Mark Knopfler: Brothers in Arms, 1988

Although this was written in 1985 about the Falklands War, it has come to stand for many different kinds of solidarity, most recently British Forces in Afghanistan.  YouTube views of any version are in the multii-millions; this one, live and while Mandela was still in prison, might still be the most moving. 

It is this fellow feeling that infuses the military, more so when things go wrong.  Having one's ship torpedoed, being rescued, enduring a POW camp, sitting in an FOB, or in a convoy waiting for the next IED: the rest of us get it intellectually, but not viscerally.  Is it the sharing of intense fear – the most heightened emotion – that chooses an anthem?  Something about Brothers in Arms has made it anthemic.

insects and flowers

HMS Grasshopper: built by Yarrow Shipbuilders, Glasgow in 1939, operated in a gunboat squadron in Shanghai securing Chinese rivers until the Japanese invaded China when Grasshopper and Dragonfly were sent to Batavia when they were bombed on 14 February 1942.

Locust-class gunboats were shallow-draught river gunboats, deployed on rivers in China during WWII.  Judy's ship, HMS Grasshopper and sister ship HMS Dragonfly were both bombed in 1942  south of Singapore and are used now as dive sites.  
HMS Gnat was built in 1915, used on the Euphrates during WWI and then transferred to China in the 1920s where it remained until 1940 before going to the Mediterranean and being torpedoed in 1941.  Towed to Alexandria, Gnat was used as a fixed anti-aircraft platform and was scrapped in 1945.

Why these boats were named after insects is difficult to find out.  However there is a class of delightfully named Royal Navy ships — the Flower-class corvettes, such as HMS Buttercup, HMS Larkspur, Peony and Crocus, used in WWII as anti-submarine convoy escorts in the north Atlantic.  They were relatively slow, armed for anti-submarine operations and some had anti-aircraft weapons.  There were 225 of them, 80 of which were in the Royal Canadian Navy and not named after flowers but after Canadian towns and cities, such as HMCS Timmins, HMCS Quesnel, Calgary, Chilliwack and Orillia.  

HMS Chrysanthemum, built by Harland & Wolff, Belfast in 1940 Transferred on 26 January 1942 to the Free French Navy as Commandant Drogou. Returned to the RN in May 1947. Sold on 7 August 1947. Resold in 1948 as mercantile Terje 10. Resold in 23 May 1959 to Portugal as hydrographic survey vessel NRP Caravalho Araujo (A524) until 3 September 1975 when she was transfer to Angola's Navy.
Ships have inevitably desperate biographies: if not sunk during a war, they are traded away for more pedestrian and workaday lives: HMCS Battleford, built in 1940, was sold in 1946 to Venezuela and renamed the Libertad; HMCS New Westminster, built in 1941 in Victoria was sold in 1950 as mercantile Elisa, resold in 1952 as mercantile Portoviejo, resold again in 1954 as mercantile Azura and scrapped in 1966 in Tampa.  HMCS Nanaimo, built in Esquimalt in 1940, was sold in 1952 to the Netherlands where it became the whale catcher René W Vinke. In fact a lot of them, both from the RCN and the RN seem to have become whale catchers.  How horrible.

Judy

Frank Williams and Judy with her Dickin medal, May 1946

Judy, a pointer and mascot on HMS Gnat, transferred to HMS Grasshopper which was sunk in 1942 along with HMS Dragonfly in China.  Judy and the crew sailed to Sumatra in a junk, hiked across the island and were captured by the Japanese.  Judy spent the next two years in Medan Camp, generally looking after the POWs, alerting them to the approach of camp guards, snakes and abuse and living off shared rations, which could not have been very much at all.  

In 1944 Judy and the crew were rescued from the camp and sent to Singapore; the ship they were on was torpedoed and Judy rescued several men by bringing them flotsam to hold onto.  Recaptured, Frank Williams, her handler – although clearly their relationship was much greater than this, found Judy, or Judy found him, in a new camp; they were sent back to Sumatra where the POWs were used to lay railway lines.  Judy lived nearby in the jungle to avoid the not-sympathetic guards at this camp.  Eventually when the Pacific war had ended she was smuggled back to England and given her Dickin medal.

