The Family Tree Mosaic

As part of the sculptural outdoor classroom that I am working on at the moment for a school here in Dublin, I was asked to incorporate a tree somewhere into the design to represent the 'Family Tree'. The 'Family Tree' is a song which has come to symbolise the 'Croí na Scoile' (The heart of the school).

I was also asked to give the students a chance to have some input into the outdoor classroom so that they can make it their own (a very important part of the process for sure) 

My solution to this was to create a large stone mosaic of the tree into the wall of the structure and to then let the students paint the leaves of the tree on precut tiles.

Past pupils, staff, board and PTA members (past and present) received a leaf to design and paint.

Almost 100 leaf tiles were painted as well as another 70 square tiles that make up the border around the mosaic.

It was great to spend some time in the classroom with students and see the excitement about creating their very own piece of art that will remain part of the outdoor classroom for years to come.

Painting the leaf tiles in class

The finished leaf tiles painted by the students

Many many hours went into the making of the stone part of the mosaic, far more than anyone will ever know, but now that it is finished I know that it was all worth it. 

The roots of the tree

The border tiles that surround the mosaic spell out 'All different all equal' as well as its Irish translation 'Gach duine atá difriúil ach freisin cothrom'  

There is still lots to do before the outdoor classroom is complete with lots more exciting features and student involvement also, so I will get back to work now, and will post more about the outdoor classroom once it is completed.

'Temppeliaukio' The Rock Church, Helsinki

Last September my wife had to go to a conference to Helsinki, Finland, so I decided to tag along and see what Helsinki is all about.

On arriving I quickly noticed that much of the buildings and stone walls in Helsinki are made of a lovely pink granite. If you had a geologist to hand he would tell you the reason for this is because Helsinki sits on an indented Pegmatitic (pink) granite peninsula that makes up part of the Baltic shield. I did not have a geologist to hand, but walking in some of the many green areas in Helsinki, large outcrops of this rock were poking out of the ground everywhere I looked.

Most of the buildings built with this stone are highly manicured and well dressed. The central train station and the parliament buildings are fine examples of this. One building that I was very much taken by was a place called The Temppeliaukio Church or The Rock Church. 

Exterior, dry stacked wall of the rock church.

A stark contrast to the well dressed pink granite buildings around Helsinki, the rock church is rugged and unmanicured.

360º view of the inside

Temppeliaukio Church is a Lutheran church in the Töölö neighborhood of Helsinki. The project comes from an architectural competition won by the architect brothers Timo and Tuomo Suomalainen in 1961. The design of their project was recognized by the jury as “completely original” and respectful of the competition goal to “include the organization plan to keep as much of the giant granite outcrop that makes up Temppeliaukio Square intact.”

Their original solution to saving the square was to have the interior of the church site excavated and built into the rock. It dawned intuitively on the Suomalainen brothers when they visited the building site that in order to save the character of place, the rock itself had to be understood as a church and everything built at the site should be adjusted to accompany the character of the rock.

Before the Suomalainen brothers started designing the Temppeliaukio Church, they had done planning work for the Ministry of Defence and thus had become familiar with rock building.

The brothers' aim was to locate the floor of the sanctuary at the level of the widest and highest street, Fredrikinkatu Street, which ends at the square. This required the church hall to be cut into the bedrock. As a result this leads the visitor to the sanctuary without the need to climb stairs, simultaneously offering a friendly rather than overbearing experience of the church space.

The Rock church looking down at Temppeliaukio Square. Photo by MKFI via Wikipedia 

The seemliness transition of the rock walls from inside to outside. 

The 24m diameter roof is made up of a copper plate-covered dome, using a impressive 13.6 miles (22 km) of copper plate strips. The dome is connected to the natural rock wall by 180 window panes that let in natural light. Due to the varying height of the rock wall, each glass part of the roof is different in size.

As a result of the natural slope of the bedrock walls, the glass panes above the altar area are bigger, allowing the altar to become more illuminated compared to the other parts of the sanctuary 

13.6 miles (22 km) of copper plate strips covered the inside of the dome.

The alter

The colour scheme of the interior was based on the  red, purple and grey shades of granite. The metals were also carefully selected to match the colours of the stone. Steel, made bluish by hammering, non-oxidised copper for the entrance doors as well as for the front facing of the gallery and interior of the dome, concrete left in its raw state.

