lime kiln rd.

Bathysphere

2009-08-05T15:36:00.000-07:00

Ive been too elevated for too long now. 7,260 ft. My truck is puffing white smoke, a sign of unburnt fuel, and it is acting weak. I feel that it isn't getting enough air for proper combustion. Its an non-turbocharged diesel 88 suburban. Other trucks its age and model that drive in high altitudes need after-market turbocharger upgrades to get the proper amount of air intake.

My journey back to the hills of central Texas will be a steady descent down to 500 ft. I've cut out several sites which would require further ascension.

I need an altimeter on my dash. But for this journey I'd call it a depth gauge, or maybe a fathometer. I'll seal all my windows closed. I'll install florescent work lamps all around the interior. Temperature gauge, barometer, hygrometer. GPS, CB, HF, VHF/UHF. I'll set up a dash-mounted fish-eye medium-format camera. I need to find a way to install my oscilloscope in my dash, connected to a microphone mounted on the top of the truck, in order to analyze my acoustic surroundings. I also really need a better sound system inside.

The first image is of scientist Jacques Piccard and Navy Lieutenant Don Walsh inside of the Krupp bathysphere, part of the bathyscaphe Trieste, the only manned submarine to have reached the bottom of the deepest part of the world's oceans, the Challenger Deep in the Marianas Trench southwest of Guam. The second image is a diagram of the bathyscaphe, the large float tank and manned sphere under it. The third image is of the bathysphere.

Their account does not mention them playing music during their 8.5 hour round trip (with only 20 minutes spent on the bottom), only the cracks and creaks of the machine. Unfortunately for them in 1960, modern drone music had just emerged and had not yet become popular with the hydronaut community (as surely as it must be today).

from Seven Miles Down: The Story of the Bathyscaph Trieste, by Jacques Piccard and Roberty S. Dietz:

At 20,000 feet, we were at the maximum depth of the normal Pacific sea floor. We were dropping into the open maw of the Mariana Trench, leaving the abyssal zone of the ocean and entering the hadal regions...

...1144-29,150 feet. Now we were as deep under the sea as Mt. Everest is high above it. In the light cone, the water was crystal clear; no "sea snow" and not the slightest trace of plankton. This was a vast emptiness beyond all comprehension. There was, perhaps, a mile of water sill beneath us...

...1200-31,000 feet. I flipped on the echo sounder and sought for an echo to record on its 600-foot scale. No echo returned; the bottom, presumably was still beyond 100 fathoms. Trying moments were ahead. We were venturing beyond the testing capabilities of the Trieste. On paper she could descend safely to ten miles and the sphere alone much more. I had confidence in those calculations. She was a complex of nuts and bolts, metal, plastic, and wire. But a dead thing? No. To me she was a living creature with a will to resist the seizing pressure. Above me, in the float, icy water was streaming in as the gasoline [for buoyancy] contracted, making the craft heavier and heavier. It was as if this icy water were coursing through my own veins.

Under the Western Sky

2009-08-04T15:30:00.000-07:00

I will be traveling through the heart of New Mexico and West Texas in the upcoming weeks. The locations I will visit include missions, cliff dwellings, old roads, military bases, scientific observatories, ghost towns, and spring-fed swimming holes:

Taos Pueblo UNESCO World Heritage Site
Ojo Caliente Lithium Spring
Puye Cliff Dwellings National Historic Landmark
Bandelier National Monument
Tent Rocks National Monument
NM State Road 14 aka. The Turquoise Trail
University of New Mexico Campus
Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument
White Sands Missile Range
White Sands National Monument
Sacramento Peak Observatories
Very Large Array
Gnome Nuclear Test Site
Guadalupe Mts salt basin
Guadalupe Mountains National Park
McDonald Observatory-Davis Mts
Balmorhea-San Solomon Spring
Hwy 90
Devil's Sinkhole State Natural Area
some BBQ joint outside Austin

Zaguan

2009-08-02T17:02:00.000-07:00

The first image is a plan of the James L. Johnson House at 545 Canyon Road in Santa Fe, also known as El Zaguan. It is currently the main office of the Historic Santa Fe Foundation. Formally a large residence, the complex now hosts the Foundation offices and 6 apartments as part of their artist residency program. A small apartment is also used to house a summer preservation apprentice. I was fortunate to be selected for this position this summer.

