Vernacular Scale

I realized on a recent trip to Virginia that what I still glean from experiencing the pre-industrial vernacular architecture of the Eastern Seaboard is a sense of appropriate scale. My definition of scale here incorporates relationships between people, between resources, and between the commerce, enterprise and production that connects them all.

Despite the obvious (and nefarious) social inequities comprising this sense of appropriate scale, is that it appears to be in balance with nature, self-sustaining, self-regulating, and thereby sustainable. Ironically, it is the very balance of relationships and resources that led eventually to a kind of prosperity, or surplus, that yielded conditions conducive to innovation, which became the undoing of said balance.

In many ways, I feel that the human psyche is still looking for the sense of scale exemplified by the basic tenets governing all pre-industrial vernacular architecture. This leads to misplaced nostalgia, or sentimentality, a romanticization of times past, and a cognitive dissonance with the present and future conditions. Given that this cycle appears to be a recurrent part of the human experience, I’ve tried through my work to develop an inner sense of scale that allows me to glean from the present and anticipate the future, using a deconstructed past as a template.

My Bonfire Coat

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My Bonfire Coat dries by the fire, draped over a shovel handle

My Bonfire Coat is a herringbone Harris Tweed from the 1960’s. I found it at an AMVETS in Chicago in the early eighties and wore it everywhere for about the next decade when I moved from city to city to country to city. I built a house and a boat in this coat one very cold winter in upstate New York and cleared land and burned brush in Exeter, Rhode Island that spring. I met my wife while wearing this coat at the Aldrich Estate in Annandale-on-Hudson on October 1, 1988. I’ve kept the coat in my woodshop since we moved to California and mostly wear it on chilly mornings while I get a fire going in the woodstove. I also wear it for our annual bonfire, a seasonal ritual born of accumulated apple prunings, wood scraps and giant fallen ‘widow makers’ from the redwoods. The coat keeps me dry in a light rain while shielding the sparks and intense heat of a roaring fire. This year I noticed a disturbing cluster of moth holes and was tempted to throw the coat on the fire as it burned down. I think I’ll give it one more year.

Makkeweks Final Inspection

makkeweks bronze

Earlier this week I met with the City of Oakland for the final inspection of our Makkeweks sculpture prior to installation. Installation is delayed until mid-2017 pending completion of Snow Park but the foundry completed the fabrication of the bronze castings and the sculpture’s interior, stainless steel armature in anticipation of temporarily storing the monster in their sculpture garden. The foundry treated the surface of the sculpture with chemicals to darken the bronze and accelerate its patina, which will continue to gain character with exposure to the elements over the next year.

 

Pacem In Terris

dome2 Peace Dome, Interior View, schematic rendering by LandDesign

Earlier this summer Wowhaus collaborated with LandDesign to develop a proposal for a public sculpture competition commemorating the US Peace Corps in Washington, DC. We did not win the commission, but we loved working with LandDesign, and the project gave us a chance to prototype a model of collaboration, and to invent a replicable structure, the Peace Dome. Building on a stacked masonry block technology I developed for our Scuppernong Commons project, I designed a geodesic dome as the centerpiece for the site. The project had special significance for Ene and me; we were Peace Corps Volunteers together in Togo, West Africa in 1990-91. Here are a few images from our design process featuring the dome, whose base would have been stacked, cut stone, with a hand cast dome of earth/cement blocks. We called our proposal Pacem In Terris, and our original, brief project narrative follows below.

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Peace Dome in situ, schematic rendering by LandDesign

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Pacem In Terris, aerial view, schematic rendering by LandDesign

PACEM IN TERRIS (Peace on Earth)

Pacem In Terris reinterprets the universal form of the dome as a human scale symbol of peace, cooperation and interdependency. Each hand-cast masonry block in the dome incorporates the unique soil of a country served by the US Peace Corps.

The dome is raised on an open, circular colonnade over a circular stone terrace. The terrace pattern mirrors the masonry blocks overhead, indicating the country of origin of the corresponding block. A borderless map of the world is cast in bronze and inlaid into the center of the terrace. Three stacked stone benches alternate with three open spaces between the columns around the perimeter of the colonnade. Terraced, native grasses provide a serene backdrop.