The brothers' vision was for the church to have a strong connection with nature and its surroundings, and they wanted the natural rough quarried stone to have a leading role in creating the atmosphere inside the sanctuary. To achieve this the bedrock walls were left rough, with all drill markings from the quarrying visible, while the resulting quarried rock was stacked on top to create the rest of the walls that continue out and over the park surface.

Drill marks leftover from  quarrying

Aside from the aesthetic and structural benefits, an additional benefit of the solid rough walls is its acoustic qualities, and with a seating capacity for 940, it is no wonder that the church is also a popular concert venue.    

The glistening Non-oxidised copper entrance doors to the church. 

Located right in the heart of Helsinki, The Temppeliaukio church is one of the most popular tourist attractions in the city, with half a million people visiting it annually. Lots more great photos of the church can be seen here. If you would like to see more photos of various stonework I came across on my trip to Helsinki you can check out my flickr album.

Newgrange and the winter solstice.

One of the exterior walls of Newgrange

As the winter solstice is coming up, I thought it would be an appropriate time to talk about one of Ireland's oldest and most impressive stone structures.
I am talking of course about Newgrange in County Meath. (County Meath  is well known as Ireland’s Heritage Capital)
According to the most reliable Carbon 14 dates available from archaeology, it is believed that Newgrange (or Sí an Bhrú as it is know in Irish) was constructed over 5,000 years ago, around 3200BC. This makes it more than 600 years older than the Giza Pyramids in Egypt, and 1,000 years more ancient than Stonehenge in the UK. It was built during the Neolithic or New Stone Age by a farming community that prospered on the rich lands of the Boyne Valley. Knowth and Dowth are similar mounds nearby that together with Newgrange have been designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.

Archaeologists classified Newgrange as a passage tomb, however it is now recognised to be much more than a passage tomb. Ancient Temple is a more fitting classification, a place of astrological, spiritual, religious and ceremonial importance, much as present day cathedrals are places of prestige and worship where dignitaries may be laid to rest. The Mound or Cairn at Newgrange is about 300 feet in diameter covering an area of over one acre, and has 97 Kerbstones at the base of the cairn, some of which are richly decorated with megalithic art. The 19 metre long inner passage leads to a cruciform chamber with a corbelled roof. The amount of time and labour invested in construction of Newgrange suggests a well-organised society with specialised groups responsible for different aspects of construction. 

Newgrange through one of the native Hawthorn hedges that surround the site

The entrance into Newgrange with the famous entrance stone, kerbstone 1

To gain entry to the tomb, it would have been necessary to climb over the highly decorated kerb stone and then slide the heavy stone door that closed the entrance to the passage (now visible bolted to the right of the entrance.)

Newgrange is an incredibly popular tourist attraction, and is a particularly popular place to visit at this time of the year because of its alignment with the winter solstice.

Immediately above the entrance to the passage is a small opening known as a roof-box, which is in alignment with the Sun at the winter solstice and allows the Suns rays to penetrate the tomb and light up the central chamber during this period (December 19th to 23rd).

Short National Geographic Video about Newgrange

Above is a 3D animation of the passage way in Newgrange. See more cool 3D models of Newgrange on this site here



The inner passage of Newgrange (image from Wikipedia)

Looking down the inner passage (photo from Boyne Valley Tours)

Inside the chamber of Newgrange (photo by OPW)

Megalithic art carved on the roof stone of the east recess off the main chamber inside the mound at Newgrange.  (photo from Boyne Valley Tours)

Building Newgrange

The white quartz facade of Newgrange

As a stonemason what I find most fascinating about Newgrange is its construction.
Many of these stone slabs, 550 in number, were collected from where they had been lying in the landscape. Because many of the stones were found to be weathered, it is believed they were not quarried, so there would have been a huge logistical task in finding suitable boulders dotted throughout the landscape.


Some of the large kerbstones at the rear of the structure

Great effort and time was needed for the planning, gathering of materials and construction of these monuments. This is clearly evident from the vast distances the builders travelled to acquire the particular stone types. The majority of structural stones in the Boyne Valley tombs are greywacke. This stone type was quarried in the Clogherhead area, north of Drogheda, and shipped along sea and river, then finally log-rolled from a docking point on the Boyne up to the construction area at Newgrange.

