A Place for Trades

I’ve spent a lot of time and words talking about the importance of making things by hand, but recently I’m finding reason to question the validity of that statement. One of my favorite ways of describing how the world we live in affects the way we think is to point out that in modern times we spend most of our lives in environments where everything that surrounds us is manufactured. Rather than being able to appreciate the skill of the maker, with whom we might consider spending our hard-earned cash, we seem to spend most of our time looking for cheaper and glitzier items that ultimately, and usually in short order, become outdated, dysfunctional or simply unwanted. Throwing something away in the world we live in is largely impersonal; at best, we attempt to sooth our karmic conscience by “recycling.”

In the early 19th century, in most of the world, and well into the latter part of the 19th century in most rural areas – a stone’s throw in time for homo sapiens – most, if not all, of what we connected with in our environment was fashioned by hand. Inanimate objects had souls of sorts because they represented the work of the skilled tradesperson and reminded us of the value of the trades in the world we lived in.

Today our view of the trades is through plywood barriers around construction sites and flybys of workers along the mass transit lines as we whisk by in air-conditioned tubes bound for somewhere important. When we walk into a big- box store to ply our plastic cash, the importance of the trades is the furthest thing from our minds as we walk up and down aisle after aisle of soulless merchandise.

To me, this understanding of how we are affected by a world full of stuff built by robots and a nearly complete disconnect with what the trades mean in our lives–the absence of “hand made” items creating a sterile rather than a holistic world–made clear sense until I heard episode #454 of “This American Life” on January 7th on public radio. The episode was called “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory,” and what I heard was “Act One: Mr. Daisey Goes to China.”

Ira Glass is the host of “This American Life,” and his show is always the highlight of my Saturday afternoons, when I’m lucky enough to be near a radio. His shows often reflect a cross section of our lives that most people might feel a little funny talking about, or his guests will discuss a topic that many people might consider “sensitive;” but what he is really providing us is a comfortable(ish) view of the world around us that is real and exists whether or not we choose to connect with it.

In the episode at hand, Ira has taken an excerpt from one of Mike Daisey’s stage monologues and adapted it for radio. The monologue is based on Mike’s experience, as a self-professed high tech “geek,” when he came across a story of another geek having purchased a brand-new smart phone and realized it had pictures on it that were taken when the camera was being tested at the factory and hadn’t been erased. The pictures were of the inside of the Chinese electronics manufacturing facility where the smart phone had been made, but they weren’t pictures of what we would think of as a factory or manufacturing facility. They were pictures of conveyor belts, pallets and people.

Here are Mike’s own words, taken from the transcript of the show, expressing what he thought about all this. “It’s actually hard now to reconstruct what I did think,” he said. “I think what I thought is they were made by robots. I got an image in my mind that I now realize I just stole from a ’60 Minutes’ story about Japanese automotive plants. I just copy and pasted that. I was like, pwop, Command-V, pwop. It looks like that, but smaller, because they’re laptops.” But what Mike realized later is they weren’t manufactured by robots; they were made by hand, a fact so unbelievable it motivated him to travel to Shenzhen China to see for himself and meet the people who worked in the electronics industry.

And after visiting Shenzhen and meeting the people Mike says, “When I leave the factory, as I can feel myself being rewritten from the inside out, the way I see everything is starting to change. I keep thinking how often do we wish more things were handmade? Oh, we talk about that all the time, don’t we? ‘I wish it was like the old days. I wish things had that human touch.’ But that’s not true. There are more handmade things now than there have ever been in the history of the world.” If you think of it by how much stuff we buy, he’s right.

Mike also points out that in an economy where labor is practically free, there is no need to invest in robots. You just turn the people into them. And in eight or 10 years, when their hands are too crippled to work correctly, you throw them away and hire their children. It reminds me of the stories I’ve heard of Henry Ford’s first assembly line, where he hired skilled wheelwrights, coach makers and other out-of-work tradespeople, only to have them walk out when they realized they weren’t being appreciated for their skills but instead being asked to become part of the machine. Today, the slabs of glass we all feel are a crucial part of our modern life are manufactured by poorly treated human machines who don’t walk out of the factories because they have nowhere to go.

So my big-box analogy has gone by the wayside. I need to be more careful how I use the term “handmade” and accept the fact that “handmade” and “made by the trades” are neither mutually exclusive nor interchangeable terms. I also need to accept the fact that in today’s world, “handmade” isn’t necessarily a good thing.

