House Launching, Slide Hauling, Potato Trenching, and Other Tales From a Newfoundland Fishing Village
Princeton Architectural Press
March 2003
ISBN: 1568983832
Eight miles off the Eastern coast of Newfoundland, Canada lies Fogo Island, an inconsequential spot of land 15 miles in length and 9 miles wide. "Fogo" is derived from "fuego," the Portugese word for fire, since in its rocky barrenness, the island appears to have "been swept clean by fire." Tilting is one of 11 remote communities on the island. It is a community of about 350 Irish descendents who fish and farm this harsh landscape the way their families have for generations. In "Tilting: House Launching, Slide Hauling, Potato Trenching, and Other Tales From a Newfoundland Fishing Village," Robert Mellin takes his readers inside the homes and indeed the very lives of these pioneer souls.
An architect and a professor at McGill University's School of Architecture, Mellin intersperses "Tilting" with renderings of the community's houses, outbuildings, tools, and furniture. The book brims also with compelling photographic images shot by Mellin since his initial visit in 1987, as well as older photos contributed by the residents of Tilting. The imagery alone allows the reader to touch this remote land.
March 2003
ISBN: 1568983832
Eight miles off the Eastern coast of Newfoundland, Canada lies Fogo Island, an inconsequential spot of land 15 miles in length and 9 miles wide. "Fogo" is derived from "fuego," the Portugese word for fire, since in its rocky barrenness, the island appears to have "been swept clean by fire." Tilting is one of 11 remote communities on the island. It is a community of about 350 Irish descendents who fish and farm this harsh landscape the way their families have for generations. In "Tilting: House Launching, Slide Hauling, Potato Trenching, and Other Tales From a Newfoundland Fishing Village," Robert Mellin takes his readers inside the homes and indeed the very lives of these pioneer souls.
An architect and a professor at McGill University's School of Architecture, Mellin intersperses "Tilting" with renderings of the community's houses, outbuildings, tools, and furniture. The book brims also with compelling photographic images shot by Mellin since his initial visit in 1987, as well as older photos contributed by the residents of Tilting. The imagery alone allows the reader to touch this remote land.
Mellin, however, goes much further in his thoroughly researched prose, mapping out the history, work, and lives of the residents of Tilting, as well as the geography of the town and surrounding area. And while "Tilting" sometimes reads a little like a textbook, the frequent inclusion of quotations from island residents lends the authenticity of experience:
"No, I never made no furniture – except tables and chairs – and couches – I made two of them. I made some washstands – that washstand upstairs belonged to an old house that my brother bought to get the land- and that old thing was in it – and they threw it out and I was coming down one day and they up there in the gulch – I see this, and 'twas all broken up – so I said, "That's a pity," and I took this and I brought it in and nailed a piece of board across it and asked my wife to paint it and there 'tis there."
(Jim Greene on Furniture Making)
Through Mellin's fondness for this traditional fishing village, we learn about practices such as house- launching, in which a house is moved from from one site to another on man or horse-drawn sleds, often across the frozen harbor!
We learn that the houses of Tilting are painted with the same oil-based concoction used to paint small wooden punts – ochre, paint and cod liver oil (this is of course extracted from actual cod livers).
Part architectural text – part sociological time-travel, "Tilting" is at least a quick escape to a far-off land of wholesomely honest and genuinely good-natured people leading simple, though often difficult, lives.
Part architectural text – part sociological time-travel, "Tilting" is at least a quick escape to a far-off land of wholesomely honest and genuinely good-natured people leading simple, though often difficult, lives.
