TIMBER FRAMING HTTPS://UK.LINKEDIN.COM/DAVID-LEVIATIN BACKGROUND
LOCATION
London Timber Frame’s current workshop is in Codicote, Hertfordshire
TALK
This talk is a record of David Leviatin’s presentation to the Cambridge Design Research Studio in March 2014. The text is a concise summary of the education I and George received in the summer of 2014. David Leviatin: What I am going to do is talk to you as a carpenter and as a historian. The way we actually understand buildings as historians is somewhat different from the way I or other carpenters understand buildings. It may be the way we use sources, I’ll talk about that in a minute. In 1989, 25 years ago, which is like an eternity, I got a PHD in American Studies and a Master’s degree in American history from Harvard College. One of the people who interested me the most, in addition to Emerson and Thoreau, was Walt Whitman. It’s all part of this 1840s, 1850s, 1860s group of people interested in ordering a new kind of literature, a distinctly American
I taught for maybe seven or eight years, at Harvard, MIT, Prague, Rhode Island, various different places. Part of what I liked was just moving around and going place to place. My last position was at the University of the Virgin Island St Croix. Two weeks after I arrived there was a hurricane, Hurricane Marilyn 1994. It destroyed the entire island. 80% of the island was just gone, all the roofs, everything, off. The interesting lesson, and this was the beginning of my education as a carpenter, was that all the teachers wanted nothing to do with building anything. They were out of there, quit. All of a sudden the people normally not considered too highly became critical. The guy that can wire your phone, the guy that can get a generator, all the roles completely reverted. I ended up connecting with someone who was a building contractor looking for carpenters. He said asked me if I were a carpenter and I said my grandfather was, he said well, fine - off you go. Both my grandfathers were immigrant carpenters who left Europe right before and after WWII where they were doing stud framing and shop fitting. I think they’d be kind of interested that I’ve gone backwards actually – the immigrant carpenter comes to the UK. I’m not sure they’d be too happy about the social mobility. I can still remember my grandfather saying something about ‘computers, computers!’ any way there I am on St Croix. The interesting thing about St Croix, after the roofs blew down, was that essentially all the walls are masonry and all roofs are cut roofs. They’re generally shallow pitch roofs, no more than 6 by 12 and they’re hipped on both sides so there was lots of carpentry to do! So we had a real quick lesson in roof framing. The other thing you learn that was really important is shuttering. There is no more talented carpenter, as far as I’m concerned, than a shuttering carpenter. I don’t care what roof carpenters say, even though roof carpentry is considered the PhD of carpentry, shuttering is something else. You’re working from dimensions that are inside and out and backwards from the one you end up finishing. Two things I learnt
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David Leviatin describes himself as a documentary photographer, cultural historian and timber frame carpenter. His work as a builder, author and lecturer reflects his interest in the combination of theory and practice to reveal connections between architecture, construction and culture. He runs a roaming company with Mike and Morgan Keogh which specialise in the conservation of timber buildings and the design and construction of new timber frame architecture. David agreed to teach Will Anderson and a fellow CDRS member George Mitzalis the basics of timber framing whilst constructing a domestic extension in their Hertfordshire workshop and a frame in White City. David, George, Will Anderson and Nazomi Nakabayashi (designer of Hooke Park’s Big Shed) formed a collaboration to practice the adaption of the conventional tendering processes for timber frame designs. This change to the procurement structure would allow client, architect, framer and timber supplier to direct a design from planning to completion, saving time, money and improving quality.
literature. Emerson was constantly saying that we should learn from experience not from books, learn by doing things. This had a profound effect on me. One of his greatest students was Thoreau, who was the guys who went off in a cabin for 2 years, 2 months, 2 days to live life to the fullest; so Thoreau is a very interesting character. So, not only did Harvard teach me how to read a text and use primary sources but there was also this notion of basically going out there and figuring stuff out on your own.