Williams and Judy went to work in East Africa in 1948 and she died in 1950.

dogs

Life would be unsupportable without them.

These Were Our Dogs, photographs from the Libby Hall Collection, Bishopsgate Institute.

set this to full frame:

Gerard Hoffnung: the bricklayer's lament

Hoffnung was born in Berlin, 1925, went to London as a refugee in 1939, became a writer, a composer and a cartoonist of a particularly gentle kind:

Gerard Hoffnung, cartoon.

From 1958:

And how dreadful, he died in 1959 of a cerebral haemorhage, just 34. 

St Basil

St. Basil's cathedral, 1554. Restoration scaffolding, 1968

Found this 1968 photograph of St Basil's Cathedral undergoing a restoration.  Evidently during the Soviet era, the backdrop for news reports was generally one of the other more utilitarian modern faces of Red Square, but today its polychromed glory is the ubiquitous backdrop to anything coming out of Moscow.  

Somewhat surprisingly, for those of us who have never been there, this is a brick building, built in 1554. Previous churches throughout Russia and on this site had been wood, probably much like this one from the mid-1700s.

Richard Davies, photographer: Podporozhye, Arkhangel region, Church of St Vladimir , 1757

During a 1955 restoration of St Basil's, a wood frame was found inside its load-bearing brick walls.  This would seem to indicate that the long tradition of stud or stave churches (that date from the late 900s) was used as the internal scaffolding for the new, aggrandised St. Basil's.  It is, they say, a veritable textbook of experimental brick work.  The traditional tall thin volumes of Russian Orthodox stave churches suits brick well: spans are narrow.

St Basil was something of a mendicant himself, something his beautiful but gaudy presence on Red Square belies.

Edith Sitwell: poet, brick

The extremely generous Edith Sitwell, modernist poet, interviewed by the BBC in 1959:

And a younger version, in 1928:

Dame Edith Sitwell, 1928. National Portrait Gallery, London

Union Bay, British Columbia

Demolition of the Union Bay coke ovens, May 1968. ©Cumberland Museum and Archives.

Yesterday I mentioned that we have a patio made from pale cream brick, scavenged from one of the old Union Bay brick kilns that used to sit crumbling beside the Island Highway. It was a devil to lay as each brick is shaped to be part of a beehive kiln, i.e. no face is parallel to any other.  It turns out that the kilns were coke ovens, part of the coal industry of Vancouver Island.  And the bricks came from Scotland complete with Scottish bricklayers, all imported, in 1880 or so, by Robert Dunsmuir, the coal magnate who effectively owned the island. 

Coke.  From wikipedia 'it is the solid carbonaceous material derived from the destructive distillation of low-ash, low-sulfur bituminous coal'.  Coal is fired at high temperature driving off coal gas (hydrogen, carbon monoxide, methane, CO2 and H2O), coal tar (phenols and aromatic hydrocarbons) and water.  Coal gas and tar are recovered and used in a number of industrial processes, otherwise, coal gas especially, is fairly toxic.  Coke burns at a higher temperature than coal, thus its value.  It didn't stay on the island, it was exported by the shipload

Union Bay was a company town, with a coal mine, a railway line, a wharf, the coke ovens and a coke washer.  Labour was imported: Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Scots.  Anyone who thinks that the present day anti-development, 'let's keep Vancouver Island natural and beautiful' lobby is stemming the tide of industrial exploitation of the land hasn't taken the coal industry seriously.  It was a significant, extensive, disruptive extraction enterprise, connected by water to the rest of the British Empire in all its outlines.

Gabriola Island brick

Stacking brick at the Gabriola Brick and Shale Products, ca 1914. GHMS Archives 1996.040.006

So what are bricks made of.  Easy, I thought, clay. Ha. Not exactly. Gabriola Brick and Shale Products that operated from 1910 - 1954, used Gabriola Island blue and brown shale.  While fireclay, a glacial clay that produces a much harder brick, was found in conjunction with coal seams near Victoria and Comox on Vancouver Island, Gabriola brick used shale, crushed by millstones made from local sandstone, plus diatomaceous earth and sand.  There are perfectly round basins on Gabriola, clearly where the millstones were drilled out.  I leave that purposely vague because I don't know how they could do that.   

