Homes & Homebuilders
Masters and Markets/Chaos and Coup d'etat
The Philosophy of the Tradesman
The home builders knowledge, no matter how brilliant, is seldom a mathematically perfect science. Excellence in the trades usually flows out of a vast amount of personal experience. It is grown through trial and error, and the direct guidance of a master.
The mysteries and wisdom of homebuilding are imparted through apprenticeship. Homebuilding, like most trades, can’t be properly taught in the classroom; it is a lived experience, borne out of torn calluses and spilt blood.
One might note an analogy - a sacrificial or cultic sub-reality which undergirds the metaphysics of trade work. If a trade is in any way a religious order, then master tradesmen are in every way the high priests of it. They are rarely priestly men, but the respect they command is sacred and tough. Their altar is the saw table, and inexperience is the sacrificial lamb. They pour out the blood of their ceremony, shed by the utility knife or the coping saw, with its own initiatory oath (painfully sworn under the breath of the apprentice- we’ve all been there). By and by, we acolytes are changed with each of these wounds - these triumphs and failures. Whatever level of experience or inexperience you begin with, you reach the other side of this dusty ceremony a little wiser - a little older. Most acolytes begin this journey as a result of necessity; masters, however, are a result of love.
These ceremonies are the fertile soil in which a tradesman is slowly brought to life. But there is nothing highfalutin about it; the philosophy of the tradesmen is lived and personal. It is stained and caked on. And if the market is any indication, not many are left who want a part in it. Assuming this survey is accurate, among so-called Gen Z highschoolers, just less than half are considering entering the trades. To be fair, I get it - it’s hard, it’s bloody; it wears grim furrows that lengthen our wrinkles. And true masters are hard to find.
“Implicit in wielding tools to order the material world are the intellectual and moral faculties that direct their use. In a word, the journeyman seeks the master’s wisdom, made intelligible not through a book but through the master’s body.”
The term “philosophy” is deliberately chosen in this context. The trades being as diverse and anarchic as they are, I do not use the term to denote a specific philosophical view or a specific model of thinking. If you peruse a dozen tradesmen, you will find a dozen trades and a dozen business models and dozens of different ways of managing the business and economic relationships involved.
But in another sense, wisdom never changes. The proverbs passed down from one master to his apprentice will often mirror those in the next town. Truth is the same everywhere, even as it is diverse in its expression. The transmission of wisdom is the beginning of the apprentices journey.
It is one thing to participate in sophia, in wisdom; but only by the philo, the love of it, is the master born. Wisdom is manifested in small ways throughout the apprentices experience. But the apprentice reaches mastery only by loving and participating in his craft. In this way, we would use the word love to describe experience, action, and preoccupation. It may be noted, in fact, that this sense of love does not necessarily equate to what we might call passion (a common misconception). Passion, though strong and motivated (and perhaps a good starting point in learning), will nevertheless fade. To love a trade means self-discipline; it means taking the mundane always with the exhilarating sometimes. It also means embracing failure.
I am a young man, still; barely thirty and not nearly a master. I have learned much (for I have failed much). Consequently, I have learned to forgive myself for my imperfections, and I have learned to anticipate the weaknesses of each project. A good job (well and thoroughly done) cannot be perfect. And so we tradesmen who are accustomed to finish work bless the man who first invented caulking guns.
“Do your best, then caulk the rest!”
This phrase is a running joke in construction circles. Though framing work requires a substantial amount of architectural and regulatory knowledge, it is always rough and rugged. Finish work covers these imperfections and hides them. The framing job is never complete without the finish work.
Life experience displays the reflections of this idea everywhere. We train our body, mind and world to be far better than it was when we started. But we (I) never really feel like we’ve met the finish line. Perhaps it’s a flaw (or advantage, or curse, or blessing) of the human condition. There exist just enough gaps in our time, intelligence, strength, experience and success that all that is left for us to do is cover up the flaws. The customer, after all, has not paid for flaws, but for an ideal. To the customer, especially the inexperienced customer, perfection is still available, still reachable (at the right price).
