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.

Rolling Huts

This just in, our project has apparently been done before. This is Olsen Sundberg Kundig's "Rolling Huts". Okay...not bad...but I don't see any secret society-carts, or seal-cutting-carts. Still, they look pretty cool and probably don't function very well, like ours. Nice.








Thanks Nico for the link.

CCA Charrette Website

The CCA has just recently updated their website by posting all of the submitted work by students, including a brief write-up of the finalist teams. Here's what they had to say about ours:

"The jury greatly appreciated the humorous, narrative approach that nonetheless upheld the proposal's practical and critical objective by revealing the fundamental needs of the village residents. The small buildings proposed act as characters who recount the diversity of the activities and needs of the people of Nunavik. They weave a dialogue between the sedentary nature of the existing houses and the more mobile and progressive needs associated with the actual life style. The proposal's “fun” dimension, the appeal to the imagination and the potential for self-construction in this both didactic and anti-establishment approach are very stimulating and contribute to making the particular nature of daily life in the North better known."


To see the updated page, go here and click on 'projects'.

CCA Design Charrette

[Google Earth Image of Inukjuak, from a link on CCA website]

[Image from Index of CCA/InukjuakImages]

"PREAMBLE
Nunavik, the vast Inuit territory of Northern Quebec, is gripped by an ongoing and systemic housing crisis. A history of inadequate and insufficient housing coupled with an exploding demographic has created an urgent public health situation manifested by severe overcrowding, deficient sanitation and ventilation, the spread of infectious diseases, psycho-social stresses, and violence. This crisis exists across Inuit communities of the North, but it is worse and worsening in Nunavik.

The housing crisis is a political and a historical issue, but it is also very much an issue of culture and of architecture. The extremely accelerated and forced transition of the nomadic Inuit into sedentary communities between 1930 and 1950 was an enormous cultural upheaval with widespread repercussions for the Inuit and their way of life. A sophisticated array of Inuit artefacts and nomadic architectures had evolved over thousands of years and is proof of a thriving material culture which was completely adapted to its northern environment. In contrast, the contemporary architecture the Inuit now inhabit is to a large extent derived from the architecture, the climate and the culture of the South. Is it any wonder then that the Inuit do not feel “at home” in their new homes?

This year’s Charrette challenges students to propose an architecture adapted to the northern environment; an architecture of the North : an architecture properly oriented for the wind which blow strong and cold from the northwest all winter whether we live in Montreal or Inukjuak ; an architecture which corresponds to the extreme variations in sunlight experienced from season to season at high latitudes ; an architecture which reflects the traditional but also the modern ways of life of today’s Inuit societies ; an architecture which addresses the present housing crisis in Nunavik."

[Image from Index of CCA/InukjuakImages]

[Image from Index of CCA/InukjuakImages]

[Image from Index of CCA/InukjuakImages]

THE STORY
In our group of five grad students, we dedicated the first of three long nights to understanding the major issues concerning the town of Inukjuak (pronounced Inoo-joo-ack). We bounced many different ideas off of each other but were very much hindered by our own limited understanding of the culture and how forcible of an intervention can be appropriated to such a fragile culture. One of the root problems in itself is that a violent intervention has already taken place by a government housing band-aid plan that has de-centered the Inuit culture altogether. To put things into perspective, the Inuit here are living in a suburban community model, cutting seals on their kitchen floors, because kitchen counters make no sense for this task. They eat on the floor and so the 'southern' kitchen and dining layout is completely inefficient for their intents and purposes. There is no correspondence between culture and home.

[Image from Index of CCA/InukjuakImages]

We struggled as a team to reach a balance between the extremes of a violent and timid solution. Where one of the project requirements was to design a temporary housing solution for eighty young men, we proposed to design eighty tools for these eighty men. The idea was that these eighty people would all have customized tools where they would have to work together as a community to build the houses (which we didn't design). As an idea, it was nice to chew on for a while, but we had a hard time representing and actually understanding the idea and practicalities as a team. Our group collapsed the day before we had to submit our project to Montreal. One member quit.

