In the spring of 2022, I had a great time scribing together a small cabin frame of ancient shipbuilding timbers. Prime live oak and white oak shipbuilding timbers harvested in the mid-19th century, these massive balks were discovered buried in a long-forgotten saltwater storage pond at the former Charleston Navy Yard in Boston, Massachusetts. In this article, from the Autumn 2022 issue of Northern Woodlands magazine, I write about the history of these timbers and the eclectic scribing methodology I employed to join them into a gem of a little cabin.
Publications
Here’s a Northern Woodlands web extra, by Cheryl Daigle, in support of my article that appeared in the magazine’s Autumn 2022 issue. In this interview, I describe my approach to the adaptive reuse of a 19th-century barn in Lyme, New Hampshire, as a residence. I speak to matters of the continuity of craft, authenticity, and how the light plays on variously textured timber surfaces.
A review of China’s Covered Bridges: Architecture Over Water, by Ronald G. Knapp, Terry E. Miller, and Liu Jie. This important book is the first comprehensive survey of the fascinating covered-bridge heritage of China. Based on entirely different structural principals than the covered bridges of North America and Europe, Chinese covered bridges have also seen the least research and documentation, even within China. From Timber Framing 140 (June 2021).
There is a unique curved and inclined (nearly helical) covered footbridge at the former Lamson and Goodnow mill complex in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts. Researched and written with my colleague Hank Silver, this article appeared in Timber Framing 131 (March 2019).
Here’s the story of fabricating the round-log timber frame for the new Moosilauke Ravine Lodge, the centerpiece of Dartmouth College’s outdoor campus on New Hampshire’s Mount Moosilauke. In replacing a beloved, if whimsical, lodge that had deteriorated beyond repair with a new, high-performance building, our focus was on creating a new structure which would continue to inspire connection to it’s place in the world. This article originally appeared in Timber Framing 126 (December 2017), and was reprinted by the Carpenters’ Fellowship (UK) in The Mortice and Tenon 63 (Spring 2019).
This article is about the process I employed to fabricate the centerpiece staircase for the Moosilauke Ravine Lodge. Seamlessly scribed together and completely blind fastened, this staircase also tapers over a foot in width from top to bottom. This technical piece, published by the International Log Building Association, appeared in Log Building News 202 (June 2019).
My article, “Pursuing the Guitarde,” tells the story of my studies to learn croche, a traditional stereotomic approach to the layout of doubly-curved timbers. I worked through exercises from an old French carpentry manual, ultimately building the first guitarde model by an American carpenter. This article appeared in Timber Framing 121 (September 2016).