Old House, New Discoveries - We Start From Here

 In 2012 my great-aunt Mary passed away, leaving us her little house in the small, southern Colorado town of La Veta.  She always was my angel and we are more grateful than words can express for her last gift to us.  We made a deal with her that we would try to make a go of things here.  And so, here we are.

Her house was her father's house, my great-grandfather Tony's (I'm named after him) where he had lived since 1930.  It hasn't changed much in the past 84 years.  And now a second Tony Masinton has taken up residence.  I am about the same age as he was when he bought the house, the first house he could call his own after moving his family from town to town for years.  And now, we are here, after 15 moves (6 of them trans-Atlantic) over 16 years.  The first house we can call our own.

We like old things, Stephanie and I.  And this house is a bit of a time-capsule.  It is filled with little details from the early and mid-twentieth century, the odd eccentricity here and there (the Holy Light Switch is my favorite, but more on that in another post), and lots and lots of hidden traps for the newby conservationist.  It needs work.  It needs updating.  It needs love.  And we have never done this before.

So, since we like old things - and I like old buildings especially - we are chronicling our time with the house.  We've been here a week so far.  We've spent every day scrubbing and cleaning every surface, peeling away the recent past, and reaching deeper into the house's story.  Today, in a very high cupboard in the kitchen I found shelf lining made from the Pueblo Chieftan from July 25 (our wedding anniversary), 1972.  It's a tiny thing, but it's a new discovery.  We have many, many more to go.

The House.  12 August, 2014.   (Photo: A Masinton)

The challenge of reconstructing the past - Strangers Hall, Norwich

The challenge of creating a vision of the past which values material and historical integrity is significant.  This is well known but never well understood until an attempt is made to carry this out in practice.  The greater the integrity, the longer it takes to produce a finished vision.  The value of such an exercise is, fortunately, equally significant.

For example, attempt a vision of Strangers Hall, Norwich, in the first years of the seventeenth century as an example.  The subject matter is simply one room, the parlour, but the brief is to reconstruct it as it might have been based on all of the physical, historical and comparative evidence available.  A single image, a snapshot.

What's wrong with this picture?  Discuss.
(The Parlour, Strangers Hall, Norwich, c1600 - Image: A Masinton)

Technical challenges are legion.  There are the very basic but fundamental issues of creating geometry based on data collected in the field.  Scan data, even if it were available at the level of individual objects, is practically useless on its own.  A more conventional approach is called for, but proceeds slowly in the absence of an appropriate set of moulding profiles and rim sections.  Materials are particularly difficult.  Creating a digital version of the material properties of tin glaze Maiolica ceramics, for instance, is difficult, to say the least.  What about a material definition for wood, or pewter, or linen, or felt, or tapestry?  Add to that the issue of the interaction of the material with virtual light sources, and the technical difficulties quickly compound.  What light sources should be used?  A 'simple' exterior sun light - then at what time of day, what time of year?  Interior artificial lighting of the period?  What might these have been?  Tallow?  Wax?  Rush?  What are the photometric properties of each of these light sources and how best the model them digitally?  It is a given that a 'global illumination' rendering model should be employed because it is the most physical accurate simulation of the propagation of light through space, but which approach?  Ideally, an unbiased renderer, of course, but even here there are numerous choices - and if interior lighting is attempted, an unbiased approach may not be suitable simply because the equivalent IES data for historical light sources has never been defined.  To do so would be prohibitively time-consuming.  It is a study within its own right.  Even if daylight alone is used, what about the transmittance qualities of historical glazing?  Again, no quantitative data exists.  And, horror of horrors, what if the windows were 'glazed' with horn?  It quickly becomes evident that the benefits of an unbiased approach are limited because the fundamental data necessary to allow the resulting render solution to claim some historical accuracy simply do not exist.

However, in a way, these issues are trivial when compared to the intellectual issues of attempting to envisage a specific past.  If the project has a well-understood range of technical tolerances, then the technical challenges can be met.  Work in this area is advancing all the time, and the vast majority of scholarship in the field of visualising the past concentrates on technical issues.  This is understandable because these issues are the safest.  These are the ones it may eventually be possible to overcome.