Cretaceous shales of ceramic value are from the Pleistocene era, are sedimentary, have a low fusion temperature and a short vitrification range.  All the deposits in British Columbia turn out pink to red building brick.  In the nineteenth century, every city had a brickworks, just as they had a lime kiln. Evidently there is either shale, clay shales, or clay throughout the western provinces, but it is only deposits near cities that were developed – it says something about the cost of transportation in the early to mid-twentieth century: punitive relative to the cost of developing a local brickyard.  China and stoneware clay, rare in BC, were the basis of the large pottery industry in Medicine Hat, Alberta, which, unlike local brick production, was given a national reach facilitated by the Canadian Pacific Railway. 

It seems obvious to say it, but the colour of local brick gives a specific and often unique colour to a city that derives directly from the kind of shale or shale clay the city sits upon.  Today, in Canada, all brick comes from one source of brick manufacture in Ontario.  Even I-X-L of Medicine Hat, the once dominant brick manufacturer in Western Canada, is gone.  According to the 1952 BC Department of Mines bulletin (No. 30): Clay and Shale Deposits of British Columbia, clay and shale are everywhere in abundance – it is impossible that it is mined it out.  There must be some other economic equation in operation that makes one vast centralised brickyard with extreme delivery costs more efficient than a local industry.  Personally I don't get it.

mexican vaults

Mexican vault. photo by Michael Ramage, Scaffolding to structure seminar, Cambridge University. This example was done by unskilled students in a learning process sort of way, but it shows the nature of the brick used.

A very interesting pdf of a Scaffolding to Structure seminar, under Philippe Block and Lara Davis at Cambridge University in 2010, is here.  It includes the building of a mexican vault, above, outlined for them by Alfonso Ramirez Ponce, a Mexican architect who lectures at UNAM and teaches low cost sustainable construction using regional materials. 

Such vaults are called bovedas; an odd little video, below, shows precisely how they are done in Mexico, by skilled masons:

The Boveda at Casa Chorro from bloodredcolt on Vimeo.

the timbrel vault

Rafael Guastavino's patent application for the centuries old timbrel vault. ca 1880

This wide, flat vault relies on thin layers of brick, tile or stone with carefully misaligned joints, that make a laminated shell. The layers are mortared and so all the edges are held in place not by the gravitational pressure exerted on each chamfered brick or tile face running parallel to the direction of the vault, but by laminated continuous lightweight surfaces — cohesive construction, called so by Rafael Guastavino who imported the technique to the United States from the northern Mediterranean where it was ubiquitous — the Catalan vault, for example.
All this is from a dandy set of photos and texts from Low-Tech magazine. 

What is quite interesting is the absence of formwork, other than some regulating lines at the base of the vault.  Masons stood on the finished portions of the vault itself as the next section cantilevered ahead.  And all layers were laid down at the same time.  It is an incredibly elegant construction system, and was what Dieste used in his extended cantilevered ribbon-like vaults.

The timbrel vault in construction

Eladio Dieste's bricks

Eladio Dieste. Salto bus station, Uruguay, 1974

Dieste's hallmark: double cantilever self-supporting thin-shell single-layer brick vaults.  Here for a bus terminal in Salto, Uruguay in 1974.  Dieste lived from 1917 to 2000, a surprisingly contemporary career, little known here.  Gaussian vaults: double curves.  The book on all of this is Remo Pedreschi's The Engineer's Contribution to Contemporary Architecture.  Pedreschi's explanation of masonry vaults points out that the thinness of the shell is dependent on the dimensions of the block and the finishing layer, typical ratio is 30/80. Dieste's vaults were 130mm thick, and the vaults spanned 50m, an astounding relationship using bricks and mortar and not achievable using concrete.

Pedreschi writes that 'Dieste's sense of cosmic economy' – what a lovely phrase – led him to derive strength from form, rather than from mass, using hollow brick (2/3 the weight of concrete) and extremely shapely catenary curves, i.e. higher, curvier vaults.

So, what was going on in Uruguay while this beautiful work was being built? State of emergency in 1968, Tupamaros geurillas defeated by the military in 1973, torture, break up of the unions, torture, the removal of the Communist Party, torture, political prisoners, dictatorship, mass emigration, economic crisis, desaparecidos. 

