Love the pics posted by @ArchMaher of historic stone construction in Jordan, these stairs in particular. The two photos seem to show similar constructions, though the structural principles are very different:

short thread on the cantilever v the pencheck stair

Cantilevers rely on weight at the tailed-in end to keep them from tipping out, and on the (generally low) strength of stone to resist the tension produced in its upper surface. Too great a load, the stone will fail, and the tread will snap. Stone doesn’t like tension.

porches not blurring boundaries between ext and int but redrawing them sharp thru your body, verandahs a kind of vivisection, your eyes and ears and finer hairs outside and the rest of your body in, your head roofed over, your shoulder safe against a wall
a thread about porches… a porch cut into or carved out of the volume of the building, a space dug out or collapsing in; a local, limited, careful inversion of that interiority; a surprising fold an unexpected introversion

There’s an old story I just made up about a mason, spending his days piling stone on top of stone. Raising a church.

He’s asked by the abbot: “We build for the glory of God; how do you intend to keep the stones standing through years of wind and frost?”

A thread… “Simple, I put something heavier on top, to keep it in place”, the stonemason replies.
“And how do you keep that from falling?”
“Well I put something even heavier on top.”
“And on top of that?”
“Something even heavier…”

Something heavy all the way up.

The art of persuasion with a 3-pound hammer, or stonecutting…

a thread: As a building material, stone is timid, unambitious. It is modest, plodding, and incremental, one chunk laid atop another. Another, and another. In nature we often find it rolled dull by streams and tides, or buried, in beds belowground. It’s a burrowing animal, a groundhog.

A thread on building with stone.

Particularly, the way stones are arranged in the wall, or ‘bond’.

Specifically, that bond called sneck, or Scotch.

A stone wall is a stone wall, right? Look at these two: rubble (L) and sneck bond (R). Just stone walls. Stone is rock given purpose, picked up with an intention in mind. Rubble is closest to that primal purposeless state. Unsquared and relatively unworked it expresses an economy of effort. The worst knobs are knocked off. The stone is turned over to determine how it will sit…

A thread in which I look at the use of willfully rude, raw, broken, imperfect finishes for stone--used not for the sake of economy, not for expedience, but purely for effect--and in which I compare the stonemason's work to a literal pile of shit, but not in a bad way. An earlier thread told the story of the stonemason who brought order to a disorderly world. Cutting stone was a matter of taking irregular rock and producing that squared, faced stone out of which a square, regular cosmos could be created.

https://twitter.com/James_Taite/status/1507746986774212613?s=20&t=tUxSTbAWNLu50kEssIIq7Q

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.