The 2017 work year was a variety-pack of projects and travels bringing rocks and people together. Projects from 2017 now lie nestled in snow, while projects for 2018 are already underway.
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Free stone construction is a practice of seeking. The contents of a pile of loose stone is just waiting to be found out. Everything needed to create a sturdy structure is there. The possibilities are discovered as they’re uncovered, then explored and exploited, one after another. Moment by moment, movement by movement, stones topple into place. Their size, shape and center of gravity are predetermined by the natural forces that made them, but their status in a construction relies on an instant, reflexive response to their stature by the builder.
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As part of its 40th anniversary, the Montshire Museum of Science in Norwich, Vermont commissioned me to create a permanent, interactive, environmental art piece. The result is a 1,000 sq. ft. dry stone and stainless steel sculpture that rises like a geologic upthrust from the open space alongside the museum entryway. Visitors can walk, climb and sit on the undulant surfaces of the work, or, simply view it on their way to, and from, the building.
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Over the past few months I’ve been a guest speaker and adviser to senior students in the architecture department. Their thesis project was to develop a program, and design the buildings and grounds for The Water House, a destination spa and environmental education center being built in western Massachusetts. The studio was sponsored by the New England distributor of Marvin windows, A.W. Hastings. Prizes were offered to the top three designs, judged by me and and a dozen other landscape professionals and regional architects.
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In late autumn of 2011 Gordon Hayward called to say that Teddy Berg had asked him to write a book about her gardens on Rice Mountain in Walpole, New Hampshire. He wanted to know if I’d care to contribute a few essays, and, of course, I said I’d be pleased and honored to do so. ‘Gardening on Granite’ is hot off the presses this month. It’s a large-format book packed with gorgeous photographs and a lovingly told, personal history of a very special place and time.
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I laid up another length of Galloway style wall reusing the stone from an adjacent derelict wall. The beauty of what Tony had in mind when he called me last year to begin the project is now clear. With the original wall line shifted away from the trees that had grown up in it, the new wall and mature trees have space to breathe.
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Every new idea leads to an adventure. In the past when I’ve wanted to record and transfer “points-in-space” from a clay model to a full scale construction I’ve made a grid-style guide frame and physically measured the distance from the frame to the surface of the model. To build the horse eye sculpture I will need thousands of measurements on a 6”x6” grid. My new idea was to find someone who could digitally scan the model for the measurements I would need.
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Trick-or-treaters had the trick played on them this autumn when a pre-Halloween Nor’easter dropped a foot of snow on our area. Witches and goblins don’t usually have to scale snowbanks to ring doorbells. And I don’t expect my stone supplies to disappear under a blanket of white stuff in October. But after a short delay, the project I had scheduled for last week got underway and a 100’ length of “singling” was produced for Cochecho Country Club. This style of dry stone walling is well suited to a materials supply constituted of boulders. The stone was resurrected from the remnants of an old field wall. The wall line was reestablished and a crushed-stone base installed.
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Work on the 8th hole stone fence at Cochecho Country Club in Dover, New Hampshire ended on a bright note yesterday with sunny skies. The golfers were out in droves. It will be interesting to see how the new wall becomes part of course play. A ball that hits the wall will ricochet toward the green instead of bounding, as it would have previously, into the rough. In any case, Brian and I are happy to be out of the line of fire from long drives gone astray.
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An inch of rain isn’t the best way to start a new job, but that’s what I got Wednesday in Dover, New Hampshire where I was beginning construction at a golf course. The original fence ran alongside of an old town road. Its remnants had been pulled down by the course maintenance crew and a new footing established away from the tree line. By Thursday afternoon the clouds lifted and the wind began to dry the mud. Friday was beautifully sunny.
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The Sheep Shed resides at the convergence of two paths trodden into the hillside by many generations of sheep hooves. Three dry stone walls, built from cobbles and boulders selected from a gravel pit, support oak timbers. A light weight network of spruce log poles rests on the frame. In ascending layers, thick slabs of flat stone from a quarry in Goshen, Massachusetts cover the pole rafters. The roof stones are not affixed in any way. They are held in place by the sheer weight of their collective mass. Twenty tons of stone float over the void of the sheep shed interior.
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