A catalogue of materials
What This City Is Made Of
Eight materials, each one with a plane you can see from the sidewalk, filed not by where they came from and not by how old they are, but by how each one was made before it got here. Nothing here is offered, priced or sold to anybody.
The idea, in one paragraph
A city is usually described by its buildings. This catalogue describes it by its substance instead: one entry for each material that has a visible face somewhere in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and one question asked of every entry. The question is how the material was made before it arrived, because the answer to that decides nearly everything else about it, including what it cost, where in a wall it was allowed to be, and how long it has lasted.
A material is not a building. It lives in several walls at once, in parts of town that have nothing else in common, which is why this catalogue cuts across the city instead of dividing it into pieces.
Look up an airline fare
No card field exists anywhere on this site. Nothing is paid to Tallyhouse at any point, by anybody, for anything.
Five ways of making
- Made by cuttingTaken out of a bed in blocks, then dressed to a face.2 in the catalogue
- Made by firingMolded from clay and burned, so the color is a record of the burn.3 in the catalogue
- Made by castingPoured wet into a form, on the ground it stands on or at a works.1 in the catalogue
- Made by sawingCut from a log to a dimension, and sold by that dimension.1 in the catalogue
- Made by rollingSqueezed between rollers until it is a sheet, then sold by the sheet.1 in the catalogue
Three of the eight
What every entry answers
Three cells, the same three on all eight, printed at the top of the entry before any prose:
| Cell | What it holds |
|---|---|
| Which bed or works | The ground or the plant the material came out of, or a plain statement that it has neither |
| How it was dressed | What was done to it between the raw state and the wall |
| How it got here | The carriage, because for building material the carriage is often the larger part of the price |
An entry that could not answer all three would not be published, and the generator that builds this site refuses to lay a page for one that cannot.
Four articles on the making itself
One form on this site goes anywhere outside it
It is the fare lookup above, and it appears nowhere else: not on an entry, not on an article, not on any of the standing pages, not in this footer. Open any of the eight entries or any of the four articles and there is no form, no figure and no button to press. That takes a reader about ten seconds to confirm and it is the only assurance here worth anything.
An outside booking service runs it on a subdomain of this domain, and if a reader books after looking, Tallyhouse LLC may earn a commission from that service at no extra cost to the reader. That is the entire commercial arrangement behind this site. What the lookup is sets out what leaves the browser and what is refused, and how this is paid for goes through the arrangement slowly.
What is refused here
Tallyhouse is a publication. It does not sell, quote, price, survey or repair anything, does not supply building material, does not recommend a trade, and arranges no travel of any kind. There are no prices on this site, no assessment of anybody's building, no recommendation of any trade, and no material for sale. About says who publishes it and prints the particulars.