Hello and welcome to the eighth installment of Tennessee Adoxographic, my occasional newsletter about the 1982 World’s Fair and one of it’s key pieces of themed architecture, the [[Sunsphere]]. This letter is a collection of a lot of different things I have been thinking about the last several months, about [[Las Vegas and Gatlinburg]], about [[context]] in the built environment, and about an architect named [[Hubert Bebb]]. Because there are a lot of connections between these ideas, I thought it might work to present this letter as a work of hypertext, using [[Twine|twine]]. There are also a lot of dead ends; you may want to use the back button to explore other threads.
Someday I'll finish my [[interactive fiction opus|the one about sounding more profound]], “Only Maynard Gets to Call Me Al” [[in which you’re a washed up Paul Simon in early summer 1986|maynard1]], all of your personal and professional hopes hanging on your forthcoming album, [[Graceland|graceland]]. You prank call Art Garfunkle with your frenemy Chevy Chase, ponder your increasing irrelevance in youth culture, and suddenly remember the spring morning almost twenty years earlier when you flew out to Hollywood (without telling Art) to guest star in an episode of Gilligan’s Island in which you were supposed to play a folk singer named Al. During the first scene, a coconut falls on your head, giving you amnesia for the duration of the shoot. You seem to recognise the fact that you’re on a stage but don’t know to act. You keep calling Bob Denver “Maynard”. The director, realizing the show probably isn’t going to be picked up for a fourth season and that this episode’s script is weak and a regurgitation of at least four different, earlier episodes, decides to lean in and tells the actors to follow your lead, hoping for some kind of improvised gonzo hit, but the show gets cancelled the next week and none of the footage was usable anyways and an executive from Columbia Records quietly had all of the footage destroyed and got everyone on set that day to sign an NDA. One of Columbia’s A&R reps secretly gets you back to New York where you woke up two days later unaware of the incident.
If there’s ever a second “season” of (link: "Tennessee Adoxographic")[(goto-url: "http://tinyletter.com/adoxographic")], it’s going to be about Graceland (the place, not the album).
Is the [[non-linear structure|torus]] of this newsletter my way of rebelling against the [[conventions of email newsletters|gamification of newsletters]], a mechanism for making the content sound [[more profound than it is]], a cheap workaround for not organizing [[my thoughts]] in a rational manner, or just a subconscious attempt to sabotage any notions I had about someday collecting these [[newsletters|anchor links]] into some kind of chapbook or [[zine|webbed sites]]? Who can really say?
I recently saw a short presentation at (link: "Wordhack")[(goto-url: "https://www.babycastles.com/about")] from Edith Viau about (link:"experiments with mapping poems onto a torus")[(goto-url: "https://github.com/eviau/torus/blob/main/index.md")]. The poem Edith presented was a grid, with each portion of the grid containing a phrase or discrete unit of poetry, and the idea was you, the reader, could proceed either left, right, up, or down to the next poetic subdivision. That the poem wasn’t a set of lines, to be read through strictly linearly, but that it could meander, that different paths with different but parsable meanings were possible, and that the poem could loop back upon itself if it needed to was all fascinating to me. I had been thinking about ideas of [[nonlinear narrative|museum, artichoke, sassafras, horse]] for a while, about choose-your-own adventure structures and ways to randomize the reading, but I was really taken by this approach. I can’t actually read the poem that Edith presented because it’s in French but I think the idea is really neat.
For some other projects I've been thinking about, I've been trying to find variations on paper fortune tellers, or cootie catchers. I'm interested in using them as a way to physically represent a non-linear or branching narrative and have been trying to see if there are other traditions or formulations on the paper fortune teller, other folding patterns that result in different numbers of forks or different levels of complexity. I know that (link: "Beryl Graham")[(goto-url: "https://www.berylgraham.com/cv/art.htm")] was doing work around paper fortune tellers in the 1990s but I haven't seen too much else about their use in art or poetry. If you know of other prior art or folding variations, please email me about them.
The gamification of newsletters implies the potential to speedrun a newsletter. [[I am not a speedrunner]] and I don’t watch too many speedruns but I spend a considerable amount of time thinking about what it would mean to speedrun things that aren’t, strictly speaking, games. Can you speedrun doing your taxes? What would a Duolingo speedrun look like? I recently had to buy a washing machine and it’s a goddamn smart appliance and you can download different wash cycles off the internet so of course I’m going to try to find a way to speedrun laundry. I like the idea of speedrunning because it's about applying an external constraint, in most cases just reaching an [[end state|final slide]] as quickly as possible, and in the process of trying to fulfill this external constraint, you realize how meaningless all of the internal constraints are. Speedrunners learn the rules of a game to find out where they break. What I guess I am saying is I don’t know what it would mean for you to [[speedrun this newsletter|speedrunning strats]] but I’m all for it. Email me your best times. Maybe I’ll start a [[leaderboard]].
1: KIT
2: RBS
3: DSB
4: ORB
5: ASS
In the Tennessee Adoxographic speedrunning community, we call this "Cabin Skip".
THE END.
[[BIBLIOGRAPHY]]
thank you for reading my ground-breaking work of architectural criticism. please give me one (1) prestigious architecture award, please and thank you
It’s 1986 and you are Paul Simon. [[Congratulations|maynard2]].
You are [[supposed to meet Chevy Chase tonight|maynard3]] to talk about shooting a music video for "You Can Call Me Al". Chevy wanted to catch the last night of the Playboy Club, you wanted to go to Shout Disco. Chevy said, “Aren’t you a little old for Shout Disco?” and you rejoined, “Aren’t you a little young for the Playboy Club?”. You and Chevy have [[great banter]], you think. You finally agreed to meet at Area, which is fine. You learned a long time ago an important rule in compromising: that if you can’t get what you want, [[nobody gets what they want]]. There’s nothing wrong with Area although it does maybe take itself a little too seriously. After an hour or two of Singapore Slings and leering at women half your age, who hadn’t been born when Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. came out, you realize that Chevy isn’t coming. The bastard blew you off to shut down the Playboy Club. This is why you are friends, you tell yourself. [[You ask the bartender|maynard4]] to use the bar phone. Coincidentally, it is 3 a.m. on a Wednesday. You [[call Art’s apartment|eraserhead]] because you know he’ll be sleeping and you hang up as soon as you hear him answer.
Studio 54 had shuttered a few weeks before. Chevy had called it and I quote “the end of an era”. What a fucking tool.
Chevy would say, “Didn’t see ya there, pipsqueek!” and you’d reply with a “Look where you’re going, you fucking ogre!”
You turn to the bartender and point at your drink and shout, “Is this Seagrams? Is this fucking Seagrams?” and then you pause before delivering your favorite line, arguably the most beautiful sentence in English. [[“Do you know who I am?”]]
The bartender who is maybe 25 looks you up and down and says “no, actually.” It’s been a decade since Still Crazy After All These Years came out.
You wonder what Carrie is up to these days. It’s been a couple years, sure, but,
You caught a midnight showing of Eraserhead at the Waverly in Greenwich Village in maybe ‘79 or ‘80. You watched dumbfounded. You like to talk at movies, analyse them, get a conversation going with whoever you’re there with, but you don’t say a thing the whole time. As you’re walking out, you shout, “Oh my god, that was Art!”. Word of this reaches David Lynch, who is incredibly flattered, because he thought you were calling his film a work of art. In fact, you were remarking on how similar you found the main character to Garfunkel, down to even the haircut. You work “Eraserhead” into your repertoire of nicknames for Art but it doesn’t land as hard as some of the others because even though he senses the cruelty in your intent, he didn’t see the movie and doesn’t know what you’re talking about.
if Bjarke fuckin Ingles can present theory as a comic book whose title is a pun (that doesn’t even make sense) riffing on a Mies quote, I can write a newsletter whose title is riffing on [[Brown / Venturi|Venturi, Brown]] / [[Izenour]]
“The commercial persuasion of roadside eclecticism provokes bold impact in the vast and complex setting of a new landscape of big spaces, high speeds, and complex programs. Styles and signs make connections among many elements, far apart and seen fast. The message is basely commercial; the context is basically new.” - [[Venturi, Brown]], and [[Izenour]] in Learning From Las Vegas
In the early 1960’s, Philadelphia architect Robert Venturi published “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture” which was essentially the ur-text of post-modern architecture. Within a few years he had married fellow architect and urban planner Denise Scott Brown and the two of them were invited to [[Yale School of Architecture]] to teach studios. The most famous of these studios was the [[1968 studio to study the built environment of the Las Vegas strip|learning from las vegas]]. Denise Scott Brown had long been fascinated by Las Vegas: both how it had [[evolved|the beach]] and how [[nobody in the world of architecture and urban planning was paying any attention to it|vesuvius]] because it was this sort of crass [[commercial vernacular]]. The strip at the time was unprecedented from a planning perspective; here was a landscape designed at the scale of the moving automobile, where every building, low slung and set back from the road by a sea parking, was [[functionally equivalent]] in that they all provided a place to gamble, eat, drink, and sleep. The studio was drawn to the semiotics of the strip, [[the signage employed]], because the signs and the billboards were the only means of communication that the buildings had to differentiate themselves.
“Architects who can accept the lessons of primitive vernacular architecture, so easy to take in an exhibit like “Architecture without Architects,” and of industrial, vernacular architecture, so easy to adapt to an electronic and space vernacular as elaborate [[neo-Brutalist|brutalism1]] or neo-Constructivist megastructures, do not easily acknowledge the validity of the commercial vernacular” - Venturi, Brown, & Izenour in Learning from Las Vegas
I won’t brook any [[maligning of my beautiful raw concrete]]. Brutalism is humble. Those who would decry it as monumentalist are usually just confusing “monumental” for “big”. Of course these buildings are big. Sometimes there is a need for big buildings and this is a reasonable way to build big buildings.
I’ll concede that the prescriptivist tendencies of modernism were often problematic and a lot of American architecture carried out in a brutalist style, like public housing projects of the mid-century, was actively racist. But the central drive of brutalism, to do the most with the least, is the only tenable position going forward. In the future, that might not be with concrete buildings; suitable sand for concrete is already becoming hard to source for many construction projects across the world. But we should cherish our existing brutalist building stock.
There has been a popular distaste for the style, at least in this country, for as long as the style has been around. I believe that much of this is a reaction not to the style itself but what the buildings built in this style represent. Brutalism is the architecture of public housing projects, of government buildings, of university campuses of a certain era, of population density, of many of the things the conservative movement in this country hates. Brutalism is the architecture of social programs and socialist countries of the Cold War and I think that ultimately is [[what has tainted it in the American consciousness|hot new conspiracy theories for 2021]]. Not that the buildings are “cold” or “hulking” or because we don’t understand the etymology of the word “brutalism”.
My hot new conspiracy theory for 2021 is that, in the same way that the C.I.A. championed abstract expressionism in the 1950’s and 1960’s, using modern art as yet another cold war proxy front, they also started a smear campaign against brutalism.
Another book co-authored by Izenour, White Towers, about White Tower hamburger restaurants, a regional White Castle clone that expanded into deco and modern restaurant designs after a court order prevented them from putting crenelations on their buildings, is near the top of my list for books to track down.
"buildings can be pretty neat, in my opinion" - kit buckley, 2021
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how with big box stores out in the exurbs, you always find rivals in close proximity. The Lowe’s is almost always just past the Home Depot, the Cabela’s almost alway across from the [[Bass Pro Shop|bass pro shop]], the Michael’s and the [[Hobby Lobby|hobby lobby]] where one can keep an eye on the other. Some folks on Quora attribute it to zoning laws but let me assure you that the Walmart exists in a place beyond the reach of zoning, beyond the reach of laws. I saw some pretty clever arguments for a game theory perspective, [[Hotelling’s Law and Nash equilibria]] and all that. But I think that’s another thing we learned from Las Vegas, that there can be something symbiotic about operating your store [[right across the street|vesuvius]] from your competitor.
The short version of Hotelling’s Law is this: imagine you have a lemonade cart at a football game and at halftime you wheel your cart out onto the field. Now imagine that someone else is also operating a lemonade cart and the fans from the stands are just going to go to whichever cart is closest to them. You and the other cart will jockey for position, trying to attract more patrons than the other, but eventually the two of you will both end up side by side on the 50 yard line, each drawing exactly half of the crowd. John Nash later extended this idea and showed that in this situation, for any even number of lemonade carts, you’ll find stable positions where each vendor draws an equal fraction and no one can maneuver to get more than that. Nash also, arguably more interestingly, showed that if there’s an odd number of players, this system will not achieve equilibrium. I remember writing a paper about how Nash equilibria explain why the American two-party political system feels threatened by a third party for some Political Science 101 class when I was 19 and getting a much better grade than I probably deserved.
The Las Vegas strip was a thing far removed from a hyper-moralizing America and its architecture reflects this. Its architecture [[largely doesn’t care|no rules]] what you think of it, doesn’t care if you judge it, because it knows its true audience - its customers - will show up anyways. This is probably why nobody really cared to study it before Denise Scott Brown; it doesn’t lend itself to criticism because it won’t react to criticism and criticism of it won’t sway others. In a district where all of the businesses are in the same business and direct competition, where their product is essentially fungible, the building itself has to do whatever it can to get people in the door. It has to be spectacular. It has to be [[spectacle.]] It is the roadside attraction, it is whatever novelty is required to get people to pull over here. In other places, it might make sense to build something similar to your neighbor, to have a cohesive aesthetic, to have a local context. In Las Vegas, though, you need to stand apart. If your neighbor affects the style of a palace of the Roman Empire, you build your own Mount Vesuvius right out front with daily eruptions.
Under the Las Vegas Strip, the Beach!
No Rules, Just Right - The Las Vegas Strip, Architecture of
In 1972, Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venture published Learning From Las Vegas along with the co-author and graduate assistant, Steve Izenour. The [[book|first edition]] was the culmination of their research and observations from the 1968 studio as well as some of their own work and student work in response to what they found.
The architectural distinction between Ducks and Decorated Sheds was first put forward in this book. A Duck is a building whose outward form expresses the nature of the building itself, it is named for a (link:"duck-shaped building on Long Island")[(goto-url: "http://loc.gov/pictures/resource/mrg.06708/")] that was built as a farm stand, selling duck eggs. A Decorated Shed is a building whose meaning or usage is only apparent through signage or applied decoration. The Sunsphere, with its 360 panes of gold-tinted glass to reflect and embody the sun, is a Duck. A [[Walmart|functionally equivalent]], a low slung box (likely surrounded by other low slung boxes) is a decorated shed. (link: "This Pal’s restaurant")[(goto-url: "https://goo.gl/maps/uviV5hShpNuKW4NK7")] in Johnson City, Tennessee is a Duck; you can tell that it is a restaurant because the menu is carved into the facade.
The first edition of Learning from Las Vegas was this massive, beautiful book designed by MIT Press’s Muriel Cooper. Once it was out of print, a second stripped-down version was printed in paperback with many of the illustrations removed or shrunk and with some of the student work and synthesis of their findings removed. In the introduction to the second edition, Denise Scott Brown mentions her disapproval of Muriel Cooper’s design of the first edition, suggesting that a well prepared modernist presentation of the text undercuts the message: a post-modern ode to an ugly [[commercial vernacular]].
I’m honestly amazed that I don’t have a giant stack of coffee table books about the neon signs of Vegas in the mid century, about (link: "Vegas Vic")[(goto-url: "https://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/highsm.12085/?co=highsm")] and the like.
My initial plan was to put all of this in the body of an email and then use anchor links inside the email so you would click on a link and it would take you to a different position within the same email. I was very proud of this idea until it became apparent that most email clients refuse to follow self-referential anchor links. I guess spammers beat me to the idea? Then I was going to do this all as a google slides file; I was very firm on the idea of imposing a non-linear concept on a linear structure. But after like 8 months of casual hand-wringing, here we are in Twine.
I just had a thought, just now while writing this, "what if Zines but Online?"
and then i remembered That's Websites babey
The Yale Art and Architecture building, designed by Paul Rudolph, opened just a few years earlier in 1963. It’s a stunning work of [[brutalist|brutalism1]] architecture; interior shots are instantly recognizable because the interior walls are vertically ribbed bush-hammered concrete and the carpet is a bright reddish-orange (“paprika”). Bush-hammering removes the smooth surface on the convex vertical ribs of the wall, giving the walls a texture reminiscent of unfinished quarried stone slab. [[My dad]] dragged my whole family through it when I was maybe nine, not because he was nostalgic for his time there, but because it was [[one of the great buildings|ysa2]] and he thought everyone needed to see it.
The art school and the architecture school were co-located with the idea that some cross-pollination would benefit each discipline but my dad claims he was the only architecture student taking any art classes during his time there. But then again, my dad is prone to Making Claims.
My [[dad|dad2]] was at Yale Architecture school during the [[Learning from Las Vegas studio|learning from las vegas]] but he didn’t participate in it. While they were conducting their field observations, his cohort was building a rural community center, like actually swinging hammers, in a mountain hollow in eastern Kentucky. It was geometric with lots of skylights, imagine a scaled down version of the Baltimore Aquarium but in wood instead of brick. As far as I can tell, it burned down some time in the 1980’s.
One of my [[dad’s|dad3]] fondest memories of his time in New Haven was picnicking in the field next to the [[Lippincott]] foundry where all of the sculpture awaiting transportation was kept.
My dad’s other notable adventure during architecture school was his involvement in the Colossal Keepsake Corporation of Connecticut, a group of mostly architecture students who raised money to build Claes Oldenburg’s Lipstick Ascending on Caterpillar Tracks. The sculpture was a large platform for giving anti-war speeches, tank treads in plywood were added to the side of the platform and a large lipstick tube rose from the center of the platform like a column. In the original version of the sculpture, the lipstick was vinyl and could be inflated and deflated. The sculpture was installed in Beinecke Plaza on Yale’s campus without the administration’s knowledge or permission and it stayed there for 10 months before Oldenburg removed it; it had not weathered well. The Colossal Keepsake Corporation of Connecticut also pressured Yale into buying the sculpture from Oldenburg and having it rebuilt from more permanent materials; the current version of Lipstick Ascending was fabricated at [[Lippincott]] and installed in a much less prominent location on Yale’s campus in 1974, where it is still located today.
(link: "Lippincott Foundry")[(goto-url: "https://www.lippincottsculpture.com/gallery/images")] was founded in 1966 as a fabricator for large-scale metal sculptures in North Haven, CT. During the time my dad was around, they would have been fabricating sculptures for Louise Nevelson, Ellsworth Kelly, [[Claes Oldenburg|dad3]]. Maybe Alexander Calder. Three copies of Barnett Newman’s [[Broken Obelisk]] were there, just sitting in a pasture, where my dad had a sandwich and watched his dog play.
(link: "Twine")[(goto-url: "https://twinery.org/")] is a free tool for making and telling non-linear and/or [[interactive stories|only maynard gets to call me al]]. I think it's pretty neat.
never forget that Hobby Lobby knowingly bought artifacts looted from Iraqi museums and smuggled them into the country and never faced any real consequences for it.
Also Ellen, if you're reading this, thank you for loaning me your book on the subject. I'm going to try to finish it soon.
UPDATE - I did return Ellen's book but I did not read it.
speaking of architecture, as a fun little treat do an image search for "memphis bass pro shop" :)
I was in Seattle earlier this year, having maybe just ruined a nearly twenty year friendship and feeling like shit about it. I was taking a walk through the University of Washington campus and rounded a corner to discover one of the copies of Broken Obelisk. It was striking. And for a few minutes, I forgot about being sad about wondering if I was being a shitty friend.
"Is this the year I finally read Guy Debord?" - me, to me, every year for the last like decade.
Hubert Bebb was an architect who spent the second half of [[his career]] working in the Knoxville area, from the 1950s to the 1980s. Much of this time was spent working in [[Gatlinburg]] and one of the things he did there was codify a vernacular design standard for the area that emphasized natural materials and prohibited neon signage and other modern design elements. Not to say that he was against modernism; his design for an observation tower at [[Clingman's Dome]] is a beautiful brutalist spire with a helical ramp. Towards the end of his career, his firm also designed the [[Sunsphere]].
Las Vegas and [[Gatlinburg]] both started around the same time specifically as centers for tourism and expanded as American appetites for tourism increased in the mid-century. If the draw of Las Vegas was a [[permissiveness|vesuvius]], as a place that embraced the modern (and [[post-modern|Venturi, Brown]]), then Gatlinburg’s whole aesthetic is one of rejecting the modern. A very convenient retelling of a very selective history. The mythos of Las Vegas is built at least partly on some fucked up ideas about the west, cowboy stories and manifest destiny and the like. As much as Las Vegas is about expansion westward, outward, or maybe even moreso, Gatlinburg’s about a retreat inward, [[into the mountain hollows we both forgot and misremembered]]. Also cowboy I suppose but different.
Clingman’s Dome is a mountain located in Great Smoky Mountains National Park right on the Tennessee-North Carolina state line; it is the highest point in Tennessee and the third highest mountain in the eastern half of North America. In the 1950’s, the Park Service decided that the existing observation tower on top of the mountain was no longer sufficient for the growing crowds visiting the park and [[Hubert Bebb got the commission to design a new observation tower]]. You might expect that based on the Park Service’s construction guidelines which favored natural and site-specific materials as well as Hubert Bebb’s predilection for the same, that the tower might have been built from stone. It sounds like that was perhaps the original plan but the ultimate structure is a beautiful piece of geometric modernism in raw concrete. It is a simple round covered platform, 28 feet in diameter, atop a slender 45 foot tall column. Bebb wanted the lookout to be accessible to anyone who came to visit the park, so rather than a flight of stairs, the tower is approached by a sloping walkway, 375 feet long, that loops back over itself. The observation tower was completed in 1959 and is probably Bebb’s second most famous commission after the Sunsphere. My ambition is to someday hike up there and get photos of it and dedicate another letter just to it.
it's Febuary 2024 now, I have had this newsletter for four years now, born out of a talk I gave online about the Sunsphere, and I have been thinking about the Sunsphere for over a decade. I need to wrap up this Twine project and send it out because tinyletter is getting shut down in a couple of weeks. I moved to Knoxville during that time; my office is a few blocks away from the Sunsphere. I see it several times a week.
You would think that I would have something very important to say about it here. I would have thought that too. I have to finish this Twine deck right now and I don't know what to say about the Sunsphere except that I love it. It's big and it's dumb and I find it incredibly endearing. If you're ever in Knoxville and want to go see the big old ORB, drop me a line. Thank you for reading this.
He started his career in Chicago, designing buildings for the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago, also known as the Century of Progress International Exposition, along with his friend Nathaniel Owings who a few years later would be a founding partner of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill. (Within a decade, SOM would design the entire top secret city of Oak Ridge, right next door to Knoxville, as part of the Manhattan Project.)
Ultimately, I don’t know to what extent working on the 1933 World’s Fair and then spending a good chunk of his career working in the tourist destination of Gatlinburg informed the design of the Sunsphere. But it must have, right? I certainly see echoes of the Gatlinburg Space Needle, completed in 1969, in the hexagonal structure of the Sunsphere’s tower.
The Clingman’s Dome observation tower project was one of several similar projects that the park service carried out under a billion dollar budget in the 1950’s to help modernize the parks, making them more appealing to and able to accommodate more visitors. Many of these projects were modern in style and while budget surely was a part of that, I imagine that there was a psychology to breaking with the previous rustic style used in national park construction. The first big round of park construction projects, carried out during the Great Depression by the Civilian Conservation Corps, were make-work projects. Their rustic style was born of pragmatism - what can you build with native materials, with what you can find on site. The [[rustic cabins]] and picnic shelters are little monuments of austerity. I think that pivoting to a more futuristic style in the post-war period was an extremely intentional way of rebranding the national parks. In the thirties, they were building parks because they had to; in the fifties, they were building parks because they could. Simple, clean geometric shapes rendered in seamless [[raw concrete|brutalism1]] was futuristic and unprecedented, especially in the mountains of Appalachia. It was the architecture of the future, of progress, of world’s fairs.
Let’s say you want to build a log cabin. Let’s assume you’re somewhere up in the mountains at a site beyond the reach of roads meaning that you can’t easily import your building materials, that you are going to have to build your cabin with materials you can gather nearby. I think it’s okay to imagine these things, to indulge your back-to-the-land type fantasies from time to time. The first thing you’re going to need, like most buildings, is a foundation. You’re going to want to construct either low walls out of stone or at least little stone columns every so often to keep your sills, your lowest logs, elevated off the ground. Eighteen inches seems to be high enough to prevent termites from climbing up and getting into your sills. [[Your sills]] are going to be logs you’ve hewn square, meaning they should look rectangular in cross-section, and they’re going to rest directly on your stone supports on the long sides of the cabin. If your cabin is more than twenty feet across on its smaller dimension (the span between the sills), you will probably want to install a middle sill and similarly support it with stone.
On top of the sills, you’re going to set your floor beams, or sleepers. Like your sills, your sleepers are going to be logs you’ve hewn square but they’re smaller. They’re going to span the gap between your sills and ultimately your floorboards are going to go overtop them. You want to set your sleepers maybe four to six feet apart; any farther apart and the floor can sag. You’ll want to cut notches in the sills as wide as the sleeper and half as deep, you’ll then cut the same notch in the sleeper; this allows the sleeper to rest in the notch of the sill and for the top of the sleeper to be at the same height as the top of the sill, making it easier to install your [[floorboards]].
