on site 39: tools by on site review

ON SITE r e v i e w

TOOLS 39 summer 20 2 1

S White

From the call for articles: which is the tool here? the book, or the map? or the multi-function pliers. When I posted this pair of pliers years ago on the On Site miscellanea page, someone wrote back from Brazil saying they were window dresser’s pliers. They hammer and pull small nails and tacks, they clip wire, they pry things, they are the size of your palm and fit in your pocket. But here, in this case, they simply hold the little street atlas open long enough to take the picture. The 1969 London street atlas is open to a section of the dockland where I worked on the restoration and conversion of an 18th century granary and wharf building in 1975. The atlas was a tool for finding new paths to cycle to from Sloane Street to the Prospect of Whitby next door to our buildings, which I see from Google maps are no more. The pocket road finder is now a tool that checks my memory. q

ON SITE r e v i e w

TOOLS 39 summer 20 2 1 contents Stephanie White, editor

Introduction

Michael M Simon

Toolbox-thing

Ron Benner

Trans/mission November 17, 2019

Scot Bullick

Collected Tools

Yann Ricordel-Healy

Signifying Objects

Photolanguage: Nigel Green, Robin Wilson

The Stereoscopic Lens Adaptor

Stephanie Davidson

SM 9711031

Karianne Halse

Measuring Tools

Mark Dorrian

On the Level

Stephanie White

Small Level

Suzanne Mathew

Tools Talk Back

Roger Mullin

Drawing Modelling Instrument

Yiou Wang

Magnifying Liliputians

Lawrence Bird

Ice Tools

Greg Snyder

1996 Terramite T5C, AKA ‘Buster’

Douglas Robb

Learning from the Tree Crusher

Adrian Cooke

Branding Irons

Emily Vogler

Grain Bikes

Michael Blois

The Roundover Bit

David Murray

Lost Devices

Miscellaneous tool sightings

Masthead and contributors

40: the architect’s library

41: infrastructure

calls for articles: 41: infrastructure

front cover back

Trenching tool, found beside the highway Estwing hatchet, found in the basement

on site review 39: tools

introduc t i o n stephanie white Tools. Even the simplest of concepts can open up enormous boxes full of semiotics, definitions and other complexities. It must be the times, we all read too much theory at school and it has marked us like a chalk line Have thought a lot about tools since posting the call for articles, receiving the proposals and ordering this issue; thinking of transitive and intransitive tools, much like verbs. Some tools are single action things, others are part of a process: their particular use means little without a place in a chain of events. If the tool simply exists, and one delights in its making, its potential, its appearance, it rests as an intransitive object: meaning stops there. If a tool is important because it performs in a way that enables some change, it is transitive. In keeping with the materiality that is On Site review’s preoccupation, I have opted to go with things of material substance, beyond words and lines on paper, which often carry the most important qualities of architecture and design, but for this issue we want to break down process into acts of hand and tool. Tools have form. They can be simple or complex, but they all have a task, and their main import is the performance of that task. Yann Ricordel-Healy suggested I read Caroline A Jones’ 1996 Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist, specifically Smithson’s ‘relation to tools as expressed through his writings and photographic documentation’.1 Jones points out that the post-studio art of the 1960s signalled a change in how art was produced — no longer the studio-atelier system but something superlatively American and masculine: a post-war industrial production of art. Her case studies are Frank Stella, Andy Warhol and Robert Smithson who all eliminated the authority of the hand and moved on to tools as generators of art objects. In Smithson’s case his tools were bulldozers and dump trucks. This stopped me in my editorial tracks, such as they are. My choice of tools as the subject of an On Site review summer issue was mostly because I like tools, we all have tools we use and love. The tools I had roughly in mind all had to do with the hand when the first three submissions came in: a tree-crusher, a backhoe called Buster and a piece on methodology. Of the tools you see here, in this issue, only a few are hand-held.

Mark Dorrian suggested I read Fabio Morábito’s Toolbox, pointing out that the tree-crusher, backhoe and methodology were all tools of pain. So many common tools are about cutting, breaking, ripping apart — violence inflicted on some unsuspecting material. Which is where, several months later, Caroline Jones’ outline of post-studio art as a masculinist, violent disruption of hitherto passive material, touches tools of pain. Smithson’s 1969 Island of Glass was planned for Miami Islet, ‘wind swept, preferably flatish and barren, in short an island that would have no commercial value’, in the Strait of Georgia off Vancouver.2 Controversy at the time was local. A barge of broken glass on its way from California to Miami Islet was intercepted as just more US junk to be dumped in Canada. Theoretically and conceptually, the project shifted to a search for other sites, culminating in Map of Broken Glass (Atlantis) and Map of Broken Clear Glass, both gallery installations. The feet of seagulls and the seals that would unwittingly climb onto an island of glass shards were outside critical discourse. It is still seen that his ‘dialectical method eschewed sentimentality and anthropomorphism, viewing the landscape as always in flux and apprehended in a necessarily violent confrontation of mind and matter’. 3 Looking back on it now, Smithson’s project is violent all the way through. And imperialist, and colonial. Tools of colonisation range from guns to treaties, railways to residential schools. Tools are enablers. And a vast range of enabling technologies allows ideas to be planted as surely as does a new seed drill. q

There are many ways to consider tools; clearly in their material and operative sense as a collection of metals and woods, machined parts and handles assembled to perform some task, and as instruments of measurement, taking the temperature of our desire to register the world we have inherited, mashed and manipulated, bruised and over-heated. Rather than On Site review’s self-selecting gender balance, very few women submitted articles this time. Where are the sewing machines that transform planar material into 3d forms? the knitting needles that make lines into complex garments, the bendy spatulas that smooth drywall better than those big rigid things made for the purpose? Is it that the word tool itself is something from the world of men’s work, and that women don’t think of the things they use as tools, rather simply as how to do something? q

1 C a r o li ne A Jon es. Mac h i n e in the Stud io: C onstructing the Postw a r A m e ri c a n Ar ti st. C h i cag o: Univer sity o f C hicago Press, 2019 2 h t t ps : //h ol ts m i th s on f ou n datio n.o rg/island-bro ken-glass 3 h t t p s : //j oh n cu l b e rt.word p ress.c o m/2014/10/04/erratics/

on site review 39: Tools

TOOLBOX- T H I N G MICHAE L M SIMON

M i c h a e l S im o n

I’m staring at this toolbox. At least it looks like a toolbox. It’s toolbox shaped. It’s almost rectangular, a bit more than a forearm long by a hand wide and tall. The two longest edges on the top are chamfered thirty degrees or so. Without having to pick it up, I can imagine its weight and it gives the sense that it is made of metal. The colour is that bright fire engine red that a lot of metal toolboxes are painted. It has a hinged handle on top and a draw latch on the front - both have shiny nickel plating. It looks a lot like the toolbox that followed my dad around when I was growing up. If it wasn’t on the workbench in the garage, it was in the trunk of the car - wherever we were going. “Just in case” he would say. It looks just like that, except for one small thing. Well, more like, for the absence of one small thing. It is missing a line. The line. There is no line to divide top from bottom, lid from box. On any other toolbox that line is a seam. Really, it’s the absence of a physical line that is important there as well. Maybe it is more importantly a space demarcated, in fact, by two lines – one that defines the top edge of the box and another that defines the bottom edge of the lid. The tiny radius created by the hemmed edge of the metal however further dissolves the line and upon staring it is more of a soft dissolving gradient - from bright red to blackness. Either way, whatever you want to call it, it’s not here, not on this toolbox-ish thing. This toolbox cannot be opened, not physically anyway, not without destroying it. Whatever is in there is never coming out and nothing else is ever going in. Its contents, even if just empty space, are forever cut off from the outside world. I remember, as I laid down that last weld that finalised the division of inside from out, the focus of making was momentarily broken by the feeling of doing something wrong. The contents can now only be contemplated. But is it a toolbox? Was it ever a toolbox? I mean, it looks like a toolbox. I cannot NOT see a toolbox when I look at it. As I write this, it just continues to sit there, quietly, doing whatever it is doing. Is it useless? I would say no. This particular toolbox was never made to open, not literally anyway; it was never intended to contain or store another physical tool. It was made to be made and now it is a point of focus, enabling me to write this paper, and at least in this moment it’s doing that perfectly well. Like a word said too many times – toolbox, toolbox, toolbox, toolbox, toolbox – this object is moving farther and farther away from normative sense the longer I look at it, and in a way it is taking the toolboxes it represents along with it. q

on site review 39: tools

trans/mi s s i o n : November 17, 2019 ron benner

R o n B e nne r

Trans/mission: November 17, 2019. The date refers to an article/op-ed in The Globe & Mail by St. Louis-based journalist Sarah Kendzior where she described the Trump administration as “a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government.” I subsequently bought her book, Hiding In Plain Sight, in April, 2020 which became the title of an open-call, online exhibition for the Embassy Cultural House which was zoom- launched on October 30, 2020 with 51 contributors. For the exhibition I photographed the process and tools involved in the making of Trans/mission: November 17, 2019 which was completed on October 8, 2020. The tools used were the following: The Globe & Mail newspaper, the op-ed article and sentence, “a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government” by Sarah Kendzior, watercolour paper, Mexican stencils, a ruler, a pencil, a mortar and pestle (cochineal), a Mexican lime squeezer (limes), a stainless steel cup and spoon, a recycled plastic container, a paint brush and a Canon Rebel 35mm camera. Before the arrival of Europeans, the cochineal insect (a scarlet red) and the indigo plant (a translucent blue) were major trade items exported by the indigenous people of Oaxaca, Mexico to other parts of the Americas over thousands of years. I have used these colours, both raw and ground, in my work since 1987. q

on site review 39: Tools

embassyculturalhouse.ca

collecte d t o o l s s c o t b u ll i c k

S c o t B ullic k

Oracles Garden, 2020

This best represents my first instincts to collect and when the habit reaches mature saturation one has to make difficult decisions to find value in the items amassed. Delve deep and find the root of such instincts. Or reposition them and bring their aesthetics and history along. q

on site review 39: tools

signifyin g o b j e c ts y a n n r i c o r d e l -h e a l y

Self-portrait, digital photography © Ya n n Ri c o rde l -H e a l y 201 6

on site review 39: Tools

The Hammer, "Black Objects" series, steel, wood, wood dye, matt varnish, 9 x 25.5cm © Ya n n Ri c o rde l -H e a l y 2021

on site review 39: tools

T he Ster e o s c o p i c L ens Ada p t e r photolanguage: nigel green, robin wilson

N i ge l Gre e n /Ph o tola ng ua g e

photo fieldwork and fragmentation In 1924 F E Wright of the Geophysical Laboratory of the Carnegie Institute advocated the use of the three-dimensional effects of stereoscopic imagery in geological fieldwork, writing of its ability to enhance the visual account of ‘the story of the field relations between certain features’.1 Wright was drawing attention to the sometimes inadequate results of conventional photography within geological research and its ‘revisualisation’ with regards to photography’s capacity to record a strong enough ‘impression of space’ and of the ‘spatial relationship between details’ within the field. Noting that the taking of stereoscopic imagery is often associated with expensive, specialist equipment and impractical for the already over-burdened geologist in the field, Wright proposed that a sufficient result can be obtained through the careful taking of near-duplicate images with a conventional camera, and then provided the mathematical equations that would support effective stereoscopic imaging. We write (nearly one hundred years later) to advocate the misuse of stereoscopic technologies within the field of urban and architectural field work, in order to destabilise and re-invent ‘the story of the field relations between certain features’; to make utopic space through architecture’s ‘re-visualisation’. The constraints on equipment and cost in fieldwork outlined by Wright are familiar to us but have been improved by a more recent invention: the stereoscopic lens adapter. This is a relatively cheap addition to a standard 35 mm camera lens — a configuration of dual mirrors within a small and light-weight housing, facilitate the taking of dual images on a single 35 mm negative. The version we use is a 1980s Pentax Stereo Adapter.

on site review 39: Tools

The first time we used the adapter as a tool for speculative field work was in response the water meadow landscape of Christiania in Copenhagen during a project called Surface Tension (Brandon LaBelle, 2007), and the peripheral landscapes of the Swedish city of Malmö for the first phase of the project Land Use Poetics (Maria Hellström Reimer, 2009). Both of these projects were brief, with sites explored, work made and exhibited within a window of approximately five days. The Stereo Adapter was part of a tool kit aimed at the production of a radical imagery with little time for processing and evolution. The work from Land Use Poetics was exhibited in the Museum of the Sketch (Skissernas) in the university town of Lund and dedicated to preparatory sketches for public art, sculptural works and monuments. Although largely photo-based, we thought of the works we presented there as ‘sketches’ — propositional, but for a ‘monumental’ or ‘sculptural’ outcome that would remain absent (the preparatory imagery for a never-to-be-realised future work). This role of the photographic image as assuming a transitional status (not a definitive, referential one), also underpins our use of the Stereo Adapter in a broader sense, for we do not use it for the production and display of stereograms (the completed ‘3-d’ image manifest through the additional use of stereoscopic viewer), but for the qualities of the ‘raw’ print itself, as a duplicated image. We value it in its in-between state, for the way its lenticular duplication intervenes into and distorts conventional photographic space.

