Reciprocal Roundhouse Building
Mode – Skype or Zoom
Language – English
2hr session – On day of your choosing
Cost – £155
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The Reciprocal Roundhouse Crash Curriculum
Adrian a professional with 20yrs of roundwood timber framing experience. The sessions will be a direct live video link between the two of us with no other participants so we can have time to cover all the questions you need to ask. This course will only suit you if you have some amount of previous building experience.
The course can be booked for a date that suits you. The beginning of the session will start as a 5 minute interview to establish how the curriculum can be tweeked to best suit your interest. We will then proceed sequentially through a building project from the ground up. At each step we’ll discuss specifics that will be unique to how your project might evolve.
Adrian Leaman – Tutor. “I’ve been running Roundhouse Building courses since 2003 after working with Ben Law on his now-famous ‘Woodland House’. At that time there were no established techniques, we just made it up as we went along. Since then I’ve build more than 20 roundhouses. Pretty much everyone Roundwood Framing today will have been taught by Ben or I or someone we’ve taught. However there are enough experienced people doing it now that a few different styles have emerged which is very exciting. I’ve cherry-picked a range of techniques to teach for this course ranging from the original & rustic to the modern & sophisticated.
GOT A QUESTION ABOUT THE COURSE?
Or call 07952 759466
What inspired me to build a reciprocal roof roundhouse.
I started working on roundwood timber frame buildings over a decade ago in Belize.
The reciprocal roof roundhouse is a particularly elegant and mind boggling spectacle of geometry. The Reciprocal Frame, also known as a Mandala roof, has been used since the 12th century in Chinese and Japanese architecture although little or no trace of these ancient methods remain. Leonardo da Vinci designed a self-supporting bridge using this method in the 16th century
The timbers in a reciprocal roof roundhouse are left round but they do need the bark removed. You can have the logs mechanically peeled. However that process strips away the natural form which trees spend decades maturing and which is so relaxing on the eye. It’s a real joy to see the natural world expressed in a building. Archie Milles once mused that, “No writer could ever match the poetry expressed in the form of a single tree. Peeling the logs by hand leaves the natural form of the tree intact.
Raising the frame is another classic moment for people to come together in a rare moment of ‘team building’, literally. This feels good because for thousands of years collaborative outdoor work was part of community life. The power of the shared journey to overcome a physical challenge is well recognised for its feel-good social bonding effect. I’ve built structures for many different organisations over the years and most of them have been run as team building events. I have helped school children, college students, university students, corporate groups, community groups and families shape their own environments. It’s always a joy and a real one off opportunity for most people that they’ll never forget. (Adrian Leaman – course tutor)