Does stability lead to complacency, and does complacency lead to dull thinking?  I've always thought so myself.  In theory it should be the opposite, but in practice it isn't.

Melnikov's bricks

Konstantin Melnikov's Moscow house in construction, 1929. © www.flickr.com / janvaneyck

The AD Classics description of Melnikov's house by Tim Winstanley  explains:
'Exterior walls finished with white plaster are constructed in a honeycomb latticework using local brick.... The shapes of the windows are a direct result of the honeycomb structure, with the angles determined by quarter lengths of the standard local bricks. Nearly 60 hexagonal windows employing nine types of frames establish the aesthetic quality of the rear cylinder, showering the interior with light. The manner of structure and glazing system employed also eliminated the need for structural lintels or sills. Voids that were not glazed in the honeycomb structure were filled with clay and scraps, adding mass to a wall system that helps to mitigate the extreme temperature differentials of summer and winter.'

Is brick the material for this?  In 1929, did Melnikov say, hey we could do a diagrid. Shukov did it in steel in 1896, but times are tight so we could do it in — BRICK!  

Probably.  Embargoes, economic collapse, 5-year plan failures, absence of the full spectrum of building materials is the spur to invention.  We need them as much as we need advances in technology.

Константин Степанович Мельников: Konstantin Melnikov, 1929

Konstantin Melnikov House, 1929. Chromogenic Print 32 x 48, ⓒ Richard Pare, 1999

Although it is the hexagonal windows that usually define Melnikov's house, the front curtain wall that faces the street is a magnificent thing.

Центросоюз: Tsentrosoyuz Headquarters, 1936

ⓒ Richard Pare. Chromogenic colour print: Centrosoyuz headquarters, Moscow, 1999.

Tsentrosoyuz [Центросоюз] headquarters [Central Union of Consumer Cooperatives], Moscow, 1929-1936. Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret and Nikolai Kolli.
The astounding architecture of Soviet bureaucracy: offices for 3500, restaurant, lecture halls and theatre.  

The construction is reinforced concrete with 40mm thick blocks of red tuff used as insulation. Tuff is volcanic ash – small pieces of magma < 2mm – blown into the air during a volcanic explosion and consolidated into a porous aerated easily carved material.   The tuff used in the Tsentrosoyuz headquarters is from the Nagorno-Karabakh region, an area rich in limestones, tuff sandstones and clay shales.  This is all starting to sound familiar.

Alison Watt

Alison Watt. Sabine, 2004. ©The National Gallery, London

Ann Hamilton: the event of a thread

at Park Avenue Armoury, New York, December 5 - January 6

engineered cementitious composites

ECC incorporates super fine (100 microns in diameter) silica sand and tiny polyvinyl alcohol-fibres covered with a very thin (nanometer thick), slick coating. ECC has a strain capacity of 3%, regular concrete has a strain capacity of 0.1%.

ECC: a ductile concrete that does not use coarse aggregate and does include a coated network of fine polymer fibres within the cement that allow it to slide under stress, so no irreparable breaches, just thousands of fine cracks, dusted with cement, that self-repair with water.  

Engineered cement composites were developed at the University of Michigan by Victor Li in the early 1990s.  Although fibre reinforcement comes in many modes; the ECC uses micro-scale (10 micron) fibres that actually bond the cement within the concrete. They introduce a plasticity that allows the concrete to deform rather than break. In a paper by Victor Li, the abstract states: Engineered Cementitious Composites (ECC) is a material micromechanically designed with high ductility and toughness indicated by multiple micro-cracking behavior under uniaxial tension.

Neat.  Apparently ECC is of great use in bridge repairs where there is an incompatibility between old concrete under stress and new normal concrete patched in, which is both shrinking and calcifying at a different rate, introducing weakness at the old/new interface.  ECC's flexibility – its internal slipperiness – does not allow it to shrink and crack.  And in  2003 in Japan where most of the applications seem to be, it was sprayed in a 20mm layer over 600m2 of the aging, cracking, leaking and spalling Mitaka Dam.

To add to all of this wonderfulness is that its life cycle costs are lower than conventional concrete (tested on bridge deck systems: agency costs – material, construction, and end-of-life costs, plus social costs – emissions damage costs from agency activities, and vehicle congestion, user delay, vehicle crash and vehicle operating costs. These costs were estimated across all life-cycle stages (material production, construction, use, and end of life) over a 60-year analysis period.)

