Transition Culture

17 Apr 2007

The Wisdom of Old Buildings and the “Golden Stain of Time”.

Over the Easter break I went to Bradford-on-Avon near Bath, a beautiful place, blessed with a fine canal and some beautiful old buildings. I am always drawn to old buildings. There is something about them that is hard to define, what Christopher Alexander called [The Timeless Way of Building](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Timeless-Building-Center-Environmental-Structure/dp/0195024028/ref=sr_1_1/203-8847489-1550349?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1176758427&sr=8-1″TWB”). Hydrocarbon man has often vilified the buildings of our ancestors as basic and backward, but very often the common sense and practical ingenuity they contain is something we can only admire. The Victorian art critic John Ruskin summed up for me what is so powerful about old buildings when he wrote;

>When we build, let us think that we build for ever. Let it not be for present delight, nor for present use alone, let it be such work as our descendents will thank us for. And let us think, as we lay stone on stone, that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred, because our hands have touched them, and that men will say as they look upon the labour and wrought substance of them, “see, this our fathers did for us�.

>For indeed, the greatest glory of a building is not in its stones, nor in its gold, its glory is in its age, and in that deep sense of voicefulness, or stern watching, of mysterious sympathy, nay, even of approval or condemnation which we feel in walls that have long been washed by the passing waves of humanity. It is in that golden stain of time that we are to look for the real light and colour and preciousness of architecture�

“The golden stain of time”. I encountered this most powerfully in the early 90s when I was travelling in China in what was formerly the Amdo province of China and visited [Labrang Tashi Kyil](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labrang_Monastery”l”), one of the great monasteries of Tibetan Buddhism and one of only 12 from the original 6,000 that had survived the Cultural Revolution. Visiting places where people have gone on pilgrimage and touched the stones for many hundreds of years is amazing. The golden stain not only of devotion, but also of reverence.

Anyway, back to Bradford-on-Avon. We happened across an extraordinary building there called the Tithe Barn. This 14th century structure is about 168ft long and 30ft wide and was used to store food grown on the estate. The two large porches at the front were to allow carts to be offloaded out of the rain. On the opposite sides are doors placed in alignment, so the wind blows straight through allowing for grains to be winnowed in the dry.

The high openings in the walls are unglazed to allow for ventilation as well as to allow the owls to get in at night to hunt for vermin. The most extraordinary thing about the building was its roof. It is made with massive oak beams which span the 30ft width and support an enormous weight of the stone tiles on top. It is an extraordinary way to make a roof. Starting with large sandstone slabs at the bottom, the slabs get smaller and smaller as it works up the roof, until by the top they are small stones. None of them are nailed, all held in place by their own weight.

These buildings were a central part of the rural economy and now exist as museum pieces. While many buildings that formed the backbone of our rural economy have now been turned into houses, it may well be that at some point in the not-too-distant future we will need them again, and we will rediscover these structures as the working structures they were intended to be. The extraordinary craftsmanship of buildings like the Tithe Barn is something to marvel at, especially with the realisation that everything was done by hand, from the felling and the sawpit to the timber pegs and the laying of the irregular slates. If the passing of the peak means that some element of this craftsmanship is returned to our lives, we would be the richer for it.