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that were important came about because there were lots of wealthy people with pools. We would do the pools using formwork. I remember we had a made a bunch of these on the ground and we were lifting them to line up and they were off by about two feet. There we are all trying to move them like this and then one of the old guys who was sat round threw us a length of 2 by 4. We looked at him like what are you on about? One of the other guys who was a bit smarter, was like: I think he wants us to use it as a lever, but we had nothing to lever off. So the old guy threw another bit of 2 by 4, a little piece. Then somebody cottoned on and said nail the little piece into the ground, use the other against it and move the whole thing. You start to learn these things. Essentially, using the structure as a tool to accomplish your needs. This was sort of earth shattering to me. Another break through moment was all of these roofs would have ridges. In order to put a ridge up, before the common rafters would go on, you need props to get the ridge level. What we would do is tape a spirit level onto a straight piece of 8 foot timber nailed to the ridge. One day the same old guy turned up and asked why we were doing that. We said what are you on about, we’re trying to get the ridge level. He said you guys have got the biggest level out there in the world to use, it’s called the horizon. So there are these moments were you say I don’t need the tools, if I just take a look around I can figure stuff out. St Croix provided the basics of carpentry but also gave me the opportunity to work with people who new stuff intuitively and didn’t talk much about it. It also introduced me to a crowd of people: a lot of the carpenters there were Vietnam vets, lots of alcohol problems, drug problems. One of the things you realise about being on a building site is one of the least important things is getting through the job, the most important is making sure your paid on time and that people aren’t jacking you off for money. One of the jobs we did was a big cedar frame, I was really interested in it. It was big, 12 by 12 and smelt wonderful, jointed with steel plates. One of the old guys between his coca cola can topped up with rum said to me if you’re interested you should get into timber framing. So I went on line, or not online actually, I did whatever there was before online, and looked up some books on timber framing. This one came up by Tedd Benson, published in 1980. I have to say I was a sucker for this. It was like Thoreau wrapped up in some self-help manual. Benson basically reinvented timber framing in the US, it’s all about the revival of a forgotten craft, he became involved with the carpenters guild in
NW America which was created in 1985. This was just a wonderful book about building stuff by hand. I decided if I were going to learn how to do this stuff properly I needed to go where it was done properly and that wouldn’t be in the US. I found out that the UK had a very strong tradition of timber framing, so did the French, the Germans, the Dutch, but the English spoke English. So I came over here. I had a few addresses that people had given to me; I called Carpenter Oak out in Chippenham which is one of the earliest timber frame companies. Basically I went out there, they said we certainly have work, can you cut a roof? I’m like yes of course, so they were like OK you’re hired no problem. They then gave me this book, I read it and was just blown away. It was Richard Harris and this is the book actually, bit of a bible for all of us. Not only is the terminology spot on but it fits in your pocket, it’s just terrific. I happened to call Richard after I had read the book and ask whether he might be able to recommend anyone to work with. He said there’s this sort of odd guy called Peter McCurdy based in Reading. At that time I wanted to stay close to London, Carpenter Oak was not close to London, Andrew Holloway and Green Oak Carpentry was not close to London, so I went with Peter. I meet with Peter and was really struck by the way he talked about buildings. He was basically interested in the fabric of the building, he was talking like a historian, I appreciated his logic; this was all stuff I could understand. So I started working there in 1998 and we went through a run of very exciting, very interesting projects. I just caught the tail end of the Globe, so that was quite interesting and then there was this reconstruction of Pilton Tithe Barn in Glastonbury. The projects that actually made the company money were the repair projects, the grotty projects, barns that needed repairing and there was a lot of it. That was where you learned how to do stuff. It’s only when you take things apart that you learn how they come together. Many carpenters don’t know what’s going on beneath the shoulder of a joint because they’ve never taken a building apart. One of the things I did learn from Peter was not only taking apart buildings, but how to label them, how to record them, how to treat them like a primary source. In Peter’s little porta-cabin he had a wonderful library. I saw this book and started going through it, everybody knows Cecil Hewitt despite what we may or may not think about him. This was an eye opener. I was a catalogue of joints. My idea of coming to the UK was to learn timber framing and then go and make money
selling timber frames in America to anglophiles. This was like the pattern book that I had been dreaming about.
