Concrete and clay

It was a deluge of a day but ideal for visiting an absorbing trio of Pennsylvania edifices created by the eccentric millionaire archaeologist and collector Henry Chapman Mercer in the early part of the 20th century.
Well-heeled and well-educated, the scion of a wealthy family, Mercer was fascinated by the past and determined to preserve it for the future. He had both the vision and means to do so, and in particular made it his business to search out and acquire a huge collection of tools and artifacts just at the point in time when many of the traditional rural crafts and trades were becoming obsolete, their practitioners reaching the ends of their working lives without apprentices to follow on. Mercer purchased, indiscriminately, the entire stocks of farms and workshops which would otherwise have been destroyed or dispersed. In order to house his vast collection (estimated at 50,000 items) he needed to create a museum: so he built a castle. Out of concrete.

On his travels in Europe Mercer became interested in ceramic tiles. So he learnt to make them. He located a source of clay on his estate. He built a tile works. Out of concrete. It is still producing tiles to this day. There's an example of one of Mercer's here.

Such a visionary if eccentric gentleman collector and creator needed a fitting residence to conduct his unusual lifestyle and to entertain his guests so in 1912 Henry Mercer built himself a mansion. Out of concrete. It's called Fonthill and is really quite extraordinary in its singularity and its self-indulgent gratification of Mercer's personal whims and schemes. He even engineered the marriage of two of his faithful servants so that they could continue running the place. He himself never married but had very affectionate relationships with a series of dogs.

Needless to say the museum is fascinating: do look here at Guinea Pig Zero's blip from his previous visit. The tile works still operates with the original kilns, moulds and methods as the young ceramicist working there explained to us.

For me perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the whole Kubla Khan-ish enterprise was Mercer's innovative and imaginative use of concrete as a building material possibly with a nod to the adobe structures of the southwest but decades before the Brutalist architecture of the 50s. Monumental and rough-caste, bearing the imprint of the wooden moulding used in their construction, the cavernous concrete rooms, the massive pillars, the labyrinth of passages and stairwells leading one into another, make Fonthill unlike anything else. Impossible to capture in a single image so my blip is simply shows the claypit beneath the tileworks where bags of fresh clay are stored in the cool damp depths to mature until ready for use.

Concrete and Clay just popped into my mind - anyone else remember it?

A short YouTube video of Fonthill can be seen here.