THESIS ABSTRACT
RICHARD SMITH | MARCH 10, 2009

Reconnecting Fragments: The Labour of Love

Boat building and fort construction in maritime Canada form two of the first productive enterprises in the colonies, involving individuals from the community exchanging and developing ideas through the medium of the ship’s draught. This made a profound intellectual impact such as the genesis of engineering in Canada but also the transferring of one culture of building to another . Through this intellectual phenomenon came hybrid solutions to conventional building methods and high-quality construction of dwellings because of skilled boat builders. This creative and analogous relationship has since been divided by historical preservationism and the modernization of craftsmanship.

This thesis explores the theoretical writing of amorous attraction by Barbara Maria Stafford, and a discussion of the amorous qualities philia, and agapē in the writing of Alberto Perez Gomez. Together, these make up essential connective qualities that emphasize making connections between divided relationships and learning through similarity, not difference. Taking spoils of boats and appropriating them inventively, the fort will be transformed into a boat building and repair workshop with outlying trades buildings––common to boat building and fort construction.

Amorous attraction contends that we have forgotten how to think analogically, that we should conduct the nobler task of connecting using analogy rather than dividing by disanalogy. Coupling this process to the architectural process of craftsmanship and bricolage therein, the proposed architecture can help reconnect the vast potential of this hybrid vernacular culture of building.

Drawing Progression

Jan 22, 2009

Dec 8, 2008

Midterm Critique

I bungled my midterm. It was poorly explained and defended -- maybe I was tired? I inadvertently emphasized only the functionality of the boat-building shop, skimming through the theory and poetics of the project, thinking the critics (same ones from colloquium) remembered the ideas of the project from the last crit. And so the question came up "If we are really going to talk about functionality, then why did you place your building away from water, on the top of a ridge, inside a fort?". Traditionally, boat construction takes place at the water's edge; I hadn't discussed or drawn the justification for its placement away from the water. Also, the use of spoils seemed to the critics to have been lost along the way which frightened me the most, despite several efforts at conveying spoils integrated into the building. I skimmed this part in my explanation too, ugh! The critics suggested to flip leftover boats upside down and use them for the roof of my building.

That said, I've revisited some of the main ideas and tried to rework them. To better "stitch" the boat shop into the fort (and manifest the idea of amorous attraction I proposed earlier), I'm introducing the concept of the compagnonnage, or the "journeyman", the apprenticeship of tradespersons to become master craftspersons. Five trades related to boat and fort building (wood-working, metal, fabric/weaving, glazing, and cooking) will be placed at the five bastions of the fort. In the medieval tradition, to become a master craftsperson, the journeyman must complete a masterpiece of his trade. I'm proposing that each bastion is a place to build and/or display these masterpieces, and that in concert, these trades exchange techniques and knowledge, generating hybrid solutions to their craft. The collaboration of these as a "trades centre" better justifies its placement. But tying it all back to spoils...? Maybe this is diverging too much.

"Les Compagnons" is a modern organized version of the same task the journeymen executed in the past. It is a program for youth to travel (in this case, across France) and study the built work of their predecessors. The program helps young tradespersons specify their trade and gain a mastery of their work.

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili by Leon Battista Alberti has come up as a suggested reading which could be a very helpful source for my thesis. The text involves both spoils and amorous attraction, but one that exists in the dream state of Poliphilo who pursues his love Polia. The drawings depict spoils in many interesting scenes, and architectural elements celebrated in the text. A warning that this could be an epic tangent...

CHAPTER SUMMARIES

[The first attempt at a written structure for my thesis].


Reconstructing Fragments: Amorous Attraction in a Game of Spoils

Chapter 1: The Structure of Spoils.
Subchapters:
a) Spoils and Memory
b) Cut and Paste: Verbatim Quotation
c) Appropriating Spoils
d) Case Study: House of Loreto

The term spolia, has a clear association to an initial violent act that removes a part from its source to be used elsewhere. Individual Spoils possess an innate ambiguity between simultaneously understanding their original purpose and context and their possible re-understanding. Spoils possess the ability to transport a fraction of meaning from its original source into a new context. They alone have the ability, in the right hands, to stimulate memories and touch souls.

Rome had begun conserving and reusing pieces of their civic buildings in the 4th century. Buildings were judged worthy of conservation because they were repositories of Roman traditions. Ruins were always dismantled for reuse and never demolished. The presence of past building traditions was always to be reconciled before its imbued traditions and “verbatim quotations” lost to a new ahistorical construction.

