WE THE PEOPLE
Once accessible, the restoration crew cleaned out decades worth of bird’s nests, old shingles and other debris from inside the dome.
What do you see in the original framing?
What’s so special about the shingles?
“W hen I look at the original framing, a couple
of things go on in my mind. They have their
marching orders: build a temple and it’s got to
have a dome on it. And the dome is not being
built every day, so they have a problem on their
hands. It basically breaks down very logically into
its parts. They start off with a major rib that’s a
perfect half circle, and that goes up first. And
then you bisect that on the perpendicular with
two others. So now you’ve got the four cardinal
dimensions of a roof rafter. And in between those,
you need other rafters. It does take quite a bit of
math and conceptual layout of how to get the
wood up there to support lathe strips so you can
put the wood on it.”
“We’re using old-growth, vertical grain cypress for
our shingles. These are virgin forest trees in parts
of swamps that
were inaccessible “We’re handmaking 5,500
or had sunk to the shingles on that roof and each
bottom of rivers,
one has ... this bevel on the
what some people
bottom, which is unique to the
call sinker cypress.
building. I’ve never seen it in
Specialized
use in the field of a roof.”
loggers are going
in and getting it
from South Carolina and Florida. We’re handmaking 5,500 shingles on that roof, and each one
has to be individually handmade with this bevel on
the bottom, which is unique to the building. I’ve
never seen it in use in the field of a roof and not
just in the starter course. Because you’re putting it
on a hemisphere, you have to handplane the sides
of each one so that they can wrap around.”
What does it tell you about Dinsmore’s approach?
“I have a feeling they’re kind of winging things as
they go along. I’ve never done a study of that, but
I’ve often heard that the architectural concepts are
what they are bringing from the old country. And
they’re using just what’s available here to create
what’s in their minds from the Old World.”
10
The Architecture and Historic Preservation team
expects the first phase of the Temple restoration to
be completed in summer 2016.