What does it mean to build something that lasts? In an era of thirty-year mortgages, disposable construction, and houses that can’t survive a flood for more than twenty-four hours without mechanical intervention, that question feels both urgent and radical. This episode of Doomer Optimism ventures deep into the world of traditional building with Seth Harris and Patrick Lemmon, the founders of Orthodox Masonry, a Vermont-based company dedicated to reviving solid mass wall construction in brick and stone.
Ashley has been increasingly drawn to the built environment and its relationship to human flourishing, and this conversation is a natural extension of that inquiry. Seth brings the perspective of a lifelong Vermont craftsman, homeschooled through all twelve grades, apprenticed to blacksmithing, and mentored from childhood by watching his grandfather build a house and shop by hand. Patrick arrived from a different direction, a South Carolina native with a background in biblical studies, philosophy, and music, who apprenticed under master builder Clay Chapman and spent years in Oklahoma helping to build a town before eventually landing in Vermont. Together, they represent something rare: a genuine partnership between people who not only know how to build but have thought deeply about why we build and what our choices in construction say about us as a civilization.
The name “Orthodox Masonry” is deliberate and worth unpacking. Patrick chose “orthodox” with a lowercase o, not to invoke any particular religious tradition, but to distinguish between traditions (which can be good or bad depending on time and place), and orthodoxy, meaning the handful of timeless principles that get reaffirmed generation after generation. Square, level, and plumb. Generous roof overhangs to shed water. Materials chosen for and from the place where you are building. These are not nostalgic preferences; they are durable truths that the modern construction industry has largely abandoned in the rush toward cheap, fast, and standardized.
The conversation ranges widely: from the post-WWII housing crunch that elevated stick framing to total dominance and never looked back, to the monoculture of today’s building code that eliminates both the humble ten-year hovel and the thousand-year stone church in favor of a compressed band of thirty-year sameness. Patrick and Seth are sharp critics of the modern approach, but they are not merely lamenting the past. They are actively building and consulting with clients across the country, doing restoration work, and finishing their first new-construction solid brick house in Vermont, complete with hempcrete insulation, lime mortar that breathes like skin, and no air conditioning required.
By the end of this episode, you may find yourself reconsidering what you thought you knew about your own home and what it would mean to live in a building that was honestly made for the place where you live, from the materials under your feet, designed for the people who will actually use it, and built well enough that someone a hundred years from now might be glad you did.
Transcript
Ashley Fitzgerald: Hello everybody, welcome back to Doomer Optimism. We are back. We took a little hiatus from recording, and I have two episodes in a row on the topic of the built environment and how it impacts human flourishing. I had Alicia Pedersen from Courtyard Urbanism on the previous episode — she’s focused on building into courtyards to change urban spaces. Now I have Seth and Patrick from Orthodox Masonry. I’ll start by having you guys introduce yourselves briefly, say what Orthodox Masonry is, and then we can get into the conversation. Thanks for being here. Also, my husband Patrick is joining us, and my Patrick and this Patrick know each other from a conference. I’m just really a production assistant grabbing coffee. All right, you guys go ahead and introduce yourselves.
Seth Harris: So I’m Seth Harris. Just before we started recording, we were talking about the wall behind me. This was my grandfather’s house. I grew up the next house down, about 400 yards away. I homeschooled all 12 grades. My father had a cabinet shop in the basement, and we were always doing farming and gardening. My grandfather was building this house and shop my whole childhood, so recess often meant hopping on my bike, coming up here, and helping him. I got a very early introduction to the trades. I was also an apprentice blacksmith. I had different plans for a while — I wanted to make musical instruments for a living. I looked into that and it’s a tough market. I looked at blacksmithing, specifically making woodworking tools, and did an apprenticeship at a local living history museum, which was great. That never quite took off, but as soon as I got out of high school, I took over the family business doing cabinetry and carpentry and have done a really wide range of trades and crafts surrounding building.
Patrick Lemmon: Seth won’t say this about himself, but he and his whole family are the old-school Vermonters who get put on postcards. Seth is who people from Massachusetts and Connecticut come to look at — the real deal.
Ashley Fitzgerald: The natives.
