Tettura

Limestone | Lizards | Little Buildings

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There's something prehistoric about Moosehead Lake and northern Maine in general. It's sandy, with low, scrubby almost tundra-like evergreens, and a big scary lake with huge grey root systems of dead trees.

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Woods near Norwood, New Jersey, USA.

I gave myself the task of trying to find a site to build a little tiny house in these woods - maybe a place to go watch and listen to the water in the stream?

I liked this spot at the confluence of two little streams. In springtime when the water is higher and rushing through the rocks this must be a really cool place to sit.

Sometimes I think these kinds of places are better enjoyed by leaving them unbuilt, and just visiting. Though a little platform to sit on and a bit of shade can be very nice.

Building a good foundation here without disturbing the root system of that really knotty tree holding the bank together would be tricky. Maybe the house would have a sort of floating foundation, which just sits on the ground when the water is low, and floats when the water gets higher? Also... I wonder about the toxicity of pressure treated wood for the immediate environment... I wouldn't want to ruin the quality of the water in the stream by using nasty chemical-treated wood.

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The open-ocean side of Cliff Island, Casco Bay, Maine, USA.

Some kind of metamorphic rock-making happened here?

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Salt marshes near Plum Island Sound, near Ipswich, Massachusetts, USA.

This is surreal landscape. The tide here changes by 10 feet, and the salt marshes are really flat with a winding drainage rivulets that get wider and deeper as you get closer to the ocean.

I walked onto the marshes from solid land, where I could easily jump over the smaller rivulets. Closer to the ocean I eventually reached wide rivers like the one in the bottom picture. 

I slept near the little cabin in the first picture and that night it was a full moon and a spring high tide, so the water was about a foot higher than normal high tide. At about 2 am, I woke up to the sound of gargling water - the little bump of land I was sleeping on was completely surrounded by water, illuminated in the moonlight!

The marshes are dotted with what I think are bird-hunting cabins, all built on wooden stilts above the high tide line. The marshes seem to go on forever...

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An old granite quarry near Rockport, Massachusetts. It's now used as a town water reservoir.

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Impala in Kruger Park, South Africa.

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The edge of a residential district at the Greek colony of Selinunte, Sicily, Italy.

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Among the rocks near Kettle Cove, near Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts, USA.

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Bridge across the Gweru river near Gwelutshena, Nkayi North, Zimbabwe.

Because of the lack of guard rails, a bus rides over the side into the river about once per year.

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Found some purple clay in an eroded stream bank in the woods near the Palisades in New Jersey!

There was some more compacted claystone? upstream and other interesting sedimentary stuff going on.

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Granite chapel in Evergreen cemetery, Portland, Maine, USA.

Lime mortar, slate roof. The granite blocks look really new - they look like they haven't aged at all in the hundred years since they were put up. Not like the soft tuff in Italy.

Samuel Wilde Memorial Chapel, built 1902.

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This guy teaches people how to make skin-on-frame wooden kayaks for a living, and runs an off-grid farm/homestead. He has a few interesting and smart designs for improving the thermal efficiency of his heating systems. For his building projects, he collects fallen lumber that floats downriver by rafting it up in the bay with his kayak and then taking it in with the tide and hauling it out onto a flatbed truck.

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Hint: we saw this 5-10 minutes after take-off from Munich on a flight bound for New York.

Which German city is this?

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A 100 Watt solar panel charges a battery in a home in Gwelutshena, Zimbabwe.

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Tidal riverbed near Essex, Massachusetts, USA.

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Visited the construction site of a 28-story residential tower near Chinatown in Boston.

Two of the superintendents showed us around the building. They told us about issues they were having with unexpected deflections in their poured concrete slab floors, which caused errors of up to 3 inches between floors in places. This is a problem in places where you want to hang curtain walls from the slabs. They showed us the connection detail of the main steel floor beams to the reinforced concrete column core. These were actually just shear connections - the beams were simply supported between the core and peripheral steel columns running the height of the building.

One thing that struck me was the strong emphasis they put on having a super-accurate Building Information Model. Making sure that they model everything down to the last detail means that they can have more predictability when installing everything in the field. This saves on labor costs because cuts through steel can be done in the shop and not using union labor, there are fewer collisions and corrections to be made, etc.

The floor beams came from the steel manufacturer with a camber (slightly arched with the middle higher than the ends). This is so that when concrete is poured over the beams, they settle flat. Apparently there may have been some miscalculation or something else went wrong, because the beams appeared to have too much camber, meaning that some parts of the floor weren’t level, up to a large fraction of an inch. They have to actually grind down the floor and pour in self-levelling compound to make it level because the tolerance for the wood floors they plan to install is very low ( <1/16”).

In one spot, they had a cantilever of about 5 feet out from the peripheral columns, which lean in towards the top of the building. When they installed little kickers to support the cantilever, the beam they attached the kickers too was in danger of “rolling.” Anticipating this, they installed a little diagonal beam to resist the rolling.

Parts of the envelope are hanging curtain wall, and parts are precast concrete panels, or “stones,” with punch windows in them.

We got to see them installing the roof insulation and drainage system which was just a few layers of tapered foam insulation topped with a few layers of water/vapor? barrier, which was pitched to direct water into drainage pipes.

The method for casting the core was pretty interesting. The concrete company that Suffolk subcontracted with for the core has a really well-developed process where they have a climbing formwork /scaffold that uses hydraulic pistons to climb the concrete core as it's curing. Their team and machinery were so well coordinated that they could cast a floor per day. Because they were casting during winter, they had to be careful to keep the concrete warm while it cured. So they had a 30-foot blanket skirt hanging from the climbing formwork to keep the few floors below them warm. Too cold, and the concrete might freeze and lose a lot of structural integrity. Too hot and it might cause other problems. Because they were jacking the climbing formwork up using concrete poured only the day before!, they made 8 test cylinders for each pour, and tested them to failure 8,16,24... hours after the pour to prove to the structural engineers that they could safely climb to the next floor. Using this method they were able to pour the entire concrete column in around 28 days. They used #11 rebar for the reinforcing steel in the core, which is some of the biggest rebar you can get at 11 x 1/8" = 1 3/8" diameter.

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The vaulted double-ceiling at the Boston opera-house. It looks like there is a primary masonry vault ceiling here with a secondary ornamental wooden ceiling underneath it, with a few feet of separation between the layers. The effect when lit is pretty awesome. Is this a guastavino vault?