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Urban Heritage: Research, Interpretation, Education
CORDWOOD HERITAGE
Jaroslaw Szewczyk
Urban and Spatial Planning Department, Biaùystok Technical University,
Ul. Grunwaldzka 11/15, 15-893 Biaùystok, Poland. E-mail: [email protected].
Abstract. The author displays the specific, old building technique, called cordwood construction, in which pieces of debarked tree
(or also cut 8x8x60 cm) are laid up crosswise with masonry or cob to build a thick wall. The alternative names of the technique are:
cordwood masonry, stackwood masonry, stovewood masonry, cordstead, firewood wall, log ends wall, wood block masonry,
stackwall, or in French, bois cordé. Although cordwood can be found throughout Europe, Asia, North and Central America and
South Africa (in Europe, cordwood walls are mentioned to be in France, Norway, Poland, Belorussia, Lithuania, Northern Greece,
Romania and Balkan countries), this building method still remains relatively unknown and rare.
In North-Eastern Poland, cordwood houses concentrate features characteristic to a wide range of other vernacular buildings:
inventiveness, freedom of material and shape, integration with an environment, resourcefulness while taxing natural resources.
These features are analysed as typical for urban tissue of old, pre-WWII, multi-ethnic towns in N-E Poland.
Keywords: cordwood masonry, stackwall, stackwood construction, cordstead, log ends construction, firewood construction, vernacular
architecture, indigenous architecture, borderlands
1. Introduction
Urban heritage recognition and protection, sometimes
omits some values of unique artful material and specific
indigenous construction. In North-East Poland, cordwood
construction is such an undervalued building method that
can be found occasionally in old, vernacular urban tissue.
Its seeming affinity to other alternative housebuilding
techniques (such as cob), resulted with the underestimation
of that technique as heritage carrier, in the past. It is still a
hidden asset.
The second unsolved question was, how the sense of
material and construction, could impact on an individual,
subjective perception of an urban tissue. Cordwood
construction can be an excellent example of such a visual
impact.
2. Definitions
The term cordwood construction refers to a building
technique, in which “short lengths pieces of debarked tree
are laid up crosswise with masonry or cob mixtures to build
a wall”[9].
There are many alternative names of the technique.
1
Tishler W.H., Perrin R.W.E., Stratton R.
The most known are: cordwood masonry, stackwood masonry, stovewood masonry, cordstead, firewood wall, log
ends wall, wood block masonry. In Canada, it is called
stackwall, or in French, bois cordé.
This variety of the names is caused by a geographical
dispersion of cordwood buildings, followed by a diversity
of variants of the technique. According to many sources
(although having no scientific status) cordwood can be
found throughout Europe, Asia, North and Central America
and South Africa [9]. For example, old cordwood barns and
other cordwood buildings were relatively popular in
Wisconsin, USA. In Europe, cordwood walls are mentioned
to be in France, Norway, Poland, Belorussia, Lithuania,
Northern Greece, Romania and Balkan countries. Usually,
examples are rare and relatively unknown. However, this
type of construction have been rather disregarded by
heritage researchers, with exceptions of a few American
scholars1.
3. The Construction
In Poland, cordwood buildings are usually erected with
lime, clay or other types of mortar, as well as with aspen,
Jaroslaw Szewczyk / Urban Heritage: Research, Interpretation, Education, 120–128
Fig. 1. Examples of cordwood walls that were built in 1930’s in Bialystok, Ostrowiecka Street. Aspen and spruce firewood have been masoned with
cob and lime mortar. The wall sides were originally plastered. Photos by Jaroslaw Szewczyk, 2006 and 2007.
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Section 4. Role of Urban Heritage in Contemporary City
spruce or pine firewood instead of bricks2. There are four
variants of the construction.
In the first one, firewood blocks are laid perpendicularly to wall faces. In the second, blocks are interlaid with
spacers parallel to wall faces. Spacers are laid horizontally
along the inner and outer faces of a wall, with the space
being filled with mortar. The third variant has
nonperpendicular, horizontal-diagonal arrangements of
wooden chunks with no spacers. Finally, the last version is
the same but it has insulation gaps inside.
Building firewood were always carefully cut into blocks
in Poland. These blocks, if laid accurately, formed a wall
catching one’s eye with its very expressive rough texture.
Nevertheless, cordwood walls were always plastered on
their inside and outside in order to protect their sensitive
construction against the impact of weather. For this reason,
most cordwood buildings hide their unique construction
under the plaster coat, although cordwood material can be
reasoned on wall thickness. The walls in many cordwood
buildings are from 50 to 65 cm thick, including plastering.
Despite an apparent worldwide occurence of cordwood
technique, only Polish and American examples have been
recognised precisely. Their comparison hes revealed
essential differences between Polish cordwood technique
and its American counterpart. Firstly, cordwood with
nonperpendicular, horizontal-diagonal arrangements of
wooden chunks that can be found in Poland, was absent in
America. Secondly, horizontal spacers were absent in
American cordwood masonry, too. Thirdly, wooden blocks
were not cut (but they were debarked only, see fig. 1 and 2).