1 F.E. Wright, ‘Stereoscopic Photography in Geological Field Work’, Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences, vol 14, no. 3 (Feb 24th, 1924), pp. 63-72

Stereo print of Spillepeng, Malmö, 2008

In Malmö, the Stereo Adapter perhaps found its most pertinent use as a response to the landscape of Spillepeng, a new landfill peninsula projecting into the Baltic Sea, created with bagged waste from Malmö. Sections of Spillepeng had been landscaped by a team from the Landscape Laboratory of the Agricultural College at Alnarp. The dual stereo image posed a nexus of critical questions around the notion of new land, amplifying the sense of unease in the navigation of a terrain that was not simply being worked, but in the act of being made anew – its substrata, surface and its animate life all established little more than two years before our visit. Although Spillepeng was too new to be on coastal maps at the time, it was a model extension to the indigenous ecologies and habitats of Southern Sweden. An image of a shallow valley with young willows, with a season of regrowth after pollarding, captures powerfully the newness of the land, one which has not yet completely settled from the industrial processes of its creation. The stereo print amplifies a sense of disjunction in the terrain: on one hand, the photographic image itself could be said to resonate with a history of art of the worked landscape such as Van Gogh’s sketches of Dutch farming landscapes around Nuenen, or Peter Henry Emerson’s documentations of the Norfolk Broads (both from the 1880s), even Rembrandt’s etching St Jerome Beside a Pollard Willow (1648). On the other hand, the effect of the doubled image within the stereo print suggests processes of replication, cloning, the artificial; a terra forma, a sci-fi landscape in which the assumed relationship between the natural and man-made has to be completely reassessed.

N ig e l G r e e n/ P ho t o la ng ua g e

A distinctive feature of prints using the Stereo Adapter is the black border in the centre of the dual image, which occurs as a result ofa blind spot between the two mirrors. This is not a crisp demarcation between the two, as with a stereo camera, but an unpredictable void in vision that distorts the inner margins of both. With practice one can mitigate the effects of the blind spot and limit its encroachment on the two halves of the image. However, with our interest in the intermediate phase of the print itself, we embrace the distortions of the central void as a generative zone of interference. It is a central frame that is rogue; that appears as a hostile inversion to the luminosity of the photographic image. It is a third region of image-making within the print, where the indexical realism of the photograph is in fatal dialogue with abyssal depth and obliteration.

on site review 39: tools

Rob in Wils o n / Ph o to l a n gu a ge

Nigel Green using the Stereo Adapter in La Courneuve, Paris, 2018

After a quite long period of inactivity the Stereo Adapter was reengaged in 2018 for field work in the outer districts of Paris. In research for the Brutalist Map of Paris we had come across the work of Renée Gailhoustet and Jean Renaudie at Ivry-sur-Seine town centre. Renaudie’s language of ‘difference’, of the cut and rotated plan in endless mutation, produced the well-known Étoiles D’Ivry. Just to the south east of the town centre is Gailhoustet’s lesser known Spinoza housing complex of 1971, akin to a Le Corbusian Unité, but with the public spaces of the undercroft divided not by regular pilotis, but by a series of monumental tectonic slabs with arches and circles cut-out, a visual play of recessional screens and intersecting spherical geometries creating a sculptural space of promenade with diverse opportunities for repose and for sheltered socialisation. Our use of the Stereo Adapter at Ivry was driven by a curiosity as to what the stereo would do to an already highly complex architecture. We were working toward a particular curatorial dissemination, an exhibition in the foyer of London’s Barbican Centre, Re-wiring Brutalism.

Whereas the earlier stereos, taken and printed using analogue methods, were left either untreated or subject only to light interventions (such as the addition of a spot stains of coffee), the stereo prints of Ivry were processed digitally with additional layers added in Photoshop. These in part respond to the architecture of the stereo print itself, as much as the architecture represented with it, re-enforcing its internal frames and borders, and adding colour tints to accentuate the effects of the doubling of the image. Within the example shown here of Cité Spinoza, we see a core at the centre of the image where a detail of the undercroft’s structure and the fenestration of a community building remains legible, relatively stable, but doubled. In the outer regions and margins of the image, however, dynamic effects of compression, overlap and transposition take hold. The Stereo Adapter has re-moulded space radically, the hazard of mirror-play and its distortions introduce a phantom tectonics and a theatrical sense of mobility to this space of vital structure. Pilotis dissolve before they meet the ground, and are eaten by colour as if by acid. At the foot of the image a doubled procession of heavily pruned botanical forms appear, jutting out of the lower, black frame of the stereo, grotesque and gesticulating, like Surrealist marionettes. In hindsight, with these monstrous botanical denizens at the base of the image, the grotto-like enclosure of the wider scene, the tints of green and cerise, we can associate this revisioning of Cité Spinoza with a curiosity from the popular cultural history of stereoscopic imagery: the French Diableries of the 1860s to, roughly, 1900. 2 These were modelled, miniature fantasy scenes of the underworld recorded in stereoscopic photography, peopled by devils in revelry, served by an army of skeletons and young women. The scenes were enhanced with back-lighting and watercolour tints.

Stereo print of Spinoza Housing Complex, 2018.

N ig e l G r e e n/ P ho t o la ng ua g e

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The ‘devilry’ of our undercroft imagery, realised through the accidents of mirror-play, is not diabolically inspired, but perhaps critically associated with rogue spatial impulses akin to the underworlds of the Caceri d’ invenzione series of Piranesi, which indeed may well have been a distant reference in the minds of Gailhoustet and Renaudie themselves. They share a drive to break existing rules of spatial order, to overturn hierarchies of attention through disorientation, to actively assert the image as a site of spatial mutation which challenges that of architectural production. If there is a latent critique within the disorientations of our stereo prints, it is not so much directed at the architecture of Gailhoustet or Renaudie, as at the culture of imaging that currently disseminates such architectures on social media, and which defines a fetishised, global media spectacle of brutalist icons. For Re-wiring Brutalism we positioned Brutalism within the radical technologies promoted within the Barbican’s wider 2019 season of curatorial projects, called Life Rewired. We proposed Brutalism as a spatial technology that reached an apotheosis with the work of the likes of Renaudie, the implications of which are yet to be fully appraised. Rather than presenting examples of Parisian Brutalism as a conventional architectural, curatorial portrait, we wished to introduce the work of Renaudie and Gailhoustet as part of a fragmented sampling of brutalist spaces, which included imagery of Chamberlin, Powell and Bon’s Barbican itself, presented in-situ. The Stereo Adapter was the primary tool of fragmentation and the production of a comparative and defamiliarised aggregate of Brutalist space. In the article ‘Photography and Fetish’ the film theorist Christian Metz developed some thoughts on the differences between photography and film regarding the issue of fetishisation. 3 What emerges from his differentiation is a powerful sense of the force of the photographic frame as the imposition of an ‘immobility’ and a ‘silence’ through which still photography asserts its authority over the referent. He wrote, ‘Photography is a cut inside the referent, it cuts off a piece of it, a fragment, a part object, for a long immobile travel of no return’. In Metz’s understanding, the notion of the ‘fragment’ alludes to the referent of the photographic image itself, that which is presented as the centre of viewing and attention, but which, by definition, is formed through the exclusion of other things (the wider contingencies of a relational reality beyond the frame). This, we suggest, corresponds to the design object-centred structure of much architectural photography prevalent in professional architectural and social media. The raw prints issuing from the Stereo Adapter cannot be said to restore the relational complexities of a wider context beyond the architectural, object-centre, but they do actively fragment and disturb Metz’s ‘immobile’ ‘fragment’.

N ig e l G r e e n/ P ho t o la ng ua g e

Robin Wilson installing work at the Barbican Centre, 2019

Detail of Photolanguage’s exhibition at the Barbican Centre, 2019

2 For information on the Diableries see, https://www.londonstereo.com/ diableries/index.html 3 Christian Metz, ‘Photography and Fetish’, October 34 (1985), pp. 81-90 N ig e l G r e e n/ P ho t o la ng ua g e

on site review 39: tools

The opportunities for stereo duplication within the Barbican were diverse, reflecting the range of interior, exterior and transitional public spaces at different scales that one has access to there. I wish to describe here one image of a northerly section of the complex, within the undercroft colonnade space of the apartment blocks around Beech Gardens to invoke through description the potential of the raw print of the Stereo Adapter as a productive reordering and fragmentation of the architectural photograph, toward a reinvention of, to recall F E Wright’s words, the ‘spatial relationship between details’ and the ‘story of the field relations between certain features’.

One of the building’s massive jack-hammered pilotis, a signature component of the public spaces of the Barbican, is the ‘central’ referent of this image, but its centrality is, of course, immediately displaced and doubled. Its role in a stable and legible order of perspective depth within the colonnade and the garden’s rectangular lake is fragmented, and we see instead an ambiguous cluster of four columns. The doubling of the nearest column now suggests the cruder structural system of a sub-flyover space, whereas in the mid-ground beyond, columns are subject to varying levels of dissolution, with one almost withered and substituted altogether by the central black ‘frame’-void of the stereo print. Distortions at the base of the print introduce an uncertain threshold, a blurred jetty of mirror play, confusing the boundaries between solid ground and water. A radical transformation manifests at the right-hand-side where the mirror mechanism of the adapter imports a slice of urban detail from outside the expected scope of the frame: one of the three iconic Barbican towers, Lauderdale, is compressed into a skeletal slice of balcony and frame, reduced to a quarter of its actual thickness but still coherent as architecture and reminiscent of the slimmest of Hong Kong’s high-rise dwellings. This right-hand region of the image is configured like an arched aperture, or even a transparent column, and overlaid with a faint screen of dirtied orange, encouraging our gaze out to zones beyond the limits of the Barbican, where a blander, more recent office street façade pushes into the frame. The fetishised homogeneity of the Barbican enclave is broken by a sudden reminder of the wider contexts and conditions of urban modernity. q

Stereo print of Barbican Centre, 2019

N ig e l G r e e n/ P ho t o la ng ua g e

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sm 9 71103 1 stephanie davidson My washing machine sits in the corner. It is not attention-seeking. Dutiful, reliable, loyal, more of a friend than a machine. This is a portrait. q

Kenmore washing machine SM 9711031, age unknown

S t e p h a n ie Dav i dso n

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measurin g t o o l s karianne halse

Ka ri a n n e H a l s e

A collection of nine (ancient) plumb bobs Various materials: brass, iron, cotton (strings), wood (reels) Manufacturer and year of production: unknown Acquired in Venice, 2019.