The second image is a photo of the interior walkway of the complex. The name El Zaguan is derived from the Spanish word for this type of covered outdoor walkway that connects the interior courtyards of homes to the street. At the James L Johnson House, the zaguan connects to both an east and west garden, separating the complex into three buildings (all sharing a contiguous flat roof). One enters the offices and apartment rooms from the zaguan. The photo is looking towards the west garden.

The third image is a plan and images of the Donaciano Vigil House at 518 Alto Street in Santa Fe. The property is currently owned by the Historic Santa Fe Foundation and is rented out as a private home. This house consists of two buildings, the main house and the sala on the street side. From the street one enters a door within a larger wagon door, into an exterior covered zaguan. The zaguan connects to the backyard and the interior courtyard. Similar to the Johnson home, one enters the rooms of the house from this walkway. The top image is of the zaguan, with its rustic portal columns facing into the interior courtyard. The bottom image is of the wood wagon door with the entrance door set within it.

The use of the zaguan is similar to the layout of a dogtrot house, a vernacular Southern/Appalachian residential type in which two small structures are separated by a covered breezeway and connected with a common roof.

The fourth image is a photo (via greatbuildings.com) of the 1904 Brown House in Orange County, Florida, a typical dogtrot-style southern home. These homes occur throughout the south, into Texas. Many historic German, Anglo, and Mexican vernacular structures in Texas incorporate breezeways and courtyards in various forms and materials.

The environmental concept present in this residential type is obvious; walkways tunnel breezes (see Venturi effect), which are further guided in through doors and windows, cooling the rooms during the hot summers. The breezeways are often very wide, enough to act as rooms in themselves. One can imagine how nice these spaces must be during 100+ Texas summers, dogs laying around, people relaxing with cold beers. During the winter months, these breezeways often had the ability to be enclosed.

With the arrival of the railroad in Texas in the late 1800s, people began to move into urban areas, leaving behind knowledge of their former ways of constructing houses. Attempts to modernize lead to the importation of residential building types and styles from the east. Modern factory produced components arrived via the rail. In Austin, the rich built Victorian mansions and craftsman bungalows, and the poor built small wood frame shacks. All these types still exist today, insulated and air-conditioned. Dogtrots and zaguans remain a thing of the past, preserved in historic house museums.

The fifth image is a photo at the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems in Austin, led by Pliny Fisk and Gail Vittori. They have been experimenting with ideas for a more sustainable architecture since the 1970s. The concept of covered, open-air spaces and walkways is incorporated throughout their demonstration complex. It looks so nice and relaxing...and liberal...

As I prepare to return to Austin, where it has been over 95 degrees every day for the past month, I wonder what happened to the knowledge of breezeways. They are popular forms among passive solar enthusiasts, certainly, but their cultural symbolism stops there. In Santa Fe, the courtyard house is a celebration of Spanish cultural heritage, shared by everyone of all ethnicities. The celebration of cross-cultural influence has overpowered any modernist desires to import new building forms from the east, so the typical courtyard house with its breezeways and portals remain firmly entrenched, even as the neighborhood development patterns of these homes succumb to that of post-war sprawl. Courtyards and zaguans are the cultural property of passive-solar liberals and conservative deeply-rooted families alike, whether rich or poor.

A building's form says more about its occupants than simply that they desire to stay cool during the summer. There are cultural identities at stake. Who does Austin want to be? How can we begin to adapt the city's built environment into a form which is more reasonable for a place with 100+ weather all summer? How can these wonderful breezeway forms be culturally meaningful to everyone, and not just the post-hippie eco-liberals?

