Show me some pictures of iron work in your local area

[stan]

I`m sure some of you live in parts of the world that sports great iron work.I have photographed a few pieces I have seen round my Town. 

[DSW]

I did this post of the Cathedral in Bryn Athyn near my house, but with the new site update, it looks like all the picts are gone! Hey Glen, any chance these can be salvaged or if not any chance I can get temporary editing powers on that thread so I can reupload all the picts?

All the metal work is hand forged Monel. I'll repost a few of the picts here. Everything in the cathedral is different. No two doors have similar handles or even bolt heads. No detail was too small for them to forge in monel, right down to the door hooks, the switch plates and even the individualized switch plate screws.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[stan]

wow that's impressive a wonder what the age of that work is? The screws on the switch plate show the depth of detail what a craftsman,  I went to Philadelphia once for 3 or 4 days lots of good stuff to see but I did not see that Cathedral.

[DSW]

Cathedral is in Montgomery County about 30 minutes north of Philly, almost in Bucks county.  Cathedral was mostly built between 1913 and 1928, though they do still do some work in there. Warren (Iron Studio LTD,  here) just did some new monel hand rails for the cathedral this past year, and a few years back he did all the hinges and  handles for a new door to a handicapped bath that you would swear was original to the church. Warren also teaches at least one of the blacksmithing classes that the college across the street runs every July.

The church believes that only God is perfect, so they took pains that nothing in the  church is exactly the same. The stone work has no straight lines, things are deliberately "off", bowed or twisted slightly etc. They also were influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement and wanted to get away from cookie cutter "machine" made stuff and back to the original medieval crafts as possible, even though they weren't scared to use modern tools and materials to do so. Supposedly their glass is just about as close to real medieval glass as anyone has managed to come and their reference library and notes on that stuff is used for reference if repairs are needed on many of the ones in Europe.

 

It didn't hurt that Pitcairn was funding everything so there basically was an unlimited budget. He ran the project himself and most of the stuff was made full scale as a "mockup" so he could look at it and approve or disapprove it. The colleges archives are full of a bunch of these demo pieces. They ever went so far as to build a 5th scale mock up of the exterior on rails, so they could roll it out and he could view the exterior under real light conditions on the site. There were no drawings done for any of this.

The attention to detail is amazing. There's a chapel screen inside that you can spend hours and hours studying as well as that door I posted. Every little finial and scroll is different.

 

Glen Cairn, the Pitcairn mansion just up the hill also has a ton of great monel forgings in it. Sadly I'm guessing the thread I did on all that is probably missing all it's picts as well.

http://brynathynchurch.org/cathedral/history/

http://www.brynathyn.edu/academics/workshops/

 

I'll have to see if Glen can do something with the old picts or set things up so I can reload them for both the Cathedral and Glen Cairn.

[Judson Yaggy]

I also have a large number of missing pics in old posts from the Shelburne Museum and from Fort Ticonderoga in VT and NY  (USA) respectively.  Both places are well worth a visit to see ironwork, if you are at Fort Ty walk thru the "garden" portion below the fort to see some INCREDIBLE gates.  

Edited June 2, 2015 by Judson Yaggy