By Scott Boylston

Happy 2013!

We’re starting the new year with a milestone, and a thought about the nature of permanence and the built environment.

First the milestone: We are over 25% of the way to meeting our Kickstarter goal! As of earlier today, we surpassed the $2,000 mark, and with 29 days left, things are looking good! Why bother waiting any longer: join the team!

Now for the thought:

Over 150 years ago, John Ruskin wrote about Seven Lamps of Architecture, those seven lamps being Sacrifice, Truth, Power, Beauty, Life, Memory and Obedience. Much has changed since 1849, and we wouldn’t necessarily embrace all that Ruskin espouses in this book about what architecture ‘should’ and ‘should not’ be, but the chapter on memory has many jewels.

The images in this post are scanned from a small series of carpentry books that Emergent Structures board member and JT Turner’s Preservation Director Mark Fitzpatrick showed me a few months back. The book series,Audel’s Carpenters and Builders Guide, Volume 1, was published in the mid-1940s. That’s the same time that the buildings out at Strathmore Estates were built: it not just possible, but probable that some of the carpenters that built the houses that we have helped deconstruct owned the very same set of books!

The quote had always resonated with Mark, and it felt especially meaningful to our endeavor to bring discarded materials back to life: if we cannot save every building, might we preserve, celebrate and share something that was ‘sacred’ about each of them?

Another passage from the chapter on Memory:

“There is a sanctity in a good man’s house which cannot be renewed in every tenement that rises on its ruins: and I believe that good men would generally feel this; and that having spent their lives happily and honourably, they would be grieved, at the close of them, to think that the place of their earthly abode, which had seen, and seemed almost to sympathize in, all their honour, their gladness, or their suffering,—that this, with all the record it bare of them, and of all material things that they had loved and ruled over, and set the stamp of themselves upon—was to be swept away, as soon as there was room made for them in the grave; that no respect was to be shown to it, no affection felt for it, no good to be drawn from it by their children; that though there was a monument in the church, there was no warm monument in the hearth and house to them; that all that they ever treasured was despised, and the places that had sheltered and comforted them were dragged down to the dust.”

To 2013, then, and 2063, and 2113…