The prospects for this week looked especially good for construction until Hurricane IDA decided to head north, and with her four days of mostly constant rain. Fortunately we made some progress on Monday, and by Thursday we received our inspection for the electrical conduits in the Annex. And a lot of conduits there are:
Continue reading “Week 97 (Rain, More Annex Conduits, and More Rain)”
This week we hit a milestone that’s significant enough to have a tradition associated with it: we fully dried in the Music Room and Booth roofs! Earlier this week, word came in from our general contractor:
Congatulations to us all !
Our HVAC team yesterday finally shoe-horned 40 gallons of duct work into a 5 gallon bucket. Today our carpenters completed the roof framing.
We are now deserving of the ancient German tradition that is huge up north and doggedly hangs on in the south ………. We now have an evergreen branch nailed to the peak of our main roof ! This signifies being dried-in (semi-permanent roof protection from the elements).
[…]
It’s taken us quite a while to get to this point, but now we are cooking with gas !
Rather excitedly,
Scotty
So I went in search of documentation of this tradition, and here is what I found.
Work continues on the roof, the ductwork, the masonry, and even the plans, but the most visible feature of this past week’s progress has been the continued work on the Annex Conduits, specifically the electrical conduits. Last week saw the final placement of the technical conduits, locking them in cement, and filling the Annex foundation with gravel. Here’s where things started on Monday, with fresh lines demarking the boundaries of the Annex Control Room (click on the image to see a highlighted version):
And then the disturbance begins…
Yet another great story on NPR, Pink Martini: A Tale Of Two Songs. Brilliant!
Listen all the way through for the twist!
The framing process reached a major milestone this week, with the foreman telling me that we are now drying in the Music Room roof. Hallelujah! But that was merely the tip of the iceberg, progress-wise, as we enjoyed five days of ideal weather, and the site was humming with dozens of workers every day. In five days we:
There is no single picture that adequately summarizes all of this progress, but this one shows a good bit:
For more details, read on:
This is going to be a glass half-full/glass half-empty posting. On the positive side, we have half the duct work up in the space that’s going to be our attic:
On the downside, here’s how much has not yet been installed into the attic:
I’ve read a number of good books lately, and figure I should recommend some of them to the readers of this blog. If you like these suggestions, feel free to give me “helpful” votes on Amazon.com…
There has been much progress in many areas since my latest construction blog posting, but clearly the establishment of the major structural members of the roof over the booths must be the headline. Here you can see several such structural members, two hips and a bit of the top plate (which is effectively the top ridge of the roof as well):
But there is much more progress to report, as you will see…
Continue reading “Week 92 (Booths: Masonry Completed/Roof Framing Begins)”
After posting Copyright v. Culture last month, Bruce Warila contacted me about re-publishing the article on his site, Music Think Tank. I agreed to do so, and was pleasantly surprised to see 10 comments within a week. That, and having made some more progress on The Glenn Gould Reader (edited by Tim Page), compelled me to write a followup to the article, which I reproduce here:
Thanks, all, for writing your comments, and thus contributing to this discussion.
To the question “doesn’t culture primarily advance through people creating new works, as opposed to recycling old ones?” I would say the answer is beyond my ability to answer in a perfectly factual manner. Since we’re talking about Gould, perhaps his perspective on the matter could be enlightening. The article in question (from The Glenn Gould Reader, edited by Tim Page) is “Strauss and the Electronic Future”, and he writes:
Continue reading “Copyright v. Culture: Music Think Tank Followup”
It took about eight months to get the Music Room masonry done from start to finish. It took about 2 weeks to do the same for the principal Booth walls and another 2 weeks to completely finish the masonry portion of the Control Room. Wow!
But that’s not the only progress this week…
Manifold Recording / The Miraverse 
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