RENAISSANCE
We took the opportunity to start from scratch. Our new idea was to design a pre-fabricated cart, much like a boat trailer, but fitted with an inhabitation on it (think of it as a pop-up camping trailer). This time, we approached the project from a completely different angle. We decided to emphasize our design on responding to the social crisis that is a by-product of the housing crunch. So, we designed 35 unique carts that cater to specific events that are important to their culture, to their health, their education etc, and each cart having a backup function as a sleeping cart. We designed seal-cutting carts, star-gazing carts, kitchen-carts, science-carts, music-carts, dance-carts etc. The carts are all based on the nomadic lifestyle of the Inuit. Each cart can be hitched onto a vehicle, or pulled by several people, ideally to spaces between the hugely separated houses, or even to different towns. The carts can then be linked with a link-cart to make a whole cluster of events. So imagine a tool-making-cart linked to a story-telling cart linked to a kitchen-cart. The combination of these events create dynamic and flexible situations, all responding to the afflictions: privacy, stress, amnesia, and boredom.

As soon as the idea was formed, we started production and called in reinforcements. Because many of our original team members had other personal commitments, our team roster went as low as just one person manning the project at a time. Nevertheless, our great friends came to the rescue and helped draw 35 carts through the night. We managed to print the panel in just the right amount of time and rush to the bus station to drop off the panel in Montreal. The project was only 20 hours old by the time it was printed and en route to Montreal. The result:

[Our dream-team panel. Isn't she a beauty? Thanks Ed, Nico, Jess, Morgan, Max, Marc, Matt]

RESULTS
On the Monday evening, while attending the reception in one of the UQAM buildings, it was announced that our team won Honourable Mention! The judging was split into two categories, ACTION and IDEA (or agitation in French), with a 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and Honourable Mention in the action category, and two awards, 1st prize and honourable mention in the idea category. We won honourable mention under the IDEA category! Apparently the categories were formed spontaneously, based on the split in design strategies submitted by teams. The team that beat us was from McGill and submitted an all-text panel. It included test-site application forms for people to develop houses in the town, or so I believe. Another Carleton team placed second under the Action category. Congratulations and huge thanks to our whole team! Way to go Carleton!

NEW SLIDESHOW ADDED



LINKS
Watch Tugaliak (Ice Blocks)
Watch Qulliq
Watch Issaituq
CCA website

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.

CCA Design Charette

I will be participating in a Design Charrette from Thursday October 30th to Monday, Nov 3rd with fellow grad classmates in Montréal. Last year, our class was well represented and got honourable mention for their design. A description of the project as copied from the CCA website:

The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), in collaboration with the École de Design de l'Université du Québec à Montréal, Université de Montréal, McGill University, Université Laval, Carleton University and Ryerson University is organizing a design charrette related to the ongoing housing crisis in Nunavik. Participants will be invited to propose design solutions at a variety of scales encompassing urbanism, architecture and industrial design.

The university charrette will run from Thursday October 30th to Monday, Nov 3rd 2008. All projects submitted will be exhibited at UQAM’s Coeur des Science (175, avenue du Président-Kennedy) from November 3-5th 2008. This is the 14th edition of the university charrette. It is now an annual forum for young creators in the fields of design and planning, bringing together the full range of design-related disciplines: architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, industrial design, interior design, and graphic design. In addition to university students, the charrette welcomes young designers (recent graduates) participating in internships with professional associations in Quebec.

The Flying House of Loreto

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.

History.

Governor General "Art Matters Forum"

[Image from the Governor General's website]

Yesterday, the Pit was transformed to host the Governor General Michelle Jean and panelists David Hughes, president and CEO of Habitat for Humanity Canada, Jean-Claude Marsan, architect and urban planner (U of Montréal), and Sheryl Boyle, assistant professor from Azrieli School of Architecture (Carleton), for a discussion of sustainability: "How do we sustain buildings? How do buildings sustain us?". I encourage you to read the framework for last night's discussion on the Rideau Hall blog. You can also watch the entire podcast of the event from the website.

Old Registry Office, Ottawa

A recent case study in Urban Heritage Conservation seminar with Jim Mountain:

[Image of the Old Registry Office, Ottawa. Photograph from: Heritage Ottawa Official Website]

Context
In 1873, the City Registry office was built to contain both Ottawa and former Bytown’s official records of property history, land ownership, and names of land proprietors. The building was used for this purpose until 1909, later to be sold to the Federal Government in 1935. In the 90’s, the building was bought by the Viking-Rideau Corporation (developer and owner of the Rideau Centre). This purchase was part of a land-exchange deal between the Department of Public Works and Government Services. In this deal, there was no commitment to preserve the structure (Fleming). The Registry Office is only one of four remaining in Ontario, and unique in many architectural aspects, including its twelve-foot deep foundations designed to prevent theft of the official records by tunneling.