Little Shoal Creek

2009-07-30T22:30:00.000-07:00

This image is an excerpt from the Augustus Koch birds-eye view of Austin in 1873. It shows Little Shoal Creek flowing into Shoal Creek at the intersection of 4th Street and Rio Grande Street. At 6th street and Shoal Creek there is shown an iron bowstring arch bridge. In 1887 this bridge was replaced by the 3-arch stone bridge that still exists today, a reversal of the usual pattern of bridge replacement occurring during this time of rapid industrialization. At 6th Street between Nueces Street and San Antonio Street the drawing also shows a small single-arch bridge spanning Little Shoal Creek, basically a culvert since the road surface does not change as it crosses the bridge. This small bridge is stone as well. Ive seen it. It was buried under the city, along with several other bridges over the creek, when Austin finally succumbed to Modern Times, literally (Latin succumbere, from sub- + -cumbere to lie down or under) by channelizing and covering Little Shoal Creek with concrete completely by 1932 as part of Austin's infamous "negro district" plan of 1928. The small bridges were incorporated into the walls of the storm drain and still exist there today.

As far as I can tell, Little Shoal Creek is spring-fed. I know that it has a consistent stream of water during dry weather. There is a spring somewhere under downtown Austin feeds that creek. There are apparently many, channeled up and rerouted into storm drains and down into the river.

Synthetic Stucco

2009-07-25T19:59:00.001-07:00

The first image is of Taos Pueblo, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The second image is of a residential project by Tesuque Stucco Company of Santa Fe, who specialize in the installation of Dryvit and SCO synthetic stucco products on adobe-style New Mexico homes.

The third image is of a standard Taco Bell prototype design finished also in a synthetic stucco, most likely with exterior styrofoam insulation, also known as EIFS.

Synthetic stucco is an acrylic resin which is troweled on like traditional plaster, but in thin coats over metal lath or fiberglass mesh. It can be dyed and finished in a variety of ways to imitate a wide range of other materials. In addition to being the material of choice for many new projects here in Santa Fe, Exterior Insulation Finishing System (EIFS) is also the great American suburban building material. It has been largely used in the construction of suburban homes, shopping centers and commercial structures such as fast food restaurants since the 70s.

Though the Santa Fe Historic Design Review Board currently recommends (not enforces) cement plaster over the use of synthetic stucco in their historic districts, acrylic materials are slowly taking the torch as the future carriers of the Santa Fe style. Is this a sign of the ultimate devolution of architecture? of the destruction of authenticity? The term faux-dobe is becoming more and more popular here. What to do!?!

Before I could dismisses Santa Fe entirely as a colonial Williamsburg in denial, I really had to think about the meaning of the style in terms of its material history. SHORT MATERIAL HISTORY OF PLASTER IN THE SOUTHWEST: Before synthetic stucco, homes were rendered with Portland cement. Many still are. Many use cement plaster with synthetic acrylic as a protective additive. In fact this is how synthetic stucco was first used. Similarly, Portland cement was first used as an additive to lime plasters. This has been the case since the early 20th century, possibly earlier, but definitely only after the eastern Anglos immigrated here and begun intermingling and/or completely brutalizing the local Spanish-Indian population. Over time Portland cement became more and more dominant as people grew comfortable with its use. Similarly, lime was first used as an additive to mud plaster. This has been the case since the Spanish entered this land and begun intermingling with and/or completely brutalizing the local Indian population. Prior to lime, of course, people in this area would use just mud with straw or animal hair or stringy plant material or whatever was laying around. Now, last I checked, its currently debatable whether the Spanish popularized the adobe mud brick technology here or whether there were native populations who already had been making them here for centuries. But in the New Mexico area, the famous ancient pueblos are all either carved into cliffs or made from puddled mud, that is, they would just pile mud into the shape of a wall, so therefore, no need for plaster. Plaster, as far as I've read, is a newer technology that entered New Mexico from the south with the mud brick, most likely from a combination of the Spanish and the central American Indian cultures.

So where does that leave us? What then is the authentic plaster material? Well, hey, plaster/mud-brick isnt even the original way of constructing earthen structures in this area, so has New Mexico been faux-dobe since the 1500s? Of course not. And this argument is very historically naive.

The debate about authenticity in material use comes from the European-by-way-of-East Coast modernist mantra of material honesty. Being a concept that started influencing southwestern architects in the 1930s, the debate between a real material and a fake material took as its subject the then current transition of lime-mud-adobe construction to cement plaster and brick and wood frame construction. Since this point in time, the general consensus is that cement is inauthentic and lime-mud is authentic as an adobe plaster.

