"When I was starting out, a year or two in, I could teach anyone how to use a jointer. I knew three rules, and that's what a jointer was, what everybody needed to know, and all there was to know. The tool was simple."
"But now, after using one for forty years, I scarcely know where to begin. The process feels complex and beyond words. Every board gets a different treatment -- where I hold my hands, and why, seems to depend on a range of factors I can't even point to.
When students ask why I did one board one way, and another another way, I feel I can only tell them a small fraction about my decision process. So I say cryptic things to the kids, such as 'listen to the board, and feel it. You'll know when your hands are in the right place.' And they can't understand, because they don't have the experience or the feel yet."
"I was a much better teacher when I didn't know anything about craftsmanship."
I see a common pattern in all craftsmanship, whether considered handwork or mindwork. Learning begins with verbal instructions, the conscious mind guiding what to do. Over time, much becomes ingrained, habit, and unconscious, and the conscious, verbal mind has a lesser role. In some arts -- consider juggling -- you might argue very little is controlled consciously.
"The more we learn, the less we know" is an old, but perceptive joke.
Please ask any professional sports player to tell you "how they do it." Please attempt to master any discipline, from business to medicine, by just reading the book. Learning by verbal instruction simply introduces the elements, while mastery comes from practice. Mastery is a hands-on phenomenon. Books are for the school children of every discipline.
The questions I draw from this concern how relevant language and conscious thought are in our lives. The older I get, the more they seem to be a tiny, though privileged, part of our complete engagement, and survival and thriving in the world. They are doorways, but they are not the realms beyond. They are tools, but not the work.
This is no insight on my part: religion maps it, philosophy names it, psychology charts it. Fate. Genes. We think, but our thinking is not as free nor as powerful as we imagine or hope. Only a very small part of our brains is devoted to the production and maintenance of conscious thought and language. It is a deep illusion to think they are the omniscient and omnipotent controllers of a perfectly responding mechanical body and self.
We admire and revere the ivory tower of academic institutions, and only the uneducated denigrate them. Still, we also denigrate the application of learning if that application cannot be articulated consciously, and verbally. The design rationale is everything to the career of the aspiring creative spirit, whether the artist can articulate it, or a critic in his or her stead.
The scientist without data is a crank. The philosopher without learning is a mystic. The artist without learning is a folk artist. The psychologist without learning is a hippie.
My old friend didn't do much teaching because he couldn't address our collective need (lust?) for educated, verbal rationale. So, he left the door open for others who could, so to speak. But their mastery is, by definition, more verbal. While they can teach what they can put to words, and much of that is valuable to the beginner, I wonder if that capacity blinds them to the true nature of mastery, which resides in our unconscious, in our hands, in the habit of our actions. And, to be clear, I'm not sure there are words to address the mastery of creation, both practical and aesthetic except to point a finger outside the door and beyond our acceptable, rational intellectual discourses of the matter by any discipline.
For me, the interesting question is simple:
By removing the privilege of language, conscious thought, and design rationale, while privileging non-verbal craftsmanship and mastery, do we gain anything towards a better living in our made objects?
The Arts-and-Crafts movement was nostalgic, trying to preserve a prelapsarian vision of the quaint craftsman's shop in a quixotic fight against the industrialization that has brought us our modern prosperity of things and inventions. It was helpful to a privileged few to hide away in their cleverly-appointed bungalows and pretend the smokestacks did not blur the horizon. While I admire the aesthetics of many arts-and-crafts designers, putting cats back into bags has worked precisely never in any way in human history in any enduring way. So I don't see an erasing of what we have accomplished in design to be a way forward. I wonder towards a breaking of the hierarchy, a disassembly of the privilege of the consciously designed aesthetic, and a heterarchy with craftsmanship and mastery.
As some famous Roman thinker once suggested, there nothing is new under the sun. Where can we find an architect like my old friend? One who has no conscious, intentional, aesthetic design rationale? One who creates towards something infinitely more complex and fully human--design that doesn't search for and use concepts governed by language, whether verbal or mathematical, but derive from the practice and knowledge of a life lived intentionally well?
By definition the word isn't out on this kind of builder. They must exist, and we have all seen their work. Can we understand it? Can we feel it? Can we appreciate it? Do we denigrate it, and prefer the work that the critics can study and perceive endless symbols, references, aesthetic and social commentary and even beauty?
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Not many architects work with their hands, and more do than build the buildings they design. It's simply not practical in the modern world with our specializations, divisions of labor, and the sheer scale of the things we build.
It is nostalgic, mythic and utopian thinking (fun for dreams and books, but enters in the real world only with violence) to imagine a world in which the rationale of the head and the mastery of hands are united in all we do. It is useful only as a great and naive question to ask. Where it takes us, and what other questions it raises, are the point.
Few of us study, but we all learn. We simply get better at what we do. By dint of repetition, ability quietly develops, sometimes quickly for 'the naturals', but eventually for all of us.
But a paper designer becomes better at paper design after a lifetime of designing on paper. So with Autocad or Rhinoceros. But nobody lives in Autocad or in Rhinoceros.
So what non-verbal mastery would lead to the creation of truly great built-environments? What head do we remove to reveal what hand? And would that work?