Patrick Lemmon: I’m Patrick Lemmon. I’m not from Vermont, but I call it home now, thanks to Seth. I’m originally from South Carolina. I have a different background, though Seth and I share a lot of similarities. I worked with my grandfather doing woodworking growing up. He had a wood shop — not for his job, it was just a hobby, though he was an engineer professionally. He was constantly making furniture, and we had a good chunk of land that we would manage, cut trees for firewood, and thin out. I went to college and did a dual major in biblical studies and music with a minor in philosophy. Then I took all that and went into building, which I think is all very well interconnected. I’m deeply grateful for that education and lean on it tremendously day in and day out. I approach the design work I do through the language of music and my musical background. I went and apprenticed under a master builder named Clay Chapman, who’s also from the South — just one state over in Georgia. I worked with him and then followed him out to Oklahoma, where he’s still helping to build a town. He, and now I, specialize in building solid mass wall masonry structures out of brick or stone and trying to revive that practice. After three years of apprenticeship, I struck out on my own and formed the company Orthodox Masonry — with a lowercase o. Nothing against the Orthodox Church or anything like that. What I was going for was the lowercase o orthodox approach to construction versus just a traditional approach, because you can have any tradition at any set place in time and some of them are really bad. My grandfather would always say, “Sure don’t build them like they used to — thank God.” So my initial trajectory was to define the orthodox things, the handful of truths that keep getting passed down and reaffirmed generation after generation, starting with the simple stuff: build things that are square, level, and plumb; have generous roof overhangs to keep water out; understand that water runs downhill. Everything beyond that is open for conversation. We want to listen to what others have said, both in the present and in the past. The great thing about buildings is you can walk through an old one and actually listen to what the builders were saying. They communicated through their hands and through the decisions they committed to. And it doesn’t take much experience before you start being able to hear their thoughts. We want to take that on — not regurgitate it verbatim because we’re not in their time and place, but meaningfully add to the conversation that’s already ongoing. Seth and I met on a project in Pennsylvania several years back, building for a group of Carmelite nuns. We hit it off, and for a long time I had been wanting a partner rather than being a solo operator, because it’s such a heavy load. Seth is great, and fortunately he thought I was halfway decent, so we joined forces. For a number of reasons we agreed that Vermont is a better place to put down roots and do what we’re trying to do. I had been looking for people to work with for almost 20 years. My grandfather and I started working together, and he was finishing this place — but it’s built for six people to run. There’s a woodworking shop, a mechanic shop, a machine shop, a sawmill, excavation equipment. The scale just does not lend itself to one or two people running it. So I’ve always been looking for a business partner and a team. One of the big hurdles was becoming an employer — doing all the paperwork while also doing the actual work, mentoring the crew, and handling all client interactions. You have to do all of them well for it to work. If you’re missing any one piece, it breaks down. It’s like a machine, and the weakest link is where it fails. Having a partnership was a necessity to avoid burnout. For many years the way I made it work without a team was to work as a sole proprietor and sub out to friends, and they’d sub back to me — somebody gets a project and four or five people come help. It’s a decent system, but with workers’ comp requirements and the governmental structure around it, it’s getting less and less viable. What I watched with friends who tried to grow their businesses is that they very quickly became simply business owners instead of craftsmen. They have the knowledge, but it’s a shame — they’re typically the most capable person on the crew, but they don’t have the time. The only way to get the time is to work 60-plus hours a week: 35 or 40 hours with the crew and then 20 to 25 hours of paperwork and administration. You burn out. It makes more sense to join forces.
Ashley Fitzgerald: I’m glad you found each other. I’ll say two things. One is that Alicia from Courtyard Urbanism is a PhD Shakespeare scholar who got into courtyard urbanism and is now working with architects and developers all over the country. I think it’s the kind of people who are interested in a lot of things and know how to put them together who can go toward these niche areas that most people overlook. The other thing is that the two of us got into the built environment by having a brick building on our property in Uruguay that was kind of falling apart. There’s a lot you learn on a homestead about how the natural world works, and a lot of it has to do with where water falls and what materials it interacts with. We went to natural building workshops — cob building, straw, bamboo scaffolding — and they always said a building needs a sombrero and boots. You need a hat and solid footwear. There are principles about how the natural world interacts with the built world that are pretty much universal. There are also two new buildings on the Uruguay property that I somehow designed. I built maybe two percent of both of them, but it forces you to engage with everything you guys do on a daily basis, in a much more basic way. Our first house there is made of structural insulated panels — they use steel-framed foam panels there, where here it’s OSB. They’re really cool and quick to build with. But just calculating overhangs — I was out there before the first house went up measuring where the sun was, orienting it for solar gain, and the overhang was just enough so that in the hot months, the sun wouldn’t come in between 11 and 2. It worked out really well, almost perfectly, with about four inches to spare.