The inability for us to accept a material of our own time as a legitimate cultural expression has enforced the perception that there are cultures in New Mexico which are supposedly more authentic than contemporary American culture. But the image of earth-colored stucco has been rendered in numerous ways by numerous cultures of people over time. Looking at an adobe building, whether rendered in mud or in acrylic resin, I see the image of a complex and shared regional identity. It is the celebration of mixed heritage. It is the celebration of history. You can't avoid seeing the pueblo-style, and therefore you cant avoid talking about why it is the way it is. The style brings the complexity of history and culture into public everyday conversation. Look again at the image of the Taco Bell. What does this say about us? Is it something that we can celebrate?

Material honesty is a joke. It is an outdated European Modernist ploy to justify emperical, positivist ambitions. How do I determine what the most honest material should be for a pueblo-style house? Attempting to resolve such logic will ultimately force you to abandon the style altogether, therefore erasing centuries of history and culture for the sake of progress.

Now, the real problem with synthetic stucco is in its durability and maintenance. I actually hate synthetic stucco and cement plaster because they are far too difficult to maintain. Yes, they last longer without problems and cement can be used successfully for decades, but when they do fail, as everything does, you are in quite a mess. They trap moisture and hide structural problems. Mud plaster is ridiculously easy to patch. It immediately shows its problems, so that maintenance is easy, though frequent. As I work here in Santa Fe on mud plaster repair, this is the most common argument I hear for its continued use. If cement were easier to maintain we would be using it, Im sure. The growth of cement and synthetic stucco on buildings is a sign of people simply wanting a maintenance-free home. This is where the material choice is disappointing to me. Really, maintenance-free means that when it breaks you throw it out and get a new one. There is no more pride in working-on or fixing. These are seen now as failures. I aim to encourage the opposite.

Monumentalization through Charcoal

2009-03-14T14:10:00.000-07:00

"Between the colossal inanimate forms and those mote-like creatures darting in and out among their foundations, there is such a contrast, such discrepancy in scale, that certain questions force their attention on the mind. What is the realation between these two? Are those tiny specks the actual intelligences of the situation, and this towered mass something which, as it were, those ants have marvelously excreted? Or are these masses of steel and glass the embodiment of some blind and mechanical force that has imposed itself, as though from without, on a helpless humanity?"
...
"Are not the inhabitants of most of our American cities continually glancing at the rising masses of office or apartment buildings whose thin coating of architectural confectionery disguises, but does not alter, the fact that that they were fashioned to meet not so much the human needs of the occupants as the financial appetites of the property owners? Do we not traverse, in our daily walks, disctricts which are stupid and miscellaneous rather than logical or serene--and move, day long, through an absense of viewpoint, vista, axis, relation or plan? Such an environment silently but relentlessly impresses its qualities upon the human psyche." --Hugh Ferriss, The Metropolis of Tomorrow

"Ferriss's expressive chiaroscuro drawings mixed poetry and power in a twntieth-century Sublime. Like Piranesi, to whom he was frequently compared, Ferriss monumentalized his structures, exaggerating their scale and dramatizing the profound power of their simple mass. For Piranesi in the eighteenth century, the ruins of the past offered the paradigm for the architecture of his own day, while for Ferriss technology and the new forms of the contemporary metropolis promised an ideal city of the future. Ferriss's buildings were not in the process of romantic ruination, as were those of Piranesi or J.M Gandy, but in the course of construction. His awe not of nature'power, but of man's."
--Carol Whillis, Drawing Towards Metropolis

Monumentalization through charcoal, through representation, through art.