The plumb bob is a measuring tool used for suspending a vertical line in space. It embeds a spatial relation, through the force of gravity. Suspended from a point above, the plumb bob embeds time and movement; requiring patience while seeking stability, balance and symmetry. The collection of ancient plumb bobs was acquired in Venice for a particular use. It was put into dialogue with a 3d photogrammetry operation, measuring Venetian building facades. The plumb bob was placed physically into the context, defining a vertical datum within the digital scans; a stable vertical in an environment where all other lines are everything but straight. In today’s society, the plumb bob as a measuring tool has become obsolete, replaced with laser technology possessing an outstanding degree of numerical precision. However, the plumb bob manifests a spatial relation and immediate relationship between the tool (object) and place – a quality which is rendered visible in a 3d environment where gravity, sense of scale and time is lost.

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Ka r ia nne H a ls e

Folding ruler (ancient, Danish) Materials: wood, brass Manufacturer: Thomas Aston & Sons Makers, Birmingham Year of production: Before 1897 (after 1897 taken over by I & D Smallwood) Acquired in Copenhagen, 2020.

The ancient Danish folding ruler embodies a bygone measuring system. The now abandoned system of measurement ‘tomme’ was replaced by the current metric system in 1907. The measuring unit of ‘tomme’ embeds a bodily relationship, where the human body acts as point of reference. One unit equals a thumb, with variation between countries: In Scandinavia, there were at least three different tomme-measurements (a Danish ‘tomme’-unit was 2,62 cm, the Swedish was 2,47 cm, and the Norwegian was defined as 3,14 cm). This folding ruler is acquired in Copenhagen for a particular use. It has been used in dialogue with a traditional panel door, measuring a sectional cut. First measuring with an ordinary metric folding ruler, the measurements of the door did not give any sense, giving strange numbers. However, when introducing the old folding ruler, it became clear how it spoke the language of the door. The logic of the door’s dimensions became revealed. The ruler itself possess bodily attributes. Operating the tool involves a performance of movement, and a choreography of rotation and folding out. Almost like a dancer. The hinges and rotation-mechanisms resembles joints between bones. Stretching out limbs, defining spaces between before returning into an entwined position. q

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On t he le v e l mark dorrian

M a r k D o r r ia n

There is something comforting and reassuring about this thing. I received it as a gift and it has always seemed to me to be a kind of moral object, in the same way that Joyce’s Leopold Bloom describes Davy Byrne’s as a ‘moral pub’. There is something of that world in it too, with its brass and hardwood, reservoirs of spirit and glass optics, which I imagine as seen in mid-day sunlight filtered through leaded windows. It has a calm demeanour, quite different from files or hammers or saws. Its role is not to act upon another object, but to rest in relation to it and to tell us something through that adjacency. The level’s presence bestows a stillness and it has to be still to be used. Its action doesn’t come from the application of some force, but in rest, when the movement of the bubble comes to a halt in its gently-arcing capsule of volatile liquid. The substance is a warm yellow and the bubble so thing-like that it might seem an object trapped in a magically liquid amber, or even a little parcel of air conveyed to us from some primeval past. The level is not graduated, only the middle point matters, and around this the tool is symmetrical – with the exception of a second liquid sight, this for reading verticality, which is let into one side of the instrument. Now, although I’ve just claimed that the level doesn’t demand the action of a force, of course it does, but it’s one not applied by its user, for it relies upon the differential effect of gravity upon the air and ethanol in the glass chamber – the same force that renders the surface of any bucket of water horizontal, or rather subtly compliant with the curvature of the earth.

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Levels seem to be about lines or planes, but in the first instance they are really – as the etymological link between level and the Latin libra implies – about points of balance around which these are projected. Spirit levels are scales that weigh things against one another, converting this vertical relation into a projection of horizontality that is ultimately tangential. The tapering curvature of the sides of this level, with the protective brass plates laid into the ends of its bottom face, I much enjoy, partly – I suppose – because it ambiguously both draws the object to a close and projects it, giving the instrument a conclusiveness while at the same time extending it by gesturing along the line it constructs. But the pleasure is also to do with the affinity that the resultant form suggests with liquidity, on which the tool’s principle of operation depends. The level’s ship-shape brings to my mind eighteenth-century engravings that I have sometimes seen of ships at sea emerging from below the horizon line, or Pliny’s story of a light at the top of a mast seeming to descend and eventually disappear below the watery surface as the boat recedes from view. While this level is a small object that fits comfortably in the hand, its sensitivity to great – planetary, even cosmic – forces makes it something much more than this and feeds the imagination with vast horizons. Today we may live in a world of unprecedentedly precise technologies, but I find they don’t – as this level does – give me an idea of precision that sets my mind in motion in the same way. The micro-circuitry embedded in my iPhone gives me information, but as an object it is, I have to say, far from a tool with which to dream. q

small me a s u r e m e n t s stephanie white

S W hit e

1:1

No information on this. I use it to level clocks, of which I have many, sitting on old chests of drawers which warp and unwarp with the seasons. If the clock mechanism is slightly atilt the clock doesn’t run for very long. Big fat mantel clocks bonging out their Westminster chimes every 15 minutes are rather looser in fit than the three Japy Frères clocks which are like skittish racehorses: elegant and termpermental. Sometimes just a piece of paper is enough for a shim. Longer levels skip over small variations, this little 4 1/2” level is for very local changes of grade. The eye can see when things aren’t quite square; the level indicates the degree. Contemporary levels centre the bubble between two lines; with this one you have to balance the ends of the bubble in relation to the middle. You can level clocks left to right by ear. The tic and the toc have to be absolutely equal or the clock won’t run. The small level is for front to back levelling, perpendicular to the pendulum arc: the clock will run if it tilts slightly to the back or the front, but eventually it will loosen the mechanism. Clocks communicate with each other when they are fairly close. Slowly, they will coordinate their speeds. I don’t know how this can possibly work other than something happens when sound waves meet brass. We can do fairly fine adjustments using the pendulum length, but the perfect adjustments are done at some molecular level and involve temperature and gravity: any change and things all go agley.

This level lives in its little case in my desk along with other rarely used but lovely metal things — letter stencils, WWI binoculars, a 50’ black steel tape measure in a leather case, a set of draughting instruments — all tools, meant to be used and which over their long lives have accrued a powerful presence. Even small penknives worn smooth by years in a pocket full of change have an insistent longevity: they might be beautiful, but they also work. They illustrate nothing but themselves. Is this my cabinet de curiosités, tools so far removed from contemporary daily life that they constitute an archaeology of things? But I have used most of them, I remember whose they were and where they came from. They are hardly curated — a compass, a mechanical dash board clock; there is a kukri and something else deadly I cannot bear to look at. But there is also a slide rule and my much-used ruling pen. We were once fluent in these tools. And we once fixed things. But we have become inarticulate and impatient. q

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Tools Ta l k B a c k suzanne mathew

figure 1 Market Square Weather Data Survey Weather instruments can generate large amounts of data about the environment. In this survey collected for Market Square in Providence, data measurements included wind speed, wind direction, temperature, humidity, pressure, and location. While the survey is thorough, the spatial effect is lost. a l l i m a g es: S u zan n e Math ew

When we experience outside space, our bodies sense a number of factors that we cannot see – changes in light, temperature, humidity, and sound create atmospheric envelopes that we move through, that we are aware of and that we consciously inhabit. But our sensory functions operate far too quickly for us to fully understand what we are experiencing, and as a result we often omit the dimensions of the phenomenal environment from our depictions of space. While weather instruments can measure near-invisible changes in microclimate, I’ve tried to develop methods for observing these phenomena to better understand how we ourselves can more fully sense exterior space. The utility of such tools goes beyond their mere capacity to measure: these tools talk back, and in that have the ability to increase our own capacity to notice. By using tools, I’ve been able to condition my consciousness to recognise the small changes in atmospheres that often evade us.

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My methods for surveying microclimates are simple: using hand-held weather instruments, I take incremental measurements of changes in light, temperature, wind speed and direction at certain intervals across a site. These measurements may be taken on a set grid, at set distances along a transect, or at specific moments of transition or change. These plotted measurements are used to generate a visual representation of the climatic atmospheres. Each survey I conduct requires a certain degree of in-the-moment responsiveness, of in-situ decision making, and this is where I’ve learned to hybridise both my body’s and my instrument’s capabilities.

good at: detecting contrast perceiving enclosure quickly recognising significant changes in atmosphere

good at: measuring and recording small incremental changes not good at: recognising patterns or space

figure 2 Body-Instrument dialogue

what the body notices Bodies and weather instruments have different relationships to environmental data. Bodies are adaptive: as we sense external conditions we adjust to maintain a level of internal stability – our pupils contract to control light, our circulatory systems have temperature gradients so that we can protect our core. Our skin’s sensitivity to heat, pain, and texture varies across our body’s surface. Because we are so good at remaining stable, small incremental changes in light, temperature, or moisture can be difficult to notice if we aren’t paying attention. In other words, we aren’t that good at sensing gradients. But what has become clear in my environmental surveying is that our bodies are really good at sensing contrast – a sudden change between two adjacent conditions, or a direct change happening in one place over time. As we move through space, we sense invisible edges between atmospheres: the boundary of a volume of shade where there is a sudden change in light and temperature, the cool moist volume of air that hovers near the water’s edge, the heat that travels up through a city street grate. These sudden changes mark the edge of a bubble of space, and by sensing atmospheric edges our bodies build our feelings of interiority and exteriority when we are outside.

what the tool notices, and what this tells the body The hand-held weather instruments I have used are highly sensitive and give a precise reading of environmental conditions to a tenth of a degree. It would be easy to assume they provide accurate measurements, but many of these tools are designed to take stationary readings or to adjust to changes slowly, and because of this they don’t acclimate as quickly as a body – accuracy often requires 1-5 minutes of waiting for an instrument to settle into its surroundings. In walking surveys, this has meant that the instruments are good at sensing gradients, but sudden contrast or change interrupts the instrument’s functioning as it needs time to recalibrate. These differences in behaviour create a dialogue between the body and the instrument that allows me, as the surveyor, to make more frequent and more sensitive observations by comparing what my body feels to what the instrument displays. We are often in disagreement, and these moments of incongruity force me to look more closely at what is going on. If the instrument is accurate, what am I not noticing? How is my body adjusting? If my body is accurate, has the instrument failed to acclimate? Or is it not affected by elements that are affecting me? In this dialogue I am forced to collect the data again, this time looking more closely, examining the context and environmental dynamics and understanding that my body is reading them all at once, while the instrument is pulling them apart. on site review 39: tools

figure 3 Market Square Microclimatic Mapping After data was collected it was mapped using GIS, Rhino and Grasshopper. The survey was conducted in a series of linear transects through key locations in and around the site. In this preliminary data mapping, color gradient points and their corresponding circle diameters represent the temperature measurements, and the arrows indicate wind direction and speed.

sensory space comprehension

a l l i ma ge s : Su za n n e M a th ew

figure 4 Market Square Atmospheric Projection This drawing uses the first mapping as a reference to render the spatial temperature gradients in the square. Tall canopy trees and the projected building shade create intermediate temperature zones between the river (left) and road (right).

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Bodies and weather instruments can both sense, but where instruments measure and collect data, bodies adjust, react and comprehend in real time. Instruments extract and isolate singular climate factors, bodies process multiple inputs at once and immediately compress them into a reading of comfort and space: our sensory impression is simultaneously qualitative and dimensional. These capabilities can be complimentary, but when they differ in the field, the complexity of our multi-sensory systems becomes legible. As an example, in the surveys of Market Square (figures 3 and 4), I often found that I disagreed with the temperature readings of the Kestrel weather meter that I was using, but in these disagreements I formed a clearer understanding of how multiple dynamic factors affected my own inner feeling of temperature.

S uz a nne M a t hew

figure 5 Thermal Envelope Sequence This final drawing remaps the same weather data as a notational sequence that describes the chronological experience of the body from the beginning to the end of each survey. Dash marks are used to indicate changing temperatures along the walks (a morning and afternoon survey). The spacing between the marks correlates to temperature, and indicates how the sensation of space might expand and contract based on the perception of thermal changes in the environment.