Far more troubling are issues of interpretation.  Even where evidence is relatively rich - where an inventory exists, where items from the inventory survive, where the room remains - understanding and interpreting this evidence is fraught with problems.  Inventories have long been a chimera for archaeologists and historians.  They present a beautiful, itemised report of the contents of a house.  They tell you what items were found in what rooms, sometimes in lovely detail, particularly when it comes to painted cloths, tapestries, linens and cooking ware.  However, while they provide a room-by-room description of the house, when the house itself survives efforts to match the room names to the surviving structure are notoriously difficult.  What the creator of the inventory meant by 'little chamber' or 'parlour' is rarely certain.  Inventories also only present a catalogue of items found in these rooms - not their distribution in space.  If we know that the 'little chamber' contained two beds and three valences, where were they in that room?  Were they piled into a corner?  Were they laid out to offer the most efficient use of space?  Were they arranged to put a visitor at a social disadvantage?  Were they 'presented' to catch the eye?  Were they rumpled and worn, bearing the marks of generations of stories? And what if some of these items do survive - if we have good material evidence?  Some of these questions can begin to be answered.  But trouble remains.  How much has this been altered over time?  What has been lost into the silence of the past?  We may have a bed frame, or a painted cloth, but what don't we have?

These are issues of synthesis.  Evidence exists.  Scholarship, good scholarship, dealing with the evidence already exists - at least a collection of scholarship covering a collection of sub-issues and individual types of evidence.  To create a visualisation of the past is to attempt a synthesis of all the available evidence in light of all the available scholarship.  The resulting image is a map of all the scholarship that has gone before.  It is as much a vision of our own state of understanding as it is a vision of what the space may have looked like at a point in time.

But then, what about all those places in our synthesis where we have no evidence and where we have no scholarship?  Just how very much falls into these uncharted areas of the map becomes clear in the process of creating the image - and this is perhaps where the act of image creation is most valuable, the most dangerous and the most rewarding.  The process of imagining a space in the past is one which is concrete and systematic.  The luxury of focusing on one kind of evidence does not exist.  For the parlour at Strangers Hall, floor, walls and ceiling must exist.  But how were they covered?  And what colours?  How was the room lit and how were the objects within arranged to catch that light?  With what messages and meanings did the owners fill that space?  These are Exciting questions because they bring us closer to a conversation with the people of the past in this place.

But, they are dangerous questions, thrillingly dangerous because to attempt to answer them you cannot rely on evidence and scholarship alone.  You must use your imagination.  Even if all of the pieces of this puzzle survived - to assemble them would require imagination.  But to use the imagination, and to still claim integrity, is to open one's work to criticism.  It is an open invitation to dismantling and rejection.

And that's the point.  A visualisation should never seek to present the past.  It should invite the viewer - any viewer, to enter in and begin to engage, to pick it apart, to find the seams and cracks, and to build on these.  It is to ask the viewer to find weaknesses and to see these as signposts pointing the way forward for a deeper understanding of the past.

Brunelleschi's Experiment

In 1425 Filippo Brunelleschi invented game engines.

What he had invented, of course, was much more fundamental, much more revolutionary: linear perspective.  Game engines, and along with them the invention of virtual reality and augmented reality, were mere by-products of his work and as such they went without comment.

According to his adoring biographer, Antonio Manetti, here's how it happened...

One day in Florence in 1425 Brunelleschi assembled the good folk of the city in the Cathedral square.  He seems to have had something of the reputation of a wizard and the gathered audience must have been pleasantly mystified with what they saw.  Manetti doesn't give the exact details, but somewhere in the square before them were two objects, possibly placed on stands or easels, and probably concealed under cloths.  Brunelleschi asked for a volunteer.  A man was put forward and Brunelleschi accordingly asked him to stand behind the nearest veiled object which was then unveiled.  It was underwhelming.  It was a small rectangular panel, perhaps a painting, but, as it was facing away from the audience, it was difficult to tell what of.  Brunelleschi asked the volunteer to go close to the panel where he would find a small hole drilled in it.  He was to look through this hole into the square.  All the gentleman would have seen was the veiled object as it stood directly in the line of his sight, limited by the hole through which he was peering.

Brunelleschi gazes at the Duomo

(Photo: Jason Pier - used with permission

from Flickr: here)

Then the second object was unveiled.

Brunelleschi asked the volunteer what he saw.

'Sir,' he said, 'I see the Baptistry.'

The audience gasped in astonishment.

What the man was looking at was a mirror.  But what he was looking through was a painting of the Baptistery.  To him, when the mirror was unveiled it was as if Brunelleschi had simply plucked the veil from where it had hung in thin air opening up his view of the actual Baptistery in the square beyond.  What he was actually seeing was a reflection of Brunelleschi's painting of the Baptistery which matched the man's perspective exactly.  This matching of perspective made it real from the observer's limited point-of-view.

