I've always liked old buildings. My grandma's house wasn't really all that old when I was a kid, but it seemed ancient, mostly because we almost always lived in new houses when I was growing up. Build a house, live in it for a year or two, and then build another one. We lived in nine different houses by the time I graduated from high school. For the last thirty-five years, my life and livelihood have revolved around old buildings in one way or another. A few of those buildings I have had the good fortune to know in some detail, often before some well-intentioned restoration, ill-advised remodeling, or sheer neglect destroyed the historic structure. I still like nothing better than looking at an old building, figuring out how it was constructed and how it evolved over time and why the heck both were done the way they were done. If I get to write about it, draw it, or whatever, so much the better. So here is a little curio cabinet of historic buildings that I have known, to one degree or another, put forth here for your amusement and/or edification. Most of these studies were entirely my own work, but a few were originally done as part of a team, which is duly noted within each document. As I have reformatted them for the web, I have been able to take advantage of new information and resources and have incorporated as much as I could into the present documents. Any image below that appears to have a dead link is simply a placeholder for studies that I will add at some future date.
Tommy H. Jones, January 2010 |
|