Market Square is a small urban brick-paved plaza, adjacent to the Providence River. In the summer, the site is exposed to full sun but also to an intermittent breeze that flows down the riverway, which is channelised and surrounded by urban conditions. A federalist brick building projects shade into the square, while on its other side a grouping of large oak trees creates a small, enclosed garden. Most of us may anticipate that it would be cooler in the shade, and warmer in the sun. But in measurement the river’s edge, though fully exposed, was 4°-9°F cooler than spaces further away from the river, even though some of those spaces were in deep shade. What I came to understand is that by the river my feeling of warmth was a negotiation between the warm air coming from the piazza and cool air hovering above the water, the impact of the sun’s radiation on my skin, and the intermittent cool breeze coming through the corridor. Here, while the instrument registered lower air temperature, my inner temperature began to rise due to the direct exposure to the sun, but the intermittent breeze created a fluctuating tempo of warming and cooling in a space that otherwise looked uniform. The intensity of light drew my attention to the surface of my skin and my feeling of space compressed, though in this spot I had the longest depth of view up and down the length of the river. While the temperature felt cooler in the shade, the instrument registered warmer air than expected in both the building and tree shade.

This clarified for me that the buildings and trees significantly blocked the cooling effects of the breeze, and that warmer air was getting trapped under the tree canopy, while the brick surface of the plaza retained heat and radiated warmth back into the plaza. Although it remained cooler than the urban street, it was warmer than the exposed space by the river (figure 5). Through these surveys my body has become more aware of moments of enclosure marked by phenomenal transitions, and I am also seeing that the dimensions of volumetric space are dictated not only by solid boundaries, or the distance of the horizon, but by the contrast of these atmospheric moments and their relative effect on the surface of my skin. The instruments I’ve used have their own metric scale and range of precision, but what has been more important is how they pose contradictions to my assumptions, and how they point out finer phenomenal gradients than I may notice when taking in all of the effects of a dynamic environment. Instruments and tools are conceived with specific functions, and in that are reflective of what we see as our own limitations. But what I’ve found is that the measuring tool can be treated as a temporary aid – that in borrowing and observing its own incremental sensing of the environment, we can tune our own. q

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Drawing M o d e l l i n g Instrume n t r o g e r m u ll i n

This is a scaffold for imagining: a box of bits that assemble to ring a spherical space for work, a jig that provides several extra sets of arms. Jump here to Cartesian spaces and remember Calder’s Circus, Hejduk’s Victims, travelling workers and pocketbook philosophers. This is a unique tool that is 25 years young. By design, it doesn’t do the same thing twice. It gives your hands a chance. Gauges of wire cross and mesh, scale collapses and reemerges as found form. q

R o g e r M ullin

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R o g e r M ullin

facing page, counter-clockwise from top: Carrying case, 2013. Tool disassembled Circular configuration (1/3) and tripod Untitled, 2013. Wire object produced with tool this page, from top: Untitled, 2013. Wire object produced with tool Plume, 2013. Wire object produced with tool

on site review 39: tools

magnifyi n g lilliput i a n s yiou wang Then God said ‘Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth.’ – Genesis 1:26-28

Scale figures, tools made in our own image, are widely used in architectural models and drawings. Our miniature facsimiles populate the scenes we create, filling in architectural spaces, landscape, places and their blank margins. Different from Divine Creation that endows people with agency, designers deprive scale figures of both agency and the human psyche. Scale figures are standardised, commodified tools in human shape. People, bodies that occupy the space, are the subject of architecture, they make demands upon space, they manipulate space, they enact space and they navigate space. Conversely, in architectural practice, minuscule versions of people are objects of architecture. Space demands them, manipulates them, and enacts them, and they just passively sit still in perpetual poses whose only existence depends on a designer’s representational needs. Although things that manipulate people’s emotions and actions can have agency, as Gell postulates with dolls, the resemblance of a scale figure to a social agent is only superficially visual.1 Despite the progression of technology and digital culture, photorealistic resemblance of miniature facsimiles to people is incrementally simplified to abstract symbols of humans, reducing their personness layer by layer. The scale figure cannot exercise agency when the decision of whether to add it and where to add it involves nothing but straightforward utility. But it is not trivial — a passive recipient of agency from the human architect, the scale figure registers intention and subconscious projection.

from left to right: Toy Soldier, circa 1920 Wooden mannequin vs Nendoroid Le Corbusier, Early sketch of Modular Man Chris Ware, comic character Woody Brown, from Rusty Brown, 2019 Tamiya 12622 1/350 Crew Set Eric Wong, detail from Cohesion

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utility ‘Man as measure’, an historic thought underlying art and architecture since the Renaissance, has persisted as an aesthetic to fix the proportions of architecture to those of the human body. From Vitruvian Man, to plaster cast figures, to wooden mannequins, the importance of man as measure presented the human body as a regulator of architectural form, a function which has a connection with, but is different from, the industrial indication of the scale of a space – the height of the ceiling, the width of the prospect space, the depth of the room. Originally man as measure meant replicating the proportions of the human body onto buildings, since the human body was believed to be perfect. However ‘man as measure’ has been used for decades as the comparison of the building scale to the size of an average 6-foot inhabitant. The scale figure gives the viewer a direct and perceptual understanding of spatial scale.

1 Gell, Alfred. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. 2 Jones, Wes. ‘Architecture Games’. Log No. 19 (Spring/Summer 2010), Anyone Corporation, pp. 25-39. 3 Wang, Yiou. ‘Form Follows Fiction – Narrative Drawings of Pictorial Profusion’, in Danilo Di Mascio of (ed.) EAEA15: Envisioning Architectural Narrative, University of Huddersfield, Huddersfield, UK. 2021.

non-architecture fillers

narrative

Figures are the loneliest part of an architectural proposition, as they violate many conventions of architecture and landscape practice. In sections, translucent figures disregard the natural rules of physicality. When architectural models and drawings are expected to be interventions, scale figures are expected to be accessory. In most cases, they are the only readymade portion of an architectural drawing or model, their nature should not compromise the perceived originality of the proposal. When a model is discarded, or when a new drawing file is opened in a software, the old figures get reused without any alteration, when such blatant copying is not tolerated in any other part of an architectural proposition. Scale figures can be obtained effortlessly in an age when the Internet is abundant with CAD freebies, but their very nature as a signifier of human beings evokes an uncanny second thought. Scale figures can be traded digitally from the Internet or physically from art supply stores. Now, as more varieties of scale figures are readily available for those architects to add scale to a drawing, the creators of the figures are mostly forgotten. Recognition of artistic intellect, from da Vinci to Le Corbusier, is now just a mechanical process of production.

As technology provides more varieties of architectural mediums, the utility of figures lies no longer in scale indication or measure, a simple ‘less is more’ proposition, 2 but in their ornamental potential and narrative aspect. It is a convention in both commercial architecture and architecture schools to populate drawings, renderings and models with figures to augment visual appeal. If figures on physical models are still called scale figures by tradition, those that populate 2-d drawings and renderings could be regarded as style figures.

Often added as a readymade in the last software along the workflow, and having no place in critiques and discussions, figures are assumed to be characterless. The discipline’s collective attitude toward scale figures reflects an architectural attitude toward nonarchitecture, an analogy of the self-sufficiency of the architectural discipline and its desire to only query its own medium in response to every question. The scale figure itself, not architectural in its properties or method, is brushed aside as one of the least serious portions of a presentation. A serious look at the scale figure punctuates and punctures the self-referential discourse of architecture.

Style figures speciated quickly with software development and thrive in the contemporary digital culture of architecture. Architectural and graphic designers make different kinds of style figures – realistic, silhouette, low-poly, vintage, pastel, funky, gender-fluid, punk, rigged – to satisfy diverse needs and fill market niches. These commercial repertoires of 2-d style figures as packs of 1:87 or 1:125 scale figures in plastic bags or hanging in plastic frames waiting to be popped out from the armature are mouldpressed, mass produced, standardised ornament. No matter how critics dismiss them as eye-pleasing sleight of hand that shifts the visual attention from the architectural space, style figures are effective in commercial practice and student work and will continue to be a strategy in representation. The stylisation and proliferation of miniature figures accompanies the postmodern transition of architectural models and drawings from representation to narrative, from prescriptive to imaginative. A postmodern interest in representation increasingly dissolves the causal relationship between ‘representation’ and a priori design, to the extent that representation gains autonomy. Style figures increase their own participation in a design narrative because such micro-narratives align with a postmodernist resistance to any meta-narrative. Architects and artists who design their own figures believe that their narrative can be told in no standard poses or standard appearances. Drawing Architecture Studio, Eric Wong and Chris Ware integrate figures into their spatial stories with spatial and temporal multiplicities: different stories and stories happening at different times appear simultaneously on the 2-d canvas, using an interplay of space and figures to convey asynchrony. 3 To the viewer, apart from visual pleasure typical of ornament, these drawings convey an engaging quality of intrigue, typical of fiction.

c o u rt e s y of Fon dati on L e C orb usier

c ourtes y C h ri s Wa re

h t tp:// w w w. e r ic w o ng . c o . uk

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4 Meredith, Michael, et al. An Unfinished ... Encyclopedia of ... Scale Figures without ... Architecture. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2018

5 Jones, Dora Epstein. “Little People Everywhere: The Populated Plan.” Log No. 50: Model Behavior, Anyone Corporation, 2021, pp. 59-71. 6 Sadler, Simon. “Games without Frontiers.” In Donetti, D. (ed), Architecture and Dystopia. New York ; Barcelona: Actar, 2019.

objec t- person scale

the construction of a model society

In their book of over 1000 scale figures, An Unfinished ... Encyclopedia of ... Scale Figures without ... Architecture, Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample argue that architects are responsible for the drawing or rendering of figures that might occupy their space.4 Documenting a wide variety of scale figures, copied, collaged, rendered, or hand-drawn by prominent architects, this book demonstrates a degree of self-reference at a small scale across different resolutions, from a direct self-portrait cropped photo placed in a render — a personal reference that the inhabitant is the architect themselves, to suit-and-tie figures metaphorical of Homo faber (working man), to nonspecific references to general people, to cursive or abstracted representations barely recognisable as humans. Meredith and Sample present scale figures detached from an architectural environment or proposition, rather as an intellectual exploration of them as variably personified objects.

Although scale figures may seem to be the passive recipients of agency in expression, persuasion or propaganda because they are reproductions of people, projections of people inescapably latch onto them – masculine, feminine, misfit, sitting, standing, stereotypical, atypical, young, old. Rather than cartoons that represent the individual designer’s world-building endeavour, as Dora Epstein Jones describes it, 5 scale figures should be understood as a collective phenomenon that reflects that which society thinks is ideal. Gender, race, posture, health and dress, each of these present on a scale figure embodies one aspect of what we project as the normative human. The act of populating the model or drawing with scale figures carries an inherent social discipline that normalises the inhabitants of an ideal society. We should be aware of how we choose to use these tools, and be alert that such decisions are not always as conscious as we want them to be.

While the scale figure might occupy an awkward, lonely position as an architectural device, scale figures outside architecture have other lives as sculpture, art objects and as toys. Early records of scale figures used to simulate military tactics can be traced to the seventeenth century in Europe. Unless a lead soldier is still being used in a model battlefield, its role is as a toy, and more latterly as a cultural collectible. The collector is less involved in playability and more interested in the figurine itself. Whether a toy or a relic, they contain the property of personhood.

Such awareness creates a new paradox — first, too much demographic specificity in scale figures distracts the viewer from the crux of the model or drawing. Second, what is an unbiased, nonidealist approach to the use of scale figures? Even if there is one, how do we focus on the figure’s ways of relating to and interacting with the space, rather than the personality or eccentricity of the scale figure itself?

If Alfred Gell had been writing Art and Agency: an anthropological theory now instead of 1998, his agency theory might have expanded from dolls to a variety of anthropomorphic playthings across the scale of personification: model figures, pose-able action figures and nendoroids. Garage Kits (GK) of anime, movies, and games are miniature resin sculptures of human shape – a line of highly fetishised scale figures. Their charisma as art toys, designer toys, and pop sculpture originates from the 2-d drawing of anime characters in concept design. They represent a representation. When such figures are used in architectural presentation, they represent a cultural position.

