Thursday, July 14, 2016

We returned to Birdwood this morning to begin fieldwork. Shayne Brandon and Will Rourk joined us there at the beginning of the day to continue exploring the site and discussing our project goals. After that, we worked on the property’s smokehouse. First, we photographed each elevation and corner of the building, as well as some details that we found important, such as the presence of both open and filled-in slots in the walls on three sides of the smokehouse. We then made our first attempt at field drawing by sketching the eastern elevation. The group worked together to measure and record the dimensions of the building, and we found that the sides of the structure are not quite straight, as the elevation’s width was not the same when measured at several different heights. We also attempted a drawing of a section of the carving on the doorframe, and then moved on to a drawing of the plan of the entire structure and recorded measurements for the lengths of all walls, distances between windows and doors, and distances between the interesting slots on the building. With these measurements and an architect’s scale, we will produce a scale drawing of the plan in the studio.