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

Day 132: Mistakes Were Made

We have, at best, one more week on site before Carla’s family starts to get offended by our absence during the holidays. I’m still hopeful that we’ll get a lot finished in the time left – though every night I’m forced to revise my expectations when I realize that we can never work as fast or as efficiently as I imagine. In architecture school when a deadline was looming, one of our design profs used to tell us to decide how much we wanted to get done, estimate how long it was to take, then cut the amount of work in half and double the time estimate. It was good advice then, more so now.

The replacement glass for our big south window arrived intact on Tuesday afternoon (only seven weeks late). The delivery truck could get no closer than the snow bank at the end of the driveway, so we rigged up a sled from leftover 2x4s and plywood in order to drag it to the building. The snow, at that time, was 20” deep. We were suitably impressed by our own ingenuity. (This was solely Geoff’s idea…I accept no credit - Carla)

Today we installed the glass. Carla’s cousin Donald drove an hour from Belle Cote to give me a hand lifting it into place, and everything went well until I cracked it.

The tragedy happened when I was trying to insert the neoprene gasket against the bottom interior edge. It wouldn’t fit, and I could see the glass wasn’t sitting tight against the exterior of the frame at that point. So I tried to tap it into place with my hammer, using a block and striking at the very edge, where the metal spacer between glazing layers should, in theory, offer some strength. In my rush, I figured I couldn’t possibly do any damage. I was, of course, mistaken.

The good news is that the crack is fairly minor as these things go. It’s about six inches, spanning edge to edge at the corner and on the interior face only. So it shouldn’t affect the performance of the unit… I hope.

I’ve been pretty crabby with others on site when they’ve made mistakes, but I have to admit that no one else has done anything quite this stupid. I will forevermore be a humble and patient boss.

- Geoff

Day 117: The End Has No Beginning, the Beginning Never Ends*

Winter has hit Cape Breton and the snow is slowing us down. I’d hoped to be finished with shingling by now, but it will take at least one more week. Carla is afraid of heights so, as we climb higher, there’s less and less for her to do, and her dad’s going back to Halifax tomorrow. Meanwhile, I’ve yet to start the plywood cladding on the crow’s nest, or the custom front door, or the cap flashings for the roof parapet, or the handful of other things I can’t remember right now. Listing all of it reminds me that it’s pretty doubtful we’ll finish what we’d like to in the two and a half weeks left before Christmas.

BUT the shingles on the north and east facades are complete and look pretty cool. I love the monolithic quality of the building seen from that corner.

- Geoff

* apologies to Jason Starnes

Day 116

We had some help this weekend from an unexpected place. Last Friday I stopped in at Brian MacKay-Lyons’s office in Halifax to catch up with my old bosses and give a presentation on the artspace over a few beers. The office has really densified over the past couple of years – it looked to me like there were about 15 employees, crammed in every available space, and a whole new menagerie of gorgeous wood models on display. The presentation went well --people seemed excited about what we’re doing and Brian had some kind things to say about the design.

Anyhow, it turns out that Matt, briefly my coworker at Busby Perkins + Will in Vancouver, now works for Brian. After the presentation he told me that he wanted to learn the delicate and zen-like art of shingling. With my grateful blessing, he decided to drive down early Saturday morning and work here for two days. At 8:00 AM on Saturday, Matt called from Antigonish (about 90 minutes from here), where the season’s first snowstorm was in full swing. ‘The driving’s pretty bad here. Everyone’s pulled off the road…Should I keep going?’ I told him that things looked great in our backyard. It was a calm, clear day so far. He elected to soldier on. But when he arrived, the gods got angry.

We managed to work for about two hours, cowering on the high scaffolding, with the winds and snow whipping around our ears and throwing loose shingles across the valley. Then we packed it in. We spent the rest of the day talking stereo electronics and holding a music listening party on our laptops. (Matt is now a fan of the Chills, The Clipse, Dean & Britta, Field Music, and Chad VanGaalen.) Sunday morning the weather was even worse, so we made some farewell scrambled eggs and he headed back to Halifax at 10:00 in the morning to try and salvage the remnants of his weekend.

- Geoff

Day 114

Our move to Toronto is finally getting sorted out. I’ve accepted a job with RDH architects, starting on January 2. Carla and I made a great apartment find – a live/work loft conversion in Corktown. It is, as they say in real estate parlance, a ‘true’ loft, with 14-foot ceilings, enormous industrial windows and lots of raw concrete. Our friend Graham checked it out for us in person and gave his official thumbs up, so Carla drove an hour to Port Hawkesbury to FedEx the deposit to the landlord by the next day. No one in ‘Hawkesb’ry’ could tell her where to find the Fedex box, not even the post office workers, but eventually she tried the mall with the giant Wal-Mart and, sure enough, there it was. Now the only thing left to work out is how to move all our shit from Vancouver.

- Geoff