The scale figure as a utilitarian tool functions as a measure of scale, proportion, activity and convention. Demographic representation as an added utility is a sign that utopianism, an enlightenment egalitarianism, is shifting to identity as the representation of personhood.6 Generally in architectural scale figures a vestigial universalism lingers:whiteness and gender stereotypes prevail. To neglect the distinction between inclusivity and convention, and to mistake one for the other, is equally troubling. Inclusivity is a resistance to an idealised projection, and it must be achieved by abandoning one or more conceptions of what has been normalised. Intentionality in the choice of scale figures however, results in another projection of an idealised demographic that is equally and inevitably subjective and limited.

Using recognisable little objects of greater or lesser charisma provides animation to an otherwise unpopulated and bleak abstraction of space and building. The greater the personality of the scale figure, the easier is the entry to the architecture being represented. If we are searching for personhood to identify with, we are pre-disposed to think about the architecture as a space populated with people we know.

from left to right: TenGuSan limited edition vinyl art toy featuring himself in a Japanese Tengu mask by LTNC Toys, 269USD Francesca Perani Enterprise studio, illustrative scale figure. Figures at four different scales Scale figures from the renderings of (in order): Bernard Tschumi, First Office and Frank Gehry SANAA scale figure

Vi ny l Pu l s e

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c u t o ut m ix . c o m

neutrality Rather than the cautious hand-picking of what we think as ideal for an architecture scenario, what would be a truly neutral, but meaningful, personable scale figure? The use of racialised, gendered and/or wheel-chaired figures easily falls into a naïve projection of the politics of inclusivity onto the space, a crutch Jones calls it, a mimicry for non-effective architectural propositions that need a lavish political entourage to cover their spatial shortcomings. We can look at other examples: SANAA’s elongated, abstract silhouettes give little information of individual character and group representation. Bernard Tschumi’s scale figure is abstracted to a line and an arrow, providing minimal inference as to what kind of people they are, yet emphasising the direction of movement or attention. In a populated model or drawing, the importance of scale figures is in their vocalisation of interaction between people, and the relationship between person and space. Scale figures differ from chess pieces whose identities are fixed; scale figures are pieces whose meaning exists not in their characters but in the relationships between element and element, between pieces and the environment.

From mannequins to mass-produced scale figures, this tool in human form has undergone reductive transformations and digitisation over decades becoming abstracted, laconic, commodified and impersonal. Because of their de-personalised features, they slip into objects of art, toys and sometimes fetishised collectibles. Littered across an architectural model or drawing, they can signify a political stance that overrides the content of the work. As serious tools, scale figures are a narrative constant that add a fictive aspect for architectural representation and preserve a good amount of imagination space for both the architect and the audience. q

Micha el Mere di t h , H i l a ry Sa mpl e / MO S

h tt ps ://t o ffu .c o /pro du c ts / c a d - s a na a

on site review 39: tools

ice tools sputnik architecture

At Sputnik Architecture we put together ice structures and sculptures every winter, including Anish Kapoor’s 2017 Stackhouse warming hut, and multiple sculptures and ice chutes around Winnipeg. We have learned many techniques from an ice artist in Norway, Luca Roncoroni, who has built many warming hut projects. We start by harvesting the ice, cutting it out of rivers and lakes with chainsaw, ice tongs, skip steers and tractors. Then we use an array of specialised tools to stack and carve the ice. The tools are mostly self-made or adapted from conventional chisels. Speicial ice carving chisels have to be kept unbelievably sharp — the slightest flaw in the blade can ruin the ice surface. This articulated chainsaw was developed in Winnipeg for harvesting ice en masse. Dave Froese, a former combine harvester repairman and several others from The Forks maintenance team, with some input from Sputnik, mounted a chainsaw onto a hydraulic arm they built, which is mounted on a skip steer. That’s Peter Hargraves in the orange toque, guiding the saw to cut dozens of blocks at a time.

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S p ut nik Ar c hit e c t ur e

So, tools or technology - we are good with both, enjoy both, make use of either as suits the work. Figuring that out always requires some inventiveness and a willingness to rejig the ready-to-hand, to look at it differently and make something new — and really present. q

Many of the works created with these tools can be seen in the new book Warming Huts: a decade + of art and architecture on ice. Halifax: Dalhousie Architectural Press, 2021 https://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/9780929112749/lawrence-bird/ warming-huts https://www.ubcpress.ca/the-warming-huts

Spu tn i k A rc h i t e c tu re

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1996 Ter r a m i t e T 5 c , aka ‘Bust e r ’ greg snyder

C a s ey Ev e l o

Buster demos the old house

In the first lecture on soil and foundations I issue an invitation to students to consider the virtues of heavy equipment ownership. I offer a backstory of the experiences with my own small backhoe/loader as testimonial to the assortment of deeper understandings of being in the world facilitated through the possession and use of this tool. In the fifteen years that I have had Buster it has been used to clear land, remove trees, dig trenches, move large quantities of sand and gravel, tow trailers and tend burn piles. If Levi-Strauss’s bricoleur were to assemble a piece of heavy equipment this might be it: off-the-shelf hydraulic components and third-party interchangeable gas and diesel engines, and manufactured in West Virginia. It is functional and matter-of-fact, with opportunities for the amateur mechanic to savour repairs and maintenance, and the amateur aesthete to savour its reductive beauty and place among backhoe physiognomies. q

A n a s ta s i a K r a s no s lo b o d t s ev a

Buster’s kinetics

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G r e g S ny d e r

The Terramite Corporation Compact Loader Backhoe Patent application drawings

Terramite T5c logo

Buster digs a water line trench

The Terra m it e C o rpo ra ti o n

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L ea rning f r o m t h e T re e Cru s h e r douglas robb

While researching the history of the W A C Bennett Hydroelectric Dam at the Royal British Columbia Archives, I came across a passing reference to a machine called the Mackenzie Tree Crusher. This ominously-named device— the largest of its kind — was designed for a singular purpose: to crush trees. Conceived and manufactured by the LeTourneau Technologies Corporation in Longview, Texas, it consisted of a central chassis connected to two spiked drum rollers that functioned as wheels. Above the front roller extended a rigid

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beam designed to topple ‘all sizes of vegetation, both large and small’.1 The spiked rollers would then ‘fell, break up, and partially masticate all vegetation’ that stood in the Tree Crusher’s path, leaving behind it a wake of splintered debris and sawdust. 2

1 Orlemann, Eric. LeTourneau Earthmovers. St. Paul: MBI Publishing, 2001 2 LeTourneau, Robert Gilmour. Land clearing machine. U.S. 2959201A. United States Patent and Trademark Office, 8 November 1960

Aerial photograph of Tree Crusher ‘mowing’ trees within the Williston Reservoir inundation zone. Photo taken from BC Forest Service Clearing the Peace slideshow presentation in 1966. Image courtesy of Jim Wiens / Mackenzie and District Museum

By the late 1960s when construction of the dam was nearing completion, approximately 177,330 hectares of boreal subalpine spruce forest needed to be cleared — and fast. The water of the Williston Reservoir: a vast artificial lake impounded by the W A C Bennett Dam, was rising. Failure to clear the trees that grew within the reservoir’s inundation zone would result in large quantities of floating debris that could threaten the dam’s structure and pose a risk to future recreation such as boating and fishing. Site preparation for the reservoir initially relied on manual techniques like hand felling and slash-and-burn, but these methods were deemed too slow to clear such a large area. A new tool was needed; something that could rapidly clear-cut vast tracts of forest ahead of the rising flood waters. In 1964, the B.C. Forest Service organised the delivery of two Tree Crushers to the newly-established resource town of Mackenzie on the Parsnip River in northeastern British Columbia. 3 These were the machines to clear the site. While the B.C. Forest Service grappled with the razing of thousands of hectares of woodland, a parallel project of large-scale land clearance was underway across the Pacific. In 1965, the United States Armed Forces began experimenting with new ways to clear the dense jungles of Vietnam which provided cover and a tactical advantage to Viet Cong forces. The U S military had conducted various tests using airborne herbicides, defoliants and fire-bombing techniques, all with varying degrees of success. In a bid to expedite its land-clearance program, military officials commissioned the LeTourneau Corporation to manufacture a fleet of Tree Crushers to aid in the war effort. With financial support from the U S military, these machines — initially designed for commercial logging operations — quickly grew in size, speed and ferocity.4 Most of these ‘enhanced’ Tree Crushers were shipped across the Pacific to the jungles of Vietnam, but two made their way north to Mackenzie. The first Tree Crusher arrived in Mackenzie on six flat rail cars and took nearly four days to unload and reassemble. Enthusiastic reports of the Tree Crusher’s arrival reflect the fervour of midcentury infrastructure development in British Columbia. In the late 1960s, northern B C was seen as a ‘vast tract of unexplored and

3 Kvarv, Einar. A Branch History Paper for the 75th Anniversary of the B.C. Forest Service. Victoria: Ministry of Forests 4 LeTourneau, 1960

uninhabited country’ in urgent need of modernisation. Projects such as the W A C Bennett Dam were celebrated for ‘rolling the frontier back 500 miles to the north’ and for bringing new lands and peoples into the purview of the Canadian state.5 The Tree Crusher played a central role in this nation-building agenda, and was emblematic of a high-modernist impulse to subdue and ‘improve’ unruly frontier landscapes.6 This sentiment was often expressed by workers engaged in landclearing activities, who commented on the machine’s fearsome presence with a sense of admiration: [The Tree Crusher] was a massive vehicle that moved on two rollers, each seven feet in diameter. The rollers had heavy spikes that crushed and splintered the trees as the machine rolled over them. The theory behind it was that new growth would hold the pieces in place long enough to get so water logged they wouldn’t float to the surface as the area became flooded. Successful or not, the idea was great.7 While the Mackenzie Tree Crusher may have seemed great in theory, its operational tenure was relatively short-lived. After two years and countless breakdowns, the Tree Crusher had only cleared about 2500 acres, or 1000 hectares, of land. As a bespoke piece of industrial equipment, its operators had to learn how to troubleshoot frequent mechanical failures in the field with limited access to equipment for repairs. The landscape surrounding Mackenzie also provided many unforeseen challenges. For instance, the 175-ton machine would often get bogged down in the soft fluvial soils along the Parsnip River. Workers improvised by crushing trees that grew on firm bedrock until a second, more nimble 80-ton Tree Crusher could be shipped to site. By 1970, the rising water levels of the Williston Reservoir put an end to the land-clearing works and the two Tree Crushers were abandoned in the forest. It was not until 1984 that the Municipal Council of Mackenzie voted to retrieve and refurbish the rusted remains of the original Tree Crusher as a monument to the town’s industrial heritage. Today, the bright yellow machine sits as a roadside attraction in Mackenzie along Highway 39. 5 Wenner-Gren British Columbia Development Co. Ltd. Assessment of Water Power Potential, Vol. I. Victoria: Royal British Columbia Archives, J.F. Pine Fonds MS-1172, Box 1, 1958 6 Scott, James C. Seeing like a State. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. 7 Kvarv, 1987. p 5