This project proposes to appropriate the spoils of boats and buildings as the pieces in a game of amorous exchange between fort construction and boat building. Spoils of boats can be disassembled and reused for the boat-building workshop and fortification, chasing the right fit; in reverse, the boats repaired and built from this workshop can employ pieces of fabric or rope from gabions in the building into their construction. The game becomes a sharing of pieces from the similar “other”.

From tradition, the house of the Virgin Mary is thought to have been transported by angels from Nazareth to Croatia, then again to Recanti, Italy; and finally a third time to its present location in Loreto. This practice of dis-assembly is a fundamental aspect in a game of fragments, where a building is never static, but able to move and be modified.


Chapter 2 – Games and Amorous Attraction
Subchapters:
a) Objective and Rules of the Game
b) After Descartes: Postmodern Annihilation of Resemblance
c) Amorous Attraction
d) Spoils as Analogical Devices and Storytelling

The game of spoils is a game played between boats and architecture. The rules are that spoils from boats (e.g. wood planks, sails, masts etc) are disassembled for use in parts of the boat construction workshop, and by extension the Fort Beauséjour. In reverse, rope, fabric or wood can be used the construction of boats. The game operates on its own course and meaning as a volunteer activity that can enhance the co-dependency of the regional boat building trade and architecture. The purpose of the game is to revive the similarity between, historically, a collaborative activity which is now two otherwise unrelated things.

Cartesian thinking created a will to divide things into smaller individual parts. It fuelled an annihilation of resemblance and a celebration of difference. The after-effects of this is a difficulty to relate between a seemingly infinite cosmos of individuality. Difference, be it cultural, artistic, or pedagogic, has many positive qualities but at a certain intangible point, we lose the ability or patience to relate between entities in a gigantic superstore of convictions.

Barbara Maria Stafford describes a Game of Back and Forth in her Visual Analogy, a work that attempts to restore analogy and perception to the forefront of some of the issues confronting our time. She argues that we have lost the ability or interest to work analogically, and as such are drifting further away from making connections, only emphasizing differences. Amorous attraction is used in the context of this thesis to describe the process that spoils undergo to find their proper fit, as well as a programmatic union between boat building and fortifications. Using an analogy of amorous attraction, we can begin to make connections between boats and architecture, land and water, invention and memory.

Storytelling using analogy with spoils. Need more info.


Chapter 3 – Transformative Exchanges
Subchapters:
a) Metis and the Workshop
b) The Bricoleur and Rural DIY Methodologies
c) Boats to Buildings and Buildings to Boats
d) Paradigm Conversion (Reason from Symbolism) (Boats and Buildings)

From mythology, Metis is the skillful intelligence that guides the Greek goddess Metis. This is conjectural knowledge that lies between reasoning by analogy and skill at deciphering signs which link what is visible to what is invisible. The thesis proposes that both the game of spoils and workshop spaces foster a development of the Metis sensibility.

Synonymous with Metis is the bricoleur, borrowed from the French word bricolage, from the verb bricoler – equivalent to the English "do-it-yourself", the core meaning in French being, however, "fiddle, tinker" and, by extension, "make creative and resourceful use of whatever materials are at hand (regardless of their original purpose)". The do-it-yourself attitude is commonplace in rural Canada, and equally in the maritime region of Chignecto. A person who engages in bricolage invents his or her own strategies for using existing materials in a creative, resourceful, and original way. The bricoleur is the intended worker of fragments to exchange between boats and architecture in the game of spoils.

Seafarers are often cited describing the boat they build and sail as a house of their own. The inhabitation of boats share many commonalities to that of inland buildings, such as shelter, structure, maintenance and decay, pleasure. Much can be learned from the other. Creating an exchange of spoils is a start to making a timeless partnership between disparate vocations.

At the time of the construction of the Fort Beauséjour, a paradigm shift was occurring – a shift from symbolic, metaphysical thinking to scientific methods. Vauban stripped all symbolic and analogical meaning from the fort in favour of prescriptive, scientifically grounded occupation of defensive buildings. Much the same way, boat builders drifted away from crafting symbolic meaning in their watercraft. Today, “superfluous” ornamental details are lost and the naming of a boat is one of the few residual myths associated with a traditionally romantic pastime.