Patrick Lemmon: So, you asked earlier about traditional versus orthodox — specifically in Vermont, what’s something traditional there that you would just get rid of? In Vermont and Pennsylvania, you’ll see a lot of stone houses, especially farmhouses, where they stood the stone up on its broad face to get a nice presentation of big flat stones, but it’s all stood up on end. It might be four to six inches thick — a slab stood on end. It’s like having a book upright versus laying flat: it’s way less stable. I completely understand why farmers did it, and these structures have lasted a long time, but it’s something I would not want to do. Structurally, if you lay stone in flat and run it lengthwise into the wall, it’s going to last even longer. A lot of the restoration work we do centers around failures that come from standing stone on end. You’ve got a 150- to 200-year time issue on your hands — which, compared to today’s 30-year problems, is great, I don’t want to be too harsh about it — but it is a tradition that I don’t think is the healthiest. Vermont’s demographics are really interesting. This valley was settled in the 1740s and 50s. There were Native Americans and settlers coming in, and it went from essentially no people to full capacity within about 20 years, staying at that higher population until the Civil War. Then soldiers came back having seen Ohio with its three feet of topsoil and no stones to speak of, and a large chunk of the population just moved west. There was even a whole town in New Hampshire that just picked up and moved as a unit. Vermont didn’t get back to that population level until the 1960s when the interstate came in. So you have Vermont settled by the adventurous people who left Europe, and then the people who stayed in Vermont were those among the adventurers who didn’t keep on moving west. In the building culture here, if you say you’re a builder, that means you can build a house from beginning to finish. When I started traveling to other places and said I did building, people would ask, “Are you a framer? Are you a finish carpenter?” And I’d say yes. Who wouldn’t be able to do all of those things if they’re in the trade? We’ve been talking about trying to revive the term “housewright,” because that captures what Vermont historically had — someone who holistically takes on a structure. A master builder is an analogous title: you know all the facets and work cohesively to bring them together in-house to complete the structure. That’s what architects used to be, at a grander scale. Someone who knows both through their head and their hands how it all goes together. There was historically less specialization in any one particular thing but a much deeper understanding of the whole. The most costly thing about materials, by and large, is getting them from point A to point B. That was true back then and it’s still true today, though fuel subsidies and logistics efficiencies have made it cheaper. Part of what we’re trying to revive is that you can do things more efficiently and cheaply by using local materials — but it means you have to build in a local style. If you want your Vermont house to have niches in marble and look like Santa Fe adobe, you’re going to pay a premium. But if you’re willing to embrace the local realities and cultivate a relationship with what the local stone wants to be and what the local wood wants to be, it makes everything work better.
Ashley Fitzgerald: Are they still making bricks in your area?
Patrick Lemmon: Not in Vermont that I know of. East and north of us there’s some, and south there is, but not locally. When my grandfather was coming up through the trades, there was a brick plant in Bellows Falls, which is 15 minutes from here, and one in Keene, which is 45 minutes. There are eight different bricks in the wall here, turned up so you can see the stamps on them: Vermont, DB Co, Drury, Kane, Pray — those were all local brickworks.
Ashley Fitzgerald: We just did a patio with reclaimed Chicago pavers that are all stamped. A lot of them had asphalt stuck to the top from being under a road, and you can chip some of it off and leave some — it adds charm. Bricks don’t go bad. But listen, I have a kind of doom question. Do you think local materials are suited to a local climate? It’s an obvious point in one sense — Adobe obviously made sense in New Mexico and Arizona — but is there also a higher-level or even a spiritual component to that?