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What lessons can designers, engineers and others engaged in the transformation of landscapes learn from the Mackenzie Tree Crusher? To answer this question, I suggest that the Tree Crusher can be conceptualised in three different ways — as a tool, as a monument, and as a metaphor — and that each category offers insights into the ways that we ascribe meaning and value to land. As a tool, the Tree Crusher is purposefully blunt and indiscriminate. It was designed to ignore the particular qualities of place according to the logics of speed and efficiency shared by the logging industry and the United States Armed Forces. These overlapping technical requirements are reflected in many of the tools now commonly used in design practice, which were originally created to facilitate surveillance and combat operations in enemy territory (such as GIS and remote sensing technologies). Similarly, the militarisation of land-clearance seen in the jungles of Vietnam is reflected in the BC Forest Service’s approach to site preparation for the Williston Reservoir: subalpine forests stood in the way of a particular political economic agenda, and the Tree Crusher provided a powerful weapon to advance the Government of British Columbia’s strategy of northern modernisation. As a monument along Highway 39, the Tree Crusher reflects the convergence of capital, labour and industrial ambition that carved the town of Mackenzie out of BC’s northern forests. It commemorates the men and women who established Mackenzie and prepared the land for the Williston Reservoir, many of whom went on to work in the pulp, paper, and timber mills which now dominate the town’s local economy. Yet Mackenzie’s economic future is uncertain. The forests surrounding the town are suffering due to combination of factors, including high tree mortality associated with invasive species such as the mountain pine beetle, as well as the increasing frequency and severity of wildfires linked to global climate change. As a result, many of Mackenzie’s mills have closed citing an ‘ongoing lack of economic [wood]fibre’. 8 Against these difficult odds, the Tree Crusher symbolises the struggle and resilience of Mackenzie’s founding citizens, and offers hope for the town’s future economic prosperity.

below: LeTourneau Tree Crusher in operation near Mackenzie, British Columbia, 1966. below right: Le Tourneau Tree Crusher as monument on BC Highway 39, Mackenzie BC

However, the Tree Crusher can also be read as a monument to the hubris of reckless resource extraction. Decades of industrial clear-cutting, mining, hydroelectric development and, increasingly, the construction of energy corridors and pipelines have reduced the forests surrounding Mackenzie to a fragmented patchwork. As subalpine boreal ecosystems struggle to cope with the pace and scale of industrial development, so too do the livelihoods that depend on them. This is acutely felt by Indigenous peoples who rely on these landscapes for food, medicine and traditional cultural practices, yet who have been socially and politically marginalised through processes of Canadian settler colonialism. Viewed in this light, the Tree Crusher embodies all the failed schemes and misplaced ambitions of many of Canada’s northern extractive landscapes. It is both a monument to failure and a reminder of ongoing forms of dispossession and violence inflicted upon northern lands and peoples. Lastly, as a metaphor, the Tree Crusher symbolises the ways in which historical (and ongoing) practices of resource extraction and infrastructure development in British Columbia (and elsewhere) fail to recognise the socio-ecological and multi-species relations embedded in all landscapes. Complex and dynamic relationships, such as mycorrhizal networks which enable trees to communicate and share resources with one another, have only recently come to the attention of Western science (although long understood by Indigenous knowledge).9 The Tree Crusher is blind to these obligate relationships, as are many other tools which designers routinely use to observe, visualise and stage interventions in the material world.10 We can witness this mentality in contemporary design projects that instrumentalise nonhuman relations through discourses of ‘ecosystem services’ or through the logics of industrial silviculture. Like the Tree Crusher, these land management approaches reduce complex landscapes to industrial throughputs for technical and economic systems. These strategies are not only reductive, but also deeply unjust. They deny the forest its vitality and agency as living being embedded within broader relational landscapes, of which humans are also a part. As it currently sits at the side of the road in a landscape increasingly marked by wildfires, flooding and biodiversity decline, the Tree Crusher offers a cautionary tale of the consequences for failing to uphold our earthly relationships. In other words, the Tree Crusher reminds us to learn from our mistakes. q

P h o t o g ra ph e r u n kn own . I mage c ourtes y of Jim Wiens / Ma ckenz ie a n d D i s tri c t Mu s e u m

8 Oud, Nicole. “Paper Excellence Permanently Closes Pulp Mill in Mackenzie, B.C., at a Cost of 250 Jobs.” CBC News, 15 April 2021 9 Simard, Suzanne. Finding the Mother Tree: Uncovering the Wisdom and Intelligence of the Forest. New York: Penguin, 2021; Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013 10 Robb, Douglas, and Bakker, Karen. “Planetary voyeurism.” LA+ Interdisciplinary Journal of Landscape Architecture, vol. 12, 2020. pp 50-55

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G o o g le s t r e e t view, 2 0 21

acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship program funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). Many thanks to Jim Wiens at the Mackenzie and District Museum for providing archival photos, and to the staff at the Royal British Columbia Museum and Archives for their research assistance.

branding i r o n s adrian cooke

If a person fabricates a tool, do they, through a more hands-on process, introduce a certain sensitivity and aesthetic that directly affects the shape, surface and tactile appearance of the final form in a way that industrial manufacturing processes may not? I am surrounded by tools, both electric and hand held, used for specific purposes in my work. They enable me to manipulate, create and sculpt all kinds of forms out of wood, a medium I love for its versatility and warmth — it can be cut, bent, burnt, sanded, drilled, chiselled, chipped, dyed, laminated and imprinted with saws, drills, sanders, carving tools and propane torches. Burning has a history in my work; beautiful contrasts between hard and soft grains emerge when charred surfaces are exposed and manipulated. For me, branding is a natural extension of the burning process. Sometimes in the development of a project there isn’t a tool available that will accomplish what you need — aesthetic decisions dictate a path where the only choice is to make your own tool — tools born of necessity. The sculpture Origin required such an approach and a small set of branding irons was the result. Origin is a wall mounted large flat wooden square, burnt, gouged and stained to represent an evening sky. Five adjunct pieces, lathed wood lenticular cloud shapes, hover in front of and below the sky. The surfaces of these forms are imprinted with small branded marks — grain elevators, clouds, stars, the moon — elements experienced day and night over and over again while living on the prairies, and elements whose significance is magnified by the unbending presence of a horizon that emphasises the relationship between up and down, sky and land. The lenticular cloud forms are a continuation of themes and philosophies found in my work over the years. The brands are a method of mark-making that not only reflect my interest in burnt surfaces, but also speak to the practice of branding used in rural settings as a method of identification and ownership. As a blacksmith would do, I heated, hammered, shaped and filed large iron nails into five different brands. These tiny branding irons are sculptural entities in their own right, beautiful little objects, iconic and symbolic, that reflect the ongoing influences that mark my sculpture practice. q

from the top: Set of branding irons used as a mark-making tool for wood sculpture Origin, 1991/2019. Each iron is 15.5cm x 2cm, made from modified iron nails The burning process: the branding iron is heated with a propane torch One of the wood cloud shapes marked by one of the branding irons

a l l i ma ge s Adri a n C o o ke

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GRAIN BIK E S emily vogler tools to help diversify local agricultural production Tools shape the way we shape the land — for example, as the size of tractors has increased over the past century, so has large scale transformation of agricultural landscapes. Large farms now dominate crop production in the United States; technology has been a major driver of these landscape changes as large tractors reduce labour by allowing a single operator to manage more acres. Unlike vegetable production where each vegetable must be harvested individually, grain can be treated as a bulk product, which lends itself to mechanisation. The invention of the combine at the end of the nineteenth century revolutionised grain production. Before this, farmers reaped (cut the grain), threshed (separated the grain from the stalk) and winnowed (separated the grain from the chaff) separately. The combine does all three harvesting operations in one simplified process, saving time and labour. Current grain production in the United States, dominated by large scale industrial farms in the north, central and south plains, is entirely dependent on large combines that can harvest up to 150 acres per day, weigh over thirty thousand pounds, and can cost a half million dollars. In addition to shifts in technology, government policies and the economy have favoured the consolidation and growth of large farms over the past half century.1 Some of the negative ecological, economic, health and social effects of this approach include aquifers drying up, food security dependent on global politics, waterways polluted by large scale input of chemicals and fertilisers, topsoil lost, rural farming communities emptied out. Increasingly it is recognised that resilient regional food systems benefit from a distributed model of local food production with a range of farm sizes, diverse crops and a mix of agricultural approaches. 2 This is especially true in New England which has a highly fragmented land use pattern; cities and towns are close to one another and the interstitial landscape is a mix of low-density residential sprawl mixed in with fields, wetlands and forests. To create a resilient regional food system, food production needs to be thought of as a mosaic that extends across the urban-rural gradient, a mosaic made up of large parcels in rural landscapes with greater potential for largescale production, mid-size parcels in suburban landscapes, and small parcels in urban landscapes. Grain production may offer a unique opportunity in this transformation. Unlike vegetable production which requires significant labour and has a less orderly aesthetic, the lawn and grain field share similar landscape aesthetics; like the lawn, a grain field can provide open views and an uncluttered ‘field condition’. The grain field can help shift perceptions and introduce people to inhabiting a productive landscape. Local landscaping crews normally hired by homeowners can be retrained to service the grain field, with a trailer of small-scale tools. As society works towards long-term shifts in priorities, preferences and policies that will be needed to create this diversified landscape mosaic, there also is the need to develop new tools to support farmers working at these new scales of production. Small-scale farmers might have the equipment to plant grains but not the equipment to harvest and process them for market. Small-scale farmers interested in experimenting with growing grains are either stuck between large-scale expensive combines or time consuming hand processing.

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To support small-scale grain production, we developed three microscale machines for threshing, winnowing and de-hulling seeds. They are made from simple locally available materials (wood, screen, bicycle parts and fasteners from the hardware store), and made with simple tools (a Skilsaw, a drill, stapler, angle grinder, bicycle tools and either wire feed or oxy-acetylene welders). 3 These micro-machines are highly adaptable, allowing them to be used for several different crops, from grains to beans. One of the primary objectives in developing these tools was to create an open source set of plans and a free supporting video online.4 Farmers around the world interested in growing grains at a small scale can bring the plan set to a local fabricator who can use the instructions to make the tools. These local shops become a part of the landscape mosaic, developing and fabricating tools that shape a new approach to shaping the land, based on the support of a local food economy that prioritises diversity, resilience and innovation.

the thresher After grain plants are harvested, the dried plant can be put in the thresher where the grain is separated from the stalk. The bike powered swipples in the drum hit the seed heads or pods and break them apart so the seeds fall out. The design uses 1 x 10 finished lumber for the drum and all the power a person can supply while biking. The easily changeable swipples are made from wire, bike spokes, wood, and plastic or metal chain depending on the crop. The guage of the scalping screen (through which the threshed material falls) is also easily changed. The thresher can be used three ways: 1. as a batch process where the whole drum is filled with plant material, processed, and then the fibrous remains are removed. 2. as a pass-through process where seed heads are fed in through the right top window, get processed as they move to the left, and the empty seed heads are tossed out the left side window. 3. as a sheaf process, where sheaves of cut and aligned grain are held by their stalks with the heads thrust through a window on the side of the drum to be processed, after which the straw bundle is withdrawn and a new sheaf introduced.

1 MacDonald, James M, Penni Korb, and Robert A Hoppe. Farm Size and the Organization of U.S. Crop Farming, ERR-152. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, August 2013 2 Donahue, Brian, et al. A New England Food Vision. Durham, NH: Food Solutions New England, University of New Hampshire, 2014 3 This project was a collaboration between Jan Ludovic Yoder (a fabricator), Olaf Bertram-Nothnagel (a filmmaker), and myself (a landscape architect). Lu and I worked together to develop the conceptual framing of the project, Lu developed the tools, I drew and developed the open-source plans, and Olaf made the instructional videos. 4 https://projects.sare.org/sare_project/one16-277/

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fanning mill After the thresher separates the grain from the stalk, the winnower sorts and cleans the seeds. It first grades material by size with two (high pass and low pass) screens, then winnows the remaining material in a vertical winnowing tower. The screen size is selected for the particular crop. The tilt angle of the screens is adjustable, as is the rate and amplitude of the screen shaker. The speed of the; blower is also adjustable. The design uses re-purposed bike parts for the transmission and gears, 12 x 24” screens, and common 1 x 12 and 2 x 4 lumber. The blower is designed for maximum power and inherent turbulence. If finer tuning of the blower is needed (for small seeds) the air inlet can be partially blocked (choked).