And secondly, pieces of wood protruded from the mortar
by an inch in American cordwood walls, while in Poland
walls were plastered to be as smooth as possible.
4. Urban Cordwood
Differences between the variants of cordwood construction on these two areas, included their origins and
locations. In Winsconsin (USA), cordwood-constructed old
barns were built by poor immigrants from Europe. Those
roots caused, that the technique could be found mainly in
countryside but absent in cities and towns. Since 70’s, a
cordwood revival has been touching country residential
building in USA and Canada, outside cities and towns.
On the contrary, this rare technique can be found both
in villages and towns in North-Eastern Poland. It seems
that cordwood was even more popular in towns than at
villages. In Bialystok (a city that was a town before the
2
3
WWII), not less than 8 cordwood buildings still exists. They
all were built in 30’s. It can be estimated that originally about
20-40 such houses were built in that city. In Bransk and
Bialowieza, in each of those towns3 about 5-10 cordwood
houses were built in 60’s. Some leavings of three cordwood
houses still can be seen in a small borderland town named
Krynki. The past existence of cordwood buildings could be
assumed or supposed in a few towns in North-Eastern
Poland: Hajnowka, Michalowo, Narew, Suraz, Zabludow,
Szepietowo and Grodzisk.
Looking for the urban roots of cordwood masonry, we
have to take into account the past social background. Before
the WWII, many towns in East Poland had mixed, multiethnic population. Jewish communities formed unique urban
phenomena called shtetls. Aside there were Polish, Russian,
German and Tartar communities, as well as Ukrainian and
Belorussian ones. That mixed general public ceased to exist,
leaving an unique, vernacular, wooden urban tissue
cobwebbing a town or even a whole city. Old cordwood
houses are relics of that indigenous urban environment
created by poor, multi-ethnic communities.
The subject of this paper is an urban assessment of
cordwood heritage, and not the appraisal of isolated
individual cases of cordwood architecture. Admittedly,
cordwood masonry has never be prevailing nor even
common. In fact this type of construction was relatively
rare even in the past. But its value has not risen from its
percentage share in urban tissue. It rise from its visual impact
and expression, from its uniqueness and ingenuity. Single
cases of cordwood houses concentrate the features
characteristic to a wide range of other vernacular buildings
of that time and location: inventiveness, freedom of material
and shape, integration with an environment, resourcefulness
while taxing natural resources, mutual penetration with
elements of a nature, visual coherence in spite of formal
heterogeneity, mystical union with the spirit of that time.
These are cordwood added values.
To valuate correctly both single cordwood-constructed
masonry items and old, slum-like estate correctly, the
appropriate estimation criteria should be drawn. They can
be reasoned upon the basis of common theory of vernacular indigenous architecture.
5.The Heritage Asset
The respect to vernacular indigenous architecture has
been rooted in architectural theory, not only since Ruskin’s
“The Lamp of Memory” in his “Seven Lamps of Architec-
There are also other indigenous wall constructions similar to brick masonry, but with bricks replaced by alternative materials. For
example, around the Polish village Czarna Wies Koscielna (North-East from Bialystok), which was a pottery center, there were a number
of buildings which walls had been masoned with waste roof tiles and potsherds or broken pottery. Outwardly, a few kinds of cob walls had
similar construction, at that territory.
Actually, officially, Bialowieza is still a village yet, despite its population of nearly 3 000.
Jaroslaw Szewczyk / Urban Heritage: Research, Interpretation, Education, 120–128
Fig. 2. Examples of cordwood houses in Bialystok and its surroundings. The second variant of cordwood technique (of four ones mentioned in the
article) has been used here. Photos by Jaroslaw Szewczyk, 2006 and 2007.
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Section 4. Role of Urban Heritage in Contemporary City
Fig. 3. Dilapidated cordwood houses that were built in 1930’s in Bialystok and Krynki, are shown. This urban space can impress very intensively,
including some favourite places for artists’ contemplation. Students of architecture are expecting artistic inspiration here, when looking for spirit of
the place, genius loci. Photos by Jaroslaw Szewczyk, 2006 and 2007, except of the last one, made by Magdalena Rodziewicz, the student of Faculty
of Architecture, Bialystok Technical University, in Krynki in 2003.
Jaroslaw Szewczyk / Urban Heritage: Research, Interpretation, Education, 120–128
Fig. 4. Symptoms of decline can generate aesthetic values reflecting subtle metapsychical consciousness of time factor and gentle, subconscious
affection to transition and passing. But also the surroundings are old and premortal. Photos by Jaroslaw Szewczyk, 2006 and 2007.
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Section 4. Role of Urban Heritage in Contemporary City
ture”. In fact, that outlook was widespread and deep-rooted.
For example, 169 years ago an anonymous correspondent
of Polish newspaper “Przyjaciel Ludu” (“Folk Friend”)
wrote: “Can any fresh limestone tinsel surpass that peculiar
composition of manifold, greenish and ginger lichens, that
cover some dilapidated, thatched roofs? Yet one’s eye
loves to dismember intermittent repairs of shredded straw
and reed...(...) So equally revere these both: your
grandparents’ donjon and your parents’ shanty”[26, p.131132]
. Writing this, he appreciated the past time petrified in
dilapidated tumble-down houses. He appreciated
vernacular architecture as heritage carrier. He perceived
architecture as roomy medium to a private, meditative,
intimate discourse with the past. He also exalted genuine,
native, familiar, congenial, ancestral values of his manmade environs.
