Manifold Recording / The Miraverse

Two months ago, the completion of the Music Room Cloud gave me the opportunity to take a step back from basic progress reports and to talk more broadly about the aesthetics and architecture of the project, in particular the way that large features of the studio design fit together into an integrated whole.  That was a very popular post, and it circulated widely among designers and architects, geometers and algebraic topologists, as well as studio cats and studio rats.  Now it is time to focus on the other jewel of the main studio, the Control Room, and the way that smaller features fit together into an equally integrated whole.

Front and center is one of the hallmarks of Wes Lachot’s RFZ design, a hybridization of wall and ceiling that Wes calls a Walling:

Manifold are the layers of acoustic and aesthetic wonders that trace its wonderful seven-sided symmetry…

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The installation of the wood floor in the Music Room is now in full swing, for real this time.  Here are three perspectives of first twelve diamonds:

Despite the awful spectrum of the mercury-vapor work lamp, these images do show how the wood appears to change color as one moves around the room.  It should be even more dramatic once the wood is finished.

So, what makes this such a challenge to install?  Read on…

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In the Annex Control Room the carpenters have cut and installed the subfascia for the rear soffit.  Here you can see one of them putting up the decking on top:

And here are a variety of perspectives to try to show what this curvature really looks like:

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As I explained in last week’s update, the angles in any control room are unlike any angles one expects to find in normal framing carpentry.  And our Control Room design has more interesting angles than most.  This week we established the endpoints of the most unique framing in the project, the intersection of a sloped front wall meeting angled side walls that both intersect a ceiling that is itself both pitched and rotated.  There is no steel square in the world that tells you how to measure or make those cuts.  In fact, even locating where in space these different planes all intersect is a math problem unto itself.  Here is the solution given in wood:

To learn how we figured this out (and about more construction progress), read on…

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Before this past week, I had thought that the maths involved in framing a 5:12 pitch roof was fairly straightforward: for every 12 feet of run, there’s 5 feet of rise, and so there’s not much to figuring out how to cut a rafter and put it into place.  That may be so for rafters that are running perpendicular to the walls and/or roof pitch, but things get a lot more interesting at the hips, when two facets of a roof come together to form one common line.  If you don’t believe me, check out these hip shift and hip drop calculations.  With many tangents and arc tangents, it’s not for the faint of heart!  And so our brave carpenters begin the most complex part of the Control Room roof yet: the hips…

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