Patrick Lemmon: I think about this type of question. Having a building belong has so much to do with respecting the environment in which you live. Part of the doom is that we’ve become disrespecters of the environment we’re trying to work in. The building industry is not acknowledging this — people aren’t even thinking about it. It’s not that anyone is actively being maniacal; there’s simply no regard. It’s akin to a worldview — I see this in both atheist and religious thinking — of being separate from or superior to nature. That transfers into treating the environment, the water, the rain, the wind as irrelevant. There are so many buildings sited purely for the view with no regard for wind exposure. Ski houses perched on a ridge where you’d experience the full wind chill all winter. These are all prices people pay. Coming back to whether stuff belongs: we do a lot of stonework — dry stonework for retaining walls, field walls. I came into structural masonry through cabinetry, then carpentry, then timber framing. During the building slump around 2009, I got into solar panels and excavation, ended up with machinery, and got into stonework. I got certified through the Dry Stone Walling Association of Great Britain, through the Stone Trust here in Vermont — a nonprofit focused on education in dry stone walling. That’s how Seth and I ended up meeting, because through that organization I was asked to go to Pennsylvania as quality assurance on a structural masonry building. I’d done lime mortar work and repointing but had never built new stone buildings, though I’d done a lot of structural dry stone work and had all the experience with timber framing. Coming back to whether materials belong: when you talk to a client and ask where they’re going to get material, they’ll usually say they don’t have any. Then I’ll ask if they have a field, and ask if they’ve walked to the bottom of the field. People have been pulling rocks out of Vermont fields for 200 years. They’ll build walls around the field, and then once the walls are done they’ll dump the rest in a pile at the bottom of the hill. Half the time, they have plenty of stone right there to do what we want to do. And if you build out of stone that came off the property, it looks like it belongs. Vermont is geologically diverse — you’ve got all these layers squished together, then sliced off by a glacier and tumbled around. Working with glacial till you’ll have 27 different types of stone, and it’s so pleasing to the eye to have that variety. You’ll also have a predominant mix of whatever the ledge is from that particular property, broken off by freeze-saw cycles and come to the surface. You see this all through Europe — different building styles based on the material available. When you take local material, design for local weather, and start having a relationship with the place and the material itself, you start creating lovely things. You worry less about trying to match Venice. Venice used Venetian marble because it was near Venice. They did wonderful things with it, and people think, “If I could just have Venetian marble, I too will look like Venice.” It never quite works. You should be who you are.
Ashley Fitzgerald: So what happened in the industrial era? What is a stick-frame house and why, in your opinion, is it an inferior way to build? Most people would say, “I don’t know, they put buildings up, they seem to last.” They’re built with a lot of parts that break in 20 or 30 years, but talk us through what the mainstream way of building is right now for someone who doesn’t know much about it.
Patrick Lemmon: My gut is that it really depends, and stick framing in itself is not all that bad. But when it becomes the only thing, that’s the problem. Having buildings with different lifespans is healthy. Not everything needs to last a thousand years. It used to be that you had some things that would last that long, some that would last 500, some 50, and then the hovel that Ernst built would only last ten years because he did it wrong, and that’s okay. But now we’ve compressed all of that, and the bandwidth of the portfolio has been constricted into this tight 30-year mortgage reality. You have a monoculture. The difference between the lowest quality house you can build and the most expensive house you can build is very compressed. You can’t even get building permits to build your simple hovel anymore. The people on the fringe of society who could afford to build a 10-year structure are restricted to conventional houses. And there’s nothing in between. But the top end has also been brought toward the middle. People are spending enormous amounts of money on houses whose structural quality has not gone up one bit. They’ve put in higher-end refrigerators, stovetops, and electronic systems, but the structure itself has not improved. You’ve still got the same R-values. There’s a required R-value and people just don’t go beyond it much. All the products are still laminated, so you have that ticking clock — moisture gets in, it delaminates, and the house you wanted to pass down as an heirloom is going to deteriorate. And it’s not just about you or your family — it’s about the community. You need a certain number of buildings that last from one generation to the next so you’ve got threads connecting people across time. I did an early consultation in Louisiana, where my father’s family is from, in St. Francisville. I ended up staying at a house called the Cabildo House. It’s solid brick, built sometime in the 1600s. It has this long history of being the capital seat of the short-lived Republic of Florida — a country that existed for about 45 days. My grandfather and his brother got their haircut there when it was a barbershop. Then it became the town library, which is how the current owner experienced it as a child going with her grandmother. It sat vacant for 20 years after someone parged it with Portland cement in the 80s and did a lot of damage. She and her husband bought it, removed the Portland cement, brought it back to life, and turned it into their home. And here I am having a conversation and connecting the dots — my grandfather got his haircut here. That thread of community connection can only happen when structures can endure that long and survive that much neglect. In Louisiana, they had more damage done to their structures in 2015 or 2016 from flooding — not a big hurricane, so it didn’t make the news — than from major storms. Hundreds of thousands of homes got irreparably harmed because the flood waters didn’t recede for three days, black mold set in, and all you can do is knock them down. With a brick structure, you just come in and pressure wash it. Buildings that can’t survive 24 hours in their own environment without mechanical support are a problem.