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One of the many enjoyable aspects of collecting and using old tools is gleaning clues from them about the tradespeople of the past. As I said in my last blog, tools can teach us a lot, and I enjoy learning from the ones tradespeople made themselves. For the most part, they are pretty easy to spot because of their unique qualities or because they were fashioned out of another tool that has been modified for a new purpose, but sometimes they are so well made it takes a careful eye to tell them from those made by an experienced toolmaker.

If you think about it, the first tools of any type would have been made by hand, either as an experiment or as a way to fit a specific need. A task that was done repeatedly might become easier if a tool could be made that made it easier or simpler to accomplish. Maybe a tool was already on hand to do a specific job, but modifying it made it work that much better. And if a tradesperson decided a new tool was needed, he or she might not have had the option of going to the hardware store to pick it up. It’s also possible they didn’t even see the need to if they could just make it themselves.

I also believe that people who lived and worked in earlier times made use of things that might have become worn or damaged, rather than throw them away. Once a file has become dull, it isn’t of much use as a file, but the grade of steel used to make it makes for a decent wood chisel if it’s modified into one, and the price is right as well.  A saw blade with broken teeth won’t cut much wood, but the strong, flexible saw steel is good as cabinet scraper stock.

Custom wood planes are actually quite common, and early wood planes are rarely found with an iron made by the plane maker. Early iron mongers forged plane iron and chip breaker sets in standard widths, and plane makers would fabricate the bodies to suit the needs of woodworkers. Planes were made of different sizes and lengths or with the irons set at different angles suited to the type of planing to be done and the different types of wood. It was your choice whether to buy a pre-made plane or just the iron and chip breaker so you could make your own plane.

It’s also not that uncommon to find custom-made metal planes that stand out from their manufactured counterparts because of their uneven proportions or rough castings. So it was quite a surprise to me to discover that a plane I had brought out of storage for cleaning, and that I had always assumed had been made by an early plane maker, revealed characteristics to me that caused me to come to a different conclusion.

I knew the plane iron was wrong because of its shape, and closer inspection showed it to be the blade of a Sorby tanged wood chisel. This of itself could easily have been simply a matter of replacing a lost or badly damaged iron with the blade of a chisel. It also became obvious, once I started paying closer attention, that the wedge, which on this type of “chariot” plane also serves as the chip breaker, had been fashioned by hand. It was quite well done, but clearly hand made, and again could easily have been a replacement made by the plane’s owner to keep the plane in service.

It would have been a simple matter to be satisfied that I had solved the mysteries of the little gunmetal plane, but now I was getting curious. Looking more closely, I realized the wooden finger block at the nose of the plane had also been fashioned by hand and was shaped in a way that could have been made to fit the owner’s fingertip. The likelihood of the finger block being damaged is really low, and it would be pretty hard to lose because it is held in place by hand-slotted screws.

Studying the body of the plane showed that the shoulders were actually two different shapes and sizes, something you would never find on a plane made by an experienced plane maker. The stepped nose of the plane was also not equally offset, and removing the iron and finger block revealed the inside of the body to be roughly cast and unfinished. Now I was confident I had discovered in my collection one of the most well- done craftsman-made tools I had ever seen. It was so well done it disguised itself as having been made by someone whose trade it was to make them.

I couldn’t help but ask myself how many people I knew who could pull that off. I know I’m not among them. What that little plane reminded me is that in more ways than one, tradespeople have changed. Today we look to quality tool makers to supply us with what we need, and they aren’t always easy to find. Instead of creatively fabricating something to make our work easier, we fashion our skills to suit the tools at our disposal. I can’t help but wonder how our own creativity has been diminished by today’s vast array of ready-made tools and materials.

 

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Call me crazy (you won’t be alone), but after 30-plus years I once again find myself in a play (I play the Marquis de Sade), which means I’ve been getting home from rehearsals, and now shows, well after my normal bed time. Needing to wind down a bit, when I got home on Tuesday, I tuned in my local PBS station just in time to watch Roy Underhill’s “The Woodwright’s Shop.” I first met Roy at the Timber Framers Guild Eastern Conference in Troy, NY, in the 1980s. He did a pit-sawing demonstration, which caught the attention of many of us who were wrestling with the issue of whether we wanted to do our work with traditional hand tools or give in to the grid and fill our shops with noisy, dangerous power tools.

I next enjoyed Roy’s company at the Masters of the Building Arts Festival on the Mall in Washington, DC, where I had been asked to do a demonstration on traditional 18th-century timber framing. Roy shot an episode of his show there and couldn’t resist trying out the antique twyble he had purchased at a local antique tools shop. The twyble is a double-ended chisel with the handle in the middle and is used standing up to cut mortises. My next two interactions with Roy were at the Preservation Trades Network’s IPTWs in St. Clairsville, OH, and then in the Holy Cross Historic District in New Orleans after Katrina.

