The Wood That Became Iron

A town sits between lakes, and from above it's hard to say where the water stops and the street starts. Irtyash, Sungul, Bolshie Kasli. Water on every side, and between them, for a hundred and fifty years, an iron foundry. Its castings went out across the world. Railings, candlesticks, small figures, all of them lighter to look at than to lift. The lacework in that iron is almost indecently fine.

But today we're not looking at iron. We're walking down the street, and we're looking up, at the wooden windows.

Over one window on Lenin Street, the frame curls like a baroque picture frame. Two scrolls meet in the middle, as if someone drew them in a single stroke and only afterwards remembered they'd have to be cut with a chisel. The paint has worn down to grey wood. Behind the glass, there's a pot of pink geraniums. This is a house people live in. Somebody had tea in there this morning.

These pictures were taken by a photographer named Ivan Stepanov. He grew up nearby, and as a child he saw these houses through a car window. You don't study houses like that. You drive past them. Then he noticed he was seeing fewer of them. One burned down. Another got wrapped in vinyl siding. A third simply folded in on itself. So he came back with a camera and started talking to the people who lived there.

What they told him was simple. This house is over a hundred years old. That one went up in the nineteen-sixties. In that one there still lives the grandson of the man who built it. In one town, nineteenth-century carving stands beside postwar carving, and the newer work carefully copies the older. The neighbour down the street was the best pattern book anyone could ask for.

Now here's the part worth the trip. The famous iron lace of this place began as exactly the same material: wood.

To cast an iron piece, you first make a model. At this foundry, the models were carved from wood, by hand. When the plant prepared its celebrated iron pavilion, two pattern-makers, Tarasov and Shirokov, transferred the drawings onto boards. Every curl of the future metal first existed as shavings under a blade.

The pavilion was shipped to Paris, to the World's Fair, and it won the top prize, the Grand Prix. Then comes a story people here like to tell. The president of France, they say, offered to buy the pavilion for two million, and the plant's manager answered that he didn't sell the sculpture called "Russia." Maybe it went exactly like that, maybe not. Either way, the pavilion came home. Today it stands in a museum in Yekaterinburg, the only iron building in the world that's kept the way a painting is kept.

So iron is wood that decided to stay.

And the wooden lace stayed on the street. Here it's tempting to decide that carving is just decoration, something a craftsman does to get through a long winter. But then why are the curls always at a joint? Because a window frame covers the gap between a log wall and the window box. Without it, the wind walks right into the house. Shutters kept out heat, cold, and other people's eyes. The beauty grew out of necessity. First you had to close the seam. Only later did it occur to someone that the seam could be closed beautifully.

Now look at the gates. The carving there is different. It isn't cut out with a fine saw from a thin board. It's cut into the thickness of a beam: sun-shaped rosettes, twisted half-columns, bands that look like rope. That's the older work, and the slower. The pierced carving on the window frames is younger. It arrived when good tools did, and it could be repeated. One street holds two crafts at once, and one of them is now almost never seen alive.

Forty years ago, more than twenty thousand people lived here. Now it's about fifteen thousand. A house without an owner dies faster than a person. Two or three years without a roof, and you can lift the carving off with your hands. There's no ill will in it. Iron lies in a museum under glass, and wood stands in the street in the rain.

That's why a photograph works here like a jar of preserves. A photographed window frame outlives the real one. And, more importantly, it starts to count as something worth keeping. What people look at gets torn down less often.

Ivan's whole series is linked below this story. Look at it slowly, frame by frame. It's one of those rare cases where all you need is to lift your eyes above the ground floor. In almost any city, you'll find there's plenty to see.

Anything at all — a building, a word, a habit you never questioned. moygid dot online.