Hand Hewn: The Traditions, Tools, and Enduring Beauty of Timber Framing
272
Hand Hewn: The Traditions, Tools, and Enduring Beauty of Timber Framing
272Hardcover
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781635860009 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Storey Publishing, LLC |
| Publication date: | 10/15/2019 |
| Pages: | 272 |
| Sales rank: | 1,054,114 |
| Product dimensions: | 9.10(w) x 11.70(h) x 1.20(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
the making of a TIMBER FRAMER
GROWING UP IN A SMALL TOWN in Massachusetts in the 1960s, it was easy to get swept away in the Modern movement. Everyone was looking forward to the great future ahead: flying automobiles, space travel, and, most importantly, plastics. We were an opportunistic and futuristic society; no one was looking back. In our haste to try every new fad or gadget, we were losing sight of many of the old ways that had served us well for centuries. No one thought twice about abandoning old stuff. I'm sure the preponderance of young people played a big role in that attitude. The number of students in my high school graduating class of 1973 was the school's largest ever, the peak of the post–World War II baby boom.
From Destruction to Reconstruction
AS AN ADOLESCENT, I was fascinated by all the new construction of highways, bridges, and buildings. Preceding much of this new construction was the destruction of the old. I spent many hours watching old stone, brick, and timber buildings being destroyed to make way for new shopping plazas, drive-in banks, carwashes, and fast-food chains. The most common way to destroy the old was with a crane wielding a wrecking ball or a clamshell bucket. With the sounds of tearing, splitting, crushing, and crashing down, and the resultant dust clouds, it was quite a spectacle — and watching was one of my favorite pastimes.
My father operated such a crane and was responsible for much destruction. A couple times I sat in his lap while he maneuvered that clamshell to tear open roofs, and a couple times he brought that lovely 1958 American Hoist & Derrick Co. truck crane home for me to play on. I learned quite a bit about how old buildings were built by seeing them torn asunder. It is too bad there was so much destruction, but it was the times. Old was bad, new was good! I guess as a society, we must lose some nice stuff before we realize that what is left is valuable. Oh, and there is some wonderful irony here: My dad tore down old timber-framed buildings with a crane when I was a child; I have spent my adult life repairing old timber-framed buildings and constructing new ones and raising them without a crane. Because he passed when I was a boy of 10, he wasn't around to witness my lifelong restitution for his acts of destruction.
excerpt from an article in
THE NORTH ADAMS TRANSCRIPT, MAY 1, 1965
EPITAPH FOR A BELOVED AND CHARMING BUILDING
BY GRIER HORNER
JOHN SOBON, the guy who pilots the 60-foot crane for David McNab Deans, swung into the cockpit, his cigar jammed into the side of his mouth, and started easing the levers back and forth skillfully. There are eight levers and two foot pedals and John worked them the same way he's been working them since 1940. Back on this one, forward on that one and the yellow iron jaws that he says go about 2,600 pounds swung into position. The cables on the orange crane's long neck slapped the steelwork and the jaws came crunching down.
In one gigantic metallic bite the six-apartment house that may be the city's oldest building opened up like a hollowed egg hit by a hammer. Bite by bite the brick and dried wood, the pegged hand-hewn beams, the bark covered logs that carried the roof were wrenched from the building in a cacophony of groaning splintering wood and a cloud of dust.
His forehead creased under his steel hat, John Sobon ran his hands over the levers worn down to the bare steel and polished by use.
The jaws arched side- ways and up in a fluid motion. Sobon brought them down smoothly over a second-story partition without touching the partition before the jaws locked on it. It pulled out whole and he dropped it into the truck.
And the walls put up in 1832 came tumbling down.
A Summer Job Becomes a Lifelong Pursuit
WHEN I LEFT FOR ARCHITECTURE SCHOOL in the city, my intent was to eventually live there and design high-rise buildings. Such were the dreams of a small-town boy, but five years of college life in the city and a fortuitous summer job sent my aspirations in nearly the opposite direction. In the summer of 1976 I worked for a contractor, Richard W. Babcock, who dismantled old unused barns, then repaired rotten timbers, replaced missing parts, and re-erected them and finished them off to become upscale homes. It was adaptive reuse of 200-year-old structures, and while a few other, widely scattered individuals were doing the same thing, Richard was on the forefront of this "barns to homes" concept.
DRAWING TO PRESERVE HISTORY
As part of my documenting process, I measured the buildings and created drawings that would be used whether the barn was simply repaired or relocated or it underwent a change of use. Drawings such as these are becoming increasingly important as historic records as countless barns are lost over time.
