theCASTLE: Week 9

Week 9 started slowly, partly because we all turn up in dribs and drabs, but also because those people that missed the mid-week meeting had to have the reasoning behind the madness explained and understood before we could actually build the rig. I got chosen as spokesperson and tried to describe this new iteration we were about to embark on. A two part, sliding structure made from four U shapes which are individually composed of six pieces of timber and with two parts braced together with plywood sheet and sliding along runners. No wonder some members of the class had absolutely no idea of what we were making until it finally started getting put together before their eyes. Like all group events in the Castle we again had a diplomatically decided on goal that we were all mobilised towards (whether we knew what that was or not) and we were suddenly all working and moving timber and cutting and bolting things. We had been asked early on to divide into groups to tackle different parts such as the floor structure and the sliding tracks as well as the main body of the rig, but this constant division into smaller parts I think created a lot of the confusion and frustration within the group, being told to either be here or be there and have an outcome for the thing you were supposed to be doing. There was little flexibility to change from a topic that didn’t stimulate, so instead of getting caught in the claptrap I made sure I was part of the group making the frames, which was probably a good idea because there were only really a few of us who had been there for all discussions (and hence had already discussed why the frames needed to overlap a certain way, etc.).







The frames came in two parts, an upper U frame which had 2 x 1650mm arms and a 2850mm top plate, that over lapped by 90mm as well as the 135mm join of the timber width, and a bottom U frame, which had 2 x 2250mm arms and a 2850mm bottom place with the same overlap. These frames were screwed together with two screws in each corner to try and make them strong enough. Matt and Mitch then led a drilling drive where they drilled holes for the adjustable height connection, and while that went on Bek, Hannah and I learnt how to use the hand-held Fesco circular saw to cut the plywood bracing pieces. We got confused a few times in putting the frames together when we accidentally put together two bottom U parts and then wondered why the next frame was so much smaller. We also had to make sure that the joins in the U parts and the two-part frame as a whole had all the timber pieces lined up in two planes and so this involved turning some pieces around to make sure we weren’t putting undue stress on the material and for visual quality. I didn’t pay too much attention to what the other groups we doing but by the afternoon we realised we had two sturdy portal framed halves of the Castle and a floor plate and some running tracks. I helped out cutting some plywood to fit as the floor and by late afternoon we, amazingly, and by pure determination and enjoyment in what we were doing, had the beautifully simple, and pure skeleton of the test rig. There was an amazing atmosphere of achievement and celebration, verging on hysterics as we tried to heave one of the 3.6m cardboard walls on top to understand the enclosure of space that we had created, only to have the wall teeter on the edge of the 3m high rig. The feeling of the group was on a tremendous high, we were so so so happy and proud of the entity that we had made. Sitting around in the afternoon sun on the test rig of raw, quite ordinary materials, we all just laughed and enjoyed the sight of the rig’s runners being soaped up and sliding back and forward. What it actually meant to have made something like this was that we could demonstrate the fact that we were not there to make decisions on what the Castle would completely be about, but to demonstrate what we thought and understood on the topic of small spaces. Being inside the skeleton Castle really showed you what the implications are of planning decisions that you make every day, such as room heights, things I know my understanding of has particularly been consolidated through the test rig Castle explorations. The making of the test rig was a pure, classic moment of the Castle and one of elation when it actually all worked the way we had come up with.