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what one wisconsin city is made of

Eau Claire, WI

A catalogue of materials

What This City Is Made Of

Eight materials, each one with a plane you can see from the sidewalk, filed not by where they came from and not by how old they are, but by how each one was made before it got here. Nothing here is offered, priced or sold to anybody.

The idea, in one paragraph

A city is usually described by its buildings. This catalogue describes it by its substance instead: one entry for each material that has a visible face somewhere in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and one question asked of every entry. The question is how the material was made before it arrived, because the answer to that decides nearly everything else about it, including what it cost, where in a wall it was allowed to be, and how long it has lasted.

A material is not a building. It lives in several walls at once, in parts of town that have nothing else in common, which is why this catalogue cuts across the city instead of dividing it into pieces.

A plain red brick wall laid in running bond, the joints of each course sitting halfway along the bricks below
Running bond: every course offset half a brick against the one above it, so no vertical joint ever runs. This site is laid the same way.

Five ways of making

  1. Made by cuttingTaken out of a bed in blocks, then dressed to a face.2 in the catalogue
  2. Made by firingMolded from clay and burned, so the color is a record of the burn.3 in the catalogue
  3. Made by castingPoured wet into a form, on the ground it stands on or at a works.1 in the catalogue
  4. Made by sawingCut from a log to a dimension, and sold by that dimension.1 in the catalogue
  5. Made by rollingSqueezed between rollers until it is a sheet, then sold by the sheet.1 in the catalogue

Three of the eight

Made by cuttingThe soft bed under the slopeSills, lintels and one belt course, cut close to home out of a sandstone that came away easy and hardened afterwards.Made by firingCommon brick, and the back wallThe cheapest fired unit in town, soft molded from clay dug within a wagon haul, and the whole reason a rear wall is a different color from a front.
Made by castingRock faced block, poured on the groundHollow concrete units made on the site with a hand machine, in a mold cut to imitate a stone that was never quarried anywhere.Made by rollingSheet metal, delivered by railGalvanized sheet, sold by the sheet and by the catalogue, pressed into the one part of a front that nobody looks at and everybody sees.

What every entry answers

Three cells, the same three on all eight, printed at the top of the entry before any prose:

Cell What it holds
Which bed or worksThe ground or the plant the material came out of, or a plain statement that it has neither
How it was dressedWhat was done to it between the raw state and the wall
How it got hereThe carriage, because for building material the carriage is often the larger part of the price

An entry that could not answer all three would not be published, and the generator that builds this site refuses to lay a page for one that cannot.

Four articles on the making itself

There is one form on this site

It looks up airline fares, it sits on its own page, and it appears nowhere else: not on an entry, not on an article, not in this footer. It has nothing to do with the subject of this catalogue except that the same reader may want both.

An outside booking service runs it on a subdomain of this domain, and if a reader books after looking, Tallyhouse LLC may earn a commission from that service at no extra cost to the reader. That is the entire commercial arrangement behind this site and it is set out at length in how this is paid for.

What is refused here

Tallyhouse is a publication. It does not sell, quote, price, survey or repair anything, does not supply building material, does not recommend a trade, and arranges no travel of any kind. There are no prices on this site, no assessment of anybody's building, no recommendation of any trade, and no material for sale. About says who publishes it and prints the particulars.