As underwhelming as this may sound to us, what the man saw would do nothing less than revolutionise the very way people in the West saw their world.

Previously, people were accustomed to depictions of the world around them which were stylised in terms of their visual perspective.  It is likely that this mis-match with visual reality was not much of a cause for discussion of disappointment.  Most of the time it must have gone without notice.  It was convention, and as such, was invisible in the same way the the page or screen upon which text is written is invisible to the reader.  However, once Brunelleschi demonstrated his grasp of linear perspective all other representational art must have become ... different for the good people of Florence.  It must have become different in the way the design of the iPhone3GS became ... different ... when the iPhone4 was unveiled.  The world was changed and people did not look at what was familiar which quite such familiar eyes.

Within a generation most visual art in Italy would take into account linear perspective.  Within a century this would rule art across Europe (even in England!).  The world - or the way people expected to see it - had been changed forever.

Now, about the invention of game engines, virtual reality and augmented reality.  Brunelleschi provided a model for those in that he had created a system whereby the viewer was immersed in a representation of reality rather than the reality itself.  The effect only worked because it provided a convincing experience - which is at the heart of video games and their engines today.  The foundation for virtual reality was also laid because the rules of linear perspective eventually lead to the transform matrix which allows 2d vector graphics to mimic 3d perspective in realtime on display screens.  And finally, Brunelleschi's experiment overlaid his version of reality - a possible reality - atop his observer's view of reality itself.  It the 'magic window' effect of overlaying digital content on a mobile phone's camera stream.

It has taken a while for technology to catch up with the vision presented almost six centuries ago and there is still some controversy over what Brunelleschi actually did in that square on that day, how he did it, and what he actually meant by it.

However, to close this little circle of ideas, you will find below a demo of one way in which Brunelleschi may have set up his demonstration.  It runs in a game engine and it is entirely dependent on your experience and your own point-of-view.

How will our growing expectations about the dynamic nature of imagery produced today shape the way we see our world tomorrow?


Click the image to begin.  W,A,S,D to move, I to move mirror up, K to move mirror down, T to switch sketches

Explore the piazza (there is no dome on the Duomo because it didn't exist in 1425).  Find the panel with the drawing of the Baptistery then go round back and peer through the peephole.  Raise the mirror in front slowly to see the drawing overlaid on the 'reality' of the 'actual' Baptistery in front of you.  You can toggle between the kind of pseudo-perspective common at the time and linear perspective, just to appreciate the impact of this visual change.

Tomb Readers

I'm on the BBC!  Again!

Back at the end of October (around Halloween), my Archaeology office partner Helen Goodchild and I teamed up with battlefield archaeologist Tim Sutherland to try to record the almost invisible medieval inscription on a tomb at Saxton parish church.  This is supposed to be the final resting place of Lord Dacre, killed at the Battle of Towton in 1461 and buried in the nearby cemetery at Saxton.

The inscription has almost completely weathered away.  To bring it back, and to record what's left accurately, we used an RTI technique and the YorkToolkit, which I developed to metrically record details revealed from RTI.

Anyway, it's been quite a lot of fun and has proved useful to Tim's groundbreaking and important research on the Battle of Towton.

So, watch it!  It's on InsideOut Yorkshire & Humber on Monday, 6th February, 7:30pm BBC One.  And on iPlayer soon after.

Crossing Conundrum

So, I've spent the day drawing the plan of the church of Holy Trinity Priory, York as it may have been c1450 based on the remaining evidence.

And, I've run into a problem but also an excellent opportunity to demonstrate how the act of reconstruction can actually drive forward research on historic sites, or at least uncover major gaps in our current understanding.  This happens routinely, and it's convenient that it has happened here.

So, the problem:  the crossing.  Nothing joins up.

Help!

The church was cruciform in plan with four arms or wings extending east (the chancel), west (the nave), north and south (the transepts).  While only the core of the nave survives today, enough evidence remains to be able to sketch the outline of the medieval church.  At the turn of the last century a Holy Trinity parishioner and antiquarian, Walter Harvey Brook, undertook a series of excavations on the site in advance of restoration works.  The excavations were remarkably systematic for their time and Brook took copious, detailed notes and photographs, as well as produced three notebooks full of drawings.  Brook's excavations revealed the plan of the medieval church in much more detail than is visible today.  His work is the bedrock upon which later studies of the site are based.

Two later studies in particular are very important: the Royal Commisison report in 1972 and David Stocker's article on the priory in the BAA volume on Yorkshire Monasticism in 1995.  Of the two, Stocker is the most reliable regarding the building.