Chapter 4 - Site
Subchapters:
a) Materiality
b) The Acadians: History and Tradition
c) Vauban: Paradigm Conversion
d) Spoils of the Chignecto Ship Railway

A quarry is situated near Fort Beauséjour. These stones were retrieved by native and Acadian workers to be used for gabions within the ramparts of the earth fort. Wood from nearby growths were cut to build an ephemeral palisade at the periphery of the earth-works. Small branches were cut to make baskets for the gabions. The two materials form the basis of the site’s construction. Local wood was also used for a short-lived but prosperous shipbuilding industry in the mid to late 1800’s.

Acadians worked the land’s inhospitable marshlands with dykes to transform it into workable farmland. The Great Expulsion of 1755 is a well-known fragmentation from their land. Acadian homes are often additive conglomerations of building extensions.

Vauban sacrificed all symbolic meaning from fortress design, to refine their defensibility that was grounded in scientific reason. Pentagonal forts can be drawn in many different ways (approximately eight methods). The traditional Roman method draws two immense circles, where the pentagon fits within the overlap of the two circles. References to the landscape are drawn with these circles. The fort’s embodied “size” on the draught is then much greater than its physical size. The Fort Beauséjour however skipped this entire process by simply using ready-made plans based on a set of rules outlined and drafted by Vauban.

The Chignecto ship railway was an abandoned project, lead by Henry Ketchum that sought to taxi full size ships from the Northumberland strait to the Chignecto Bay. The project was abandoned at the collapse of the British economy. Spoils of the railway and arched bridges were collected for reuse in the visitor’s centre.

Chapter 5 - Design
Subchapters:
a) Methods
b) (De)Monstration of Sea Monsters

The drawings use vellum which has translucent qualities. Cutout drawings or diagrams are added continually, recognizing a past thought, inspiring a new interpretation. The use of adhesives naturally collect atmospheric fragments throughout the drawing process. Fishing line is embedded in the site drawing to denote topological changes, and the geometric symbolism divested by Vauban is carved permanently into the board. Instead of using branches for weaving the gabion baskets, sailing rope is used instead. Denuded figures can be seen constructing these gabions in the drawing (referring to Pastor).

The partnership between fort and boat construction is made through the exchange of spoils. In trading spoils between boats and buildings, there is the potentiality of new uses for parts of each respective thing. In the spirit of bricolage, chimeric monsters, or hybrid building systems can emerge.

Conclusion

Bibliography

THESIS ABSTRACT rev.3

Reconstructing Fragments: Similarity in a Game of Spoils

This thesis explores why today we possess a limited language of talking about resemblance and an exaggerated awareness of difference. Within this theoretical framework of what can be called a recession of similarity, this thesis proposes to appropriate the use of spolia in a proposed boat building and repair workshop to be sited within the preserved ruin and National Historic Site, Fort Beauséjour near Sackville, New Brunswick. The fragments of buildings and boats used in this playful, amorous exchange between boats and architecture will foster a sense of culture, play, and invention for the boat builder and rural community surrounding Fort Beauséjour, and an attraction of common bonds between otherwise disparate entities: boats and fortifications. It explores the discovery of similarity within difference. The game’s rules are defined as a “chase” or courtship of spoils to find its complementary fit – a timeless game that is not serious so as to encourage an attitude of voluntary play throughout generations with pieces of the building and boats. The playful exchange and appropriation of spoils will consolidate a regional language of similarity.


A PARTIALLY ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alchermes, Joseph. Spolia in Roman Cities of the Late Empire: Legislative Rationales and Architectural Reuse. Dumbarton Oaks Papers, Vol. 48 1994.

Colonna, Francesco. Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. (New York City: Thames & Hudson Inc., 1999).

Duffy, Christopher. Fire and Stone. The Science of Fortress Warfare 1660-1860. (London: Greenhill Pr; 2 Sub edition, 1996).
Techniques for the construction, repair, siege and defense of fortifications. Relevant to the place and time in which the Fort Beauséjour was constructed. Many of the building techniques outlined in Fire and Stone were in fact employed on site, according to archaeological studies of the site.

Hand, Chris. The Siege of Fort Beauséjour, 1755. (Fredericton: Goose Lane Editions, 2004).
Historical account of the Siege of Fort Beauséjour, by Major Chris Hand who joined the Canadian Forces in 1981 and attended the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario. The book is based on his master’s thesis.