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the de-huller / flour mill* This is a horizontal shaft mill intended for de-hulling grain. It can be easily converted to a flour grinding mill. This simple mill is better than the available inexpensive hand-cranked mills because it uses ball bearings and accommodates a larger de-hulling disc. In addition it has two widely spaced bearings and a stable design that makes it better for the use of bike power over electric or mechanical power. The mill uses readily available 1 3/8 x 3/4” sealed bearings. The auger flighting is made from a straight piece of key shaft metal, heated and bent around the auger shell. For users wishing to de-hull rice, einkorn or emmer, instructions are given for making de-hulling pads. For barley and oats this de-huller may not work, as much more scouring is needed for these two crops. However, it is possible that with more aggressive de-hulling discs this mill could be made to work for barley and oats. For users wishing to mill flour, instructions are given for making crude steel burrs with an angle grinder. However, in most cases the user can buy commercial steel or stone burrs and fit them to the mill. Building the mill is not difficult. The shop must be equipped to make square cuts on metal tubing. Welding techniques that minimise distortion should be used. All of the parts can be cut out first and then fabricated. Once the pieces are cut the actual fabrication time is only five hours. q

* The flour mill in this photo is an early prototype, using an antique C.S. Bell mill. Open source plans and instructional video available at: https://projects.sare.org/sare_project/one16-277/

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The Roun d O v e r B i t michael blois I have been back in the wood shop again recently exploring the techniques and tools used in furniture making. I am interested in the quality of something made by hand and the human connection it generates. When I first started tinkering in the wood shop, it was a reaction to the machine-made generic look and feel of the furniture I saw everywhere – unable to find what I was looking for, I decided to build some of my own designs. I still have a number of these pieces and enjoy their imperfections and warmth as they move from apartment to apartment. After a long hiatus I decided to reimagine one of my old designs. I tested it out in different materials, finishes and with a few new details that all work toward what I think is the best version of that concept. One of the tools that has sparked my imagination is the handheld trim router and more specifically, the round over bit. The round over bit has a concave profile and commonly ranges in radii from 1/8”, a slight rounding, up to 1” for an obviously round edge. These bits often come in a set along with a variety of other profile makers such as a chamfer, cove or bevel. Many more bit types are used to cut grooves and shapes used for joining panels. Straight bits used for trimming edges and cutting in a CNC machine. But there are a large number of bits that are not well known to contemporary design since they fell out of favour along with many other types of ornament. The double cove and demi, ogee and many other classical moulding profiles. These profiles shape crown mouldings, baseboards, wainscoting, sills and door casing; edges of tables, leg profiles and panels. Ornate combinations of concave and convex profiles are relieved by flat sections or recesses. The effect is a flowing shape that carries the eye across the piece and invites touch exploring the soft and sharp , bulging and receding profiles that remind us of the human body and other natural elements. Traditional furniture pieces are typically stained to make the wood appear uniform, bringing focus to the profile rather than to the wood itself. This is a contrast to the contemporary approach of expressing the wood and all of its variations and imperfections. 90 degree corners and exposed end-grain make it clear that the aim is to celebrate the material - it does not need ornate inlays and profiled edges to make it beautiful. Though the wood itself does a lot of the heavy lifting to give the piece a natural, high quality appearance, this approach shares similarities with an industrial aesthetic — hard edges, raw materials, exposed connections and so on. Is there something to be learned from the days of ornament and pattern books? Crown mouldings soften the edge between wall and ceiling, gable and table top. Beading or grooving adds a layer of detail that can bring a sense of scale to a piece or help contrast it from an adjacent surface. A bullnose edge, round knob or tapered leg invites touch and rests comfortably in the human hand. Though it does not technically conform to code architects frequently design a railing with a thin and flat metal profile for its sharp line and tidy appearance. But it is uncomfortable to grip and does not address the needs of all abilities. A round tube profile or one with rounded and shaped edges are easily gripped and are pleasant to use. This is just one example but it makes it clear that sometimes in design we forget the end result is not just for the eye but must serve the other senses as well.

a ll im a g e s M ic ha e l B lo is

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How much ornament, detail and shaping will contemporary design thinking accept? I think the answer is, a lot. Although more and more ornament is finding its way back in and designers are being influenced by natural elements in new ways, on the whole, millwork in large architectural projects and mainstream furniture still seems to be influenced by a desire for uniformity and crisp edges. There is room for further softening and experimentation. Taking a hands-on approach is important for designers — understanding the fabrication process as well as the opportunities and limitations of tools helps inform and inspire future work. This experimentation with a simple table has opened up a new line of thinking on some larger projects and a better understanding of how things come together. Just as I reacted to the machine aesthetic of furniture some years ago there seems to be a renewed comfort in simplicity, thinking back to the handmade and to details of the past as our lives become increasingly abstract and digital. This balance has been on the minds of designers for quite some time but perhaps a hands-on approach is the best way to make a connection with the things we design. q All of the images show the side table design in progress, starting with a veneer on engineered core with sharp corners and working toward rounded edges and a shaped leg profile in solid wood. The side table is designed to sit next to a couch and hold magazines. The bottom portion is angled so the spines of the magazine tilt up and are more visible when looking at them from above. Since the design is inspired by the way it will be used it seemed appropriate for the details to soften and to consider how it will be touched.

a l l i ma g e s Mi c h ae l B l o i s

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lost dev i c e s david murray

left: curious device found in the demolition of the 1907 Pendennis Hotel. below, clockwise: 1904-10 Pendennis Hotel, Jasper Avenue, Edmonton Alberta The 1911 expanded Pendennis Hotel. The updated hotel displayed a large wall sign that declared that the Pendennis offered the American Plan, All Modern Conveniences, N.Bell Prop. The American Plan refers to a plan that offers a hotel rate which includes accommodation, breakfast, lunch and dinner. The Pendennis Buffet A postcard taken on the first floor balcony Da v i d M u r r ay

I would like to tell a story about eating sweet BC cherries on a July day in the early 1900s in the restaurant/buffet of the Pendennis Hotel on Jasper Avenue, Edmonton, Alberta. It is a quintessential Canadian story that illuminates our long-standing commercial relationship with the United States. The tool that we found during the interior demolition of the hotel has taken me on a journey that involves a prominent inventor in Antrim, New Hampshire, the 6th Earl of Aberdeen, the Canadian Pacific Railway, the fruit growing industry in British Columbia and an ambitious Edmonton entrepreneur. So much story for such a small, strange object. In the 1890s, Edmonton was a destination for gold panning in the North Saskatchewan River and a departure point for the Klondike gold rush via the Klondike Trail overland to the Yukon. By 1900 the gold rush was waning but Alberta was open for settlers. When Edmonton became the capital of the new province of Alberta in 1905, an influx of immigrants and visitors were accommodated in new and old hotels, including a wood-framed building on Jasper Avenue at the east end of the downtown, built in the 1890s and known as the California rooming house. By 1904 it had become the Pendennis Hotel, in 1907 Nathan Bell became the manager and by 1908 he owned it. In 1911, he bought the adjacent property and doubled the size of the hotel — a significant improvement, with a brick façade and new rooms designed by Lang, Major and Company. Instead of demolishing the 1904 hotel, it was simply incorporated into the new building behind a new Edwardian façade. Provincia l Aa rchives o f A l be rta B 4327

E A E r ne s t B r ow n C o lle c t io n

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a l l im a g e s t his p a g e D a vid M ur r a y

left and above: The Pendennis Hotel remains behind the brick façade, photographed in 2007

below: Business card and food coupons from San Francisco, found among the retrieved artifacts in the Pendennis.

Over the years, the hotel has gone through numerous iterations. The economic slump after the collapse of the Wheat Boom in 1913 and prohibition in 1916 put Nathan Bell out of business, and in 1920 the Pendennis was repossessed by his mortgage company. It became a lodging house and over time was known as both the Stanley Block and the Lodge Hotel. In 2001 as part of Edmonton’s Jasper East Village Main Street Project the façade of the Lodge Hotel was designated as a municipal historic resource. A few years later the building was purchased by the Ukrainian Canadian Archives and Museum of Alberta. At that time the plan was to insert the new museum into the shell of the old hotel. During an interior demolition, the original 90-year old Pendennis Hotel was discovered inside, surprisingly intact and relatively untouched. During the demolition, hundreds artifacts were recovered, many of which had been stored in the attic of the original Pendennis Hotel. They include early maps and papers, snake oil drugs and remedies, an opium-based medicinal, the prohibition-era alcohol substitute Jamaica Ginger, kitchen and restaurant food containers, new immigrant information and reading material, early cosmetics, an ammunition box from London, England, medical records including an account book of a 1940 mass vaccination for Whooping Cough. Interesting are the numerous objects that attest to a not-completely understood relationship with the United States, especially California — likely an association with the lure of gold in the North Saskatchewan and the Yukon. Among the items found in the demolition was a strange and dangerous-looking device meant to screw onto a board, and which had two curved prongs with pointed teeth at the ends. A handle moved the prongs through a shield down into a channel with two hollows in it. This is a tool whose form is not immediately evident as to purpose unless you already know what it is. A search through Google images revealed it is a Goodell Cherry Pitter, manufactured in the mid-1880s in Antrim New Hampshire. Many Goodell tools still exist both in both museums and on internet antiques and collectible sales sites.

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This all piqued my curiosity about how it came to be in the hotel. To have a cherry pitter in a hotel in a climate that does not support cherry trees is a testament to the reach of the railways: cherries must have been plentiful enough to justify a pitter to process the glut of fruit pouring in from the Okanagan. Cherries are hardy to -20’C. Too much rain makes the cherries split — the hot summers and cool winters of the Okanagan suit cherries and a great number of other orchard fruits — apricots, peaches and plums. Cherries have been part of the British Columbia commercial fruit-growing sector since the 1890s with the first cherry orchards in the valley of Coldstream Creek, about two kilometres southeast of Vernon. The first settler in the valley, Captain Charles F Houghton, acquired his land through a military grant in 1863. Houghton’s Coldstream Ranch was transferred to Forbes and Charles Vernon and in 1891 was purchased by John Campbell Hamilton-Gordon, the 6th Earl of Aberdeen, Canada’s Governor General from 1893-98.

David Harvey Goodell. The Goodell Company, founded in 1875, made knives and various cutting devices including apple peelers, at several mills in Great Brook New Hampshire.

The Coldstream was intended to produce profits in cattle, fruit orchards and the sale of land to gentlemen emigrants. The Aberdeens planted large acreages of fruit trees and hops and a jam factory was built in Vernon. While Lord Aberdeen wasn’t a businessman and the properties were sold at great loss early in the twentieth century, he is still considered a pioneer of the Okanagan fruit-growing industry. The development of this industry leads to another question. Where and how was this fruit distributed? The transcontinental Canadian Pacific Railway reached Vancouver in 1884 and was the main deliverer of goods across Canada. An extension to Edmonton was built in 1891 and in 1902 an extension line from the main CPR line was constructed south from Sicamous to Vernon, thus fruit shipments were able to make their way east or west on the transcontinental line. Settlers and ranchers from Edmonton to southern Alberta would have access to BC fruit in season. 1903 map provided to prospective settlers showing the western Canada route of the CPR. It too was found in the retrieved artifacts of the Pendennis Hotel.

L i bra ry a n d A rchive s C a na d a / PA- 0 25 8 1 0 a n d L i bra ry a nd Ar c hive s C a na d a / C - 2 2 760 )

In 1890 the Aberdeens and their four children arrived in Canada, crossing the country on the Canadian Pacific Railway, visiting settlers, recent Scottish immigrants and indigenous communities. On a return journey in 1891 they visited the ranch near Kelowna that they had bought unseen the previous year (Guisachan named after Lady Aberdeen’s Highland home), and bought a second, much larger property, Coldstream, near Vernon. Coutts Marjoribanks, unsuccessful as a cattle rancher in North Dakota and Lady Aberdeen’s brother, managed both. Western Canada is indisputably connected by place names to Scotland; these British Empire connections sit alongside a north-south axis pointing south to San Francisco, a less-told story, but uncovered in so much of the detritus found in the Pendennis Hotel.