Having known Roy for so long, it was like sitting down with an old friend as I began to relax watching his show for the first time in quite a while. What came as a surprise was that Roy didn’t start his show in the usual semi-slapstick way he has of fumbling around in his cluttered wood shop looking for hand tools and half-worked pieces of wood. Instead, he sat down and started talking about books on woodworking and introduced his audience to his favorite author and teacher, Otto Salomon, and Otto’s theories on “Slöjd.” Otto coined the definition: “Slöjd is an old Scandinavian word having as its origin the adjective ‘slög’ that means ‘handy’. Slöjd means ‘craft’ or ‘manual skill.’”

Otto Salomon was born in Göteberg, Sweden, in 1849, and as he grew and studied in the Technological Institute in Stockholm and the Ultuna Agricultural Institute near Uppsala, he became enchanted with the process of teaching and went on to found several vocational schools. He felt that the educational practices of his time were too “theoretical,” particularly at the elementary school level. He felt that this had a negative impact on the education of many young people. He wrote:

“If practical manual work is introduced, the matter is changed, for many who are dull when the head works without the hand, excel when the use of the hand is required as well as that of the head, as in handicrafts. Children who are naturally skillful and dexterous when hand and head work together, although slow when the head works alone, have often more self-respect after discovering their power and skill; and if only one in 500 be so affected, even then the course would be worth introducing.”

It’s interesting to me how close this is to the thoughts of many of us as we try to understand the real and long range effect the removal of shop classes and hands-on education from both elementary and college-level programs is having and will have on the students who matriculate from our institutions. Salomon’s perspective on education holds much that could help us understand how educating the hand and mind together is so important, regardless of what occupational goals you have. His views on society in his book, The Slöjd System of Wood Working, written in 1892, are interesting as well. In it he wrote:

“We no longer absolutely despise hard bodily labor as we did a century ago, when to do nothing was considered more honorable than to work; yet even today we attach a certain stigma of inferiority to all forms of bodily labor. In the social work, the clerk ranks higher than the skilled artisan, and the workmen themselves are only too apt to consider that their labor is less honorable than that of their masters.”

Taken out of context, it isn’t difficult to think that was written 100 years later in this country.

In my last blog I wrote that in some situations, I believe that the tools themselves are teaching me lessons which I can learn only from them. In truth, something as simple as splitting wood is a good example because the ax teaches you about wood. You learn from experience that no two pieces of wood are alike. You learn that wood has a pattern of cells or “grain” that, if you strike from the side, causes the ax to bounce off but if you strike from the end, the wood fibers split apart. If you look carefully, you even learn that some trees have twisted grain patterns and some straight.

But no matter what you believe about learning or education, you can’t help but enjoy Otto Salomon’s take on it when he reminds us of something truly important.

“The teacher who concentrates on large amounts of factual knowledge during lessons will become neither an educator nor a teacher but merely an instructor, filling up memories with facts like stuffing meat into sausage. . .Education, cultivation of the mind, means what is left when we have forgotten what we learned in school.”

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Or does man make the tools? An interesting discussion titled “The tools we get attached to” is taking place on LinkedIn in the Preservation Trades Network Group. Folks are talking about their favorite tools, like the hammer they have had since they started working. One individual told the story of dropping his favorite trowel into a hollow-cavity brick wall he was working on and, realizing he couldn’t get it back, recorded the exact spot in the wall the trowel resided. Years later, he discovered the building was scheduled for demolition, so he returned to the site and talked to the crew doing the work. When they got to the right place, they allowed him to recover his favorite trowel.

I know I have certain tools that mean a lot more to me than others, including the first framing square I bought when I was doing odd jobs in college to make some extra money. I bought it on the recommendation of a friend’s father who was a carpenter. It is a really good square and actually has 16ths of an inch delineated on the scales and a 1-in. rule divided into 100ths. Years later, I learned that my square had a brace length chart on it for laying out braces for timber frame buildings. The length in inches is given to two decimal places. The hundredth scale is there so you can convert to 16ths using a folding rule.

It even has scales on it in 10ths and 12ths of an inch, which I have always referred to as “Stanleys.” I never could figure out a good use for them until a few weeks ago when I was asked to grade some Southern Yellow Pine floor joists in a 1916 department store. The joists were 16 feet off the floor, so I photographed them. I had measured the height of some I could reach from a stairwell, which allowed me to measure how tall they appeared on my monitor and then use the 12ths scale to create a proportion I could use to determine the knot diameters. I’m sure that’s not what the “Stanley scale” was meant for, but it sure came in handy.

