If you would like to get your ticket for the weekend you can book over at The Carpenters Fellowship
Here is a run down of all the lectures taking place at Frame this year.
Piers Taylor
Opening our event is Piers Taylor – award-winning architect, presenter of BBC2 TV’s ‘The House That £100K Built’ and ‘The World’s Most Extraordinary Homes’.
Piers will discuss his practice work of Invisible Studio – a rejection of the flat screen culture of mainstream architectural practice, and his journey into making, as he attempts to throw off the shackles of a conventional modernist architectural education and seek out a mode of practice that embraces contingency, context, people, collaboration and material.
Fergus Feilden
Next up is Fergus Feilden of Feilden Fowles Architects. Fergus will talk on the evolving role of timber framed projects in the practice, ranging from the use of Cross Laminated Timber within education projects such as the RIBA National Award winning Lee Centre, through to a contemporary Douglas fir frame for the practice’s self-build studio in Waterloo. Fergus will describe the close working relationship with engineers, framers, clients and contractors to deliver beautiful projects with timber at the heart of the design, delivery and success of the projects.
The extended lunch break gives delegates an opportunity to view some of the fascinating historic buildings that can be found around the museum site.
Oakwrights
Oakwrights are a company founded on traditional timber framing, but through tireless study and practice, have brought the technique bang up-to-date, meeting the most stringent contemporary standards. They will present their ‘Passive House’ project – the first oak framed building to meet this standard.
Simon Ely
Simon Ely, of Black Sheep Frame Finishing, is also no stranger to developing high standards of construction. His specialism is the glazing of oak frames – one of the most crucial and often the most challenging aspect of an oak framed building. Black Pig are leaders in this field, and Simon, known for his straight-talking, will have valuable insights to offer.
Robert Demaus – The Assessment and Repair of Historic Timber
Robert will explain (and maybe demonstrate) techniques including infrared thermography, microdrilling and ultrasound that can be used to investigate and assess the condition of historic structural and decorative timber, and discuss how the additional knowledge gained allows more conservative and cost-effective repairs and conservation.
He will also look at methods of repair and discuss whether current best practice involving “traditional” repair is either good practice or genuinely traditional.
Demaus Building Diagnostics Ltd specialises in the non-destructive survey and assessment of historic structures throughout the UK and abroad, using a wide range of techniques including infrared thermography, micro-drilling, ultrasound and endoscopy.
Laurie Smith – Historic Geometrical Building Design in Wales
Geometry has been used to design buildings for over 2000 years. When Marcus Vitruvius Polio wrote his Ten Books on Architecture in the first century BC (it’s still available in paperback!) he wrote that when designing a building difficult questions involving symmetry are solved by means of geometrical theories and methods. In other words, geometry was used to resolve the proportional relationships within a building’s overall design and to establish visual harmony between the building’s component parts and the whole.
When the Normans invaded Britain in 1066 they brought geometry with them and used it to design buildings such as Durham Cathedral (1093) and great monastic barns like the Barley Barn (1220) and Wheat Barn (1260) at Cressing Temple. The geometries used in these buildings were simple and predominantly based on the relationship between a circle and a square. The cylin¬drical columns in Durham’s nave exemplify this because, although they stand on a circular base, their height is exactly equal to their circumference and this makes their surface area square.
This presentation describes the evolution of building design geometries in Wales, commencing with the step by step construction of two crucial geometries found in buildings of all ages and scales from cathedrals down to domestic houses. Examples include the great door at Strata Florida Abbey, Ceredigion (1164), the timber-framed aisled hall Tŷ Mawr in Montgomeryshire (1460), the virtuoso two storey timber-framed porch at Old Impton in Radnorshire (1542) which has elaborate display geometries carved into the door head and a bracket carved with a complete set of carpenter’s tools, the extraordinary oak ceiling with massive hanging pendants in the nave of Saint David’s Cathedral (1530-40), Pembrokeshire and geometrical pattern book windows at The Hall, Llanfyllin, Montgomeryshire (1832).
The examples, which are illustrated with drawings and photographs, reveal that geometry was the design language of its time, a sophisticated manual medieval version of Autocad using dividers and straight edge in a pre-computer age.
Hooke Park – Advanced Fabrication, Experimental Architecture.
Headquartered at the Architectural Association School of Architecture’s Hooke Park campus, Design + Make explores fabrication and design at the intersection of craft knowledge, innovative technologies and natural materials. Full-time MArch and MSc students inhabit an environment that combines, forest, studio, workshop and building site. Through the realisation of full-scale prototypes and permanent buildings, students conceive and construct experimental architecture driven by the principle of design-through-making.
The key proposition is that new digital design and fabrication technologies enable traditional making techniques to be re-invented as innovative and appropriate processes for architecture. Emerging tools such as digital 3D scanning, generative modeling and robotic fabrication provide new opportunities for replicating the feedback between natural geometry, material properties and designed form that had previously connected designer, maker and the artifact.
Two recently completed projects – the Sawmill Shelter [http://designandmake.aaschool.ac.uk/project/sawmill-shelter/] and Wood Chip Barn [http://designandmake.aaschool.ac.uk/project/wood-chip-barn/] – will be presented.
Web: http://designandmake.aaschool.ac.uk
Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/hookepark
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aadesignandmake/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/designandmake/
Rick Collins – “The Most Famous Barn in America”
On Independence Day (July 4) of this year, Rick Collins of Trillium Dell Timberworks, orchestrated one of largest hand raisings in the U.S. in over a century. A Trillium Dell support crew of 30 helped guide the public raising, made pegs and ran the block and tackle. Sixty volunteers pulled on the lines to make it happen.
Rick will present on this recent hand raising of the restored 1872 “Star Barn” frame. The iconic decorated Star Barn, often called “The Most Famous Barn in America”, is a singular example of the often romanticized, entrepreneurial spirit and wealth the Post Civil War Victorian Era. From the time it was raised, it was an anomaly– and a one-of-a-kind.
Covered with stars and other symbols, the extravagant structure was built for a wealthy horse dealer/entrepreneur who made his fortune selling horses to the Union army during the Civil War (and later to the military of the Russian Czars). The Star Barn had active agricultural use from 1872 until 1986. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2000.
The barn measures 67’ wide by 105’ long, and is 56’ to the ridge. The timbers are white pine, and up to 68’ in length. The main tie beams are 53’ long. The timber was milled locally in Pennsylvania, and rafted down the mighty Susquehanna River. Timbers are mostly undersize by modern standards with gable posts being 8 x 12 and aisle posts being 8 x 10. Trillium Dell did extensive engineering and other repairs to the structure to bring it up to modern code requirements for re-use as a public space.
Get your tickets here!
This month we chatted to Ant Sawyer who is a former apprentice of OFTF about what he does now and what he hopes for the future – enjoy!
