Thread by @James_Taite

A rather boring thread about old ways of cutting stone, which is redeemed in the end with a story about an anarchist bricklayer, and in which I also reveal the secret of the practically god-like powers of the stonemason (me).
#stonecutting #stonemasonry

Cutting stone is a practical matter; it’s a matter of picking up a rock and making a stone that can be used to build. Here’s a photo of Ottawa in the 1860s; cutting stone is a process of turning what you see in the foreground into what you see in the background. Simple.

The simplest walls are those of rubble: random, unsquared, relatively unworked. Rubble involves a minimum of effort; the best natural face is used, minor projections are expected, and deficiencies in the stone are made good with generous quantities of mortar.

But to go beyond rubble, to go further than simply knocking the worst knobs off with a hammer and turning the stone in your hands a few times, deciding how it wants to sit and where the face is, requires a bit of an imaginative leap.

Cutting stone is a process of imposing abstraction on the intractable world. Looking at a lump of rock and seeing a regular form in there, somewhere. It’s a matter of applying your mind to the stone like a knife to bread, slicing the heel from the loaf along an imaginary plane.

And with this imaginary plane the face of the stone can be defined by a circumference of edges (or arrises) that lay flat, without twist. From this imaginary plane, other planes can be squared; the stone can be given parallel top and bottom beds, and ends perpendicular to these.

Simple. Except that you can’t cut most stones with a bread-knife, or even a saw… at least before the industrialization of the trade you couldn’t. Rather than slice the stone, you had to work its surface down in a series of laborious steps.

Having drawn the lines that defined this plane, a pitching chisel could cut away what projected beyond them. Stones could then be laid more precisely to a line, making it easier to build straight and plumb. Making each stone true made the whole wall true.

Pitching generally left rough projections or bellies in the centre of the stone’s face though. In a finished stone, these distinctive bellies gave this work its name: rock-faced. But in the process of producing a flat surface, these paunches had to be addressed.

Here’s a punch, a chisel found buried in the wall of the West Block, Parliament Hill, Ottawa. It was presumably used in the late 1850s or early 1860s, at the time of construction shown in the archival photo above.

This chisel tells a story: it was worn to a nub, barely longer than a fist; over and over, the mason must have hit their hand on the stone, or with the hammer. So in a moment of pique, maybe they took revenge, Poe-style, walling it in. Or so I like to imagine.

Such a chisel was used to punch or peck down the bellies of rock-faced work. Sharp blows of the hammer, repeated, produced a rough regularity. This might have been done either as a permanent finish or as preparatory to the use of finer tools.

Those finer tools might have included the crandall, a hammer with multiple removable points in a line parallel to the handle, used to give a similar but finer texture than punching…

…or maybe the bush-hammer, whose square head is composed of a number of acute prismatic points, producing an evenly pocked surface yet finer than the punch or point or crandall…

…or maybe the claw chisel, or patent hammer, or boaster, or drag, or any one of many tools and techniques developed over thousands of years to give a progressively flatter, smoother surface to stone. Cutting stone was a slow process of working through these successive stages.

So why was one finish chosen over others? Why was this process arrested at one stage of refinement or another? Maybe it was a matter of propriety; the hierarchy of tooling corresponded to a social hierarchy of building function and to an architectural hierarchy of elements.

Once, finishes were valued in proportion to the labour required in their creation, the distance they took the stone from its natural form, the extent to which order was imposed on a chaotic world.

When a regular surface had demanded the most work, and was the product of the most art, it was the most valued. To command the labour to make things flat and smooth and square was a display of prestige.

So the palace was more finely worked than the farmhouse, the façade of a building more than its flanks, and the porticoed entrance more than the walling it emerged from. Like it or not, the masonry participated in a social order that was often inegalitarian and coercive.

However, without romanticising the tedious labour of cutting stone, finishes also took meaning from the fact that they were the mark of the tradespersons hand. A fan pattern can sometimes be seen in bush-hammering. The mason was stationary, a fixed point, the face of the stone…

…horizontal in front of them, the length of their arm and the handle of the tool became a radius centred on their body. The toolmark, the hammer rising and falling as the mason pivoted, made an arc that referred to the human-scale of that radius and to the person at that centre.

Stonecutting was a practical matter. But squaring and finishing stone was also a process of giving order to the unordered universe, of repeating the paradigmatic work of gods. By making a stone out of which the world could be built masons made a cosmos centred on themselves.

Which brings us to Eduardo Galeano’s story about a Spanish anarchist in the years after the civil war. Jailed and blacklisted, jobless and impoverished, in his despair he added drinking to his sins. His son, Josep, was determined to bring him back to the church.

Josep tried to reason with him:
“If God doesn’t exist, who made the world?”
The anarchist thought, looking into the shadowed corner of the room, then motioned him closer. He whispered his secret:
“Dummy. We made the world, we bricklayers.”