Today, single building projects involve a cacophony of siloed professionals, each bringing a shard of mastery to a collective effort. A rough hierarchy of architects, clients, structural engineers, interior designers, general contractors, project managers, carpenters, electricians, plumbers, gardeners, roofers, painters, drywallers, and laborers each contribute. Each can master what they do in a lifetime of work; but none are professional masters the art of living in the spaces they create.
And isn't that the point of a built environment? That it's an environment? Where people work and live?
This is perhaps the collective responsibility of each professional and tradesman, but it is rarely part of the conscious rationale of their work. Whether a building is enjoyable, easy or even appropriate for its use is too often a secondary consideration to its expression, it's concept, its aesthetic design. Some may argue the aesthetics are key to the enjoyment and ease of use. But please ask the Mrs. Farnsworths of the world whether fogging glass walls, unbearable heat, and a canoe to get to her front door are key to their enjoyment and use of their built environments.
Much of a building's design already comes from the professional's and tradesman's personal, amateur, non-paid (and private) lives, is relevant to the lives of the future occupants. It comes though the assumptions and habits we each have. The electrician with OCD might lay out wires in the basement with such symmetry and perfection of installation as to greatly please the homeowner with OCD, but puzzle and terrify one without. Haphazardly installed wiring could be irrelevant to one homeowner, and cause for great anxiety in another, lying awake at night wondering if the building will burn down due to sloppy work.
No interior designer is hired for their pure connection with client desires, spoken and unspoken. They are hired the way all others are: through connections, locality, chance, price, etc. So the designer will impose their vision to some extent, from the limits of their experience and training. If they like comfortable chairs, they will recommend them. If they prefer the aesthetic statement of an uncomfortable chair, they will recommend them. The easy client will go along with whatever. The difficult one may challenge the price. The client may not be able to articulate what they prefer in any rational way, even to themselves. So they buy what other people half-guess they will accept, with little regard to the day after they move in, perhaps assuring them they will learn to love it.
And so many of us have learned to love the built environments we have--for a wide range of reasons that rarely touch on how we could live our lives.
We might decide that professional "mastery of creative or work disciplines" from architecture to carpentry and roofing are all professionally desirable. Then we might decide that "mastery of living life" is entirely separate, and something that only monks and other sages are capable of, or really wise people in private. But do we yoke the professionally creative disciplines to the art of living?
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That our environments contribute to the quality of our lives goes without saying. We may not chose a palace over a prison, but we still would not chose the prison. Over a hundred years ago, the writer of speculative fiction and fan of architect Bruno Taunt, Paul Scheerbart wrote:
We live for the most part in closed rooms. These form the environment from which our culture grows. Our culture is to a certain extent the product of our architecture. If we want our culture to rise to a higher level, we are obliged, for better or worse, to change our architecture. And this only becomes possible if we take away the closed character of the rooms in which we live. We can only do that by introducing glass architecture, which lets in the light of the sun, the moon, and the stars, not merely through a few windows, but through every possible wall, which will be made entirely of glass -- of coloured glass. The new environment which we thus create must bring us a new culture.
I love that he desires a better life for all of us. I admire that he feels the power of our environment over us, and that we have, in turn, the power to choose how we create our environment. Here we have a prescriptive vision of Better Life Through Plastics, I mean Architecture, from a man has thought things through.
I do ask, though, if he proposes rose-colored glass, through which we should always see the outdoors when inside. Or different colors for different rooms? I marvel at the idea of glass walls everywhere. Where would we hang our pictures, and could I ever read a book, what with all the distractions of the ever-changing weather outside?
I then imagine Paul sitting at a desk in a small flat in Berlin, window closed to the street noise below, writing these ideas. It works. he finishes them. He is published.
I then imagine Paul trying to work at a desk in Mrs. Farnsworth's house. I imagine him leaping to his feet in frustration, his manuscript incomplete, complaining that he is endlessly distracted by every change in the weather he sees through the glass walls,
at the lack of privacy as Mrs. Farnsworth, whether inside or outside, can always see him, as there are no separate rooms. I hear him complain that the bright sunlight makes him unbearably hot at his desk, and that the condensation from the windows pools on his desk and makes the ink run on his papers. wind in trees, of lightning, or passing cars, or shooting stars. I imagine Paul Scheerbart in Mrs. Farnsworth's house losing his temper over how he can't possibly get any work done with no privacy! The hot sun on his neck unbearable as he tries o
An architecture that fits all our intellectual dreaming, and its desires and needs, into its appropriate place, while also fitting all our Maslowian bodily needs and desires, can't come just from the conscious, verbal mind alone. It has to come from a certain empathy, and from an understanding of the art of living as we each, privately experience it.
If that impulse already informs the work of designers at every level of the built environment, we are fooling ourselves as designers.
But what would an architecture of empathy look like? No one thing, I think, or even a defined set of outcomes. It is rather the product of a different process, a different approach, a heterarchical one from all hands that contribute to it, towards all that a built environment can be to a full human life, within the limits of materials and their context.
Like all good design, when it is good, it does not call attention to itself as anything. It simply fulfills its intended role.
The empathetically designed and built environment would be a joy in every way, no matter who uses it.
Now, that's utopian, isn't it?
But maybe progress in this direction can be made just by loving a little more what our hands know, and lessen our reverence for what our brains can do.
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