usually working in pairs to a rhythmical beat. Swinging their hammers overhead, they slammed down the beams until the double tongue was flush in the double groove of the beam below, the beams tightly placed and assembled to form a wall.
Smoothly planed solid timbers,11 cm wide,20 cm high and up to 6.60 m long, were stacked on top of each other, layer upon layer, forming walls three stories high, the corners connected using the ancient and elegant dovetail joint or, if the interior layout was such that the corners had to be flush, with classical finger joints.
Wall beams, ceiling beams, roof beams, window frames of wood, connectors of metal, steel dowels, special extra long screws, wall ties, slotted plates, tension cables-these components all arrived preprocessed at the construction site; the solid timbers, precision cut to size, were tied together and plastic wrapped in large bundles for transport to ensure that, until use, the oven-dried timber retained the proper humidity as defined by the engineers: fourteen percent for the inside walls and seventeen percent for the facades. Every hole, every mortise, every tenon, every notch, dovetail or ledge was already in the right beam in the right place. Some 5000 beams for the two houses, hardly any two alike. Constructing meant assembling.