“In short, a ‘house’, wherever it may be, is an enduring thing, and it bears perpetual witness to the slow pace of civilizations, of cultures bent on preserving, maintaining, and repeating.”
-Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life: Civilization & Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, Volume 1 (1967)
Hi!
Buildingshed has been on a summer break the past few months. I’ll be returning to it soon, but until then, here are some of the things I’ve been reading and thinking about:
The skilled and venerated Palestinian stonemasons described in Stone Men: The Palestinians Who Built Israel by Andrew Ross:
“In the case of Palestinians, the Israeli demand for their stone presents a paradox. Aside from the cheap, skilled labor of construction workers, stone is the primary Palestinian commodity that Israelis need to physically build out their state, along with their ever-expanding West Bank colonies. Palestinian quarries have long supplied the raw material for building the houses of Zion, while Palestinian towns and villages supplied the builders. By far the majority of Palestinian stone (more than 70 percent) finds its way into the Israeli market, underpinning the dependency on the occupying power. In fact, stone makes up half of the country’s exports across the Green Line, though much of it is also used in the West Bank to construct “facts on the ground” (Jewish settlements and security infrastructure established prior to any legal recognition).”
A quarry in Kobar, Ramallah (Photo from the digital archives of the Palestinian Museum, Emile Ashrawi Collection)
With these ample deposits under their feet, it is no surprise that the region’s stonemasons developed top-notch artisanal skills and have long been venerated and sought after for their services. During the Ottoman and British Mandate eras, every large village in historic Palestine hosted a master mason who designed and constructed homesteads and common-use buildings. These craftsmen and their crews inherited and passed on tools, techniques, and know-how, serving as stewards and modernizers of the regional Arab vernacular styles. Without any professional training in design or planning, they built palaces, hilltop villages, and township cores that are much admired today as examples of “architecture without architects.” From the mid-nineteenth century, the masons were regionally employed in city building—in Jaffa, Haifa, Acre, Hebron, Jerusalem, and Bethlehem—and later, when other Arab countries in the region needed their expertise, in nation-building. Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to say that the “stone men” of Palestine have built almost every state in the Middle East except their own.
Atelier LUMA’s crystallized salt panels, made by submerging frames in the water of salt marshes:
Atelier LUMA is making crystallized salt panels suitable for use in architectural projects. Their Crystallization Plant, sited in the Camargue salt marshes, is working on techniques for transforming salt—harvested in this region of the Rhône delta for centuries—into new forms and materials.
One part of [the Crystallization Plant’s] activity involves in-depth research into the crystallization process. When submerged in the salt marshes for several days, objects become covered in salt crystals, which vary in size and color depending on meteorological conditions. The other is focused on using molding, pressing, heating, and thermocompression to make three-dimensional prototypes.
Objects crystallized in salt by Atelier LUMA (Photo by Yannick Vernet, CC BY 2.0)
Factors determining the bulk, weight, lightness, and soundness of buildings in Construction Physics:
Advances in building technology let buildings get lighter and lighter through the 19th and 20th centuries. Now, in some areas, we may be approaching current limits of dematerialization. In his newsletter Construction Physics, Brian Potter wrote recently about the relationship between mass, volume, and building performance.
Holly Jean Buck on the social and political challenges renewable energy infrastructure will pose if constructed at the necessary scale:
People don't want some company from some other place coming in, blanketing the fields near their house when they're seeing no benefit. So it's not just about the visual aesthetic, it's about who's controlling it, it's about how the identity of the region is changing. If it used to be an agricultural area, there's a sense of loss around that.
A wind turbine in Kansas (Photo by Tim Vrtiska, CC BY-ND 2.0)
Winona LaDuke on infrastructure as a beast of legend, or a promise for change:
Infrastructure has long been central to the destruction of Indigenous life and the making of settler colonial futurity. Infrastructure constitutes the body of the Wiindigo—the beast of Anishinaabe legend. Roads and rails, pipelines and dams, prisons and borders have all worked to carve up Turtle Island into preserves of settler jurisdiction, while entrenching and hardening the very means of settler economy and sociality into tangible material structures. Yet infrastructure is not inherently violent—it is also essential for transformation; a pipe can carry fresh water as well as toxic sludge.
Thank you for being there. As you go on preserving, maintaining, repeating, and changing in your own way (not like a house or a piece of stone, but maybe sometimes like a landscape or a shape made by crystallizing salts?), contrast Fernand Braudel’s observation on enduring things and the pace of civilization with some thoughts on the “hotel-ness of American life.” And look out for another letter from me soon!