Now, being a lover of Walt Whitman and everything vernacular and common and that sort of stuff, here is a photograph of a life guard shelter in Miami. I just got interested in any kind of frame that was open at all. So, I set up my own little company, as it felt the right time to move on. The first call I got was from a place called Easton Lodge about a treehouse that has been built in 1901 by a guy called Harold Peto for a lady called Daisy Greville, Countess of Warwick who was mistress to Edward VII. They said to me can you come and repair this treehouse, I said sure I’ll have a look. The treehouse was in an appalling state on the ground. I was able to sort through it, do a little survey. One of the things I learnt at McCurdy’s was that these things are like crime scenes: you don’t do anything until you photograph everything, record everything, label it and dust it off. I had said that we might find some carpenter’s marks, the architect was like no don’t be ridiculous its 1901 you’re never going to find any carpenter’s marks. Then I saw one and am like well there’s a bottom plate with a roman numeral III, bang – carpenter’s mark. After a while I found them all. By the end of the day I had actually put the cross frame together on the ground based on just the numbers I was finding. You can see it’s quite an exciting hexagonal structure in the way it’s faceted and joined. By the now the gardens were convinced we could actually do this, the question was where. One person turned up and offered a barn, I thought oh my god another of these grotty old barns. They took me to this barn called the Lordship Barn in the grounds of Riddle College in Riddle. I walked in and was amazed; it was quite a nice little grotty barn. They told me I could use a bay of the barn and in return all I had to do was a couple of teaching sessions to the College. It was a 6 bay barn. Needless to say I migrated very quickly to the rest of the barn and soon enough I was doing lots of projects there. There was something wonderful about doing work in
In any case. I had started to get to work and it was time for me to do the business, so as stunning as the barn was I needed to get on with stuff. I did a repair project where a number of joists had been ripped out of a floor by builders, the brief was that the project had been stopped and the contractor was really upset and the planning officer said the only way you can go on with the project is if you have the joists reinstated and fixed. To fix a joist joint you need to cut back and create a new one, the scale of these repairs varied from joist to joist. It ended up that everyone was happy. On larger jobs I do a drawing, I then send the drawing to a German company that specialises in machine cut frames. What I’m trying to do is not always do stuff in the old way but also use the new ones. There are somethings that the CNC machine does better than people and one of those things is cutting mortises. On a straight plate a CNC machine does that really well, it doesn’t do so well with curves so we tend to use a mixture of CNC and hand framing. What carpenters are trying to do is figure out how to solve problems. I’m trying to work out where is everyone for work today, how come the person hasn’t delivered the timber, how’s it going to fit on the truck, all of that sort of stuff. Meanwhile, everybody who was coming into the barn while we were working would all go WOW! No matter who it was, the guy reading the meter – anyone at all. I finally got some time, as work got slow, and I thought to myself I’ve got to work what is the wow factor here. I started to put the tape on things and began to record some interesting facts. First of all the most important dimension for a building is the span. The span, the span, the span. Outside of building to outside of building. The span in the Lordship Barn is 33 feet. The length of the building is 110 feet. That’s a twelfth of an acre which was 66 by 660 feet at the time. Half of 33 feet is 16 feet 6
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What I noticed when I was doing jobs for Peter was that people responded to the frame before it was closed in. When people would stand amongst a frame and see the oak and the light and the patterns cut across the sky everybody would go crazy. When we started to put the roof on everyone would say ‘oh, isn’t it a shame that we have to cover it up’. So perverse me started thinking is there some way we can actually create some buildings that we don’t have to cover up?