Ashley Fitzgerald: We went to a wedding in Delaware in an over-a-million-dollar house on the beach. It was giant and multi-story, but so clearly a piece of crap — brand new and everything was plastic. It takes no wear and tear, and it’s on the ocean, which means salt air. The most expensive piece of crap I’ve ever seen.
Patrick Lemmon: When you were asking about stick framing — painting with a very big brush — stick framing was living alongside masonry and doing its thing. Then you had the post-World War II housing crunch, and it really took off because it’s such a cheap, fast, affordable way to knock out structures. And then we never went back. It completely wiped the floor with masonry. You had a few holdouts like Chicago. Even there, by the 70s, Chicago was kind of done with it. I was fortunate enough to be mentored by one of the last true Chicago masons, named Fred Nowicki, and just seeing in his lifetime the scale of that shift was really impactful for me. You have this cheap, affordable system, and it starts out competitive. But as it gains dominance, other layers get added on. You start closing it in, cutting out drafts, and essentially creating a Ziploc bag where moisture is dealt with through hard stopgates in a very tight envelope. Now we’re to the point where we’re spending tens of thousands of dollars on air exchange units to address what that creates. It’s like computer code — this system has gotten a lot of code added to it, and what was once fast and sleek is now bogged down, cumbersome, and janky. What we’re doing is saying that the masonry system is actually pretty competitive, price-point-wise, when you consider what it delivers.
Ashley Fitzgerald: Can I jump in? Because it might be a good time. In the buildings you’re doing — solid brick buildings — what’s your standard for ventilation and heating? Like the house you just finished a couple weeks ago, what’s the heating and ventilation situation compared to heat exchangers, heat pumps, and standard HVAC?
Patrick Lemmon: With the house we just finished, the air conditioning is simple — there is none. The thermal mass of the masonry really helps blunt your highs and lows. It really does come down to: do you have a good hat? Do you have good boots? The rest is kind of secondary. We did a blower door test on the house to make sure it passed code. We intentionally left just enough airflow so there’s natural air exchange even when everything is closed up, and we have windows that open. This is not a Ziploc bag — it has lime mortar, and we’re aiming for it to breathe like your skin. So many modern solutions to moisture are like slathering your skin in nail polish. You’ve addressed it technically, but there are going to be unhealthy side effects. One organization notes that one in three buildings is a water-damaged building. We’ve also steered away from plastic-based products — not just for toxicity reasons but also for repairability. When you go to repair a system that’s 200 years old, you can see the path forward. When someone has vinyl, you have to completely gut and rebuild. We may have used three or five sheets of plywood for this entire build — a little for the cricket at the chimney and for the lazy Susans. That’s literally it. For the insulation, this was the first house we built that has insulation in the walls. In the southeast, you don’t need insulation because the main issue is heat in the summer, not cold in the winter, and your wall thickness lets you leverage the day-night temperature cycle. Up in Vermont, the summers are great — that’s why there’s no AC — but with 17 inches of masonry facing a genuinely cold winter, insulation is meaningfully helpful. So we put hempcrete in it.
Ashley Fitzgerald: Yeah, just does anybody do a lime wash finish on the inside of the brick?
Patrick Lemmon: Sure, and if you look at the kitchen in our most recent build, we did a heavy lime wash on it. That’s really a client preference. We could do wainscoting, plaster — it all comes down to what the client wants. We’ll also do houses that are just structural masonry with hempcrete on the inside, then plastered. We just did a stone with hempcrete on the inside — a two-foot thick stone wall with a timber frame and then hempcrete up against the stone on the inside, then plastered.
Ashley Fitzgerald: On the design side — how did you develop these design skills over time? I’m curious not just about the technical skill but also the discernment about beauty and what constitutes those orthodox principles of beauty.
