The space now has sufficient electrical service. This week, the front door should be ready to pick up, and hopefully the plumbing will be finished.
Michael J. Lewis on the Decline of American Monuments and Memorials
“A structure that offers a single great lesson is a monument; one that offers many facts and anecdotes is a school or museum. And when it offers too many, it becomes preachy, as happened with the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington…”
http://www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis/archive/issue.asp?year=2012&month=04
Today I cut and beveled 36 glass stops for the large window, and trim for one side of one of the columns. Oh, and nailed them on. Total time, 3 hours.
Fabricating the storefront windows is going very well. The primary frame of 1x4s went together easily, and now the glass stops are being cut to length.
Here is a detail of the system, dry fi into place.
…small firms often don’t technically die. “They can’t exactly close,” says Los Angeles architect Olivier Touraine. “They freeze. Or they close their professional space and move into their backyard or garage.”
http://www.salon.com/2012/02/04/the_architecture_meltdown/singleton/
I’m making this up as I go along, despite the best planning I can muster. Now I know the letters of my sign can be 8″ high for the large ones, 4 or 6 for the small ones. This monster seems to have a voracious appetite for plywood and 2x4s, and no matter how much practice I get with a hammer the nails still seem to be made of spaghetti.
But with the water heater and all the electrical boxes ready, the plumbing and electrical work can be completed soon. Then it’s insulation, drywall, windows, doors, flooring, and finishes.
A couple more years at the pace I’ve been going.
He finished his work yesterday, and I’m overall satisfied with how it turned out. He re-did a few things and got the important parts more or less correct.
He was recommended by people I trust, and his price was very low. But when this self-styled jack of all trades attempted to do rough carpentry it became clear he was out of his element.
The front facade of my office is supposed to be a showpiece, and I showed him the rendering I’d done and some very detailed and thoroughly dimensioned drawings for how to frame it. The drawings went far beyond anything I do for clients, since this project is a bit unusual and difficult to visualize. Yet all my efforts at clarity were for nothing. He seemed to take my drawings as mere suggestions and went off on his own.
Further, it was clear he’d never framed a window before in his life, or if he had, he’d never framed one correctly. The existing brick window openings merely needed 2×4 stud blocking around the inside. The wood is non-load bearing. There are standard ways to do this. Yet he cut a 2×6 header and placed it above the 2×4 header member, and left an air gap above the 2×6. What was the 2×6 doing there, then? Nothing.
Then, the side should have been one jack stud and one king stud on either side of the opening. You can see in the photo what he did. I don’t know what was going through his mind when he did this.
I hadn’t caught that until he’d left, but just before he finished up for the day I notice the door header seemed a little low. “Is that 6′-8″?” I asked. He put a tape measure on it and it was fairly close to a proper door rough opening so I let it go. But later I still had a feeling something wasn’t right, so I picked up the old door and frame assembly from the trash pile and tried to set it in the rough opening. It didn’t fit. That’s when I noticed the header was not level. Not even close. Plumbers have to put a slope in drain lines, but do they have to put a slope in door headers?
And then I started noticing more errors. One of the walls he was framing was not in the right place. He didn’t leave any space around the door for trim. He didn’t follow the drawing where the electrical panel is going, and there’s no room for it now.
I spent all morning today assessing his mistakes, seeing if any could be salvaged. I decided I could live with the window openings, but the entire front wall would have to be re-done.
He’s scheduled to return Monday, and we’re going to have a talk…
One of the perks of being an architect is you get to see buildings at times in their lives when no one else does. Today I got to tour the old Jacksonville Art Museum, which has been abandoned since about 2006 after the museum moved to a new place downtown.
I’ve had a long, if fleeting, relationship with the museum, starting in grade school when we took field trips there. I still remember one gallery were we were gathered, and the teacher asked us what we felt when we looked at a particular white porcelain piece in the room, and my friend John Cole answered with the word, “hungry” to a room full of giggles. The teacher took it as a legitimate art critique, though in retrospect he was probably just signalling his desire to eat lunch.
Later on my parents took me to the series of art films they showed every month. Though I don’t recall any of the movies, I do recall the black-painted room and the uncomfortable chairs.
After college I saw an exhibition by a Southern artist who made an impression on me, one of whose works was a video of him talking about “high octaning” himself. In it, he talked about how, “If you could dream it, you could do it in 1962,” and, “You people today got your Toyota Tercel and you think you got something,” and went on to extol the virtues of the true high octane burning muscle cars of the sixties. I’ll have to dig up his name and google him.
I also volunteered as a docent at the Andrew Wyeth exhibit in around 1990, handing out cassette players in shoulder straps for guests to listen to on self-guided tours.
My wife modeled in a fashion show there in the mid-1990s, at an event my mom had something to do with. My mom did a lot of volunteer work at the museum, getting to know its director well and participating in many events.
The building has sat unoccupied since the museum moved out, but it has the appearance of having been abandoned in a hurry. There are still paintings on the walls.
A series of paintings of royalty hangs amidst the derelict walls and ceilings, as time, the elements, and work crews take their toll. The ironic juxtaposition of an obsolete form of governance with an obsolete art gallery perhaps indicates how obsolete art itself may be in today’s world.
We also inspected the roof, which was like an abandoned graveyard of air conditioner compressors. One after another sat askew on rotting curbs, some resting at absurd angles in their penultimate state before a trip to the recycler. Others quietly rusted in solemn dignity. The picture below shows a large electrical sub-panel that reminded me of the black obelisk in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Or is it the shroud of Turin?
One memorable work of art from the museum’s operational days was a moving message board of red LED lights, programmed to have random characters and shapes scroll across it. The anticipation of the unknown message was what drew me to stand there and watch it. In a similar way, this actual sign from the loading dock outside caused me to stand in amusement and just stare at it, defiantly trying to figure out what it meant:
The conundrum lies in the fact that elevators are not to be used in emergencies. Was that the reason for calling the police? We will never know.
The building’s fate rests in the hands of a community development agency who’s plans are to turn the museum into an office building.