It was meant to be just a summer job, but my introduction to this archaic building system — a system that used wooden pins to hold together beams chopped out with an axe alone — became a fixation, a devotion, and a life-long quest. This summer stint ended up changing my architecture direction from high-rise urban structures to wooden, vernacular, and residential ones. It was indeed fortuitous!
In architecture, as in other design professions, school graduates are required to complete three years as an apprentice before they can sit for the four-day licensing exam. I stretched out that period a bit, as I wanted to work for Mr. Babcock as well as a regular architecture firm. I was fortunate to work with him on some very special projects. With our passion for these old barns, we were kindred spirits. We often went "barning" together, searching out the older, more unusual, more magnificent examples of Colonial craft. As we live on the western edge of New England, our barn excursions included much of New England and New York State. I feel quite fortunate to have seen during our travels so many barns, many of which are no longer standing.
Part of my job was documenting the barns by taking photos and measurements, and then drawing the timber frame. I also began designing homes from these barn frames. It is a challenge to adapt a building designed for crops and livestock to function as a home, but when it is done well it is a one-of-a-kind home cherished by its owner.
What started as a very small niche of people converting old barns to homes in the late '60s has blossomed into a nearly nationwide trend. As countless barns have succumbed to neglect or have been salvaged and reconfigured as houses, those remaining are ever more precious. Their old hewn frames are in big demand and often are moved hundreds or thousands of miles to be incorporated into rustic dwellings. Even if the building's frame is not reused intact, its parts can be salvaged to be used as repair or replacement parts in other barns, or they can be sawn into boards or planks to finish other buildings.
The old-growth, richly patinated and honey-colored wood cannot be matched by newly cut, small, second-growth wood. And wood is an inherently recyclable material. Many of the barns we saw had already been relocated once or had timbers in them that were reclaimed from an earlier building. This recycling has been going on for centuries; we didn't invent it. Some of the oldest wooden structures in the world contain timbers from even earlier buildings
JOINERY: THE HEART OF TIMBER FRAMING
Since examining my first barn, I have been studying and documenting the wooden joinery that holds old timber-framed buildings together. In the photo below, Dutch anchor beams lie in storage, awaiting a new life as part of a barn or house. The drawing beneath is from a mid-nineteenth-century barn that was relocated from Shrewsbury to Framingham, Massachusetts.
THE LEGACY OF RECYCLED MATERIALS
Built in 1131 on a promontory overlooking a branch of the Sognefjord in Norway, Urnes Stave church features on its north wall elegantly carved components reused from an earlier church that dated back to 1070. Recycling of materials is not a new concept!
BABCOCK BARN HOMES
Below is a piece of promotional artwork for Babcock Barn Homes. Since we worked with actual antique barn frames, re-erecting them as they originally stood, each home became a statement from the past.
The First Cabin
THOUGH MY TRAINING was in architecture, my hands longed to build, not just draw. Studying the old timbers, postulating how the surfaces were hewn and the joinery cut all by hand, inspired me to try traditional timber framing. The art of hand hewing particularly interested me. The idea that one could cut down a tree and square it up into a timber using just a simple axe seemed incredible. And yet, I reasoned that it must not have been that difficult or lengthy a process. After all, there were millions, if not billions, of hewn timbers surviving in the United States alone. And what survives today is likely only a small fraction of what formerly existed. Its use surely would not have been so widespread had it not been an efficient process. I needed to know: was it still a useful, relevant method?
I decided to replicate a small, traditional, timber-framed building to better understand how it was done and whether this ancient craft was still useful today. Though I hadn't any property of my own just yet, it was my intention to purchase a few acres of forest to homestead on. It was about this time that I read Walden by Henry David Thoreau. In 1845, Thoreau built a little 10 × 15-foot cabin with his own hands on the shore of Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. He writes of his aim in carving out a little homestead and living off the land:
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.
I needed to build a Thoreau cabin, a little building that I could stay in, on my own land. Since I didn't have any land yet, I also didn't have any trees of my own to work with. I was too anxious to wait; I needed to get started anyway. The logs for my little 10 × 12foot cabin came from a variety of sources. Some were purchased from a logger in New York State, and some were scrounged during my travels, like a short piece of black walnut I picked up on the side of the road and hewed into a brace. A few pieces came from two Norway spruce trees that I felled in Williamstown, Massachusetts (see The Norway Spruce [A Cautionary Tale] on facing page).
