O potrzebie znawstwa ciesielskiego rzemiosła w badaniu zabytkowych budowli murowanych

• Authors: Aleksander Jankowski

Title variants

EN

ON THE USEFULNESS OF KNOWING CARPENTRY IN RESEARCHING HISTORIC BRICK BUILDINGS

• Languages of publication: PL

Abstracts

EN

Traces of outstanding carpentry skills in historic buildings have been of marginal interest for art historians. But in fact wooden elements are often important parts of brick structures and influence their artistic value. The roof, with the wooden structure that shapes it, creates the architectonic form of the building. Various kinds of roof framing determine the quality of architectural space and the aesthetics of the interiors. Roof framing reveals a lot about the architectural transformations of the building, whose proper interpretation crucially depends on the dating and historical stratification of the elements of the construction. A highly useful method in this respect is dendrochronology, which can determine the age of wooden elements even within an accuracy of one year. The conclusions from dendrochronological dating, however, have to take into consideration the whole construction of the building. This, in turn, requires a good knowledge of old carpentry and of the history of architecture. The knowledge of the working methods, carpentry solutions and tools, as well as of old building rules helps to establish whether the structure under scrutiny is the original or a re-worked roof framing. The original framing can date the whole building, a re-worked framing is a crucial clue in its chronology. A reconstruction of the history of an old building can also be facilitated by the analysis of the way the tie-beam is set, the relationship between the outermost trusses and the brick gables and the traces of treatment on the wooden elements of the structure. Valuable data can be obtained from carpentry joints, assembly marks, trade marks and floating marks on wood. Carpentry joints in old buildings were usually made without nails. Nails were sometimes used in joining elements of secondary importance, which could not be accurately measured and shaped before the trial assembly of the framing. Joints that are not typical of the given construction, the presence of nails and other metal elements call for an explanation. All the disruptions in the numbering marks indicate that the framing must have been disassembled or supplemented. Trade marks and floating marks help in verifying dendrochronological dating. A thorough analysis of the wooden structures in monumental buildings is indispensable in the history of art. It guarantees the factual completeness of research that conditions its progress.

Keywords

EN

HISTORICAL BUILDINGS; CARPENTRY; HANDICRAFT

• Publisher: Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology, Polish Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Kwartalnik Historii Kultury Materialnej
• Year: 2011
• Volume: 59
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 149-166

Contributors

author

Aleksander Jankowski

• Katedra Historii Kultury, Uniwersytetu Kazimierza Wielkiego, ul. Przemysłowa 34, 85-758 Bydgoszcz