Patrick Lemmon: You start with why you’re building it, who you’re building it for, what it’s supposed to do. You look at the space it’s going into. Then you look at your budget and materials. You keep feeding more and more information into the design until you hit the spot where it matches your skills, your materials, your needs, and your budget. We have a pretty good process now. The key is constraints. You set up the frame, and then you really do have so many possibilities. People think constraints are limiting — it’s like, no, now I’ve got the problem of narrowing down all the ideas that are bouncing around, because we could do this or that. Those constraints are all edges you can actually grasp, instead of having this slippery sphere of infinite possibility. I think and talk about architecture through the lens of music, probably because the community and language around music is still healthy and whole, where architecture has gotten disjointed. You can look at music theory and see things that, in our culture, we understand and intuit — when you have this chord progression or resolve a riff in a certain way, it evokes certain feelings. The same is true in building. If you say you’re going to clean-slate the whole thing, you’re walking into a situation where you’ll be completely disconnected from your community, because there are tropes and tools in building that convey certain things just like there are in film and music.
Ashley Fitzgerald: Can you give a specific example? Something like a motif in a build that evokes a certain feeling?
Patrick Lemmon: What we tried to do with our most recent build is make the front door a place that is open and inviting, but where, if you open the front door, you don’t get overt access into the house. If someone comes up who you want to receive but not necessarily welcome all the way in, or if your kids are playing safely in the back, you can let the world in at the front and control how much you let in. That, to me, is a foundational thing with the front door. Getting into specific clients and constraints — one lens we often go through is: does this client receive business guests? If so, I want to think about a layout where you can receive at the front door and then peel off directly into an office, or alternatively invite them further into the home. That constraint then informs how you think through everything else. I’ve written a bit about this — the public home versus the private home. The most iconic American public home is the Biltmore, but that house was not built for a family. It was built to entertain diplomats. Each room does one thing, because it needs to be very clear to all these guests who’ve never been there before where they’re allowed to be, what they’re supposed to do, and how they’re supposed to act. A lot of people have absorbed this aesthetic — giant dining rooms, grand entertaining spaces — and they see it and want that. But they don’t actually entertain diplomats. You need something more informal that does multiple things and serves the people who actually live there.
Ashley Fitzgerald: I think about that a lot — the space and who the people are. A Rockwell painting of a little girl sitting at the top of the stairs looking down at a cocktail party. Sound of Music style, where the bottom floor is entertaining and formal, and upstairs is the governess and the children and the private life. The other house we designed in Uruguay, which we haven’t finished building yet, has one side that’s all kitchen and living, then a breezeway, and then bedrooms — so almost like private and public wings.
One other thing I wanted to ask about is the state of this movement or interest in this way of building. Have you seen a change over your career? Are people getting more interested? And is there any move toward stripping back regulations so people can do more vernacular building themselves?
Patrick Lemmon: Yes, somewhat. At the small end, we do a fair amount of consulting for people who want this and we just can’t be in all places. Several guys have said, “I think I could take that on if you can help.” So we’ll either help with a basic design or do the full design, and help them find the right masonry crew or show up for a few days to get things going in the right direction. People think the whole build has to be unconventional, but it doesn’t have to be. You can do the masonry part with solid fundamentals and then go back to a lot of conventional stuff for the rest. People in Tennessee, Georgia, and the Carolinas are doing it and making strides. I also wish I could talk about a very large-scale thing we are consulting on right now — I don’t want to tease people, but I will say I’ve never been more genuinely excited about something being actively worked on. It does seem like there’s a resurgence of interest in structural masonry, similar to what happened with timber framing. I’m right in the epicenter of where timber framing went from a dying art to something that, anywhere in the US, you can have if you want it. Structural masonry is right on that tipping point. It’s partly a backlash, just like timber framing was a backlash to badly built stick frame. We’re also focused on human scale, because it’s so easy to design something that tries to convey importance or value purely through size. You can convey genuine value through materials, texture, and proportion without making things bigger. We do ornament, though we’re simple about it compared to Victorian gingerbread. We pay attention to scale, proportion, and curves.
Ashley Fitzgerald: On the question of ornament, one more question before we wrap up: the American College of the Building Arts. Do you think there will be jobs for kids coming out of there?