the barn. The barn was a primary source of incredible value. If I had any joint questions, I didn’t need to go to the internet, I would literally go over to the joint. I had started to explore the barn; when I first walked in I saw that and that and this as initial impressions. Then I started seeing markings, carpenter’s marks on the rafters, that’s a lifting socket, there’s a level mark, there’s a two foot mark, there’s even, dare I say maybe a daisy wheel, or some evidence of one – I don’t necessarily subscribe to that, but whatever it is, could have been a paper plate that someone nailed there…
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inches, which is a rod. A rod was a standard agricultural measurement. The arcade posts are 16 foot 6 inches. Basically what starts happening when you do these measurements and you start deconstructing the building is you realise it’s a very easily replicable building based on some certain simple numbers. Then you start thinking like a carpenter. The question still is why was it resonating with people. I think it’s this rod thing and body measurement. 5 foot 6 inches is the measurement from the outside of the wall plate to the beginning of the arcade post. If you measuring 5 foot 6 inches all over the building it just keeps fitting. So 5 foot 6 is a very important measurement, it also turns out as the average height for a man in the 15th century. The barn also responded to musical harmonies. One of the things I noticed was that people kept saying this building sounds great. There’s a weird type of synaesthesia going on, full notes, half notes, I’m not a musician but the lengths of the main timbers were following a harmonic pattern. Then I started going a bit wild. Draw the frame. Put it in a grid. There’s a 3 4 5 triangle: 16 foot 6 inches, 22 foot tie beam, and then the diagonal. Then I realised that if I had to give my son, whose going to be a carpenter, 1 thing to carry around with him I’d give him a 3 4 5 triangle, cause with that you can lay everything out. Forget about circles; forget about all that other stuff. 3 4 5 triangle and you have it. You can see da Vinci’s man fits all over the place, now I could even work in the barn anymore cause every time I turned around there were these figures all over the place. My wife was getting really concerned as I was obviously developing this affair with a building. After a while I dialled it back a bit and realised that with the span being 33 feet those segments on the line represent all the different lengths of timber. With that tattooed on your arm you could design this entire building. The final thing that was spooky about this building was there’s something called a foot acre, so 66 feet by 660 feet was an acre and this thing was a twelve of an acre, 33 by 110. Could it possibly be that this barn was like a gigantic measuring device? Is this some form of agricultural common sense that has been lost? Like how everything today relates back to a sheet of plywood. 4 foot by 8 foot is our 16 foot 6 inches standard. Finally the way in which timber frames are done here, and way I learnt, is the English way which is the scribing stuff, which is time consuming and works with irregular surfaces. This means that every single mortice and the
shoulder of each tenon will be adjusted, you have to keep putting the building together piece by piece and then taking it apart. But the American square rule is an entirely different way of making a timber frame. I think this came about as a result of the lower carpentry skills amongst those sent to the colonies. There are lots of documents in the records in Boston that say please can you send us some people that know what they’re doing, none of these guys have served their seven years. What square rule allowed carpenters to do is … it’s like mental saw milling. If you have an 8 by 9 timber and it’s all twisted turned what you imagine inside is a perfectly sound 6 by 6 timber. You then strike inch and a half lines all around and cut housings to the inch and a half lines. What this means is you don’t have to put the thing together any more, you basically just cut to those lines and off it goes to the site. With scribing a joint is cut specifically to fit a waney edge, it’s really time consuming, it requires a lot of skill, a lot of patience, also shorter lengths of timber mean that scarfs need to be made for wall plates, there’s a whole catalogue of interesting and exciting scarfs. The square rule lets you take out the irregularity. This is, ugh man, this is genius right? Basically there is no more irregularity. Once you get all these lines snapped on, you just work with the measurement. What it does is it makes a very ugly timber, but if a lot of its going to be clad and closed in anyway what does it matter? Here’s how scribe rule square rule evolved. That’s a brace frame which is transitional frame still with mortices and tenons but the timber is regularised from a mill. The problem with this unlike platform framing is you need a lot of guys as you have very long lengths. This is balloon framing, again they’re getting there but they’re not there yet. There are long posts which ledges are cut into; it’s almost as if they were scared to cut the timber. These created incredible fire hazards because fire would blow right through the walls of these things. Then another genius: platform framing. One guy can do this, boom. This is the last picture I was going to leave you with. It is one of the walls in the Lordship Barn, a 1478 wall onto which I built a stud frame. One of the points I’m trying to make is things haven’t really changed that much. In terms of the section size, yes obviously, but in terms of the principles not really. So for me as a historian when I’m looking at buildings that lack sources, generally what I’ll do is go away and observe people working. Generally 9 times out of 10 if you watch people working they will be using similar thinking, similar ways of moving, that will connect the two sites. Essentially it’s all trying to solve some kind of problem.