Hanson, Maria Fabricus. The Eloquence of Appropriation. (Rome: Accademia di Danimarca, 2003).

Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1950).
Discusses the importance of the play element of culture and society. Huizinga suggests that play is primary to and necessary (though not sufficient) condition of the generation of culture. Play is a central characteristic to the activity of appropriating an amorous attraction of spoils.

Lefaivre, Liane. Leon Battista Alberti’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997).

Miller, Paul D. Sound Unbound. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008).
Article written by Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid. Describes DJ culture as a an archival impulse applied to a hunter-gatherer milieu of collecting clips to be patched in (as spoils) into remixed music. Identifies the problem of difference and multiplicity in this medium – we never move anywhere in a civilization of expanding forces of citation, remixing and sampling. An eternal expansion of information dividing a million-fold, and never creating integrity. With difference, comes indifference.

Rowe, Colin. Collage City. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984).
On the ideologies, philosophy, manifestations, and flaws of modern architecture. Most relevant is the proposition to reorient conceptions of the city from the utopian grand narrator’s single vision of the city to a more multivalent view of the city, micro-utopias.

Stafford, Barbara Maria. Visual Analogy. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001).
Argues that our culture has succeeded in creatively articulating differences, leaving us in a compromising situation that leaves us diminished in our ability to recognize the existence of the degrees of likeness. Stafford offers us a game of back and forth that exercises the analogon, where through due ratio we can link fragmented things.

Strauss-Levi, Claude. The Savage Mind. (Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1966).

William, Garratt. Loreto the New Nazareth and Its Centenary Jubilee. (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2003).

Wilson, Garth. A History of Shipbuilding and Naval Architecture in Canada. (Ottawa: National Museum of Science and Technology, 1994).
An historical overview of the interrelationship of science and industry in the colony in New France. The work focuses mainly on large-scale shipbuilding that impacted on international trade. It does however mention the coexistence of small boat building and the family-oriented trade that grew to prominence in the maritime region following the decline in large-scale shipbuilding.

Vergani, Gianmarco. The Culture of Fragments. The Journal of The Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation 6, no. (1987).
Collection of essays and articles that discuss fragmentation in a metaphysical sense. A theoretical work situated in the height of postmodern and deconstructivist theory. Provides a varied springboard of precedents on the topic of fragmentation and difference.

Vernant, Jean Pierre. Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society. (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Harvester Press, 1978).

Sketches

Throughout this nuisant transit strike I've been stuck at home to work without my drawings. I was however able to work out some details (e.g. wall sections, corner conditions, foundations, glazing etc.).

Boat Construction Time-Lapse

A sense of the process and space required to build a wooden boat.

Thesis Design Progress

Writing and theoretical research has been sidelined temporarily to allow for some intensive designing. I have come up with a second draft for my boat building workshop.

This is an older version of the existing site plan of the fort, above. There is string pasted on the board and now covered with vellum to pick up the topography lines as I draw. Choosing the point of entry was in question for a while because of the fort's geometrical regularity, but I soon realized that it was only a matter of convenience.

On my second panel, I have my proposal. It's still schematic; red represents walls that I'm adding, and yellow indicates existing work. The red + yellow square in the lower left marks the main entrance through the powder magazine whose enormous walls still stand. You then circulate east towards the existing defensive wall (the red saw-tooth form). The path then splits in two, with large boats for repairs to the north and small boat construction to the south. The yellow kite-like space at the top is where sails are sewn or repaired, and on the other side of the sawtooth wall, the eastern-most part of the building, are storage and lofting floors for drafting the boats.

In the earthworks of the fort can be found row upon row of gabions which are ancestral sandbags. They are made of small sticks weaved into a basket to contain rocks. The gabions are then stacked upon one another and backfilled to form a rampart. For my proposal I want to use the gabion as the building block for my proposal. My material palette for the whole building will be stone, wood and rope.



I found some interesting images from a boat workshop in the States somewhere, about how they transport the boats within their facility. I'm hoping I can do something along these lines where the boats are brought in by a short rail and distributed with this kind of mechanism.


Dr. Frascari and I discussed water-proofing; a building doesn't have to be water-proof but instead water-resistant. In the past century, buildings have become utterly dependent on vapour barriers rather than finding inventive ways of dealing with moisture. If the building is properly designed it can be ventilated without causing damage to the interior structure. The Querini Stampalia is a gallery by Carlo Scarpa in Venice which allows water to flood in and drain without causing any damage to the structure or material at all. Put in the context of a boat building workshop, it could truly animate the building's use.