It should be claimed that both unique artful material
and specific indigenous construction can play a great role
as heritage asset carriers that bring closer the present and
the past; and enrich and broaden our outlook on our cultural environment. Cob construction, cordwood masonry,
old log homes and many other indigenous construction
techniques, can play such an important role, as well. So
old, dilapidated cordwood houses such as those in
Bialystok, made by anonymous people of unknown
nationality and culture, intensify metapsychical
consciousness of a time factor, being an illustration of
panta rhei or an ephemeral, subjective spiritualisation of
an old town.
If even an architectural object could impress on a
man’s mind with its ruinous but picturesque vivid form,
do not an urban tissue impact our senses more strongly?
Let’s take an example. Bialystok is a city with quarters of
slum-like shanty houses in the very city centre. One such
a district between the streets Wyszynskiego, Mazowiecka,
Kopernika, has baggage of their history fixed on their
buildings, walls and roofs. Everything is premortal,
preagonal and deathbed there. Walls are only cockeyed,
fences are exclusively declivous, roofs bow down. Rough
lichens wrap each plank. Nothing is smooth, straight or
equal. Nothing is entirely new, although one can see
satellite aerials on rotten huts. Its urban tissue seems
deathbed and mystic. There are neglected buildings of
many constructions and materials, including cordwood.
It is a paradox, that an unique, old technique of
cordwood masonry reveales its visual values just before
its death, in a ruin phase, after destruction of its plaster
coating. It is just like the whole surrounding vernacular,
urban environment, that gains visual values after it was
desultory, tumble-down and dilapidated.
6. Urban Impressions
The analysis of cordwood construction in urban background can be a pretext to wider reflections on a perception of a vernacular urban tissue.
It was stated above, that symptoms of decline can
generate aesthetic values reflecting the intrinsic human
needs, subtle metapsychical consciousness of time factor
and gentle, subconscious affection to transition and passing. It can also be claimed that time notion can be the most
immaterial, unstable, volatile but essential value of some
urban tissue. These values seem to be essential for human
livings brought up in aesthetically sterile, aseptic environment. The values also seem to be immanent and timeless. And paradoxically, these heritage-carrying symptoms
of decline are annihilated after apparently-heritageconscious modern urban revitalisation.
Needn’t we to maintain a little hovels and ruins, in
order to retain a mutual coexistence of time and space? Or
is a decline necessary to enrich our life with a time factor?
Do our senses need dilapidation or not? How to preserve
actual values and not the crust only? What values can be
found in cordwood, old town houses? The questions have
been asked without a reliable answer.
7. Conclusions
Cordwood masonry still remains an old, relatively rare
and unknown building technique. This can be classified
as an indigenous and vernacular building method, that
can be valuated with criteria used for other vernacular and
indigenous buildings.
In North-Eastern Poland, cordwood walls can be
found in old quarters in towns. They are merged with
surrounding, old, vernacular architecture. Both cordwood
masonry objects and their urban surroundings are usually
very impressive, vivid and artistic, especially when rough
and ruined, paradoxically. They can also reveal their
specific roots, related to the pre-WWII ethnic composition
of towns communities.
Nowadays, old, wooden, vernacular, indigenous,
rural-like, desultory architecture becomes trendy, so that
there are new attempts to preserve other old districts.
But they have no esteem to the time factor, mummified in
rough, dilapidated, wooden or cordwood walls and
shanty roofs.
Acknowledgements
The author gratefully acknowledges the support of
the Rector of Biaùystok Technical University Grant # S/WA/
2/01.
Jaroslaw Szewczyk / Urban Heritage: Research, Interpretation, Education, 120–128
Cordwood Bibliography and Web Resources4
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4
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Since cordwood construction is still rare and unknown, even in North-East Poland, I have decided to attach an extended list of cordwood
bibliography and Web resources. Most of the listed items can be easily accessed by World Wide Web. For example 23 items are accessible
at Web portal www.daycreek.com. Cordwood Masonry section at The Earthwood Building School Web page (www.cordwoodmasonry.com/
Cordwood.html) is also noteworthy.
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Section 4. Role of Urban Heritage in Contemporary City
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About the author
Jaroslaw Szewczyk, PhD. Eng. Arch., is an assistant
at Urban and Spatial Planning Department, Faculty of
Architecture, Biaùystok Technical University, ul. (street)
Grunwaldzka 11/15, 15-893 Biaùystok, Poland. E-mail to the
author: [email protected]. Research interests: rural and
vernacular architecture, CAD.
For the list of publications by Jaroslaw Szewczyk, see
the WWW site of The Library of Bialystok Technical
University [http://libra.pb.bialystok.pl/eng/index_e.html ’!
“Publications of BTU Staff”, then choose “Indeksy” and
write the author’s surname].