What's Cooking?

Back on site........

The assembly of the rebar into the ground beam cages is underway and the site is slowly filling up with deliveries of the various raw materials.

If architecture can be considered as 'frozen music' then as far as I'm concerned, the act of building can definitely be summed up as cooking.

The rebar are strewn out on the ground like packet spaghetti and the sand and aggregate are dumped on site in giant shopping bag style sacks, looking for all the world like wholesale instant cake mix. Sacks of cement bear a strong likeness to bags of flour and a lot of the tools resemble, curiously, those that one might find in the kitchen.

As for the chefs, I can only hope that what they'll be turning out of their moulds will be more in the line of haute cuisine than a fast-food takeaway.

Ca sent bon!

Le montage des armatures de renforcement pour les longrines est enfin en route. Petit à petit le vide du chantier se remplit avec les livraisons de matériaux.

Si on peut considérer l’architecture comme de la musique figée, pour moi la construction est forcement comparable avec les arts culinaires. Les aciers de renforcement sont éparpillés par terre comme des spaghettis. Le mélange sable et agrégats est livré dans des sacs de supermarché géants. Le ciment est entassé dans de grands paquets en papier comme de la farine. Les gestes, et souvent les outils, font croire que c’est un plat et pas une maison qui est à l’œuvre.

Tant qu’on évite les spécialités régionales trop riches

Version Originale vs. Version Française

I’ve had a request, to make the blog bilingual.

This means a bit of extra effort on my part. So to make life easier I’ve asked The Client if she could lend a hand with rereading my translations. Her job will be to make sure all those elusive subtleties of the French language, that still escape me after all these years, are tweaked into a form that won’t offend the gallic ear. The grammatical ‘quality control’ will, of course, mean a slight time lag before the French translation comes online.
So, if you’re a French monoglot, and you want the latest update hot off the blog you’re just going to have to start taking those lessons.

I speak Wall Street English!

And remember - A recent Canadian study has shown that people who are monolingual are at a disadvantage with the onset of senility compared to bilingual people.

Gloup gloup

With a ‘gloup gloup’ the contingencies (2% of the budget) in the form of liquid concrete are spooned into the 3 metre deep holes that form the foundations to the house. In order to avoid flooding from the groundwater each hole is dug and filled, as soon as it is finished, from the waiting ‘toupie’ (french for transit mixing lorry).

The Builder presents his construction team. They seem, for the most part, to be of Portugese origin. They are joking about ‘speaking english’. One of The Clients neighbours is english, The Architect is english, and they are wondering if english will be obligatory on site.

Here we go

The piles are to be poured tomorrow.

Seems I’m the only one to be excited by the prospect of concrete being poured into a hole (that would be six 3 metre deep holes to be exact). On hearing the news The Skater hardly even lifted his eyes from the game console.

The Engineers shop drawings of the foundation formwork arrived with the mornings post. It’s a curious choice of communication, seeing as how everyone uses email these days. Even The Builder can mail me a ‘pdf’ or an ‘excel’. Yet The Engineer, or at least his draftsman, seems to be from a bygone era. His drawings are done by hand. They have that stripped down functionality that I’ve always found so elegant in engineers drawings. There’s not a single superfluous line. He probably whips his drawings out a lot quicker with a pencil than we do with our ‘workstations’. Even though, they only just arrived in time for a last minute modification.

Bizarre

The race is now on to get some concrete poured before the cold spell of february makes it impossible. I'm guiltily hoping that a good dose of global warming will help us keep building right through till spring.

The soil engineer and the contractors engineer have come to a compromise on the foundations and with any luck and a lot of phone calls we should be back in business this week.

The Client summoned up the courage to visit the site for the first time since before the demolition. Her comment, 'C'est bizarre'.

She hasn't yet owned up to visiting the blog, although now that the demolition has been accepted there is no reason that she shouldn't.