I posted a lot about the pre-construction work that took place at Menokin this summer. Our three interns did quite an exceptional job identifying and moving stones onto the life-sized HABS drawings of the four facades of the house.
But we’re not above having a little fun with our work, and nobody does it quite like Allie and Emily Lyth. These sisters have been part of the Menokin volunteer and intern corps for a number of years. They couldn’t resist a slightly surrealistic narrative…..
Hmmm. Which key is it?
I’m sure Francis Lightfoot Lee was always chatting on his cell phone when he entered the house, too.
Just casually scaling the house.
We did our best to replicate the HABS picture with the actual house, but it was a little challenging since the front door doesn’t exist on the house.
Scaling the actual house… just not as enthusiastically.
PART I Nothing brings a place alive like the work of many hands. Phase I of the Menokin Glass Project is underway as three interns dived deep into the Menokin stone databases to identify and locate cut and carved stone from the historic building.
Under the supervision of Encore Sustainable Design Architects Nakita Reed and Ward Bucher, the summer interns did a terrific job of updating files, re-tagging stones and finally moving them to giant, life-size print outs of the Menokin HABS drawings.
The students, Bethany Emenhiser, Sarah Rogers and Chris Cortner, came from around the U.S. and were attracted to Menokin’s innovative approach to preservation. But has the job been easy?
Only if you think moving 250 100-500 lb stones in 90 degree heat is light-weight work.
“It was fun to finally be able to move the stones to their proper places on the HABS drawings after spending weeks documenting and tagging them,” said Bethany Emenhiser, “but it was a long, hot day.”
Local contractor, Robert Yeatman, stands by as stones are indentified.
Pallets of stones were driven to the proper location on the HABS elevation, then hoisted into place by the interns
Sarah and Bethany directing traffic.
Nakita and Menokin E.D. Sarah Pope inspect the progress.
Hank Handler from Oak Grove takes his Bobcat driving very seriously.
A bird’s eye view of two of four elevations. You can see the house taking shape on top of the drawings.
Bringing in summer interns to help with preconstruction work was something of a no-brainer.The Menokin Foundation and its project partners were able to save essential funds and the interns gained valuable experience in the field, learned best practices for documentation and assessment of historic materials.
Though the preconstruction work has just begun, the progress is visible. Stop by Menokin and you’ll immediately see sorted stones atop the giant canvas drawings, a visual reminder that soon those same stones will be returned to the house.
The Menokin Foundation has designed an updated look that reflects the sophistication of The Glass House Project.
Here’s what you’ll see in Menokin 2.0:
A NEW LOGO
The redesigned logo is a simplified graphic of the Menokin Glass House; the colors represent the iron-infused sandstone and the architectural Glass.
A NEW COLOR PALETTE
The updated color palette is derived from the physical materials of the house. The colors were created using software that extracts the colors from photographs.
Inspired by the handwriting samples on the 1940 HABS (Historic American Building Survey) drawings of Menokin, this font is uniquely ours.
WHAT’S NEXT?
We are currently updating our website to make things easier to find and prettier to look at. We hope to have that launched by late summer or early fall.
Upon receiving the news of Mr. Boucher’s passing on September 2, 2012, I dug into the Menokin Photo archive this morning to look for the images that I knew he had taken here as part of his work with HABS (Historic American Building Survey). Wouldn’t it be nice, I thought, to share these photographs with the world as a way of paying tribute to the wonderful career of Jack Boucher?
Menokin: Rubble With A Cause 