Graduate Architecture Colloquium 2008

Last week I presented my thesis project for Colloquium. Steve Fai, H. Masud Taj, and Marco Frascari were present. The discussion was really interesting and helped me consolidate some topics of interest. The biggest one is developing the idea of the game which I'll elaborate below. For now, here are my slides and summaries of my discussion for each.

My thesis is this: I believe that designing and analogically playing with fragments is crucial to our sustenance, or well-being.

Central to this thesis is how to use fragments in a cosmopoetic way. From Barbara Stafford's Visual Analogy, "Our civilization is staggering under an explosion of discontinuous happenings exhibited as if they had no historical precedents. We are overloaded with personal statements, irreducibly distinctive subjects, and contradictory opinions." This thesis is a reaction to the naturally fragmented world we live in. I want to operate within this framework by using physical fragments in an analogical way, meaning drawing connections and similarities with these fragments, rather than emphasizing differences. To do this, I've come up with five points to structure a game that attempts to connect our attitudes of similarity.

The game is made up of five "points" [I was hesitant to use the word rules, fearing its restrictive quality]. The first point is translation where pieces of a building are reused for new applications to generate a new thing. In this case, the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei constructed a pavilion of 1001 windows and doors from the Ming dynasty. This project was assembled in Germany. Memory evades disposal, thanks to the artist for saving the pieces, and reconstructed to share in a new context. A relationship of similarity is set up to consider Chinese art in a German context. "How are our windows similar?"

The second point is reuse of a fragment as the same function, which is pretty much the simplest system of using fragments. It's much like recycling garbage or plainly replacing something with something better. A column capital or shaft is reused as the same function, but spatially organized to set up hierarchies based on the likeness of the objects themselves, but also how each piece came into being, or from where.


Lofting is a method of both construction and drawing in boat construction that makes use of a floor (stone or wood) to draw 1:1 scale draughts of boats. The process cuts out the trial and error events that usually occur when a boat drawing is scaled up from an AutoCAD file. The floor is reused as a wall, or repainted for more drawing. This ability to have a secondary function embedded in the functionality of a design is extremely useful and can conserve the memory of the previous functionality.

The fourth point is what I'm currently calling continual re-assembly or customization of "building blocks". The Merzbau is an example that changes constantly to suit Kurt Schwitters, while accumulating actual fragments like paintings, pencils, small memorabilia that are of value to him. As more pieces are adopted into the space, Schwitters adjusts the space accordingly. Likewise, a gabion or sandbag wall system is similar where these construction units can be adjusted to suit the inhabitant. I think its significance is largely energy-related, but I'm also thinking generally in terms of how the building is able to transform and conserve the traces of its previous states.

Recontextualization is relocating an object somewhere else. While all of the above points in some way involve a relocation (inherent to the definition of fragmentation), this is striving towards moving something like an entire building to somewhere else, where it takes on a whole new meaning and function. The House of Loreto is one such example. Also, just think of rebuilding a lighthouse in downtown Toronto. It creates a place of spectacle or discussion.

The site is Fort Beauséjour, New Brunswick. Historically, this is where events lead up to the Great Upheaval of Acadians, a precedent in fragmentation to start with.

The fort is situated on a ridge surrounded by marshland and overlooking the Bay of Fundy. My geometric sketch attempts to reveal the positioning of the fort. The 'size' of the fort is much larger when we consider what landmarks were used in drawing the pentagon and what method was used to draw the pentagon (there are about 10 different ways to draw one).

Aerial view of the site.
Panoramas to give a sense of the earthworks. You can see the beginnings of the Bay of Fundy off in the distance.
The Chignecto Ship Rail was a failed project, because of the collapse of the British economy. It was originally meant to transport full sized ships across the Chignecto Isthmus, but was only partially completed. Pieces of the brick arched bridges were reassembled in the visitor's centre (rule #1).

Which brings me to my program, a boat building and repair shop. Boat building and fort construction separately are two of the major social endeavours where communities would come together and exchange ideas and technology over the drawing. Through this process of learning, both trades eventually brought about the engineering as a discipline. Relating fragmentation to boat building is still to be refined. I really just picked the program from a hat as a challenge. Not an issue.

