tassajara

the tassajara zen mountain center is the oldest japanese buddhist monastery in the united states, nestled in a very remote part of los padros forest 16 miles from the nearest paved road. some practitioners live onsite year round (some for many years round), but during the work periods - which i was lucky enough to partake in last week - workers help with various projects around the center, provided with lodging and meals. the area's natural hot springs are incorporated into a japanese-style bath house.

i just sort of fell into this project headed by paul discoe of joinery structures, who specializes in traditional japanese woodworking. he lived on and off at the center for many years, having studied (as well as taught) zen buddhist practices throughout his life. he and a team of students were at the center for two weeks to install a gate at the entrance.

japanese joinery is a gorgeous practice in that structures are held together by notching and carving pieces of wood to nestle in neatly with one another (no screws). i mostly did finishwork on the enormous pieces you see pictured here; i wasn't there long enough to see the final assembly of the pieces, but i'll try to track some photos down.

trails and bathing and sanding and eating and bowing and allergies and such happy people.

photos and not-photos

my hard drive got stolen a few weeks ago, which really sucks you know! all kinds of photographs and writing on there that i'm never going to see again. but the morning after it was stolen i thought i'd also lost my notebook from the past few months. after an hour of suppressed panic, i found my notebook in the library. which made me realize that it is far more valuable to me than my hard drive. so it's ok.

** i've been lucky enough to participate in two fantastic building projects over the month of april - a temporary event space on campus and a japanese-style gate at tassajara - which i'll be posting about with photos very soon. the hard drive situation slowed things down a bit on the blobbing front, but keep a lookout.

what i actually do have here now (finally) are nicholas's photographs from our brick-press field trip to briones, which just got back from the developer. pretty much all of them are blurry and i think they're spectacular. here are a few.

field trip

we finished the brick press and tried it out at briones last week! it actually worked, which was pretty sublime. here are some photos from the outing, as well as an accompanying statement i wrote for a book that (aforementioned petal pusher) larisa is compiling, which should hopefully be out later this year.

the brick library is a loosely-formatted project grounded in the desire to better understand the relationships we cultivate with our built environment. after collaborating with nicholas morris (pictured) on the fabrication of a hand-levered tool that compresses loose earth into small bricks sized for my own hand, we've been exploring the breadth of local soils in different areas, building playful, gestural structures in various locations, and bringing back sample bricks to a growing archive. as of yet, the brick press serves more as a learning tool than a building tool, though it has hands in both by default. still, the process of amassing tactile information - and the result of that process, the library - lends itself directly to the process of raising a structure, brick by brick.

briones regional park, ca

bric-à-brac

as one of the world's most ancient building materials, bricks have been harvested and reused over many centuries, single modules seeing the ruin and resurrection of many structures. eternality is symbolically embedded in every structure bricks are a part of, though they lend themselves equally to flux. even this expression, to harvest a brick, implies that the brick is a living organism that requires nurturing and care, that each unit is handled and touched, that each exists fully in the present with century-long seasonal changes of fickle construction and deconstruction.

petal pusher

my friend larisa just started a flower business which is, amazingly, even sweeter than it sounds because it's called petal pusher, and because she vends from a handmade cart, built with love by nicholas. she's typically stationed on valencia and/or near dolores park in san francisco. she made her big debut in front of the gallery space i talked about (here) as part of the last oakland art murmur. things to click!/photo sources: 1 2 3

tids & bits

(1 & 4) buildings without architects: a global guide to everyday architecture by john may, edited by anthony reid; (2 & 7) handmade houses: a guide to the woodbutcher's art by art broericke and barry shapiro; (3) architecture without architects: a short introduction to non-pedigreed architecture by bernard rudofsky; (5) red building in forest, william christenberry, 1983; (6) down to earth: adobe architecture by jean detheir; (8) dwellings: the vernacular house worldwide by paul oliver.

research beginnings

i'm collaborating with my good friend nicholas to fabricate a compressed earth block press (click) as part of the brick research library cart we're making. we're hoping the cart will serve as a learning & building tool of and about brick, though it's still unclear exactly how it will live in the world after it's completed. for now we're just building the c.e.b. and the cart, as well as assembling research materials (books, samples, drawings, and raw materials related to the history and building of brick) that will in some way live on/in the final cart. we've presented the progress of the project to various groups; this is what we've been showing.



we're thinking of using those pallets as a base structure for the cart. the bricks i hand-molded from clay left evidence of their three-week drying period on that sheet of plywood on the left. side note, i molded those bricks to a size that felt nice in my hand, and that's the size we're using for our c.e.b. mold (about 3" x 5.25" x 1.5"), rather than the standard building brick size (about 4" x 8" x 2.5").



the shape of c-channel steel (foreground) is what gives it strength, allowing thinner, lighter (i.e. more portable) pieces of metal to be used for the walls of the press.



some of the books we've collected as a part of the growing brick library. we're assembling some of our favorite pages from these books, as well as many other things, into a brickbook that currently exists as a pile of xerox copies in a manila folder.



soil testing jars, an unbelievably low-tech way of testing the integrity of earth for brickmaking, will also be incorporated into the cart so that soil can be sampled onsite.



on the left are adobe bricks that nicholas made from earth and straw found nearby; in the middle are my hand-molded red clay bricks; on the right are firebricks which have a specialized formula that withstands extreme high temperatures, so they're typically used to line furnaces, kilns, and fireplaces.

there's more to come, so stay tuned ~

thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented culture, and doing nothing is hard to do. it's best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking.

wanderlust: a history of walking
by rebecca solnit

brick library

i am making bricks and thinking about borrowing.


reading a brick,
building a book