I’ve always enjoyed figuring out how early carpenters and timber framers did their work. You can learn a lot by carefully studying the things they built. Oftentimes. the marks left by the tools they used will tell you a lot about their technique and approach to laying out and cutting a particular joint, but much can also be learned from the tools they used as well. Unlike cheaply made modern tools, or modern electric tools, 100-year-old carpentry tools usually are ready to go back to work with a little reconditioning. What the tools were used for or exactly how they were used requires reconditioning of a more personal sort. To understand the tool requires trying to place yourself in a different time; in effect, you need to get into the boots of the builder, if you will.

My grandfather used to tell me, “There’s a right way and a wrong way to use a tool.” I remember feeling like some days I spent my time inventing new wrong ways. But grandpa was right; using a tool the right way makes the work go faster and takes less energy. Even using a broadax to hand hew a log into a timber shouldn’t be a strenuous endeavor, provided the tool is sharp, well hafted and used correctly

But figuring out just how to use it correctly isn’t something you can learn by reading a book. The best way is to learn from people with experience by working alongside them. Once you understand the basics and you start hewing, the tool tells you how well you are doing if you pay attention.

Knowing the proper way to use a tool can be very rewarding and instills a sense of pride, but another aspect of tool ownership that can bring joy to any tradesperson is owning good tools. Historic tools are quite collectible because, for the most part, they were well made and often the makers of the tools took so much pride in what they produced that they decorated them. Even manufactured tools from the late 19th and early 20th centuries were made with ornate Victorian decoration, clearly offering tradespeople of the day an opportunity to show off the tools they owned and were proud of.

My own toolbox holds as many 100-year-old tools as it does modern ones. Some of them I own and use simply for the joy of knowing they were owned and used by another tradesperson, or maybe several, prior to my putting them to work, but others are examples of well-made tools that are either not made anymore or are only available as poorly made examples of today’s tool manufacturing. I also own examples of some of the very ornate old tools, but those are reserved for admiring the talents of the maker and never go in my toolbox or onto a jobsite.

One of the real joys of my work is knowing I can pick up my tools, both old and new, and actually make something. Unfortunately, today few people make things for a living, and even fewer understand the old ways of working with tools that were employed by the people who created our built heritage. As I have said before, that knowledge is as important a part of our heritage as the things it created.

For me, understanding that much of that knowledge is contained in the buildings themselves is important because I know I can learn something from every project I am part of. But sometimes the learning experience comes when I figure out exactly what tool was used in the first place, finding an example of it if I don’t already own one, and experience using it to repair what it once created. From my perspective, the tool itself has taught me something.

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One of my most cherished childhood memories is the time I spent with my grandparents in the summers on the shore of Lake Huron in Michigan at the hotel/motel complex that grandpa had built from the ground up. Grandpa was the kind of person who never considered throwing things away if they were broken. He understood that with a little hard work and ingenuity he could make pretty much make anything work the way it was supposed to. What strikes me as interesting is that grandpa wasn’t unique in his ability to fix things. In his time, that was just what people did.

Unfortunately, in my opinion, during the early 20th century we went through a “value engineering” process during which we exchanged high quality for low cost when manufacturing things replaced making things. On the surface this appears to most of us to have been a good deal. Instead of having to maintain the things we owned, we could just use them up, toss them in the trash and replace them with the latest greatest version of them. What we didn’t understand was that we were throwing away more than a worn out piece of junk.

In the world that grandpa lived in, people fixed things because they were worth fixing, but they also fixed them because they knew how. When we stopped making things that were worth fixing, we stopped needing to know how, but the need for that knowledge didn’t disappear entirely because so much of what we made then still exists now.

Hence the problem of taking care of our inheritance. On so many levels, the loss of Mr. Fixit has created a snowball effect in the glut of manufactured products in our society. Today most people believe the loss of our hand-made heritage is inevitable.

Look at the major impact that “replacement” windows have had on our historic architecture. Today more people than ever are realizing the travesty this product has created, but few people realize that what we lost before we started throwing out our old hand-made windows was the knowledge it takes to repair them.

In effect, we went through a depression of understanding the importance of the skills needed to fix things prior to understanding how important those skills are, and unfortunately we never even realized it was happening. Now we are faced with more than the challenge of how to deal with maintaining our built heritage; we are faced with the challenge of remembering how it’s done.

