In the last couple of weeks, we have been preparing to build a pod for our materials and methods class, but also to give us some opportunity for design, considering that the St. Lukes church project is mostly construction and has only minimal design aspects to it.
The main premise of the pod was to finish design as quickly as possible and get into the ground in about two weeks and then finish most of the construction in an intense 2 weeks build marathon after which we would be completing the in weekends during the rest of the semester.

We began our design phase with all of us doing charettes over a day, and starting to review our ideas together with thesis. We picked the three most promising design proposals and started to elaborating them in three groups a series of reviews we pinned down one final design idea and started to flesh out its details. In the meantime we got thumbs up to start building on St. Luke’s in old Cahawba, so again we got split up in two groups, a temporary pod team of six and a church team of seven. There were some changes to the design to make the proposal more constructible and made some decisions considering the position and orientation of the Pod.

We quickly figured out the positions of the four Sana tube foundations and with the help of Johnny Parker we started drilling the holes Monday morning and managed to get the auger piece stuck at the first hole. We quickly figured out that the clay was the biggest problem and after a lot of work, including digging out the thing in hard rain we managed to get free by afternoon.
Tuesday we finished drilling the holes, having learned from our past mistakes not to drill down to fast into the soil. After having done that, we build the batter boards and bracings for the Sana tubes and got ready to receive the cement truck.
The pouring of the cement went fine without any major issues and we got it finished in about one hour.

The next phase of the project started as soon as the concrete was sufficiently dry – we framed the floor platform, consisting out of a roughly 10′x15′ square and a 4”x10” cantilever extruded north, held onto the platform by four flitch-beams.

Edit: There was a tornado warning while I was writing this post and I had to leave the red barn - I will finish this up once we are back from Chicago.

I have been sitting here for some time now trying to figure out where to begin explaining the past two months of our time here at the Rural Studio. I guess the best thing to do is to start with a brief summary of what we are working on. Our primary project this semester is to rebuild St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in historical Cahaba using the extensive cataloging system developed by last year’s second year groups when they took the church down. Unlike most second year groups, we are also working on a second project in which we were to design and build a guest pod for lecturers to stay in when they come and visit the Rural Studio.

Recently we have finished designing the pod and split into two groups to begin construction on both the projects. The members of both the projects will be mixed and swapped between the groups in order to give everyone the chance to participate on the pod these two weeks before we focus all our forces on St. Luke’s. With that said, I will explain where we are at on the church.
After a long series of really unfortunate events this semester, the foundation was finally cleared the first of the month, allowing us to begin planning what we need to get done this semester. On October 8, the church team (Ali, Ed, Mallory, Mary, Michael, Will, Dr. Professor Steve, and myself) began by getting familiar with last year’s work. With the help of the black book (which I don’t know what we would do without), we started off by setting up our scaffolding and laying an anti-termite membrane of metal flashing on top of the foundation walls. From there, we gathered and cut 8″x10″x16’ members of pressure treated wood to their appropriate dimensions to attach as our sills on top of the foundation walls. During this whole first week of reconstruction, we have attached all the anti-termite flashing, sills, found the center beam pieces, sorted and moved the floor joists we could find to the site. Also, cad drawings of the center beam location in relation to the foundation walls, flitch beam details, and estimated number of temporary floor sheets have been completed. All that is keeping us from going full force now is feedback from Joe F. about our details and the Simpson products needed to attach the floor joists, which we will hopefully figure out tomorrow. As things stand now, I feel confident we will get a lot done this semester and see some walls going up soon, despite the delays early on. We are eager and ready to get a lot of work done, or as Natalie says: “Kick some butt and take some names!”

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Check out some pictures of this weekhere.