I worked up the logs into squared timbers in the backyard of my mother's house. Each log was carried by hand from my pickup, up the front steps, around the house, and up the hill behind the garden. The neighbors undoubtedly thought me an odd fellow, as did my friends who helped me shoulder the heavy logs. I framed the timbers with mortises and tenons right there or, during the colder months, passed them through the basement window and worked them up in my basement shop. All this hand-carrying of logs and timbers was no model of ease or efficiency, nor was it easy on my back, my pickup, or the cellar window! I wouldn't dream of working like that today, but I was young and I was driven, a man on a mission to unlock the secrets of this craft. There was no holding me back.
This little building made use of naturally curving and crotched tree shapes. It was the beginning of a direction and passion that I would later refer to as "Organic Medieval Revival." Two of the posts were crotched, with the smaller fork acting as a diagonal brace. One of the tie beams was naturally arching, and some of the braces were curved. Though straight pieces were readily available and probably faster to frame up, I enjoyed working with, and felt compelled to use, the organic shapes.
THE NORWAY SPRUCE
(A CAUTIONARY TALE)
The owner of the trees I felled for my first cabin was a local prominent businessman who wanted more sun to reach his in-ground pool and tennis court area. A double row of Norway spruces between 80 and 90 feet tall stood between the pool and the court. He had already paid a tree service to remove a few of them. Since the trees were delectably straight and the trunks quite free of branches (knots are the bane of woodworkers), I offered to take out two of the remaining trees for free so I could use the wood for timbers.
Arriving on a Saturday morning with a pickup, a chainsaw, and a friend to help, I started the work. Though there was a clear, open space that I could fell the tree into, within five minutes of arriving the first tree was lying across the pool! I hadn't left enough hinge on the stump, the upper branches were entangled with the adjacent trees, and the tree was heavy on one side. The trunk swung around 90 degrees, crushing two chain-link fences and perforating the owner's new energy-saving pool cover. I still remember the rush when that tall tree came crashing down.
After cleaning up the tree and vacuuming the needles from the pool, I headed off with a pickup load of logs. The next day, with tail between my legs, I replaced some chain-link fence components and fixed the pool cover. Later that week, the owner called to see when I would return to get the second tree! after all that, he wanted me to return? Well, he stated, if I didn't go back for the second one, I would certainly lose my nerve.
He was right, of course. he was willing to overlook the events of the previous weekend in order to help me improve my skills and develop my moral character.
I returned and felled the second tree without incident, but the legend of the first tree remained fodder for gossip in all the local coffee shops for some time.
From those two spruces, I hewed out a couple of sill beams, three floor joists, a tie beam, a plate, a girt, and a couple of rafters. Oh, I also hewed out a 6 × 12 timber that I later gave as a wed- ding present to my working partner at the time, Paul martin, and his wife. They were quite surprised to find it sitting on their living room floor when they returned from the wedding festivities!
In the fall of 1980 I purchased an 8-acre parcel in Windsor, Massachusetts, where I set up my cabin. The last few components, mainly rafters, were harvested from trees on the site. In this little building I had timbers of red oak, white ash, sugar maple, Norway spruce, balsam fir, black walnut, black cherry, bigtooth aspen, eastern hop hornbeam, black locust, white pine, American chestnut, white birch, black birch, tamarack, and northern white cedar. There were 20 species in all — remarkable for such a little building.
The foundation was laid of stones garnered from the property and its stone walls. Using a wooden "stone boat," I dragged loads of stone across the pine-needled, duff-covered forest floor. The site was a small clearing that the sun poured into, with a large rock outcropping and a large, spreading black cherry tree. No trees were felled to clear the area; I just tucked the building into that little opening in the forest. Later, after reading the book A Pattern Language (by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein), I learned that a building should not be placed directly in the best spot, because that act destroys the beautiful spot. It is better to place it adjacent to that beautiful spot, preferably just north of it, so you don't block the sun from entering it. Fortunately, it was a little building, a tiny clearing, and only a small mistake. I have never forgotten it!
The whole process of building that cabin and subsequently living in it for four years taught me many lessons. I recommend it to anyone contemplating building their homestead or dream house: start small and get to know your land before the clearing and bulldozing begins. Unlike Thoreau, I didn't grow my own food on my land (at least not then), but I did make my living there. While staying in that little cabin, I managed to cut five timber frames, including a frame for my own house that was raised in the fall of 1984.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Hand Hewn"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Jack A. Sobon.
Excerpted by permission of Storey Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Introduction: We Shape Our Buildings ... Then They Shape Us 1 The Making of a Timber Framer 2 An Intimacy with Wood 3 History of the Craft in America 4 Reading an Old Building 5 Hand Tools 6 Design, Architecture & Geometry 7 Why Timber Framing Is Still Relevant Today References & Further Reading Acknowledgments Index Metric Conversion ChartRelated Subjects
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