School of Practical Stereotomy - École Pratique de Stéréotomie

I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity to have spent this past week in Boston teaching at the North Bennet Street School. North Bennet Street School NBSS is truly a remarkable institution, and both their faculty and staff are absolutely amazing people.

Participants learned the geometry behind the bell curve, which gives this dormer its unique and sweeping shape. They also learned how to layout the curved valleys and the curved bevels ontop of the eyebrow rafters.

You can see on the inside we also laid out and cut what essentially is a groin vault. This piece, set between the rafters, us to provide solid backing on the interior side.

North Bennet is truly an incredible school! Along with their faculty, amazing people!

Thank you so much to all the participants and to NBSS for hosting the workshop. It is such an honor to share this amazing intellect with you all!

To all the Finnish carpenters out there 🇫🇮—here is a slice of Northern Ontario history that speaks directly to the art of survival and craft.

​In the late 1920s and 1930s, Finnish settlers arrived in communities around Hearst, Ontario, facing unbroken forest, subarctic winters, and tough terrain. Before they even finished their main homesteads, one of the very first structures to go up was often the sauna—built circa 1930 using traditional round log construction techniques.
​These pioneers cleared the land with raw manual labor, timber-framing log dwellings, harvesting pulpwood, and adapting traditional Nordic joining methods to local softwoods. In some pockets of Northern Ontario, Finnish communities were so dense that generations grew up speaking English with a distinct Finnish accent.

​Structures like this restored 1930 sauna stand as a testament to self-reliance, resourcefulness, and carpentry craftsmanship built to endure subzero climates.

Had a great chat with Eric Fourthon from Grain de Vérité

We chatted about all things Compagnonnage and work. It was a blast and I learned so much about the history of the Compagnons. A fascinating talk!

Merci pays !

What an incredible weekend workshop! We brought geometry, timbercraft, and a little structural magic together to design and build these reciprocating (Mandala) timber roof structures.

​Over two hands-on days, we used practical stereotomy to solve the entire layout on paper; figuring out every rafter length, angle, and bearing, before translating that layout onto the rafters.

One of the funnest moment was learning the scaled model was able to hold more than 250lbs of direct weight! 🤯 (Hence the photo of the students literally standing on their work!)

Students walked away with a finished model, the templates to repeat it, and the confidence to scale this idea up.

Thank you so much to all the participants and to the Marc Adams | School of Woodworking & Time Honored Crafts for hosting. 🙏🙏

Had a fantastic week at Marc Adams | School of Woodworking & Time Honored Crafts teaching the wonderful and amazing world of stereotomy.

Participants built this really cool three legged trestle that was heavily inspired by the Zimmerer-Nationalmannschaft training model.

It's essentially a scaled down high-top patio table.

What an amazing experience!! This was such an awesome workshop!! It was so much fun getting to meet and know the whole crew at Bob Cornell Construction in Spirit Lake, Iowa. 🇺🇸

A massive thanks to Elijah Cornell for putting on the workshop and for being such a wonderful host. And a huge thanks to his whole crew for being so interested, involved, and working so hard. What an awesome bunch of people!

Thank you!! 🙏🙏🙏

In the heart of the mid-west - Spirit Lake, Iowa. Giving a professional development course to Bob Cornell Construction.

It's so awesome to see companies like this providing educational opportunities to their people. This week they are learning all about stereotomy and how it's applied to roof framing, specifically a four sided hipped timber framed gazebo.

In Atlanta at the Georgia World Conference Center with

I'm here acting as a judge for the Carpentry Competition and training for this years WorldSkills Competition in Shanghai, China 🇨🇳