Manifold Recording / The Miraverse

Despite yet another snowfall and two more days of rain, we finished (or nearly finished) a slew of milestones this week.  We finished preparing the Music Room ceiling so that it can accept our acoustic ceiling.  We basically finished framing and sheathing the Annex roof.  We blew in the tons of insulation required in the roof rafters and ceiling joists in the Booths and the Music Room.  We finished framing the Booth walls with staggered studs and resilient channel.  And we almost finished the masonry for the Loggia.

But the stage has also been set for starting some new major work: building the cypress soffits for the lower roofs of both the Main and Annex buildings, hanging drywall throughout the Main building (and later the Annex), and the major project that defines this week’s title: the perimeter footings that will underlie our landscaping walls, equipment corrals, and the various patios that extend from and between the buildings.  Here, in a fisheye view, you can see how the footings define the future outline of the patio in front of the Loggia:

But this photo of a newly scraped site barely scratches the surface of everything that’s happened this past week…

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Weather has been quite a challenge lately, and both snow and rain slowed down our efforts to complete the Annex roof.  Nevertheless, there were enough good days to at least enter the final stretch of the roof framing process: sheathing the roof.

Here’s the half that we sheathed by the end of the week:

And, because of triaxial symmetry, two of the halves yet to be sheathed:

The following photos tell not only how we got to this point, but what other work was done this week…

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This week we crowned 14 courses of masonry with the framing of a roof:

That’s pretty exciting, considering that last week we had nothing up top, and three months ago the Annex was just some footings and a foundation.

Read on to see some of the details of our progress, starting with the installation of more than 8,500 lbs of steel…

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Well that was fast…one week we’re laying down the first of our wall plates, and the next, we’re done!

With the booth framing, that is.  But there’s a lot more happening elsewhere, too…

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A new article in the New York Times poses a question by way of a quotation: can there be authenticity without originality?

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If we had decided to build Manifold Recording inside the shell of a commercial building, then we would have started the project at the point we have just now reached: the initial framing of the interior walls.  But since we are following the principles of Organic Architecture, we had to wait for the building to grow, from the inside out, until the the outer structure was sufficiently well developed to allow the inner structure to be expressed.  It has been a mind-expanding journey, and something that fills me with we and excitement.

The first wall to be framed is a solid wall between Booths C and B. CDM perimeter strip isolates the wall from the floor, and is placed under a pair of 2×6s that will function as bottom plates.  Here is the initial construction (alone with other activity related to trimming the Booth windows and preparing the ceiling for insulation to be blown in next week):

The following detail from the construction plans shows what we can expect to see as this wall grows up and becomes finished:

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The artcile Is There an Ecological Unconscious? in the January 31 2010 Sunday New York Times Magazine probes a deep psychological question, examining solastalgia and soliphilia along the way.  Both are rooted in the Latin solacium (comfort), but one riffs on nostalgia (which connects to the Greek root –algia (pain or suffering)) and the other is more cogently connected to love and friendship (based on the Greek root philia).  The article makes the case that global climate change is not measured merely by tenths of a °C or meters of sea-level rise or even parts-per-million concentrations of atmospheric CO₂, but can also by the psychic disturbance of mountain-top removal and the disorders that arise from an increasingly inaccessible natural environment.

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It was over a year ago when Ben Loftis told me “I think you’re going to need a box from Colin Broad”.  I vaguely remember looking up the name, seeing the boxes, and thinking “OK…when I’m a little closer to building out the studio I’ll have to see what’s current and what I need.”  Well, we’re starting to gear up our equipment lists, rack elevations, and wiring lists, and so it seemed like a good time to reach out to Colin and see whether his latest products suited my project.

In a word: perfectly!

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This week there was a lot of visible progress, both inside and out.  On Monday morning the roofing crew arrived, and on this truck you can see some of the very special equipment and materials that will be used to finish up the lower roof (and later the upper roof, too), a spool of copper flashing and a sheet metal brake:

The copper flashing is unspooled:

And is then formed into the appropriate shape for the roof:

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The installation and illumination of lights in the upper exterior soffit has created a dramatic change to the look of the studio, even in daylight.

The lights, and the mirror-like finish of the final coat of varnish, merely stoke my anticipation all the more:

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