I’m sure that part of why I enjoy fixing things as much as I do is the fact that I spent my summers helping grandpa fix things and sharing his satisfaction in being able to. I don’t think many of us think about how much that type of experience influenced our own lives often enough, let alone realize how unfortunate young people in recent generations are for not having had access to it. If their parents didn’t maintain things that they owned, then they would not see the value in doing so either. In fact, they probably wouldn’t even have a reason to believe there could be any value in it.

Conservation is about people first and the things people value second. It makes no difference how much something might be worth, or even if it is something that was built so it could be maintained, if people see no value in maintaining it. In a world where people who know how to fix things either don’t exist, or aren’t appreciated for their ability to do so, the value structure is skewed toward replacing rather than repairing, and, unfortunately, the cycle is self regenerating. Unless we can begin to influence current and future generations to understand the value in knowing how to fix things, conservation is an exercise in frustration.

I used to wonder how it is that “historical societies” came to be until I realized that they are the sanctuary of the handful of people who understand how important it is that we conserve our heritage and have little or no idea how to do it. Basically they have a compulsion to save what can be saved, but they become over focused on the artifacts and can’t even see the gap in understanding that exists in the world we live in as to how those artifacts came to be, let alone how to take care of them. Their solution isn’t about preserving the knowledge; it’s about preserving the stuff that knowledge built by putting it in a museum.

I have no interest in turning back the clock to a time when everything was made by hand and people worked from dawn to dusk to feed their families, but I do think that we would all be better off if there were a few more Mr. Fixits around and people realized just how important they are. I still believe there’s a tradesperson in all of us, and if we lived in a world where that tradesperson was someone we appreciated and our children looked up to, more of us would be inclined to nurture and value the knowledge that was once commonplace and was the foundation on which our heritage was built and maintained.

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Having just returned from the International Trades Education Symposium (ITES) in Lincoln, England, I’m still trying to comprehend just how progressive the trades education programs are in England, Denmark, Belgium and Europe in general. In this country we still seem to be hung up on whether or not we even need traditional trades, let alone how we should provide opportunities to learn them.

The symposium was organized by the Preservation Trades Network in partnership with the 1,000-year-old Lincoln Cathedral. The cathedral itself is a good example of integrating trades education with conservation. The Works Department, managed by Carol Heidschuster, who is the first woman to hold the position in a thousand years, is, in fact, a school. Young people with an interest in learning a traditional trade are hired in as apprentices and learn from the master craftspeople whose job it is to conserve the cathedral.

As conservation apprentices, they have the opportunity to learn stone carving, lead roofing, stained-glass restoration, timber framing and the other traditional trades employed in the cathedral’s construction. Fascinating to me was the fact that they actually have the freedom to be creative when replacing gargoyles, tracery or stained-glass imagery that has been weathered beyond recognition. Rather than being concerned with authenticity of design, they are given the opportunity to do what the original tradesmen and women did when they expressed their own creativity.

During the symposium, presenters from many different countries discussed programs that are supported by public, business and government funds that address head-on the growing shortage of skilled craftsmen and craftswomen. (In Europe and Great Britain trades are called crafts.) In Great Britain the National Heritage Training Group was established to document the existing numbers of craft workers in England, Scotland and Ireland and went on to publish reports that detail the unmet training needs.

In response, English Heritage has mounted a public campaign to make people aware of the problem and is working to create programs that will offer training opportunities. The Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment has mounted a program called Rebuilding Communities that is working to train young people in the trades in England and in storm-ravaged New Orleans. Unfortunately, there’s no similar program funded by American dollars.

Presenter Anne-Francoise Cannella from Belgium heads the Training Center for Heritage Skills, the fundamental mission of which is “conservation and transmission of know-how in the field of the architectural heritage,” discussed a program at the Waloon Heritage Institute built around the “sensitization of young people to heritage skills.” In addition to training 4,000 young people in traditional crafts since 1999, the institute has established a master’s degree in preservation and restoration of cultural heritage to provide architects access to certification as “heritage experts.”

Andie Harris, of the North of England Civic Trust, talked about the trust’s Heritage Skills Initiative, which pairs young people and those wishing to re-skill side-by-side with master stone masons, plasterers, traditional wooden window builders, blacksmiths and others in real conservation projects that give them a chance to learn by using traditional tools and materials. The program has been very successful at helping people learn whether or not they are cut out to take up a traditional craft.