The result of all of this careful work is a series of reconstruction plans of the medieval church.  Using these plans, I should be able to reconstruct much of the interior arrangement of the church.

So you would think.

Brook's plan

The Royal Commission's plan

Stocker's plan

But, as is often the case, there are gaps in understanding which pose serious challenges for reconstruction but which have gone unnoticed during the composition of academic articles on the site.  Reconstruction forces the researcher to think systematically, considering practical issues of geometry and construction techniques.  When a reconstruction exists simply in the mind it is easy to miss major problems.  Add to this the fact that we must rely on work subject to all of the unrecorded little particulars of recording on site while Brook's excavations were conducted.  And we cannot directly investigate Brook's evidence (archaeology destroys its own evidence as a matter of course).  You begin to see that we can get into trouble easily.

In the plans all arms of the church join up neatly at the crossing, naturally.  But you can see that there are differences in these.  Brook's is a bit of a fantasy coloured by what he wanted to see more than what he actually saw, and this is acknowledged by Brook himself.  In the drawing he has crossed out many features.  It is very much a sketch of hypotheses rather than a finished site drawing.  Brook's more detailed notes and drawings are much more reliable.  The Royal Commission's plan carries with it all of the weight and authority of the Commission, communicated in its sure, clean lines which do not leave room for uncertainty (except in the dotted lines indicating unexcavated, assumed, features).  Stocker's plan differs from this significantly in that he does not include a western aisle to the north transept (which I believe) but also in many subtle features as well, particularly in the placing and extent of Brook's excavated features and the still standing line of the south wall of the chancel.

The real fight here is between the Commission and Stocker.  Here, I am very much in Stocker's corner.  The Commission shows much of the line of the walls of a western aisle of the transept as excavated 'fact' based on Brook.  But Stocker checked the original source and found that he did not excavation in this location because of the cemetery, which was still operational at that time.  They also appear to have misread Brook's notes in siting his excavated transept pier base in the west rather than in the east, as Stocker shows.  Also, the Commission plan only shows a small fragment of the northeastern pier of the crossing, tracing the eastern crossing piers' full extent as conjectural.  Stocker shows that both of these piers seem to have been fully excavated by Brook.  Both plans agree, at least, on the positions of piers in the chancel's southern arcade and the relative position of the south chancel aisle wall.  But they differ significantly in the extent of that wall.

So what, then?

As drawn by both Stocker and the Commission, the plan of the church reveals a building that could not have functioned structurally in the way everyone from Brook to me (until today) have assumed, i.e. that the chancel aisles were vaulted.  Vaulting must have existed somewhere on the site because a handful of vault rib voussoirs survive.  The first pier east of the crossing should line up with the north-south walls of the transepts.  If they do, then the entire length of the aisles can be divided into convenient rectangular bays which are simple to cover with a quadripartite ribbed vault.  But, in both plans this is not the case.  The lines of the walls end in the aisle mid-bay.  It is still possible to vault these bays, but the vaults would be very awkward - more awkward than the vaulting in the same bays in York Minster.  Not having a vault in this bay would leave the remaining three bays to the east oddly alone in their vaulting, incomplete.  If an aisle is vaulted this usually runs the length of the aisle.

In fact, you can see that the medieval builders encountered this problem and seem to have found a solution by extending a short stub of wall eastward from the eastern crossing piers, to push the position of the arcade respond into line with the wall of the transept.  But in the two plans, the alignment is still poor.

The problem is that neither plan is clear about their evidence, and the evidence they do have conflicts.  What is known is the position of the southern wall of the chancel as well as the line of its southern arcade, giving the width of the chancel aisle and its length.  What is not known is the width of the transept aisles.  In the Commission plan there does not appear to be any evidence for the width of the transept aisles as they show them.  In Stocker's plan the end of the southern transept's eastern wall has been assumed to be marked by the western end of the surviving chancel south wall.  This makes the awkward corner and the structurally problematic crossing and adjoining aisles.  But in the Commission plan the south wall of the chancel does not extend as far west.  In fact, it seems to end in line with the first pier east of the crossing.  This would place the eastern wall of the transepts in perfect alignment for vaulting but make very wide transept aisles with an unusually wide western arch in the chancel arcades.  But the Commission does not seem very sure about its placing of the eastern crossing piers.

So, who is right?  And how do I finish my drawing?  I cannot re-excavate, and I'm not sure Brook left anything for me to uncover even if I did.

I think I'll take my tape measure and knock on the rectory door, ask if I can measure their garden wall (which is the south wall of the chancel).

If you want something done right...