable about doing math was the perfect internal logic of it all. If you follow the correct steps to solve an equation, then there is only one answer and it leads inevitably from the information you started with. This was comforting to me, and it was a mode of thinking I tended to retreat to when I later faced the demands of architectural design. I always felt that I could find the ‘correct’ concept for the building if I only combed through the site and program information carefully enough, and that once that concept was in place everything else would flow naturally from there, with little additional thought. In other words, the constraints of the site and the required size and use of the building formed an equation that needed only to be solved. The solution, for me, was usually some kind of combination of three or four architectural elements, each performing a different programmatic function, all structurally and materially distinct. By strictly defining these elements early on in the process, I thought I would be freed from the requirement of ongoing invention, which I didn’t think myself capable of.

I still tend to design this way,though I think my ability to fine-tune a concept to make better spaces has improved a lot. The Mabou Studio is clearly a simple assemblage of three parts, and much of the effort in detailing has come from the need to keep those parts legible. But it seems to me that the generating ideas remain a bit simpleminded. I look at the work of, say, Louis Kahn, and see that, while his works were assemblages of distinct parts, the relationships between the parts were incredibly complex. Someday I want to reach that level of subtlety and richness. Rather than working with grade-school formulas, I want to do calculus.

- Geoff

Postscript 1: Back to Reality

I’m writing this, the last entry for phase one of the both the Studio project and the blog, from a borrowed futon on the floor of our new apartment in Toronto. As with most moves to an unfamiliar city, the new surroundings seem mean and inhospitable. We don’t know our way around, and parking is a bitch. Apparently the threats of towing are serious and everyone I know here who owns a car has been burned by the parking authority on numerous occasions. And the radiators in our new place – it’s in a converted factory, complete with primitive single-glazed curtain wall that lets in the cold like nobody’s business – have been inexplicably shut down all day (the landlord controls them). We’ll have to talk to the landlord in the morning and make sure this isn’t some kind of cruel scheme to save money by rationing heat. Maybe, like my Dad, he’ll just tell me to put on a sweater.

We’ve been in Toronto about a week, and already Mabou seems distant and half-forgotten.

Carla left Cape Breton on December 21 to spend the remainder of the month in Halifax with her family. I stayed on site for a few more days to try and finish as much work as I could. I was able to complete the shingling and fastened the strapping to the Crow’s Nest – which will later be clad in plywood – but couldn’t quite find time to install the cap flashings at the top of the shingled walls. Instead I built some makeshift plywood caps that should last the winter. The finished front door never got built or installed, but I made some repairs to a couple of the operator window units, which should hopefully eliminate the leaks we’ve been experiencing, especially through the angled operator at the southwest corner. If you ever have to assemble and install aluminum windows, make sure to find out from a contractor exactly what kind of shim tape to use.

Those last three days, alone on site and working in two feet of wet, heavy snow, were easily the most physically grueling of my life. For one thing, the eighteen borrowed ends of scaffolding, with attendant bracing, jackposts, pins and platforms, had to be returned to my uncles in River Denys, about 50 km away. The only problem was that, because of the snow, there was no way to get the pickup truck any closer to the work site than about three hundred feet. That meant walking each piece of equipment from site to truck individually. My immune system must have been working overtime to keep me going for those few days, because within hours of finishing all the cleanup and moving all the tools and scaffolding off site, I was in bed with a fever.

So this is me signing off for a few months. Despite all my complaining on this blog, I have to admit that I’m pleased with how far we’ve come. Maybe we didn’t accomplish as much as we thought we would, but in hindsight I can see that we worked as hard as anyone could have and made consistent progress. And I didn’t have to make too many compromises or sacrifices.

We hope to make it back to Cape Breton in the summer to spend a few weeks on wiring, plumbing and insulation, as well as installing a door and an entry ramp, and finishing the plywood cladding. Until then…

- Geoff