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The Goodell cherry pitter is a tool that has led me to a very broad picture about the relatively recent history of Edmonton in the context of the development of western Canada, propelled by the development of the railway, bringing not only settlers and ranchers, but entrepreneurs: The Edmonton Journal noted that Nathan Bell “was the first hotel operator to purchase his site and building.” He was well-known as a hotel proprietor, and the Pendennis dining room, according to The Edmonton Bulletin, was “admittedly one of the best in the city.” I can imagine 1908 patrons of the original Pendennis Hotel sitting down in the Buffet dining room to fresh cherries from the Okanagan that had arrived in Strathcona on the train the day before and were carted across the Low Level Bridge over the South Saskatchewan River to the grocery stores on the north side in Edmonton, the capital of the new province of Alberta. It must have been a time of great optimism that was especially cheerful while enjoying a sweet seasonal dessert on a warm July day. q

D a vid M ur r a y

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miscellaneous tool sightings

‘Tailleur d’habits et tailleur de corps’, Supplément à l’Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, vol. 9 (plates). Paris, 1765.

Opening credits from the official trailer of The Human Voice, 2020, directed by Pedro Almodóvar, based on a story by Jean Cocteau. Tilda buys an axe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiS4EfoBhcc

Steel and brass shears, made in India, bought at the Reena Sari Shop in northeast Calgary, 2015.

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39: tool s s u m m e r 2021 On Site review is published by Field Notes Press, which promotes field work in matters architectural, cultural and spatial.

contributors Ron Benner, a visual artist, gardener and social justice activist from London, Ontario is currently artist in residence in the Department of Environmental Sciences, University of Guelph where he has installed a photographic/garden work on the grounds of The Arboretum. He is a co-founder and curatorial advisor of the Embassy Cultural House. embassyculturalhouse.ca Michael Blois is a practicing architect with Perkins and Will in Toronto. He focuses on civic and educational projects and maintains an interest in design research and woodworking. He can be reached at mikeblois@gmail.com Scot Bullick: born and raised Calgarian with interests in visual and auditory arts. My collecting nature supports a 3-D collage practice. I still use a sketch book and watercolour between digital and photo experiments.

F I E L D

Douglas Robb is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia. Doug’s research investigates the complex landscapes that emerge through interactions between the cultures, infrastructures, and political ecologies of energy. wdouglasrobb.com Adrian Cooke is an artist/sculptor with a record of solo and group exhibitions across Canada. The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia and the Canada Council Art Bank are among the institutions that include his work in their collections. www.adriancooke.com

N O T E S For any and all inquiries, please use the contact form at www.onsitereview.ca/contact-us Canada Post agreement 40042630 ISSN 1481-8280 copyright: On Site review. All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopied, recorded or otherwise stored in a retrieval system without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of Copyright Law Chapter C-30, RSC1988. back issues: https://issuu.com/onsitereview/docs editor: Stephanie White design: Black Dog Running printer: Emerson Clarke Printing, Calgary distribution: online: onsitereview.ca print: onsitereview.ca/contact-us On Site review 38: tools was put together on unceded Coast Salish territory, specifically the traditional territory of the Snuneymuxw peoples. Recent focus on Residential School unmarked gravesites reminds us of the many tools of colonialism, of which the Residential School system was one. A tool of pain.

Stephanie Davidson is an assistant professor at Ryerson School of Interior Design, Toronto and cofounder of the design practice Davidson Rafailidis, which was a 2018 Architectural League of New York Emerging Voices winner. Their project Big Space Little Space was the 2020 Architectural Review House winner. www.davidsonrafailidis.net @davidsonrafailidis Mark Dorrian is Forbes Chair in Architecture at the University of Edinburgh and Co-Director of Metis. Last year he ran a design studio on animation and now is trying to write about ice, starting with Rabelais’s frozen words. Karianne Halse is an architect and PhD fellow at Aarhus School of Architecture (Denmark). Her research project investigates architectural potentials of weakness from a material perspective (philosophy of G. Vattimo, ‘weak thought’), explored through artistic architectural research. www.karianne-h.dk Peter Hargraves, facilitator of the artistic and social dreams of others, founded Sputnik Architecture about ten years ago to work at the intersection of artistic practise and social mission, including Winnipeg’s Warming Huts, Riverwood House transitional housing and the Canadian Fossil Discovery Centre. He has created ice stages for Royal Canoe and the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra’s New Music Festival. https://sputnikarchitecture.com Suzanne Mathew is an Associate Professor at the Rhode Island School of Design and has a background in biology, architecture, and landscape architecture. She engages cross-disciplinary approaches to visualise the phenomenological qualities of landscape space. Roger Mullin is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at Dalhousie University. He has practiced architecture internationally and was awarded the Lieutenant Governor General of Nova Scotia Masterwork Arts Award, the ACSA’s Best Collaborative Practice Award, and the Design Exchange and the National Post’s Gold Award for Best Public Commercial Building in Canada. He currently combines his collaborative design-build, drawing and teaching practices in areas of the North Atlantic. David Murray is an architect in Edmonton, Alberta. His practice is focused on architectural conservation. It is the stories and people associated with his projects that bring about the greatest curiosity, pleasure and reward. www.davidmurrayarchitect.ca Photolanguage (Nigel Green & Robin Wilson) is a collaborative art practice documenting and reimagining the legacies of modernity in urban and landscape sites. They are currently working on a new book on Parisian Brutalist architecture. Photolanguage.info Yann Ricordel-Healy, born 1976, is writing both fiction (short stories, and presently his first novel) and non-fiction (especially theory and history of visual arts since the 60s), and fabricating bidimensional or tridimensional images. Michael M Simon’s interdisciplinary installation and sculpture-based practice draws from his experience in design and fabrication. His work recontextualises common labour-related objects, tools and materials and explores the complex relationships between people and things. www.michaelmsimon.com Greg Snyder is an Associate Professor in the School of Architecture at UNC Charlotte. His research interests are in issues that arise out of acts of making and construction, and the phenomena and meaning that accrue in and around these acts. Emily Vogler is a landscape architect whose research, design and teaching investigate social-ecological systems surrounding water infrastructure, sense of place, and climate uncertainty. She is an Associate Professor at the Rhode Island School of Design. Yiou Wang is a designer, artist, and researcher whose works intersect architecture, narrative, ludology, and technology. Yiou holds a B.A. in psychology and is currently a Master of Architecture candidate at the GSD. https: //yiouwang.org Stephanie White, editor of On Site review, has many tools, but rarely the right one for the job at hand. Her tools are mostly intransitive when they are not inflicting pain.

on site review 39: tools

2 calls for articles o n s i t e r e v i e w 40:

the architect’s library

We would like to ask you, as an architect, designer, landscape architect, urbanist or engineer, what your relationship is to books in general and your books in particular.

on books and reading

Is it passive or active? Do you still use your books, or do you circumvent them with wikipedia and downloads? Where are your books? on shelves? in boxes? all over the floor? What is the material world of your books — the shelves, the bookcases, the room(s) in which they live? Do you buy books, or do you consider the library as the site of your books? If books have played a role in your development and your continued practice, we would like to hear about it. On Site review 40: the architect’s library will work in conjunction with Architecture & Reading in Crisis, a project of city | speculations. https://www.cityspeculations.com/ To get you thinking, here are two essays about books, reading, place and time: first, a beautiful essay, recommended by Ella Chmielewska, is ‘The Drowned Library (Reflections on Found, Lost, and Translated Books and Languages)’ by Anton Shammas. There is a free download here: https://levantine-journal.org/product/drowned-library-reflectionsfound-lost-translated-books-languages/ The second is Nicole Raziya Fong’s ‘On the Alchemy of Fields’, in The Capilano Review, Fall 2020. https://thecapilanoreview.com/nicoleraziya-fong-on-the-alchemy-of-fields Neither of these are by architects or designers, but they talk about books as material objects, as magical stories, as things that slip forwards and back in translation: not just linguistic, but translation between phases of a life, between studies, between changes of profession, country, states of being. They move the personal from something inwardly looking and private, to something that reaches outward. We can all write about such things because we all have a life, a past, and a present —sometimes not too clear until you start to write it down and then patterns form, memories surface. So go to it! Let’s hear about the architect’s library.

48 on site review 39: Tools

word count: aim for 2000 words images: should be sent as 300dpi jpgs at least 3200px wide, with full photo credits and permission to publish for any images not your own. Send your proposal by September 31, 2021 through our contact link: www.onsitereview.ca/contact-us Final submissions will be due February 24, 2022

o n s i t e r e v i e w 41:i n f r a s t r u c t u r e Infrastructure: underpinning structure that makes the more ephemeral aspects of life work. Roads and roadbeds, compacted scree, drainage channels and concrete bumpers painted fluorescent yellow — these infrastructural elements allow us to drive to Banff and look at the mountains. Dams, electricity pylons, docks, railway lines, fibre-optic cable, batteries: acid, lithium and all the rest. Airports, bridges, household wiring. All these things are permanent, essential, vulnerable, either crumbling or overbuilt, ancient or experimental. In an era of great upheaval, where normality is a figment of rosy memory, where climate is forever changed, where pandemic viruses become as common as the cold, where the rich get richer and the rest get poorer, what is it that we ask of infrastructure? Is infrastructure a stabilising element, or is it a force with agency? China’s Belt and Road Initiative is changing Asia and Africa; the disrepair of North America’s highway infrastructure contributes to problems with transport: pipelines full of oil battle with trains dragging hundreds of tank cars across the country and tanker trailers dangerously share the highways with private automobiles.

Infrastructure is hidden, taken for granted until it breaks and then we are all surprised. What is it? and as designers, what is our relationship to it? Is it the purview of civil engineers and political promises, or is architecture the translation of infrastructure to the operation of daily life? Is the public realm actually infrastructure, in all its depth and function? And now, in the 2020s, what is exciting about infrastructure? American politics have included the social safety net as the infrastructure of society, in a stroke shifting infrastructure from physical and material construction to something infinitely more ambiguous and algae-like: the socio-economic political functioning of society. For this issue, we would like to look at infrastructure: the landscapes of infrastructure, infrastructural networks, how parts fit together, how they service life on this planet.

How these installations affect society, often seen most clearly in their absence, such as clean drinking water, is how we critique infrastructure. What is the Belt and Road, and what will be its environmental, social, political, military and economic consequences? Much has been written about the consequences of the Interstate Highway system in the USA, on its military reasoning, its demand for faster and larger vehicles, its social anonymity that bolsters a particularly American notion of personal freedom. These things were latent in the maps and road sections of the IH system. What is it that is latent in the trillions of dollars being spent on infrastructure today? There are other infras: Perec’s infra-ordinary, where space is both invention and inventory; Duchamp’s inframince, the unmeasurable thinness between things that touch, between one state and another; infra dignitatem: beneath notice, something so uncool that one cannot look at it, something like traditional infrastructure to the discipline of architecture. Which is why we would like to look at it now. landscapes of infrastructure hidden systems systems hidden in plain sight politics of infrastucture remittance as financial infrastructure lines on maps vs hardened borders infrastructural acts: drilling, logging, digging, burning, flooding, building crumbling infrastructure remedial infrastructure transitional infrastructure cyber-infrastructure military infrastructure civil infrastructure the infrastructure that allows the public realm the infrastructure of migration post-infrastructure proto-infrastructures

Ideas/proposals please by September 21, 2021 Use our contact link: www.onsitereview.ca/contact-us Final submission materials will be due December 31, 2021. If your proposal is accepted, we expect that the final submission will bear some resemblance to the proposal. Remember, we are a journal about architecture, landscape, infrastructure, urban design, all as conducted on site.

on site review 39: tools

ON SITE r e v i e w

TOOLS 39 summer 2021

on site 39: tools

Articles inside

lost devices

The Round Over Bit

GRAIN BIKES

branding irons

Learning from the Tree Crusher

Buster, the Terramite T5C

ice tools

magnifying lilliputians

Drawing Modelling Instrument

Tools Talk Back

On the level

measuring tools

SM 9711031

the stereoscopic lens adapter

collected tools

trans/mission: November 17, 2019

TOOLBOX-THING