Tree buffs in Washington, D.C., are building a truss for the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris, using only 12th-century techniques. And they're doing it on spec. ShawnMcCreesh reports
Ben Witman wields a goosewing ax. Photo: Greg Kahn/GRAIN “I started getting calls as soon as the fire was put out,” said Rick Brown, standing on the lawn at Catholic University the other day. Brown and his wife, Laura, are the co-founders of Handshouse Studio, an educational nonprofit that replicates large historical objects using the precise techniques with which they were built.
“Each truss is totally unique,” explained Brown. He’s 72, and was quivering with delight in his Stetson and brown vest. “It’s like a story being told, ‘Oh, looks like here the roof was leaking and there’s some kind of failure in the corner joint,’ so they had to scab in some pieces of wood, and you see how the history is really documented. These trusses they built were very ingenious; you can see how they were learning by doing.
The sweet smell of sap and fresh wood chippings wafted across the lawn while Ethan Higgins, a lumberjack who had traveled here from Ann Arbor, Michigan, hacked away at a 40-foot white oak. He looked the part, in his suspenders and plaid. It was a sweltering, swampy summer afternoon. A bead of sweat rolled down the bridge of his nose as he announced, “This is so much fun.”
“The original roof stood for 800 years,” Wampold pointed out. “So if we do our jobs right, that could be the same.” A few days before construction began, the last of the white oaks for the truss were being felled 200 miles southwest of D.C., in Virginia. Smoke from the California wildfires had drifted east, crawling over the Blue Ridge Mountains and hanging in the Shenandoah Valley that day. On the grounds of Ecco Adesso Vineyards, beyond a patch of Riesling and Cabernet Franc grapes, I met Mez Welch on the edge of a sylvan thicket.
So nobody seemed the least bit bothered that their beloved truss might never see the Seine. “The dissemination of all this knowledge as a result of a catastrophic loss — that’s the silver lining here,” said Timothy Farina, 24, a D.C.-based architect who was hewing away on the lawn at the University. “We’re still making history by doing this,” said Welch. “From what we understand, even if this one doesn’t make it, we might be able to build a second one down the line that will.
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