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concrete “treehouse.”
Today, you exit the Blacks’ dining
room onto a sweeping 60-foot walkway
that fl ows into an elevated two-story
glass, steel, timber — and mostly
concrete — structure with a fi replace
and banks of windows overlooking the
mountains.
No, the Black treehouse isn’t
actually nestled in a tree. This thing’s
nothing like your granddaddy’s
treehouse. Or your granddaddy’s
concrete.
“When she fi rst heard about the
plan, Wendy referred to it as The Bunker
or Chuck’s Folly,” says Black with a
laugh. “She was worried about the
aesthetics and the safety — it was all a
concern to her.”
Lawton partially credits the couple’s
eventual go-ahead to the fact that,
if worse came to worst, at least they
wouldn’t have to actually live in Chuck’s
Folly. “People tend to be a lot more
fl exible if you’re not doing their house,”
he says.
He admitted to having had a few
privately held misgivings of his own.
“Vermont is absolutely the worst place to
do this.”
It gets cold, and it gets wet. And it
stays that way for a while. That’s why it
took better than a year to complete the
structure.
Then there were those nearly 30foot
columns, each of which Lawton was
determined to pour in a single form,
a challenge that even he calls “a little
dicey.”
In retrospect, he offers this
admission: “Most contractors won’t pour
over eight-foot heights. The bottom
might blow out or bend in the middle.
My supervisor, Frank Finnerty, wasn’t
real happy over it.”
Even so, Lawton has no problem
explaining his Fast-Tube and fabricformed
structure from a design
standpoint. “It’s like you hold together
a silo,” he says. “Small sections joined
together and then banded.”
With fabric-formed concrete,
fl exible textile membranes take the
place of rigid formwork panels. This
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