01Plate 01 of 06 · Cornice modillion
A match is a profile and a glaze. Neither one photographs.
Move the light. Every unit on this wall is extruded from the measured offsets of one of our six plates, and every one of them is flat and unreadable until the sun comes off to the side — which is why the terra-cotta pages you opened today showed you a finished building and told you nothing.
One of them, off the wall and turned.
Two cornice profiles that differ by three-eighths of an inch look identical head-on and obvious in silhouette. This is the same cornice modillion standing in the top course outside, and the offsets it is built from are the ones printed on plate 01.
The other half fails at an inch.
Soot held in the undercut and washed clean on the top surface, so the same unit is two colours depending on where you stand.
A new unit has no history, so we match the fired body and the glaze and then let the new one be slightly new. Anything that matches perfectly on day one is wrong by year three.
- Reference
- WTW ochre 4
- Finish
- Matt
- Colour
- Warm buff, faintly green in the hollows
- Dry weight
- 74 lb
Four repairs, and one of them is nothing.
Three contractors quoting different numbers are usually proposing different repairs. In the order a quote should consider them — cheapest first, because that is the order that is honest rather than the order that is profitable.
01
Leave it and monitor
Crazing with no crack through the body, no displacement, and no path for water into the wall. Recorded, photographed, and looked at again at the next inspection.
Not an option if the report has flagged the unit as a falling hazard. That is a different conversation and it starts with the engineer, not with us.
02
Patch repair
Shallow spalling on a sound body, glaze intact around the damage, and roughly under a fifth of the visible face. Cementitious repair mortar, built up and tooled to the original profile.
A patch cannot restore a lost arris or a drip, and it will not carry a load. If the profile has gone, a patch gives back the shape without the function.
03
Replacement in kind
The profile is lost, the unit is cracked through, or the elevation is a landmark one where a substitute would not be approved. Moulded from a surviving unit and fired here.
The most expensive route and the longest. Ten to fourteen weeks from mould to delivery, and a landmark facade adds permit review on top of that.
04
Cast stone or GFRC
Above the sightline, on a non-landmark elevation, where the unit's job is shape rather than surface. A third of the cost of fired replacement.
It is not terra cotta and it does not weather like it. Put one at eye level or next to an original and the difference is obvious within two years.
Your deadline is a city ordinance, not our sales calendar.
It applies at 80 feet and has since 1996. Below that height it does not reach you, and anybody telling you otherwise is selling something.
- Who it applies to
- Buildings 80 feet and over in height. Below that the ordinance does not reach you, and anybody telling you otherwise is selling something.
- Critical examination
- A close-up inspection — at minimum one representative drop per elevation, and a drop spans no less than 24 feet. Close-up means hands on the wall, not binoculars from the street.
- How often
- Every four, eight or twelve years, depending on the building's risk category and construction type.
Four things, and the first one is a broken lump of clay.
01
A surviving unit, if one has already come down
Best case by a distance. We mould from the original, so the profile, the arrises and the surface texture come across without anybody interpreting them.
02
Photographs square-on and raking, with a rule in frame
Square-on gives the outline, raking light gives the depth. A rule in the frame is what turns a photograph into a measurement.
03
A profile template, if you can reach the unit safely
A strip of card cut to the section beats twenty photographs. If reaching it is not safe, skip it — we will take it off the mould instead.
04
The relevant page of your inspection report
It tells us what the engineer actually flagged, which is often narrower than what the contractor quoted for.