Key Issues + Solutions
The future of the Registry Office is dependent on development of the Viking-Rideau Corporation which is in the process of a major expansion of the downtown shopping centre. The new mall hopes to include about 110,000 square feet of retail space, including two floors, a third mezzanine, and two-storey underground parking. There is also much discussion of expanding convention space. The construction of this project will be taking place east of the shopping centre, on a surface parking lot at the corner of Rideau and Nicholas street. The vacant Ogilvy building overlooks the site, and is also bordered by a traffic loop on Besserer street.

[Figure 1: Proposed sketch of new Rideau Centre at Nicholas and Rideau. The current site from this perspective is a surface parking lot. Image from SkyScraperLife forum (http://www.skyscraperlife.com/canada/3429-rideau-centre-expansion.html#post70187).]

The Registry Office lies to the south of this proposed area of development, but Viking-Rideau wishes to move the existing structure from its current site to an alternative location at 60 Waller Street, the corner of Waller and Daly, to clear a path for future growth of the Rideau / Congress Centre. Viking Rideau has confronted the major issue of structural concerns in such a move, and have confirmed in an engineering study that the structure can be safely displaced to its designated alternate location (Fleming).

[Figure 2: Site map of proposed alterations to the Rideau Centre and the Registry Office. Image from Google Maps with modifications by the author.]

The Heritage Ottawa organization believes that the ideal solution is to leave the building in its place and that all future development does not encompass the building, but reveal it in its entirety (Fleming). Failing this, Heritage Ottawa claims they would reluctantly support moving the entire building to its alternate site.

Critique
Relocating a heritage building should not be considered a last resort in conserving the character of a heritage building. Relocating and reusing buildings and their fragments has been used since antiquity in both Western and Eastern cultures. Essential to heritage conservation is the notion of conservation versus preservation. The former is the sustainable continuation of a building’s use and meaning, while preservation is a lock-setting, freezing a building in time so that it can be looked at, but not inhabited as a contemporary. If a building or culture is to survive in a naturally functioning way, buildings have to adapt: to be moved around, expanded, disassembled, relocated, or turned upside down. The moment they are preserved as sacred objects, they lose functionality and cultural relevance. If we consider Rome as an example, Michelangelo removed stone directly from the Coliseum to lay the courtyard for the Farnese Palace (Crowther, 2). This is an example of using fragments from other buildings as an energy and material availability concern but also authorship of relating the meaning of the Coliseum to the Farnese Palace. In Japan, builders of traditional timber used a construction technique that allowed their buildings to be taken apart and rebuilt elsewhere, sustaining the cultural knowledge of how to build in their traditional techniques. In this way, “remodelling, removal and reconstruction of buildings is possible according to life styles’ (Kikutake, 26-27) – a completely different regard to heritage and sustainability as we perceive it today.

[Figure 3: Sketch by Wilna Clark of the Registry Office relocated to 60 Waller Street, next to the Arts Court. Image from the summer 2004 Heritage Ottawa Newsletter, Volume 31, No. 2.]

The main underlying issue of the Registry Office is location. Moving the Registry Office to its new location as one whole piece does strip the building of its original context, but it’s only moving to the next block. It still maintains its connection to the community. As an option, the excessive stone in the building’s twelve foot deep foundation could be re-used as benches or garden walls on the same location in the future Rideau expansion as a marker of its past presence.

Leaving the building as it is on the other hand will challenge the future design of the Rideau Centre to frame the Registry Office (having to expose all four sides of the existing building), but in doing so, turns the building into a museum artifact. Could we not allow the Rideau Centre to incorporate the Registry Office into its design and in doing so, truly recognize it as “an important source and reminder of local civic history?” It’s a tragic waste of embodied energy constructing such a building to keep it locked until Doors Open Ottawa.


Bibliography

• Crowther, P. 1999, ‘Historic Trends in Building Disassembly’, ACSA/CIB 1999
  International Science and Technology Conference. Technology in Transition: Masting the Impacts.
• Fleming, D. "Future of Historic Registry Office a Concern." 2001. http://www.heritageottawa.org/english/frontpage/registry.htm (accessed 21/09/2008).
• Kikutake, K. 1995, ‘On the Notion of Replaceability’, World Architecture, vol. 33,
  p26-27.

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.

Pop - Up vs. Tree House

Treehugger has just posted an article about London architect David Adjaye's Pop-Up House project in the London Design Festival, and it appears a bit suspect to me... suspect, you ask? M'yessss... My most loyal fans may recall exactly one year and one day ago, the post entitled 'Ark Magazine', a publication on Jessie's winning pavilion design for the Wood Studio course in Helsinki. Some striking similarities here...

David:

Jessie:

David:

Jessie:

David:

Jessie:

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.