The Unturned Stone

Here’s a handful of images I’ve collected over the last little bit. No rhyme, no reason.

This is a close up from the crazy-quilt paving I did for Sara and Je. These marbles are set in the joint in such a way that they can move but not be removed.

The marbles can be seen in this shot of the paving. They are found at the top of the sickle shaped joint that runs between the two huge brown stones.

Another section of the crazy-quilt. The material costs on this project were negligible. The big stones were reclaimed from an earlier walkway at the house or salvaged by Je from demo projects. Most of the fill stones and ephemera had been collected by the family, though I did buy a fifty cent fish fossil at the Goodwill. In this section you can see several slate shingles stood on edge. The rusty head of a railroad spike peeks up in the top right corner. Sara found the ring-bricks in a friends garden. Elsewhere in the walkway you can find seashells collected by the kids on visits to Grandma’s, a ceramic frog, a hammer head and scrap granite countertops.

Our current project involves reworking elements of this retained-heat hearth oven and cladding it in stone as part of an old-school working outdoor kitchen. The homeowner built this following plans created by oven-maker and bread guru Alan Scott. After some trial use, he decided to change insulating schemes and rebuild the chimney. This is a very collaborative project; the homeowner/oven-builder stood on the oven roof swinging a sledgehammer to remove the concrete shell.

Rock steady in the New Year.

This diptych image shows some of the struggles of rendering three dimensions in a design. The scribbles to the left represent my efforts to accurately depict the concrete footer and substructure for a short stack of steps and a bench. The image to the right shows basically the same angle, now completed, as part of an overlook at Pilot Mountain State Park. There were architectural plans of a sort, but they described a general finished product and not much else. I made paper models of the steps and bench, trying to make things line up the way they should. Even though I used flimsy copy paper that sagged and fell over, that process helped a lot. Since then, I’ve started using my son’s Lego® building blocks. Wow, does that make things easier. It allows me to build a design very quickly and make changes easily, with minimal fuss. That really opens the door to creative freedom, because even the most hare-brained design ideas can be tried in less than two minutes. And then I can make very accurate perspective sketches that help my clients and crew see the desired outcome. Curves are harder to render in Legos®, but the rounded shapes can be fixed in the sketches.

We completed the overlook as part of the Ledge Springs Trail. Visit the link to see a different perspective of the overlook and more photos of the trail.

I’ve just added a new zine that chronicles some stonework found on a recent visit to Rhode Island. Check out this arch, built on the leaf springs from an old truck, and the massive wall on Chase Hill.