Many meetinghouses and churches in rural Vermont where I live are built in the Greek Revival, a style that builders all over 19th century America used to embody ancient civic ideals, translating visions first built in stone to timber. Years ago I worked with a community to restore an 1802 meetinghouse at the top of the hill in Windham, VT where I lived. I had applied for a grant for the town from the Freeman Foundation and my job was to help oversee the restoration of the building. The contractors replacing the rotted sills of the building had difficulty getting the north wall to be plumb vertical. They had carefully jacked up the 100′ -foot long structure off its foundation and replaced the 50′-foot-long hand hewn beams with new beams from a local sawmill, but they had been unable to get the wall vertical when they let the building down to rest. The contractor’s solution to the dilemma was to repeatedly ram his F350 pick-up truck as fast as possible into the side of the building to try to drive in the base and straighten the walls. I grew up accustomed to seeing the columns and proportions in churches and houses around me. It wasn’t until I was helping my community restore the meetinghouse that I became aware of more than just their elegance.
After carefully looking at the building, I noticed that the south wall also was not vertical. I asked a surveyor to shoot the elevations of the walls. He found that the top of the 30-foot high walls were both tilted inward the same amount, exactly nine inches on each side, too precise and too pronounced to be a coincidence. I climbed up to the attic of the massive timber frame structure where the beams were revealed and started stringing level lines. The 50-foot-long, 12-inch-square timbers that held up the roof were identically arched, each arch measuring the same 7-inch diversion from level. The acoustics in the hall below were known for being perfect. To glean further information, I strung up my lines in the main hall from corner to corner and soon found all four walls were equally curved outward, in spite of a plaster repair of the front wall that a different contractor had tried to straighten, just as on the exterior. The precise and elegant curves explained the perfect acoustics of the space. They were very difficult to see without the strings but they were there, nevertheless.
This project documents the perspectival corrections in a series 19th century New England Meeting houses through 3D scanning and modeling the facades.