At 40 times lighter than conventional concrete, and with its bendiness, clearly it is headed towards earthquake zones, which perhaps is why it is well-deployed in Japan.  Life cycle costs can be misleading: although over a 60 year period it might be less expensive than ordinary concrete construction, I'll bet those little polyvinyl alcohol fibres with their slidey nano-coating cost a bundle, and are inaccessible to most of the people so devasted, and so regularly, by earthquakes.

oyster shell middens

John Heron, Hidden Midden 1. 2011

We are talking about numbers of oysters at an almost inconceivable scale: there is an Oyster Shell Beach in Hong Kong, Oyster Bays in both New York and New South Wales, Oyster Creek in New Jersey, Oyster Point in San Francisco, Oyster Cove on Vancouver Island, Oyster Bed in Prince Edward Island.  There is an Oyster, Virginia.

Oyster middens can be miles wide: two kinds, the discards of oyster-eating peoples, and natural banks of oyster shells on beaches.  According to Kaitlin Pomerantz, the erosion of empty shells releases calcium into the water needed to build new oyster shells, plus providing a foothold and a habitat for new oysters.   

However, tons of oyster shells were used as road beds in the early twentieth century; more tons were ground up for chicken feed and agricultural use.  It is a similar story to the mountains of buffalo bones photographed beside the CPR line in Saskatchewan in the 1890s: destination, fertiliser.   Oysters are under threat from over harvesting and the removal of habitat. So, nothing new then.  

Pomerantz has built a monument, Hidden Midden, for Chesapeake Bay (between Maryland and Virginia), not quite as tidy as the drawing above, but better: it is topped by a slab of asphalt road that registers the destruction of oyster middens, and offers a footfall for occupation, not for oysters unfortunately given that it is in a sculpture garden, but for other kinds of life.

Kaitlin Pomerantz, Hidden Midden, Annmarie Sculpture Garden, Solomons, Maryland. November 2011.

tabby

From the elegantly sublime, Niemeyer, to the desperately expeditious:

Tabby concrete. St. Augustine, Florida. Photo by Nathan Wolkenhauer, 2011In between Roman concrete and the discovery of Portland cement in 1830, there was tabby: burnt oyster shells (lime), mixed with water, sand and broken shell.  Originally Moroccan, although North Africa was part of the Roman empire so it might be continuous with Roman concrete work, the use of tabby migrated to Spain and eventually to Spanish colonies, such as Florida, using broken shell as aggregate when stone was not available.  

The lime/sand/water combination occurs all along the lower east coast of the USA, dating generally from the early 1700s.  The oyster shells were found in huge middens left by the aboriginal peoples of the Atlantic coast. The reported size of the oyster shell piles, and the size of the shells themselves – 6 to 8" x 15 to 20", evidently oysters were gigantic in pre-historic times – indicates a cultural landscape rarely discussed and long vanished.There are shell middens on all coastlines, often thousands of years old, but not all were turned into sources of lime for concrete.   

An article by Jingle Davis on the Tabby Trail on the southeast coast of the US tells how the shells were found, mined, fired, and the resultant lime and wood ash mixed with clean sand and water.  Floors were laid and hammered with linseed oil into marble-like hardness. Walls were built up using slip forms.  

Now, here's a recipe: ten bushels of lime, ten bushels of sand, ten bushels of shells and ten bushels of water gives you sixteen cubic feet of wall. 
1 bushel = 8 gallons, so presumably a bushel of lime is enough lime to fill an eight gallon container.  There is something suspiciously coincidental that all the components for tabby are in ten bushel portions.  It might be loose science, done more by feel than precise measure.

It is interesting that the making of tabby almost replicates the process of producing calcareous limestone itself.  There is something about all this lime, heat and water process that is strangely circular.

A tabby building at the Kingsley Plantation on Fort George Island in Jacksonville, Florida. Tabby concrete was used in the 1700s and early 1800s in Florida and coastal Georgia. In this photograph, one can see the slip-form casting method uses, whereby each course is a seperate pour. When set the board formwork is moved up for the next pour. photo credit: State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory