 Thank you all so much for coming, we really appreciate it and hope you really enjoy tonight's talk. We are at Yester Maro Design Build School, anybody with Yester Maro want to raise their hands? So we teach design and building classes and craft and woodworking over in Wakefield, Vermont. And our January through March classes were just scheduled, so those are on our website and we've also got some catalogs. I'm going to throw these out into the audience. Yeah. And outside. We have, this is part of our speaker series, which began last month and will go through mid-November. Later this month we've got another talk coming up, that one will be held at the North Branch Nature Center, and there will be seats for everybody. That one will be featuring a landscape architect from Northeastern University, and he'll be talking about designing public places in a way that allow people to interact with nature while improving the ecosystem around them. And that will be Wednesday, September 26, two weeks from now at 7 p.m., North Branch Nature Center. And two weeks from that, Wednesday, October 10th will be in Burlington, we're taking a show on the road a little bit. That talk will be about living roofs, green roofs with plants on them. And that will be at Main Street Landing Performing Arts Center in Burlington Wednesday, October 10th, also at 7 p.m. See you. I think that's all I have to say. I'd like to introduce you to Thea Alvin and Mack Roode. I'm an architect and a builder. Thea is a mason, the best mason I know. There may be some other masons out here in competition. I don't know, but she's the best one I know. Still learning. We have been, we're both teachers at Yes Tomorrow, and we have been associated with this project that you've been to. Please, please stop a little, please. Sure. We've been working on this project for the last eight years in collaboration with an outfit called the Canova Association. You'll see we have a location map to show you where it is, but it's in northern Italy. And the Canova Association is dedicated to the mission of increasing appreciation and preservation of vernacular masonry architecture in this area. Italy is rich in architecture, and until fairly recently, people disregarded buildings that were a mere five or six hundred years old. It's too new. Too new, focused on Roman and Greek and the Truscan and Renaissance and everything. But partially through the work of the Canova Association, people are beginning to recognize the value of these buildings. And you've been seeing a smattering of slides here. We're going to start the slideshow by showing you some images of the architecture in the region, but spend most of our time showing you the projects that we have been working on and how they progress, both we've done walls, we've done many roofs, we've done a vault, we've done an oven, always using the techniques from five or six hundred years ago. I take pride, I'm sure Thia does too, in the fact that we've had architectural historians come visit our projects and say they can't tell which is the new and which is the old part. We use exactly the same techniques that were used when the buildings were originally built. I enjoy looking at the old vernacular construction techniques because they teach me what the rules are. The buildings that have lived five hundred years say what you can and can't do. And I use those as my guidelines. Stone is very different from brick. It has real specific things that it can do. Limitations and stone, for me, is limitless. And when you see it in this application, it's profound. I think what's really fascinating about it is that unlike most of the masonry in this country, which is a veneer, the masonry in Italy and specifically in this area, it's structural. So just to Thia's point, you're seeing here's what masonry can do. Sophie, how do we get the PowerPoint coming? You realize that was an important part of it after I left. And by the way, we encourage you to ask questions, interrupt us. In the course of the slideshow, if you see something that you want to know more about, or gee, how do we do that? Yeah, please speak up. So, and we'll just interchange. So what we do, I guess we should start out. We teach a two-week course in this area. It's in domino select. And the course is half on-site construction and half design work. And you'll see at the very end some slides of our studio work and the work that we do in the studio. Our lecture tonight is mostly on the on-site, hands-on work. But the philosophy of yesterday, in general, is that you can't be a good builder unless you're also a designer and you can't be a good designer unless you're also a builder. So we really emphasize the fact that in order to understand these buildings, you need to do a design project around them. So we have the students go into the abandoned village of Gash, which we'll talk about a little bit more, choose a building and design a project for that building and present it at the end. You can see that this roof is constructed of stone and it's old. The stone is thick. And this roof is also stone, but it's much more new. So one of the first parts of the project is to observe the roof and see if it's structurally sound. And if the stone has slumped, you know that it's not. Can we lower the lights? We might be able to see it better. Probably. The stage. Just turn it off like that. What's that? Look, there's my head. Keep going. Yeah. It's all the way. Unless we turn them off. It's better. So this is where the student accommodations. This is where we live. It's awful. Here's a map of Italy. We're way in the northern part right up against the Swiss border. And this is an inset of it. The Ossella Valley is this valley right here, which if there was more water would be an extension of Lago Maggiore, who's done with Ossella. I'd say it takes about a half an hour to drive from one end or 45 minutes to drive from one end of the valley to the other. It's not very large. And this is the Farmer House kitchen where we prepare meals. And then this is the sort of common area between, and there's a splashing little river that's been diverted from the mountain stream. And it follows down between the house and the studio. So you can hear water on either side of you all the time. This is the village of Canova, which has been restored. This is the model by which we have undertaken the construction. And this is an overhead view of the village of Geshe, of the foundation structures. And you can see some of the restoration work that is underway. This is a much more modern image. And this is when we first began. Both of those are very, very old photos from the very beginning of when we arrived in the village. So this village has been uninhabited for at least 100 years, maybe 150. As you can see, it's pretty small. It's whatever, 20 houses. And it's typical of the villages in this area. The villages are only five minutes walk apart from each other. But they're dense clusters surrounded by agricultural terraces, mostly. And what's the reason that the villages have been abandoned is that the hillside villages became less enticing in terms of agricultural development and people moved down into the valley, much as they have in per mine, I would say. Do you confront questions of contested ownership? The Canova Association, which is trying to acquire these buildings in Canova, I mean in Geshe, yes, I really run into issues with that. I was saying a minute ago before we started, one of the problems is that every one of these buildings, I mean, like a building like that, which hardly looks like a building at this point, may be owned by 50 different people. It looks like this, and they don't want to sell it. And somebody may own that corner of the room, and somebody may own this corner of the room. So I'd like you guys, if you can, to look at this, see this wall here. Keep this building in your vision and the space beside it, because this has been a primary focus of ours over the last couple of years, right here. And one of the ways that we can tell how long the houses have been abandoned is by the age of the trees that are growing inside of them. Or by the dates, like here's 1621, 1561. They're old buildings. It is interesting to see the different ways, and there's some other slides of lentils and spans. They do incorporate wood into a lot of these buildings, mostly chestnut, which is very rot-resistant. So you can see here a corner of a house construction. To build a proper corner, you have a long piece of stone that's long this way and it's short on the other side. And then the next piece that's above it is short on the long side of the one below it and long on the short side. So you can alternate that pattern and create a very strong corner. And then if you take that as a rule, you can look at a wall such as this one and understand which part of the construction that you're looking at was first, second, third based on the construction techniques of the corner. You can see that this is clearly a column because of the running joints, these straight lines. This is a column that supported a whole side of a house. This is a wall that infills and this is a different kind of column. It's round and it's made with lime and mortar. And then this is another whole kind of wall altogether. So part of what we do is assess what's there, who made it, and try and figure out the timeline of the process of those folks. We don't just go in and rip it down because we have a vision. We want to rebuild and make these houses reusable as themselves. And we first have to understand what that is. Do you import stone or do you just use what? We use local stone, yeah. But we do buy or are given a lot of material if the stone is broken. Okay, yeah. Before we move on to a good cross-section of a wall, you can see the walls are about 20 inches. 60 centimeters. 60 centimeters, not that thick. You could explain how it's done but basically two faces and rubble fill in between so thick enough so that you can go two or three stories with it and still have it stand on its own. This building on that particular wall that you see with the slot window and this lower window, that's the one that we most recently tore down and rebuilt. And through the progression of slides, you'll see that one come up again. This is the building that I wanted you to remember from the first slide, a few slides back of the huge trees in the way. So here it is with all of these trees growing on it. We found in this room, this is the same building here, new staircase, you can tell by the door frame. In the bottom of that, originally the whole roof and the walls and everything had imploded, it was about six feet thick of debris. And we cleaned that out and in the very bottom of it there was a lime floor. It was perfectly smooth and sloped to a hole in the very bottom of it. And all the windows in it were slotted. And so the conclusion that I came to being me, and right, and wrong, a lot, was that it was a room that people, you could dump your grapes into the slotted window and then you have this smooth basin and you could, you know, it's the traditional Italian grape stomping room. The ladies with the skirts and the squeegee toes and everything, that was my idea. What's interesting about this group of slides, the buildings tend to be quite small. I'd say, you know, the width of this room is the width, or even slightly narrower is the width of a typical one of these buildings. And so they tend to, in terms of architectural planning, put as much outside of the building as possible, specifically stairs. Stairs take up a lot of room and if in a very small space you have interior stairs, you'd waste half of your space. And the stairs, since they make virtually everything out of masonry, as you can see, are cantilevered stones sticking out of the wall with spacers on the ends. Do you use no mortar? We use mortar. Mortar, in the old days, lime was very precious. It was very hard to get lime and the development of the kiln process is way up in the mountains. It takes days and days to make lime. So the wealth of the house was to be able to be determined by if you had lime in your kitchen because that's where you'd want to prevent wind and draft and water from infiltrating. Normally the animals are in the basement. The people live in the middle and the food and the grain and the hay and the whatever is stored above you. So the living room, if you will, would have lime and mortar inside if you were rich. As a plaster. As a plaster. And not necessarily as a bonding for the stones. So just as they have stairs on the outside, they make liberal use of suspended balconies and lofts and there's no other suspended balcony projections out of the building, which are obviously not protected, but just expand the space to some extent. This is a picture of a tower that a building that started in Roman times. I mean everything there has, you know, it just constantly evolves. At the base of this is a Roman structure and then it's been added to over the next thousand years. And the mortar in the base of that is from crushed Roman bricks. Wow. Do they get snow there? They do. They do. Although, I mean it's, there's more elevation change here than, I mean in Italy, in the Oslo Valley than we have here. So down on the floor of the valley there are palm trees. And yet there's perpetual snow in the mountains. It's the Alps. Yeah. So, and then you can walk easily in half a day from the palm trees to the snow. In the winter it does snow. It's not as brutal as it is here. It doesn't get as cold, so they don't have deep foundations, interestingly. They don't, here we, of course, have to go at least four feet down to get below the frost level. They barely go foot into the ground. Because there's also bedrock. You just start on the rock and go up from there. It's not going to move. Right. There's just more lofts and whatnot. Oftentimes the top floor of the building is a hay loft. And often the ground floor of the building is for animals. Either that or wine storage and cantina. And then there are all sorts of ways that you can span, you know, to create lentils. When you're doing it with stone it's going to be either an arch or it's going to be, you know, a large stone like here or here or here. And the amount of purchase you can see on the side of these stones is ridiculous. Some of them is only one inch. So for a stone that weighs seven or eight hundred pounds it's sitting on an inch of something and a prayer. And, but it's, you know, this particular building is a thousand years old. And obviously it works. So what we do here, we over build and we build these massive strong structures and in this climate this technique works. They don't have earthquakes. The center bottom photo. Can you explain a little on the right? This guy? Yeah. I mean these are. It's an infill window. Yeah it wasn't a window. It's an infill. Oh okay. I thought you were meant to, these things are way over designed kind of ties into the sidewall. Okay. And the top right photo. Is that two pieces of stone that make for the lintel? No there's one piece with a cross carved into it. Oh okay. So just a couple of slides on the industry in the Oslo Valley. The main industry in the Oslo Valley is stone. Still is. There are a lot of quarries, mostly marble quarries. And specifically there's this marble quarry which is the source of all the stone for the Duomo cathedral in Milan. Which is under constant renovation interestingly. And the main guy who is creating the replacement pieces is the father and son team in the Oslo Valley. Just down below the quarry. So they get a piece off of the Duomo here way up in the room. Every one of these pieces is carved intricately. They'll take an old piece, rotted stone down and they'll duplicate it, smash up the old one, deliver the new one. Is that marble? It's marble. It's marble. These are photos of a stone shed that we regularly visit. He makes both basically bricks. I guess you could call them stone bricks and slabs. And you can see how nicely this stone splits. It's a granite. It's a type of granite but it's metamorphic rock so it has. Nice. It's called. So it does have seams in it like a sedimentary rock. So you can split it quite easily. And this is what he does all day long. Him, his son, and a couple of workers. And they invite us. This is his son here and him. And his name is John Piero Gullio Matzi. And we always bring him a bottle of wine and he gives us peaches and things off his trees. But you can split that. You can in, I'd say, like three minutes. Sure. Something like that. You just make a seam on there tapping. They have a hammer drill. So they have us do it the old fashioned way with wedge and feathers just like Don and Barry. So the feathers are two angled pieces and the wedge is the splitting tool that goes down between the two angled pieces. Which they call Americans. American. So you drill a hole. And you split them open. And he hits in order. He'll hit a couple of taps on each one and come down. One, two, three, four, five. And you can hear. Ting, ting, ting. Ting, ting, ting. Ting, ting, ting. Ting, ting, ting. Ting, ting. And then it's open. And it's such a beautiful. And you can feel it part and you can hear it. It's one of those visceral like it's. That's for the big stone. But like once you get it to this stage this is a student with one chisel and a hammer. And as I say, I'd say three minutes, four minutes to score it and and split that into two slabs. Quarries. It's a marble quarry. The two on the left. This is an ancient marble quarry that was started in Roman times and only recently closed down. So obviously these are open pit quarries. Kind of like the granite quarries that we have here. This one is an excavation into the hillside tunnel, basically. These are examples of saws that you would use to cut marble. I think that this is about nine feet in diameter. We've put students up there just for fun and a person stands about this tall on that platform. And this is a saw that uses silica to cut. So it's a wet process. Some of them go in a water bath. These will go into a giant water bath. The whole slab, this one is black, it's oxidized. The whole slab will go in a water bath and there will be a set of saws a lot like those egg slicers that have ten straps that slice an egg. It's like that. It's rubbing with the silica all the time in the water bath until the stone is sliced all the way through. In that case, this is a centimeter every 15 minutes or so just to square up the stone. This is the lineman. This guy, this is a teeny little kiln that he has and he only spoke dialect and we didn't speak dialect and our Italian guy that spoke Italian and he had to have a talk first to figure out what words meant what so that they could understand each other and this guy lives up in the mountains so we went up there and he had some lime that he had burnt and you burn it for three or four days until the marble decomposes into just powder and he crushes it and then when you add water to it, it begins to have this chemical reaction and it can explode and there are a lot of lime workers that are one-eyed or one-handed because of this reaction in the lime cycle so this is why this is why we buy easy cheap bags at the store Cappuccino is the Italian for the lime lime mortar. Which we do use in preference over Portland cement they don't use Portland cement at all. So now on to some of the projects that we've done. So the first project eight years ago was to restore this building here which had no roof on it in most cases what's happened to these buildings is the rafters have people have let the roofs leak the rafters have eventually rotted the roofs collapse into the interior of the building. So we had to restore the side walls get them back up to a level condition we had to replace the lintel in the doorway and then once we got the walls out to a certain height start to rebuild the roof structure which is a the technique they use is they put down a plate which they call the rodice root and then they put color ties across the top of it they call it a chain or a catena and then you'll see the rafters get notched into the ends of the color ties and then there are purlins on top of it and I think that I can get this thing to work let's see it's shaving like a barber that's the Italian word it's part of the edge when you take off just a little bit on the edge so this is a roof shingle it's about three feet by 18 inches by two and a half, three inches thick one person can lift it two people lift it and these things as you'll see in a second are installed on the roof about four inches to the weather the roof on this building I think everyone's calculated it's a small building, it's not that big there's about 30,000 pounds how much stone there is was it right that it was a ton of square meter was it 1,000 pounds of square meter do you remember he's got a book about it how did you get connected with this project the Canova association was started by two Americans who lived there for 40 years or something they're Italians at this point and every year they do something called the architects encounter they invite four or five architects to come and spend a week there just talking and kind of just talking to each other and they invited Steve Bedaines who some of you may know he's a yesterday teacher and principal of a company called Jersey Devil talked about yesterday the Canova association said that sounds great can you come and teach they're other people than yesterday so we went stop there we go so now you can see the rafters going out it's not you can just barely see a notch right there so that sits into a notch and then we do a half lap joint of the rafters these are chestnut logs here you can see the the the plate the collar tie and then the first purlin going on top of that on which the stones start to stack up so the second layer we carve into semicircles mostly a decorative thing I think and you can see how every one of these stones has been as the barber hunted the beard so that we've got a shape that sheds the water more easily and keeps it from working its way back into the building the stones are not tipped very much they're just barely tipped how much five to ten percent so a foot of length what would be the change of pitch over that foot it's very shallow you can hardly tell oh an inch but the stones are not less than 15 inches deep front to back and depending on the mason that's leading you might have a two inch reveal and you might have a four inch so it depends on the pitch of the roof how steep those stones are and the shallower it is the more snow it'll peep so you have to play a game with the dead weight of the roof in winter some of these shots are a little bit out of sequence here's the first Perlin basically on which the stones start the material delivery in this area is always a little bit top of the bridge if that's as close as a vehicle could get they lower the pallet down onto the path and then we carried them all down the path is there any kind of mortar adhesive between them no is water what makes the stone rot? the stone no water won't rot the stone water will rot the rafters if you don't maintain the roof so talk about rotten stone marble does rot okay is that because it's porous and the water gets in? it's oxidized with chemicals in the air but granite I mean I suppose in millions of years maybe granite rots as well but water the super saturation of water if you put anything in a soggy ground it'll rot um so you put a pearl on every two or three courses of stone so here's the first stone going on now you've got two layers on then the pearl on goes in and that sequence just works its way up so one goes against it just transferred down to the plate through the outside of the stone but it keeps the back of the stone from collapsing into the cavity that is the house the stones are not long out to reach from rafter to rafter so you need the pearl to support them so a roof will be porous for air but not for water correct and if you're living in the house and it begins to leak you stick a straw in the leak hole and when it stops raining you go out the roof and tip the rock up with another shim stone and you stop the leak if you're not living in the house and it leaks no one knows and eventually the rafter will rot and it'll implode so living in the house is the key as it is here what's the life of wood structure I think if you keep water from getting to it it's hundreds of years yeah maybe more there are lintels that we've seen in these buildings that are 500 years old this is looking up from inside when you're looking up at the roof when it's done this guy here just before the cap was put on what are the two white people in the bottom left corner down here these guys these guys are this one is Afraid and he's the Italian Mason and this is Eddie and Eddie is trying not to fall off the roof and and the Mason is trying to teach him how we're closing the roof because if you look here see how there's like a line across the ridge so one side is lower and the other side shoots past it and this is set up based on the direction of the prevailing wind and then that gap where there's an overhang is infilled with a little bit of mortar so that the water doesn't penetrate and go back in and so he's teaching Eddie that and Eddie's looking around to see who's taking a picture of him is there chimney there this is a water mill actually here you can see once we dug it all out because this thing was also about six feet deep there's a turbine down below there's actually the head race is right behind these people heading down into there right here you can see it shooting this is the millstone so this was a grist mill there was no heat in it and this is the invitation we put together at the end of the class and had a reception for the village it's a municipally owned building so we were restoring it for the municipality and this is a picture of it from down below most of the pictures that you saw were from up above this is what it looks like from down below is it still in use? now it is they've restored it so that the water mill is working again as a museum I mean it's not a commercial operation by any means but it's functional this is the same process we won't have as many slides of it because you've seen the process but here's what the project looked like when we started we've rebuilt the walls slightly we've started to get the wood in actually this one over here is a student measuring it up trying to figure out what we're going to do the fireplace inside they don't have a chimney per se but a little hood that directs the smoke into a hole behind that the hole through the wall it actually drafts pretty well we found a stone beside what would be the hearth here that had a hole in it which indicated that it would have had a post and some kind of bucket that maybe would turn and this where they would make cheese when they're moving the cows up to the high mountains and down to the summer pasture this is the dairy, the Laferia where they would make the cheese so this particular project is way far away from any vehicles so we had to use stones that were on the site and we had to cut the trees down and strip the bark right there at the site and carry them just by hand over to the building the trees there are but the ones that are appropriate for building with were not anywhere near where we were building how did you cut the trees down a chainsaw we're not purists more like get it done there's a chainsaw you can see we ripped some of the logs in half to create purlins and use a chainsaw to flatten the top of the of the collar ties chestnut this is a particularly good photo I think you can see the plate, the collar tie notch and the rafters sitting in it and he sees that because he made it so I'm not sure if he's got one maybe oh wow and that's what it is here's the finished product we should click on it a little bit it took two weeks to do that it took two weeks of days of hiking up and down the mountain hauling stone and ourselves how many do you need and what about five most of these are, it's a two week class and we spend half the time in the studio so essentially each of these projects is a five or six day project after we're done eating and then before we start eating again it's a regular day eight to five kind of thing another roof the bakery we'll go through this one more quickly so we took that roof down took it off it was rotten it looked like it was about to cave in and rebuilt it this guy was our lead mason we have a different one every year to get a little different flavor his name is Primo he was 81 years old he was no longer allowed by his wife to go to work so he was mushroom hunting the whole time so is this all within the community of Gesh these are a couple, this is in the region this one is about a five minute walk from Gesh you can park close to this building and walk the Gesh in five minutes so this one is in Cropo Marcho it's the name of this village and this is a bakery this is the bakery that's virtually finished okay this is a different kind of project we built a vault over this space here the first thing we did is we cleaned it up and we don't have five gallon pails you get from Home Depot they don't have sturdy rugged pails they have these shallow weird things with handles that don't really work you have to hold them like that the one thing we discovered is that the walls were not parallel to each other we were going to create an arched ceiling here and make a cantina and never having done an arch before we thought it would be easier if the walls were parallel so we rebuilt this wall over here in the meantime, well that was happening we looked for rock and there being many quarries we got these end slabs you don't have here they drill multiple holes around the big blocks to separate them from the cliff and then they saw it up but the last slab is useless it's waste same here so this is a waste slab that a bunch of waste slabs that they gave to us and we smashed them up into smaller rocks and put them on pallets and then we found this is our lumber source doing all this on a meager budget so that's the best lumber that we could buy we did by four sheets of plywood and created the form work for the arch Ferrari tractor this is a pull start up front with the road oh my god so from that stone shed we loaded onto a truck truck to cropo marcio and from cropo marcio we loaded it onto that tractor and brought it to within a couple hundred yards of the site and then did the hand over hand we did three sets of Paso Mano you stand front to back front to back with the person and you pass and then every ten stones or so you turn the other way so you get the other side it looks a little bit like slave labor camp but it's really so much fun we're singing and dancing and poking each other can you sing one of the songs? I could but it's really out of context so here up above you're seeing that's almost closed the gap on this arch we started with the first half we didn't know how much we would be able to do in five days maybe we'll do half but in the end we were able to do the whole thing each one of these stones is basically when you're doing any arch you point each stone towards the center of that circle the center of that arch and you put shims in between it to tip the stone to make sure that it is aiming for the center so is there any mortar between those? yes we did use mortar in here so on the inside we used all of our fine lumber to shore it up as much as possible here's a picture of the formwork before we started putting the stones on and then once you do that you can start filling it up the end result of after you've done the arch and taken the formwork out what not is you fill between the two walls with rubble and create a flat floor on top of it for the next story and the more weight you put on top of an arch the stronger it is here's the formwork coming out and here's the formwork completely out and that's what it looked like that's a five day project it's amazing what you can do with the stone and with six or seven people so the next year we went into that same space and we built a pizza oven and they call this the heart of the town it's now in active use regular use as being able to feed this community this was our first experiment in carving stone we used that for the basically to frame the opening to the okay and then this is the before of this wall that we're going to rebuild and they asked us to recreate this double arch situation in the about five minutes walk away so we went and examined it and dissected it you can see from inside of that old arch you can see the carved stone and then inside is the structural laid up stone that is supporting the wall our first task was to take the existing wall down this is what it looked like from the inside of that building it's the same window this one here and this is our pattern we carved these stones we did use power tools for this we used a grinder and chisels but rebuilt the walls and then the largest stones that we had to carry up there were the lentils for the doorways we took whatever that is like eight people to carry this down up the hill to the site it's just up a hill, up a flight of stairs around a corner, up another flight of stairs and over a rubble pile are these all American students or international students? no international this girl was English this guy's American she came from Colorado, this guy's from New Zealand and we had one guy he's Scottish and he's Italian guy from Liberia his first name was King his last name was George so here's the lentil in place here's carving the stone this is carving the stone that creates the and I don't even know what to call it it's kind of the jam it's right at the top of the door and a return for the door to close into you can see the thickness of the wall here it did get to be over 100 degrees so we set up a big tarp so that we could stay out of the sun for working but it turned out that it was really really hot at 100 degrees under a tarp right and here we are building the form work but structural arches which had to be flared you know besides besides making it the right diameter it had to flare towards the carved stone what do you suppose they did hundreds of years ago to build that wooden arch they didn't have plywood you could build the same it's faster with plywood to do the arch just logs and sort of form them they've been building arches there they carried on from if I didn't have the plywood I would have just lapped towards one over the next I've also used sand bags before or grain bags whatever you can use that's malleable whatever you can put in there that you can get out again it's the getting out again part so carving should follow super helpful carving going on so these are the eventually our veneer stones although they're four or five inches thick quite heavy but it's a veneer on top of the dry wood stone so here from the inside you can see I guess this is the inside before the veneer goes on so we've got the form work in there the the wall the structural wall being built the veneer coming up to it and putting the veneer on here's the form work coming out you can see that the the veneer from the inside the veneer comes in a little bit farther than the actual stone wall so there's a return there and that is that that's that carved piece that I've pointed out before to create the top of the GM again it looks like a work camp but it's really fun when you take a wall down do you mark the stones to put them back in the same spot? No just that all the stones go back is nice we're making a different spot we took out three windows and put in two doors so there isn't the same spot anymore so these details you can see the veneer, the arch from the inside you can see how this flares towards us here's that carved piece that kind of locks the veneer into the stone wall but still is part of the return for the door that's as far as we got they've now progressed we aren't the only people who work on this the Kanoa Association has other people who also do work and although we're clearly the most productive for sure but they have progressed further our project for next year we anticipate putting another single arched doorway here in this wall and with that this structure will have four walls and we'll be able to put a roof on it those are two doors, not two windows? Two doors yeah, we can go back this 6-6 clear to the inside of that we took the wall down to I think this stone right here so that's all and it dropped below you can see this corner here and we had to rebuild all this we put in drainage and then brought this all up and now, if you look at pictures now the ground is all built up to here and they've added a new doorway on that side and this this room has a floor in it now, an anticipation of the roof match up with that roof in the background yeah and then just one shot of studio work most people work outside but we do have some inside space to work there's fine studio furniture to work and these are pictures of the presentations at the end there's there's no skill pre-required for this course either for the hands-on stuff and some people come and take the course who have some drawing or design experience but most have none we teach people how to use drafting tools and how to create a design floor plans, elevations what it all means and by the end of the two weeks they have something to present to guests that we have come in and it's really quite nice I think our crowd of what they've created is another shot of final presentation a lot, a lot, a lot of food yeah like this these are food shots we paid him that's a segue this was a festival up in the mountains that we hiked up to big tub of polenta that was being made in Italy if you've never been when you order pizza you get your own one it's not a share thing this is where we usually eat so you can see there's some elevation the valley down below we're talking about the palm trees down there you walk up to where we stay sometimes we go out to eat restaurants, sometimes we have lunch on a field trip situation I have no idea whether we're over time or under time but that final shot here we do a lot of field trips and everyone's so happy they're all eating they're all eating the cheeks but we are at an elevation if you remember the photo that Mack had of inside the mountain of marble there is a pit quarry where you could look down and there's one that you can go inside of and that's quite a long walk in and we had just come from there we're hungry and looking across this is the quarry opening of the restoration of the Duomo Milano so it's at an extreme elevation and if you can imagine how do you get a slab of stone as big as this table down out of the mountain when you don't have a vehicle so they had a whole system there's drawings and images of I don't know if they used elephants or something but just lowering things down on rollers slowly but the rows are so incredibly steep it's almost impossible to imagine how you can even do it without the modern tools that we have and then once you get it to the valley there is a river down there and the river connects to the Lago Majori through a system of canals connects to Milano so you can get the stone from the valley to Milan basically by boat so that's it? that's what we have you're welcome to ask us more questions we'll hang out as long as you want but if you're interested in this course or know anybody who's interested we do it last two weeks in July every year so we already got one enrollee for next year which is great but we need seven or eight students to run the course what's your max? 13 13 was difficult seven were from Thailand three were over 70 two were drunk the whole time one got dirty going couldn't stand so 13 it depends on you I think it's ideal and Tia you also offer a stone course on campus in May just about every year I teach the art of stone which is advanced masonry arty masonry for people from beginner through advance it's everything that we do in Italy as a house we do as a sculpture somewhere there are program catalogs here for the winter and lots of books of the Oslo Valley this is one of the most incredible photo books that you'll ever see and these are all in Italian most in Italian but really historic imagery of these vernacular buildings same with this one a lot of good photos and diagrams of how these buildings are built can you both speak fluent Italian? I listened to fluent Italian the course is taught in English though we do have Italians working with us who are pretty proficient at English so that's not a problem so feel free to linger feel free to come chat with any of us snacks there's treats, there's some coffee for sale also back there and have a wonderful evening thank you for coming