For the walls, you’re going to take logs all roughly the same diameter (ten or more inches) and a little longer than your walls and you’re going to cut notches at both ends on both the top and the bottom to make lap joints like you did with the sleepers. You want to leave six or eight inches of material extending past you notches on each end of the logs. Did you ever play with Lincoln Logs? That is the exact shape you’re going for and you’re going to use them the exact same way. (There are more advanced techniques of notching your logs like dovetailing where the geometry of the notch draws the walls together tighter and removes the need for having that six inches of material extend beyond the notch but for your purposes, [[Lincoln Logs]] are fine.)
Building the roof of a cabin is a whole other beast and is beyond the scope of this email. You’ll want to find another text if you think you might get serious about building a cabin. I’ve been summarizing the chapter on log cabin building from the first Foxfire book. I think “Shelters, Shacks, and Shanties and How to Build Them” by D. C. Beard is pretty neat too. I will say that if you’re going to cover your roof with hand split shingles, a steeper roof is going to repel water better; aim for like a forty-five degree slope.
Gatlinburg, Tennessee at the beginning of the twentieth century was little more than a logging camp on the edge of the Smoky Mountains. In 1912, members of Pi Beta Phi in Nashville founded a [[settlement school]] in Gatlinburg, deciding that the lack of a school in the area was the best choice for their first major philanthropic effort. Members of Pi Beta Phi realized that there was a market among their city friends for the quilts and other crafts that the people in the mountain community produced so selling mountain crafts quickly became a means of continually supporting the school.
The Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts was founded in the 1940’s as an offshoot of the Pi Beta Phi settlement school’s craft initiatives. The main studio building, built of native materials and completed fifty years ago, was designed by none other than Hubert Bebb, who received an award of merit from the American Institute of Architects for the design. I spent a lot of time last winter pouring through last year’s course catalog, trying to find a class to go and take this summer; I’m hoping I can go this year. We’ll see.
UPDATE - I took a ceramics and plants class, exploring the two facinating principles that make chia pets work: the way the porosity of terra cotta allows water to wick through it and the way that mucilaginous seeds like chia and basil form sticky mucus shells when they get wet, allowing them to stick to vertical or even overhanging surfaces and grow there. The class was taught by Xia Zhang and it was an absolute delight.
Tourists had been visiting the Smoky Mountains since the late nineteenth century. In reaction to clear-cut timber operations that became possible with increased rail access into the mountains, there was a movement to try to conserve the natural beauty of the area. Congress authorized the creation of a national park in 1926 but at the time, there was no major federally controlled parcel of land. The area that would become the park was thousands of homesteader, mining, and timber claims. After several years of fundraising and buying the land that would constitute the park piecemeal, the [[Great Smoky Mountains National Park]] opened in 1940.
Work crews from the Civilian Conservation Corps built restrooms and other facilities throughout the park in the 1930’s, following the parks service construction guidelines which emphasized a [[rustic style|rustic cabins]] with native materials.
A lot of my information about Hubert Bebb and his role in the design of Gatlinburg is from Katherine Nash’s master’s thesis, “Tourism as heritage: uncovering Hubert Bebb’s tourist vernacular in Gatlinburg.” (2009)
https://libres.uncg.edu/ir/uncg/listing.aspx?id=2501
Excerpts from
Denise Scott Brown, Robert Venturi, and Steve Izenour. Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form (Revised Edition, 1977)
Blake, Peter. God’s Own Junkyard: The Planned Deterioration of America’s Landscape (1964)
Description of Log Cabin Construction based on the article “Building a Log Cabin” from The Foxfire Book, edited by Eilot Wigginton et al.
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Okay, this is no longer true. In late 2022, I got the (link: "world record")[(goto-url: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjCFhXYJnGQ")] for speed running Everest Pipkin’s fantastic game, (link: "The Barnacle Goose Experiment")[(goto-url: "https://everest-pipkin.com/barnacle-goose/")]. This is because I was the only person to attempt speed running it. Most of my speed run is me reading David Berman's poems as I wait for things to happen. After having the game rejected from the moderators of speedrun.com several times, I finally got the game added. My record has since been beaten which I thought I would get defensive about and want to reclaim but honestly it tickles me to death that other people are also interested in doing such an incredibly silly thing