I’ve been going through old photos lately. I shot photos of this beautiful barn in 2014. I posted it back then, but I think it’s worth looking at it again, in more detail. Here’s what I wrote:
There are buildings that have — for lack of a better word — a sweetness to them. Like this barn, like a small abandoned cottage in an English field I once found, slowly disintegrating back into the soil from which all its materials came. Inside, I could feel the lives that had been lived there. Or the buildings of master carpenter Lloyd House. It happens most frequently in barns, where practicality and experience create form with function. Architecture without architects.
The unique feature here is that the roof’s curve is achieved by building the rafters out of 1″ material. 1 × 12s laminated together (I believe 4 of them) to achieve the simplest of laminated trusses. The barn is 24′ wide, 32′ long, 26′ to the ridge. (Thanks to Mackenzie Strawn for measuring it; he also wrote: “I have a carpentry manual from the 1930’s with a short section on the Gothic arch barns, they suggest making the roof radius ¾ of the width.”
Exterior
1 by 12’s. It looks like they are laminated, then a curve is cut along the outer edge. Brilliant carpentry!
This is similar to the construction of the Nepenthe restaurant in Big Sur: framed entirely with laminated 1″ lumber
The Art of the Barn. It’s awesome.
On the Gulf Islands in BC, Canada, we have boat shelters built with bent 1″ lumber. We easily built a jig to bend and hold in place in two runs of 1×4 in a gothic arch and then sandwich scrap chunks of 2×4 in between and screw them all together. We’d create a series of these arches. Stand them up and run 1×4’s along the sides all the way up to the top. The ridge were two 1×8’s run along the top. Then drape a large tarp over it. The frame was built in one day, and the tarp tacked in place the next day. They’d last a couple years before the bottoms rotted our due to moisture. Built correctly these temporary structures would last a lot longer.