ARHIVELE OLTENIEI - Universitatea din Craiova

The Desnăţuilui Valley houses. Traditional materials and building techniques 203In the Băileşti Field, dominated the houses with clay walls, differentlybuild, and according with the quantity of wood that they had:• Houses with the walls made of clay, coating the knitted twigs (thedominant type),• Houses with the walls made of clay, introduced between the laths(planks),• Houses with the walls made only of clay mixed with straws or chaff,• Houses with the walls made of adobes.A traditional and very old technique, used in constructions until thebeginning of the 20 th century, is the “pitchfork” technique. In each corner of thebuilding and within the walls were thrust into the ground vertical wooden pillars,constituting the sustaining element of the walls. They had in the superior side acarved “pitchfork”, on which were placed the beams that formed the exteriorshape of the walls (the upper grinder), on which the ceiling beams leaned upon.Between the intermediary pitchforks, parallel with the ground and with the upperbeams, were placed two poles that formed the wall’s framework. These (thepoles) were united through “knitted” twigs, which were then consolidated withsuccessive lairs of clay mixed with straws or chaff (the image 1 d). In the upperside, the walls were connected through the main beams which formed “the lowergrinder” of the house. Among these were placed the secondary beams thatformed the framework of the ceilings and of the attic’s floor. The ends of thebeams were extended outside the walls of the house, supporting the eaves. Thehouse built in this particular way had the disadvantage that the pitchforksdeepened inside the ground, because the roof was very heavy and the subsoilwater from the surface was infiltrating inside.More frequent were the twig houses build on a foundation of oak timber,made from an intact beam, having even 80 cm thickness, round or cut into 4 edgesand fixed in the corners through a strong joining “straight” or “spigot-shaped” (theimage 1 c). This structure formed the main skeleton of the house, which actuallywas the first “grinder of the walls”. The foundation was placed either directly onthe ground, either on stone or brick pilasters, buried under the four corners of thebuilding. In the foundation were introduced the pillars from the corners and theintermediary ones, situated at about 1 m distance between each other, and whichsustained the superior grinder of the house. Over the props were placed twigswhich were then coated with clay. In the area that we have studied, because of theDanube’s lakes, the twigs were sometimes replaced with reed. This kind ofconstruction was called by Radu Maier the hearth-placed house 14 .14 Radu Octavian Maier, Elemente inedite privind cercetarea aşezărilor şi arhitecturiiţărăneşti din vestul ţării, in „Revista de etnografie şi folclor”, nr. 4, 1988, p. 316.