Patrick Lemmon: I’m not directly affiliated, but I’ve got friends who’ve taught there. My understanding is that after Hurricane Hugo in 1990 or 1991 did tremendous damage to Charleston, they realized they didn’t have any local people who could actually fix it. That was the impetus: we need to actively cultivate this skill set for our community. At that level, yes, there will be jobs, because there’s a lot of historical work to be done and they’re not churning out huge numbers of students. There’s a real difference between that restoration mindset and what we do, though. A lot of restoration work is coming to something that already exists and interacting with it. Our approach is that we’re actually closer to the historical builders, because we’re building the whole structure. Someone from a repair and restoration background has deep technical appreciation for certain materials and methodologies, but they don’t have the volume, scale, or appreciation for how this stuff got done originally. They can hyper-focus on a particular batch of lime mortar — “I’m going to use this NHL from France, it’s the best” — but they’re interacting with buildings where the original farmer just went to the nearest lime deposit, burned it in a kiln, or used oysters and made it work, or even used mud. You can get too focused on that. If you’re trying to build something new, you need a whole different mindset.
Ashley Fitzgerald: It’s like a college student who comes out of a permaculture program versus Peter Allen, who has a small farm and doesn’t need your herb spiral — he needs you to move cattle around and think practically.
Patrick Lemmon: Exactly. We had a great guy working with us for whom this was his first new build after doing repair and restoration. On some jobs he’d get up to a chimney and replace six bricks — that’s his volume. I need 600 bricks laid in a day. It’s a whole different world.
Ashley Fitzgerald: Final question: what’s your cause for optimism about making more thoughtful, more beautiful, more enduring buildings?
Patrick Lemmon: My optimism is that there are enough people who are interested, and enough information out there that people can find and say, “Yes, this is doable.” A common refrain we hear is “I didn’t know that was possible.” And then once they know it’s doable — on both the client side and the builder side — things shift. People are doing amazing things. The same people who told me Vermont isn’t a masonry state, that there’s no brick in Vermont, literally passed two dozen brick structures on their way to tell me that. Once you go back and look, the scales fall from their eyes. We’re a little bit crazy, but not that crazy. It’s totally doable. I see people spending enormous amounts of money and I just think: for less, we could have given you so much more. Part of my optimism, honestly, is that I’m not smart enough to be otherwise. And the great thing is it doesn’t have to be resolved in our lifetime, because the structures we build are going to be a testament that it was possible. In 200 years, someone can come across this and say, “Well, that was possible then” — and maybe that’s the revival.
Ashley Fitzgerald: And you’re doing a much better job promoting it, with record keeping and thousands of pictures showing every step of the way. It’s so funny, Patrick, that you haven’t been on the show yet. With Doomer Optimism, you sometimes meet somebody who’s so completely Doomer Optimism that you immediately become friends and then forget to have them on the podcast. Anyways, I’m so glad we finally took the time. Seth, great talking to you — it’s great to have the novices asking questions and not being afraid to be ignorant. Thanks for coming on, both of you. Keep on keeping on.
Seth Harris: Thank you.
Patrick Lemmon: Thank you.
Keywords: building, masonry, traditional construction, local materials, sustainability, architecture, craftsmanship, Vermont, masonry revival, orthodox
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to the Built Environment and Human Flourishing
03:00 Personal Journeys in Craftsmanship and Building Traditions
05:58 The Philosophy Behind Orthodox Masonry
08:54 The Importance of Teamwork in Craftsmanship
11:50 Learning from Nature: Building with Local Materials
15:00 Challenging Traditional Building Practices
18:02 The Historical Context of Building in Vermont
21:04 The Concept of Housewrights and Holistic Building
23:57 The Impact of Industrialization on Building Practices
27:03 The Relationship Between Building Materials and Environment
29:59 The Future of Building: Embracing Local and Sustainable Practices
40:02 The Impact of Flooding on Homes
41:56 The Evolution of Building Materials
43:50 Ventilation and Heating in Masonry Homes
50:04 Design Principles in Architecture
52:00 The State of the Building Arts Movement
01:03:04 Optimism in Building Practices
Orthodox Masonry is a design/build firm specializing in structural masonry and timber frame construction. Creating buildings that are both structurally and aesthetically resilient, we offer an alternative to disposable construction. https://www.orthodoxmasonry.com/about
This was super interesting. Thanks for having them on.
Most of modern America lives in houses that are nearly as disposable as styrofoam cups...and about as sturdy.