Several presenters were there representing American colleges with a focus on trades education, including Bill Hole of the College of the Redwoods in Eureka, CA; Simeon Warren of the American College of the Building Arts in Charleston, SC; Steve Hartley of Savannah Technical College and John C. Moore from West Kentucky Community & Technical College – all programs that survive primarily because they have a champion struggling against often incredible odds and lack of funding. On the other hand, programs in Great Britain and Europe are often supported by both government and industry.

You have all heard me say, probably once too often, that without support for the trades and trades education this country is placing its built heritage in jeopardy. It was more than refreshing to see not only genuine concern over the need to train craftspeople in traditional skills from the presenters at the Lincoln ITES, but to see many creative and progressive solutions being put into place to make it a reality. If they can do it there, we should be able to do it here as well.

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It’s interesting how much the meaning of the word “networking” seems to change when you put the word “social” in front of it. It’s like the world has discovered a new word.

In my own life, and work, networking is really the driving force that has caused me to end up where I am today. Even though I didn’t make the connection then, its influence began to make a difference nearly 30 years ago at Hancock Shaker Village at a gathering of kindred spirits that was to be the beginning of the Timber Framers Guild.

In that pre-Internet world, face-to-face interaction was what Facebook has become for many people today. Aside from the arguments about whether the Internet makes social interaction better or worse, the act of networking itself changed the lives of 100 young tradespeople who were trying to learn as much as they could about a way of building that was largely lost in America. When the Internet did become a viable way of connecting people, that small tribe of tradespeople grew by 20 fold and, interestingly, began to include many individuals who were not even timber framers but wanted to be part of the network.

Roughly 15 years after the formation of the guild, the Preservation Trades Network (PTN) formed in a world where the Internet was rapidly becoming the standard way people communicated. For me, PTN was an opportunity to begin networking with people in many different trades, which proved to be quite valuable.

The context in which I saw my own work changed as I learned how the trades evolved over the centuries, composed, as they are, of  individual components of a complex network of skills and knowledge based on both historic traditions and cultural influences. I was humbled by how little I really knew and motivated by the opportunity to learn from so many tradespeople who were happy to share their knowledge and insight, in person or online.

The existence of the Internet has had some interesting influences on my work and my life. On the one hand, it has connected me to many more people than I ever would have imagined I would meet, but, on the other hand, it has exposed me to many more people than is easy to comprehend. It has expanded the range and scope of my professional opportunities, while providing entirely new ways to mis-communicate.

The rapid rise of digital photography, when combined with universal access to the Internet, has made it easy to share experiences in social networking environments, but it also has dramatically affected how we communicate professionally, sometimes in very entertaining ways. The fact that the owner of a historic building owns a digital camera and has email now means I can give him or her a quote on what it will cost to restore a building by looking at a picture of it!

Of course, most of the new cameras are point-and-shoot and allow you to take as many pictures as you want, for next to nothing, but that doesn’t necessarily indicate the pictures someone sends mean the same thing to me that they do to the customer. There’s something less than rewarding in receiving an email bulging with pictures of the inside of a historic building that are too dark or out of focus to see anything or are perfectly focused and clearly show something totally meaningless–pictures that seem to have come from a camera gone wild and as useful as the phone calls I get when someone sits on his cell phone as it speed dials me.

Having access to instant communication has been a learning process for all of us. Communicating through emails has taught us how much value there is in hearing how people say something, rather than just seeing how they’ve written it. It also has made it pretty clear to me how differently all of us see things.

When there is no eye-to-eye communication, words can have different meanings. When I’m asked to look at digital pictures of a building with a problem, it becomes obvious that context is critical and difficult to capture in a picture. The solution isn’t more pictures, or even necessarily better pictures. It’s being able to see the whole picture.

Looking back from here, I see better now how networking has always been an important part of the trades and traditional building. Tradition itself is based on networking. In today’s world, we have the ability to network instantaneously and globally. In some ways, it adds context to our view of the world, and in some ways, it keeps us from being able to see what can be quite important in understanding what we are looking at.

In the end, of course, when a building is trying to tell you what is wrong with it, conservation has as much to do with smelling and touching as it does with seeing. At least for now, the Internet isn’t much good for that kind of networking.

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Back in 2002 I was invited to attend the Quinque Forum, where those in attendance were asked to address this question: “What are the problems facing preservation over the next 25 years?” It was mentioned to me that I had been considered for the keynote address, which instead was given by an architect who discussed the challenges of preserving modern and post-modern architecture. To me, at the time, it seemed like a topic that was over focused. In retrospect, I have to admit that today I find the problem of preserving manufactured buildings to be even less relevant than I did then.

