Statics is a kind of dialectic (Flaneur-Essay 13)

In order to prevent an old brick wall somewhere in Prague from collapsing, builders had apparently driven a row of iron girders into the wall and mounted sturdy bars on top of them, which now braced themselves horizontally against the porous wall. I found the already weathered wooden wedges that had been driven into the gap between the bricks and the girders from above and below to be particularly successful, almost ingenious. An organic link between the mineral, durable and more ephemeral materials, in which the tension between the fresh, rigid steel and the viscous clay of the bricks seemed to dissolve. The duality between old and new, solid and soft, cold and warm, stable and decaying was dialectically resolved with the wood, which promised to contain all of these qualities, and almost invisibly provided the desired, albeit provisional, stability.

In the same spring, I had tried to support the tiled roof of an alarmingly crooked barn on the property in Greece, which was supposed to protect our firewood from the constant winter rain. To prevent the shed from tipping over completely at some point, I drove a wedge of dry olive wood into the gap between the outer roof beam and an iron post of the boundary fence next to it. I also replaced two rotten posts that had to support the heavy tiled roof, screwed two strips diagonally into the frame on both sides and finally fitted a metal bar close to the already weathered central beam by placing it on the same floor block and pushing it against the upper iron beam. In the end, I was really proud of my clever improvisation, which would certainly support the hut for a few more years.

On the day of departure, however, it collapsed. With my intervention in the delicate statics of the horizontally on vertically balanced axes of the structure, which had been load-bearing up to that point, I had thrown the whole thing out of its fragile balance.

Author: Titus David Hamdorf, Berlin, Germany

Translated with: DeepL.com