The white quartz facade of Newgrange

The facade at Newgrange consists of white quartz, which has its origins in the Wicklow Mountains to the South of the site.
The interspersed granite boulders were collected from the North shore of Dundalk Bay. The long distances involved suggest a similar sea-faring route may have been a more practical choice than travelling across land. The majority of the cairn consists of a river rolled stone acquired from the banks and terraces of the river Boyne around 1km below the monument. It is estimated that some 200,000 tonnes of material are present in the cairn. It is not known for certain the exact building practices used by this Neolithic Culture. Archaeologists have suggested various theories. It is most likely that log-rolling, the erection of wooden scaffolding and earthen ramps were employed to shift the large boulders.
Michael J. O'Kelly, who excavated Newgrange, felt that the workforce involved in building Newgrange would have been divided up into about six gangs or teams, each with its own set of tasks and area of expertise.

Kerbstone 52 on the North-western side of the mound

There is no doubt that the people in charge of Newgrange's construction, from the master builder and architect down to the team foremen, were "intelligent and experienced", according to O'Kelly.

The corbelled roof  from inside the main chamber of Newgrange (photo from Boyne Valley Tours)

The passage and chamber orthostats (large stones set upright) would have been put in place before construction of the cairn itself actually began, and it is probable the kerb would have been marked out at this stage too. The addition of grooves onto the top surface of the passage roof stones shows that the builders were aware of the need to redirect water seepage from the cairn, and therefore keep the passage water-proofed.
The corbelled vault of the chamber is one of the finest of its kind in Western Europe today, standing intact without conservation or repair of any kind exactly as it did when first erected 5000 years ago. All of the orthostats (standing stones) in the chamber are used to support the corbelled roof. Some have leaned inwards over time due to the weight of the cairn material pressing down on the chamber. The tomb builders filled the gaps between the roof stones in the passage with sea sand and burned soil to keep the passage dry. The corbelled roof was constructed of horizontally laid courses of large slabs, each course partly resting on the one below it and partly oversailing it so that with each course the diameter of the roof diminished, until finally the vault was closed by a single capstone six metres above the floor. The outer ends of the corbels were buried in the cairn and were tilted slightly downward; this served to throw off the rainwater percolating through the cairn. It was a most effective weather-proofing and kept the chamber dry even in prolonged bad weather except in a few spots, now cured.

It is known that the white quartz, which was found on the ground in front of Newgrange during excavations, was not originally placed there by the builders. Some of the kerbstones which had fallen forward some time after the construction of the monument were found to be directly in contact with the subsoil, with no quartz beneath them. The reconstructed façade of Newgrange is controversial - many people feel that it is only an educated guess as to what the original tomb looked like. The reconstruction also cut away some of the mound so that visitors can walk around the carved kerbstone, rather than having to climb over it.
Professor Frank Mitchell suggested that the monument could have been built within a space of five years, basing his estimation upon the likely number of local inhabitants during the Neolithic and the amount of time they would have devoted to building it rather than farming. This estimate was however criticised by M.J. O’Kelly and his archaeological team, who believed that it would have taken thirty years to build at the very least.

Stonehenge buit 1000 years after Newgrang
e (photo by Gareth Wiscombe)

In the later centuries following the initial construction and use of the passage toumb at Newgrange, ritual practices changed but the site remained an important ritual focus. As elsewhere in Ireland and Britain, rituals shifted from the enclosed spaces of megalithic tombs to large open air enclosures called ‘henges’. Henges derived their name from the ultimate henge – Stonehenge – but were more typically formed from circular earthen banks, circles of pits, circles of upright timbers, or circles of upright stones (without the famous horizontal lintels that Stonehenge possesses.)   

The entrance to Newgrange as it looked when it was redescovered

The passage tomb was rediscovered in 1699 when material was being taken for a road building project, a local landowner, Charles Campbell, ordered some of his farm labourers to dig up a part of Newgrange, which then had the appearance of a large mound of earth, so that he could collect stone from within it. The labourers soon discovered the entrance to the tomb within the mound.

I must admit, I have been living in Dublin for over two years now, and I have only recently made the 45minute trip by car to Newgrange. I would definitely recommended making the trip if you are in the area, or even just visiting Dublin.

Admission to the chamber of Newgrange for the Winter Solstice sunrise is by lottery. Application forms are available at the reception desk in the Brú na Bóinne Visitor Centre, where there is a special post box for completed application forms. There were 31,531 applications submitted for the 2011 Winter Solstice Draw. Application forms are now available for the 2012 Solstice Lottery Draw which will take place on September 28th 2012.

For more information on tours check out http://www.boynevalleytours.com/
For more informtion on Newgrange check out http://www.newgrange.com/

Thanks to Michael Fox from Boyne Vally Tours for the use of the photos from his website for this post.