I have had this argument, both heated and not, with many of my friends over the years, and the one thing I have noticed is that people who actually work on buildings with their hands are more prone to draw the line at the point where we stopped using traditional building methods to create buildings worth preserving. I’m not saying those buildings were built better than the manufactured ones that have replaced them, but that they were built to be repairable, which makes preserving them more straight forward and enjoyable.

I’m old enough to have owned cars that when you opened the hood not only could you see the pavement under the car past the engine, you could identify everything you were looking at and, with a little bit of knowledge and some mechanic’s tools, repair or replace anything there. As a young man, I took great pleasure in maintaining my car, and even greater pleasure in knowing I could “soup it up” if I wanted to. Today, you’re better off not messing with most of what’s under the hood of a new car, and some car manufacturers make servicing your own car so user unfriendly they don’t even have dipsticks to check the oil!

If you have been following my blog, you already know that I don’t have much use for the term “preservation trades.” I think the term itself is self serving and was created by people who were hoping to somehow elevate tradespeople who worked on old, broken buildings above “regular” tradespeople. But what I do find interesting is that tradespeople who work in preservation get a great deal of pleasure out of fixing old, broken buildings, much like the pleasure that comes from fixing an old, broken car.

My friend Ken Follett spends a lot of his time making holes in buildings and other structures so that other people, like myself, can look through the hole to see what’s inside. He calls them “probes,” but I know a hole when I see one. The point is that part and parcel of working on old buildings is being a detective. Before we can fix something , we have to try to understand what is really wrong with it and how it got that way. If we don’t, likely as not our repair, which probably covered up the real problem, will fail.

When I broke the cycle of lifetime employment with General Motors, for which I would have been the third generation, I really didn’t know why I had to do something else. I just had to. Today, I realize that my primary motivation was that I wanted to have a job that I enjoyed. I had fun doing odds-and-ends remodeling jobs. I didn’t have fun working in a factory. As luck would have it, I eventually graduated from remodeling to restoring old buildings. It turns out that’s even more fun.

But there is a line. From time to time, I get calls from people who want us to work on pole buildings, and I tell them we don’t do that kind of work. And the same would be true of being asked to work on most modern buildings. It’s not that it’s work I’m unwilling to do on principle; it’s because there isn’t any joy in it. How much pleasure can you get from realizing the reason a building is broke is that it wasn’t built to be sustainable in the first place? If it wasn’t built to last, how can you tell when it’s broke? Isn’t it just at the end of its temporary life cycle?

Obviously, there are a lot of problems facing preservation, including the need for building stewards who care, the need for qualified tradespeople, and the need for cultural change that places a value on the past. But a bigger challenge is figuring out where to draw the line. Does the fact that a building  is 50 years old make it worth preserving or restoring? Did it last 50 years by accident? Was it built to be repairable? If not, why should we try? So the question of “Why fix it if it’s broke?” may have more to do with how much joy there is in fixing it than deciding if it has historic value.

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Have you ever considered how many tools a modern builder uses that didn’t exist 100 years ago? Or 200 years ago? Or 500 years ago? It’s interesting to me to see how many people have a great appreciation for historic buildings and no real appreciation for how they were built. In the manufactured world we live in today, buildings are basically assembled from prefabricated parts. The builder’s tool box is full of “assembly” tools, often specialty tools sold by the manufacturer of some component of the building.

When buildings were built by hand, the builder needed hand tools that were suited to fabricating the parts of the building from raw materials. Many of those tools still exist and are still in use today, and for someone with a basic understanding of construction, they are recognizable. Hammers, chisels, levels and tape measures are available at the local big box store, and most people have a fairly good idea of how they are used. But they would find it hard to believe that the level and tape measure, as we know them, are modern conveniences that yesterday’s builders didn’t have access to.

Anyone familiar with the use of sacred geometry in building design is aware that actual units of measurement, like feet and inches or meters, aren’t really necessary. Laying out a building and all of its various parts can be accomplished through proportion and arcs, and the results reveal classical balance and a naturally attractive appearance. Measuring a building that was laid out using sacred geometry can present a challenge, but so can measuring a building laid out using units of measurement.

In the United States the length of a foot measure wasn’t standardized until 1893, and an international standard wasn’t set until 1959. The length of a 1-ft. measure prior to standardization could vary. This wasn’t a matter of much consequence until the industrial age and the construction of a rail system connecting cities together across the country. Without standardization of manufactured components, replacement parts couldn’t be guaranteed to fit.