CRITICISM
After describing the five rules, it was brought up that I've made five different games and that I should reduce the five points to one game. Also, there is an issue of scale that I need to address. I addressed the minute pieces of the building but also the entire building as a fragment (House of Loreto). I have to intensify which part I want to deal with. Another great criticism was "does this game have rules?" For some reason I was quite reluctant to use the word rule because of its restrictive connotation, in favour of points. But, without rules, there's no game. I should look at games which imply a real life metaphor, like in Monopoly which is a game of capitalism, and Risk which is a game of aggressive world domination. So, what is it that my game talks about? After a lengthy discussion of the game, another point that I should consider the game as having unspoken rules. I'm quite interested in this aspect, where the rules have to be discovered. In Peter Zumthor's baths in Switzerland, five rooms contain experiences for the five senses, but at no point does it say on a sign or manual that this is the case. The way the space is designed, you figure out the game -- talking at a certain level makes your voice carry, or the design of a railing encourages you to reach out to a fountain of hot/cold water. Recommended I imply my rules through drawing or model.

Thesis Frontispiece and Abstract - First Draft

A first draft of my frontispiece and abstract for my Thesis:


Amnesia and Fragmentation: Five Points Towards an Appropriation of Fragments

“Man, in a word, has no nature; what he has is…history. Expressed differently: what nature is to things, history, res gestae, is to man [1].” Amnesia is a condition that is currently affecting the architectural profession. In large part, this can be attributed to a relatively recent trend in the demolition of buildings. Paradoxically, historical preservation – the uncompromising retention of buildings in their former state is the polemic condition to a discussion of memory in architecture. Our attitudes and architecture, in a state of amnesia or memory stagnation.

This thesis seeks to explore through five points a game of using fragments as a solution to the problem of memory in architecture – a game which has rules, but is not serious so as to encourage an attitude of play with pieces, rather than a disregard or fear of altering meaningful parts of a building. This game of fragments includes translating the parts and materials of a historic building into new and unexpected applications. It also designs the parts of the building for dis-assembly, to encourage future reuse that accumulate greater meaning over time.

The play of fragments will respond to the more serious condition of amnesia and emerging issues of sustainability and energy shortages. The context of this thesis is the preserved ruin and national historic site, Fort Beauséjour in New Brunswick. A boat building workshop will be the proof of a theory of appropriating fragments. The architectural intervention will ground the aforementioned issues through the theoretical writings on fragmentation in Colin Rowe's "Collage City", Maria Fabricus Hanson’s “The Eloquence of Appropriation”, and Barbara Maria Stafford's "Visual Analogy".

1. Colin Rowe. Collage City, p. 118, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984)

1001 Windows and Doors

‘The ready-mades are anonymous objects which the gratuitous gesture of the artist, by the simple act of choosing them, converts into ‘works of art’. At the same time this gesture dissolves the notion of work’.
[Paz, Octavio. The Ready-Made. Marcel Duchamp In Perspective. pp84 ( Prentice Hall International, London 1975.)]

Like the ready-mades in art, architecture can be strategically constructed out of fragments or found objects. This process relies on the availability of materials and their inherent ability to be reconfigured in a meaningful way. In an age of colossal wastefulness, there is an abundance of fragments for play.

One example of using fragments in architecture is Ai Weiwei's pavilion '1001 Windows and Doors' in Kassel, Germany. The pavilion consists of doors and windows from the Ming and Qing Dynasty.

[Image from: Galerieursmeile]

[Image from: Mark Magazine #12 February/March 2008. pg. 77]

The actual structure collapsed in a storm. Apparently the piece was meant to be indoors but at the last second, moved outdoors. The artist has embraced its new meaning accordingly. Part of the essential purpose behind using fragments is the reuse of pieces for their energy consideration...I hesitate to wonder how these doors and windows were transported from China to Germany. Probably using a lot of energy to do so, but nonetheless were reused in an interesting way.

Sorry...my fonts went awol.