I enjoy these images Blake took and I love the commentary on them on BLDGBLOG but I want to see these cloud projections in a Ferriss rendering. I wish Blake took wide-angle 3-point perspective shot of the whole structure with its light shaft extending the towers up into the infinite.

the monument

2009-01-17T18:22:00.000-08:00

What I mean by the term "monumentalization" is a way by which we establish a richer meaning in things more than just in a simple sense, like simply noting that an image of a house signifies the object of a house and so on. Monumentalization is a mode, a way of seeing things, a mindset, but moreso, monumentalization is more specific form of establishing myth, also a mode of being, but a particularly meaningful mode of seeing something. Im reading Roland Barthes' "Mythologies" and in it he talks about myth as,

"...a mode of signification, a form...Every object in the world can pass from a closed, silent existence to an oral state, open to appropriation by society, for there is no law, whether natural or not, which forbids talking about things. A tree is a tree. Yes, of course. But a tree as expressed by Minou Drouet is no longer quiet a tree, it is a tree which is decorated, adapted to a certain type of consumption, laden with literary self-indulgence, revolt, images, in short with a type of social usage which is added to pure matter." (italics are Barthes')

Monumentalization is a social mode like myth. In it, one approaches an object with a particularly complex social expectation of how to use it in culture. It is important, more than identifying the types of things that are monuments, to identify the mindset one enters to see objects in this way. Monumentalization is a way of being in the world. Anything can be a monument if we want it to be, if we can just create the story and the myth to support it. Monumentalization, as the highest order of myth, is the process of celebrating an object as the singular, quintessential representation of a mythic concept.

However, the U.S. National Park System is the monument to the American wilderness, yet is far from it in reality. This is what I want to talk about.

the lime kiln road

2008-12-21T17:25:00.000-08:00

I am fascinated by street names. They are memories of the past that will outlast the object and replace the object, robbing it of its own name. They are the political borders as drawn by the 18th c. Mississippi River bed versus the river as it flows today. They are the cell phones that digitally reproduce the sound of a classic telephone bell ring. They are the metonymical uses of historically contiguous terms such as "the press" for the news media, and "the crown" in the nations of the Commonwealth. They are the copper cladding on zinc pennies, the "stone" veneer on Formica countertops, the "shutters" on suburban houses, and the decorative round guttae on the Greek Doric order that represent the wooden pegs holding rafters in position in earlier Greek timber construction (and in neo-classical, the guttae of these ancient stone originals).

In this transfer of form, meaning is created. That which represents becomes a monument to the original. With the creation of the monument, a building is saved, history is written, and cultural identity is enriched. To some it is fake. To others, reality is found in the illusion.

This site near the source of the San Marcos River was part of the Thomas J Chambers Grant of 1834. The tract was sold in 1848 to Gen. Edward Burleson (1798-1851), military and political leader in early Texas, who built a cabin nearby. A later owner, former confederate Major W.O. Hutchison (1834-1900), sold 47.5 acres to J.J. Belger and James D. Cahill in 1887. They erected this brick and rock kiln, in which limestone was burned to produce lime for agriculture and construction. The operation ceased by 1910, when cheaper lime became available. The site is now (1976) owned by the Brown School.
Texas Historical Commission
The Old Lime Kiln
(sign mounted on site)

The Belger-Cahill Lime Kiln is a freestanding structure of roughcut limestone blocks, built at the foot of a natural limestone outcrop. The kiln consists essentially of a rectangular chimney about 20 feet high. Within the chimney is a brick lining. On the eastern face is a arched stone opening and on the north face is a smaller, more rounded arched entrance at a higher level than the eastern arch. The southern side is severely caved in but the inner chimney has not been breached. Horizontal weathered wooden braces wrap around the structure.

It is fascinating that a road would be named after the remnants of a rustic construction industry, or that a remnant of the industry--that which is used to build historic buildings--is itself a historic structure. It is possible even that structures that were constructed using this kiln do not exist any more. Should we be paying more attention (Image 10) to the elaborate and beautiful elements of today's construction sites, to monumentalizing the tower crane, the steel scaffolding constructions, and concrete formwork if we do indeed find the history of construction practices something meaningful to us?

By the time the great Hill Country limestone quarries closed down, which were extracting some of the purest limestone in the world, and imported lime for mortar was becoming increasingly cheaper than that produced on site, the particular practice monumentalized by this lime kiln had become obsolete.

Lime Kiln Road is a winding residential and ranch road which historically connected San Marcos to Kyle as an open range dirt road through the heart of the beautiful Texas Hill Country. Many of the ranch lands have been developed into new higher density residential neighbourhoods though much of the land still remains with historic structures still preserved on them. Land owners have since closed access to the open dirt road portion of Lime Kiln Road.