The structure invites reflection on the common ground we share, inviting conversation and connection between strangers; it is also an iconic destination for prospective and returned Peace Corps Volunteers.

Scuppernong Commons

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Wowhaus were Artplace Environmenal Artists-in-Residence at the McColl Center for Art and Innovation in Charlotte, North Carolina in late winter of 2015. While in residence we realized an ambitious public project called Scuppernong Commons. The project is sited within Brightwalk, a mixed-income, mixed-use residential development that is a model of sustainable revitalization and economic development for the City.

Part architectural intervention, part social sculpture, Scuppernong Commons reintroduces the scuppernong grape to the urban fabric, and invites new traditions around the grape’s harvest, preparation and stewardship. Native to the Southeast, the scuppernong has been in cultivation since the 16th century and has been a common staple in homemade jams and jellies, juices, pies and wine.

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Scuppernong Commons consists of a walk-through arbor with overhead trellis, and poured concrete hardscape to support seasonal celebrations. In anticipation of a craft-based, community-engaged fabrication process, we designed a structural system that features a single repeating element, while allowing for randomness and variability. Twelve columns support the trellis and make an artificial allée. Each column is composed of 14 dry-stacked, pigmented concrete rings that were hand-packed with the help of volunteers from the community. The rust-red tone and claylike texture of the stacked columns evokes the region’s red clay soils.

As Charlotte continues to grow and prosper as a major hub of the New South, Scuppernong Commons is intended as a durable, loving tribute to the City’s humble origins, emblemized by the versatility and resiliency of its native fruit.

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Spinnradl Video

Spinnradl Video, shot and edited by J Miles Wolf

Here is a short video showing our Spinnradl sculptures in action in Cincinnati. The video features two songs on two nearly identical sculptures, sited about a block apart from each other along Pendleton Street. The songs are played by turning a crank, which spins a large cylinder that triggers an analog music box. Turning the crank also powers a pulsing, radial Moire animation on either end of the sculpture’s housing. Each song lasts about thirty seconds when spun at the optimal speed, and repeats as long as the crank is continually turned.

The first song featured is a German folk dance called Spinnradl (spinning wheel), where dancers traditionally make star patterns in groups of three. The song would have been familiar to the German immigrants who built the Pendleton neighborhood and lived and worked there in the 19th and early 20th Centuries. The second song is a ragtime composed in Cincinnati during the height of ragtime’s popularity. The song was composed to play on board steamboats that ferried passengers along a canal that once bordered the ‘Over-the Rhine’ neighborhood.

To learn more about the development of Spinnradl, please click here and scroll down.

New Wowhaus Website

wowhaus website

I am very proud to announce that after 15 years we have designed a new website for Wowhaus. Perhaps the most remarkable thing is how well the site we built in 1999 has held up over the years, hence the delay and hesitation: ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it?’ Right?

Because we had actualized so little work as the artist team of Wowhaus when we designed the original site in the late 90’s, we arranged things chronologically in anticipation of the career arc we anticipated, scrollable like a ‘blog, but long before ‘blogs even existed. This became cumbersome after over 15 years of collated projects. Also, the platforms we used to design and maintain the website became obsolete, and our systems manager moved to South Africa.

Our new site is more like a collage, featuring projects more visually up front, all part of the same conceptual thrust regardless of their origin, location or timeframe. Projects are arranged visually, with no particular hierarchy, and are more randomly accessible. Closer inspection reveals the divergent details. We will continue to add content as our current projects are installed and documented.

While refining the text and going through our image archives for the new site, I realized that we never really take pause to reflect on the work we’ve accomplished as a whole. Seeing the completed website for the first time gave me a rare perspective of an outsider looking in, and I found a fresh perspective on what we actually do.

It occurred to me that Wowhaus projects are an extension of our domestic life- a glimpse of what the world might look like if a family decides to rebuild it as an extension of home, claiming public space for the kinds of use patterns that might normally be associated with home, with raising a family, building a community; recasting the world as an extension of home, as both a critique and a proposal.

Click here to see the new Wowhaus website.