SPOLIA

[Image of The Lateran Baptistry in Rome, from The Eloquence of Appropriation: Prolegomena to an Understanding of Spolia in Early Christian Rome, by Maria Fabricius Hansen]

We cannot remember without architecture. Like landscape or literature, architecture is part of our collective memory and identity. When we think of the great basilicas of the past, they embody the cultural memory of a place and an identity embedded in the very way a column is crafted. At the micro scale of a column, we learn that these buildings were in fact made of fragments, or spoils, transported from distant places. These fragments, pre-fabricated by other hands are like quotations in the story of a building's life. Depending on the nature of these spoils, they often reveal surprising histories about the building's acquisition of its parts. Using these fragments was a natural act in medieval architecture, where craftspeople would 'unanxiously' use their fore-fathers' works. This way, it was understood that the language of architecture has already been spoken and that using fragments was a verbatim quotation of a tradition of building.

A Classical Example, (from The Eloquence of Appropriation: Prolegomena to an Understanding of Spolia in Early Christian Rome, by Maria Fabricius Hansen):

[Image of Santa Costanza, from: The Eloquence of Appropriation: Prolegomena to an Understanding of Spolia in Early Christian Rome, by Maria Fabricius Hansen]

"At Santa Costanza, built as an imperial mausoleum in the mid fourth century, variation in the shafts and capitals was used to structure the circular interior space. The shafts carrying arches are of plain grey granite except the outer pairs flanking the entrance and, opposite, the pair flanking the opening towards the niche with the imperial sarcophagus. These shafts are of red granite, indicating an axial quality in the round structure. Moreover, at the opening towards the niche the inner pair of shafts is also distinct from the rest as they are of dark grey granite. Of the two sets of composite capitals used in the building, the grandest is placed in the inner ring, the simpler one in the outer, indicating a hierarchy in the interior, with the inner domed circle being more important than the surrounding ambulatory."


In the information age, this great performance is hindered by anxiety of imitation and quotation, often falling victim to the absolute demolition of a building or its construction from newly fabricated pieces. This habit is wasteful of embodied energy and a contributor to cultural amnesia. Though spolia is an ancient and timeless technique of sustainable construction, the present-day challenge is a contemporary application of this practical method of design.

Building the Fort Beauséjour

I've been learning about the construction of Fort Beauséjour lately. It's a pentagonal fort, that follows a standard simple-bastion style designed by the French military engineer Sébastien Le Prestre, Seigneur de Vauban, commonly known as Vauban. His designs set up basic and advanced principles for all defensive structures to be built under the French Empire, Beauséjour being one such example.

In the text Fire and Stone: The Science of Fortress Warfare 1660-1860 by Christopher Duffy, the author goes into a fair amount of detail as to how and why these forts were designed, how they were situated.

[Image from Fire and Stone: The Science of Fortress Warfare 1660-1860. Duffy, Christopher. 1975.]

Where the Fortresses Were Built
Relevant to Fort Beau is the section on Ground. "The healthiness of the site is one of the most important single considerations which determined the position of the fort. Swampy sites were notorious for killing off the garrison." The fort is surrounded by the Tantramar marshes, though elevated on a small patch of firm soil, the trees and scrub cut away by the Acadians. The advantage of a site like this is that the fort can only be attacked from a few (dry) points, allowing a smaller garrison and upkeep. With every yard of swampy ground approached on the fort, its strength increases proportionally. However, in The Siege of Fort Beauséjour, by Chris M. Hand, the author states that the fort was actually poorly located, being too far from the water to have any impact on shipping along the river, and too far forward on the slope to defend the crest.

[Image from Forts of Chignecto, Webster, John Clarence. 1930.]

How the Fortresses were Built
Once the principle of building or extending a fort was made, costs, memorandums, drawings, shape and properties were all drawn up. They made clear the relationship of the fort to the whole of the countryside, to the distance of a cannon-shot. In drawing their plans for a new fortress, engineers began with the center point, where an average even ground was thought to be best and then determined the main direction of attack to set up the front entrance. In this pentagonal fort system, the engineers would have a set of large scale drawings on a rotating table situated at the very midpoint of the site. They would then extend a chain connected to a peg right in the center of the actual drawing and align it with points in the drawing. Once aligned, the worker would place a picket in the ground and continue through all the major points of the five bastions as per the engineer's drawing.

[Image from Fire and Stone: The Science of Fortress Warfare 1660-1860. Duffy, Christopher. 1975.]