Standardization of building components is just as important in an age of construction based on them, but when buildings were built by hand, standardization had little real value. As long as the same unit of measurement is used throughout the building of the house everything fits, but if the house next door is built based on a different unit of measurement, it doesn’t make any difference. This, in fact, is exactly the case with most of our 19th-century buildings and all of our 18th-century and earlier ones.

It is quite likely that only one person, the master builder, on a historic construction site had a rule. This rule would be used as reference for any layout to be done on the site. The apprentice carpenter would set his dividers to the master’s rule and duplicate that setting to a “story pole” or directly to the piece he was working on. Long measurements would be accomplished by “stepping off” multiple units, with the divider set to the master’s rule as well, and foundations could be made square by stepping off a “3-4-5” triangle (the Pythagorean theorem). If the rule itself were a little shorter or longer than a fellow master builder’s, it had no effect on the quality of the building.

In my trade (timber framing), the historic buildings we work on were all constructed prior to measurement standards, which can make documentation somewhat challenging. Luckily, the majority of timber frames built since 1800 have been laid out using a system called “square rule,” which takes advantage of working to set dimensions and making common members interchangeable. Knowing this means dimensions that the builder was working to can easily be established, as can slight discrepancies from them.

Charting those discrepancies allows a proportional error to be established, which can then be used to adjust the actual measurements to the nominal measurements the builder had in mind. In other words, using a little time traveling trickery, I can figure out how long the master’s rule really was; something he never knew or needed to.

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One thing I have always had a problem with is some people’s attitudes toward stewardship. More often than not, owners of historic buildings find it perfectly reasonable to justify their plans for maintaining or restoring a property based on how long it might be useful to them. Even though the structure may have been built 200 years ago or more and served many generations prior to the new owner’s tenure, they have no problem making conservation decisions that effectively reduce or eliminate the possibility that the building will last another 200 years.

 

I think the problem may be as simple as ownership versus stewardship. Ownership doesn’t lead directly to stewardship any more than stewardship leads to ownership, but these positions lead to different results, depending on if and how they are carried out. The real problems seem to arise when ownership replaces the stewardship. We seem to have lost track of what the justifications are for good stewardship, replacing them with the economics of ownership.

Understanding how this unfortunate transition occurred is pretty simple. Working out what should be done about it is another matter. Getting here has a lot to do with the transition between living in a world made by hand and one that is manufactured. In a handmade world, some things like wagons, wheelbarrows and shovels were meant to last long enough to serve our needs and then be reprocessed into other things like crates or firewood. Other things, like houses, barns and public buildings, were meant to last for many generations.

In a manufactured world, things are made to serve a purpose and are then discarded. Even the houses, barns and public buildings we build today are only designed to last a few decades at most. We seem to have lost the understanding of building durability into what we make.

When was the last time you went to Wal-Mart to invest in something really well made? The truth is we expect the same from home builders and automobile manufacturers as we do from the manufacturers whose throw-away necessities crowd the aisles in the big-box stores. The world we live in has, for the most part, become like living in one giant big-box store. We have become accustomed to our manufactured world and have lost our memory of what the world was like when everything we saw or came in contact with was handmade.

Even the work we do and see our children doing has mostly to do with services or production and little if anything to do with craftsmanship and durability. This means we think differently than we used to. A 21st-century owner of a 19th-century building has no more ability to see it as the 19th-century builder or owner did than the 19th-century builder would have seeing the world we live in today.

That’s probably a good thing for the 19th-century builder, but it also points up the fact that we have lost the ability to see our historic built environment in the way it was intended to be. The need to be good stewards so future generations can benefit from our work or the work that came before us is not hard wired into our brain the way it once was.

An unfortunate side effect of this responsibility blindness (which I believe is a lot like my grandfather’s selective hearing loss) is the apparent loss of awareness of the resources available to owners of historic buildings, even though these resources have been dramatically improving during the last couple of decades. More highly skilled tradespeople are returning to hand work instead of office or factory work. More educational opportunities are available to those with an interest in learning to work with their hands, and more suppliers are sourcing and manufacturing the traditional tools and building materials that are needed to properly maintain and restore our built environment.

Even though much has improved and many more good resources are available, I still hear historic building owners using excuses like “You just can’t find people who know how to work on old buildings anymore,” or “They just don’t make quality building materials any more.”

I suppose if the only place you are looking is at Lowe’s, then that’s true. So the question begs to be asked: Is the hand-built world and the skills needed to maintain it lost, or have we just lost the ability to see them? From my perspective it’s getting easier to see every day.

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