TEACHING MASONRY

My role as coordinator of the second year studios at IIT and again at Clemson has meant that, along with teaching wood and masonry, I have spent a lot of time thinking about how to teach these materials to architecture students. This semester I’m teaching Structures I in the graduate program and these issues are back on the front burner. Which means I still spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about these materials in very basic terms. Wood, in all its variations, masonry, and especially stone.

And for reasons perhaps related to my many years buried in the stone cities and buildings of Europe, but also to something more significant, immediate, and powerful, I am haunted by stones. I dream of the taste and smell of certain stones. Though I'm a southerner, I never ate dirt, but I know well many and varied tastes of the rocks of the southern Appalachians. Even now I can summon the taste of rocks from the creek on our land in the Black Mountains.

I'm haunted by the image of Assisi's pink stone shifting colors under a hard rain. Firenze’s pietra dura and pietra serena. The Loire valley’s slate. And the color of Montepulciano’s San Biagio late on a July afternoon is one seared into my brain. I rock-climbed for years and can recall in hyper-detail the feel of rock on certain pitches around Asheville. The quality of friction provided by an outcropping on a particular face.

So finding this photograph recently was a kind of minor miracle. One because of the people in it. But also because of what it told me about things I didn't realize I had in me. My grandfather, my father, and my uncle at their rented house in Haywood County outside Asheville around 1937.