Depending on the hardness of the soil, different foundations were laid. At Beauséjour, the soil must have been hard enough to be able to use a less severe foundation system otherwise used in marshy areas. In those sites, long vertical spikes are driven into the ground, attached to a timber raft system upon which the bastions are placed. Instead, it uses a gabion system, which is essentially baskets filled with stone (which come from a nearby quarry) and placed over a simple timber raft system, then backfilled with earthworks. The gabions are an extremely versatile 'material' to work with, and will very likely become one of the primary building systems for my proposal. (Herzog and de Meuron used a gabion system for the Dominus Winery in France in 1997). The gabions are an economical and sustainable solution, perhaps better suited for non-military applications, given their tendency to collapse under cannon-fire.

[Image from Fire and Stone: The Science of Fortress Warfare 1660-1860. Duffy, Christopher. 1975.]

Drawing the Fort
Learning to draw a pentagon is not the most difficult part about starting a site plan -- it's figuring out which system the first engineers used to draw the pentagon. There are more than eight systems (see this website to gauge their complexity). What I'm learning is that the memory of this place is quietly being spoken through its geometry.

[Image from: The Siege of Fort Beauséjour 1755. Hand, Chris M. 2004.]

As I've sketched out above, these concentric circles which are used to construct a pentagon fit exactly to the edge of the site's ridge. This means that that proportion would determine the overall size of the fort and construction thereafter. In knowing the approximate size of that initial face (known as the line of defense), laying out the pentagon with pegs can commence. A revealing difference of rationality: the French built the south-facing line of defense as their main entrance which faces the direction of attack. After its capture, the British reversed the fort, moving the entrance to the back and converting the old entrance into a cannon battery, allowing full control of the ridge.


A lot is written about the difference of quality in leadership between the French and British at the fort, and this is an additional distinction, for what it's worth.

Fort Beauséjour | Fort Cumberland

:::SITE SELECTION:::
I've selected a site for my thesis, pending Marco's approval. Each thesis proposal requires a site as a starting point for a theory and a building design. A site selection can change as often as one is willing to start from scratch, but ideally should be the enduring focus of one's thesis. Though some advisers don't push for an initial site selection, Marco has emphasized this is the most important task at first, as well as a building type for the proposed site.


I've chosen Fort Beauséjour (aka Fort Cumberland), a French stone fort built in 1751-55 located on the west bank of the Missaguash River near Sackville, New Brunswick. The site overlooks the desolate Tantramar Marshes and the Bay of Fundy. It was originally built as a counter to the British occupied Fort Lawrence near Amherst. Upon partial completion, the fort was captured by British forces and New England volunteers; commander Louis Du Pont Duchambon de Vergor capitulated within two weeks. The fort was renamed Fort Cumberland and strengthened for use in the Seven Years' War and the American Revolutionary War.

The attack on Fort Beauséjour was the start of what became known as the Great Upheaval (le Grand Dérangement) of Acadians in the Maritimes. Fort Beauséjour was a much greater facility than Fort Lawrence, and so the British chose to abandon Fort Lawrence and permanently occupy Fort Beau.


At first, I'm amazed to find grown-over ruins in rural maritime Canada. On top of this, I'm excited to investigate the micro-histories of the site and through it, conceive of architecture from the site's FRAGMENTS. I'm really interested in studying fragments or the idea of fragmentation in architecture -- lately I've been researching physical and metaphysical fragments. Physical fragments are like what you see in Michael Reynold's architecture from Garbage Warrior -- pieces of refuse re-utilized or re-invented as something new and surprising, like glass bottle walls for example. With Metaphysical fragmentation, this is a whole realm of theory that is extremely diverse in opinion and literary stance, but a by-product of post-modernist thinking in architecture. I won't get into it now... At the heart of things is a drive to use fragments for storytelling, sustainability, and memory.

I'm interested in the Fort, but also Acadian buildings, which, according to Marco are the hardest to locate, not because they were destroyed in the Great Upheaval, but because they additive buildings. When searching for an Acadian building, one might find it within a Victorian home, and before that, a French Canadian home, but at the heart is the Acadian building. Like in Rome, you can find a building that has layers upon layers dating back centuries. The building's legacy is told through its evolution of pieces. In selecting Fort Beauséjour, I'm targeting a moment where this thought process was cut off, and proposing to continue that tradition, which goes against many preservation laws by desanctifying the building and renewing it with purpose.

Here's a recent collage I've whipped up in anticipation of this weekend. I found a journal in the library of John Thomas and Louis de Courville in Fort Beauséjour which inspired me a little:


From Friday till next Tuesday I'll be visiting the site.