But when we look out into the real housing market, we find it is not a place of perfect angles, angelic lighting, indoor pools, or flawless tapestries of modernized furniture. And the corners of the market which bear any semblance of this invented reality doesn’t come with a 50% off sticker in the corner. The invented reality, it turns out, is a façade; and both the customer and the craftsman reach the other side of it disappointed.
The Market Reality
The vast compendium of illusions which is the internet might lead one to the impression that a perfect construction job is not only attainable, but the norm. And aesthetic demands aren’t the only issue; far more often, price is all that matters to the bottom line. It’s easy to see how this dynamic became the standard in customer relations. Still, some customers seem to feel as though the tradesmen has committed highway robbery if he prices according to the quality of his labor. Pinterest, price comparison programs and globalized market measurements have become a scourge with which to beat the local tradesman into submission (and eventually bankruptcy).
“The decontextualized data points don't do for those customers what they would like for the data to do.” Mr. Nate Marshall, our resident blue collar philosopher (whose Substack I can’t recommend enough) offers some thoughts to the reader. “[Many customers] don't have the skillsets that allow them to do the physical work for themselves, so they hire us. But when they get the bill, they don't understand why the price is so high.” The issue of inexperience has a negative impact on the entire professional relationship with the customer. People want to pay DIY prices for professional work.
Nate is the first to point out that price comparison tools can even be misguiding as they take national (or even global) prices and thoughtlessly compare them to the local entrepreneur. It is one thing to use haggling methods to put corporations in competition with one another. But to hold these prices up against the “little man” is not just unreasonable, it’s cruel.
“Bits of information devoid of local context or understanding of the tools, processes, knowledge, and skills involved have increasingly made the customer interaction piece more difficult to navigate.”
[Nate Marshall]
It’s not all the customers fault, of course. The market is tough. The income rates don’t match the cost of living for many. In a world of price tags, the decades of wisdom behind “Mom and Pop’s” counter simply aren’t enough to outweigh the financial demands of an increasingly tense and uprooted society. And I’m convinced they (the mysterious ‘they’ who seem to run the show) are fully aware of this world they’ve created. To cushion it, therefore, the market is veiled in aesthetics. And the vast over-connectivity of the internet was the perfect medium for this deception.
Pinterest-inspired home-design inevitably insults the special breed of excellence the master tradesman produces, and damns the customer’s intelligence to the deep abyss of fantasy. The internet transformed the customers expectations (though imaginative customers have always existed). In the sleek photography and impossibly clean floor plans, there screams an implicit (and sometimes explicit) message:
“Out with the Old, in with the New!”
What was, once, can no more be,
The bricks, and tin, and sprays of green,
In strips of color on the white,
the picket fences, soft and bright,
Stuff of legend, stuff of lore,
The buckled, tilted, living, splitting,
Creaking of a hardwood floor,
For these belonged to what once was,
and what was, once, can be no more.
Bricks, Republic and Coup d’etat
In contrast to the ridiculously angular mansions of car commercials, the tradesman’s product is a monument of order and stability. It contains a barely-caged sense of the wild world that preceded it. A wild world that will, eventually reclaim it. The cycle of life succeeds, in the end; houses will come down, or be at last overrun by the old world.
Look at the classic American home, just a few generations ago. Bricks in calculated order, laid in the well-known pattern and rigidly secured in place; a structure of one unit, built of hundreds of individuals - E pluribus unum. A suitable exemplar of the principle of republic. It rises like an iceberg towering and rolling up from an unhinged, grassy sea. And the analogy of republic doesn’t stop there. The home extended to the neighborhood, and to the town, and to the county. Every layer of Place was functionally local, socially diverse, and ordered just above and beyond the front porch swing.
The old house, the old order, is mostly a containment vessel, it turns out. Within and under and around it, wild earth and rain hungrily shift on the house. Weeds grow relentlessly, always needing care, always threatening to swallow the fence-line. The wisteria that devotedly, zealously, persistently grows back after thirty years of pitched warfare with the homeowner sprouts up once again. Feral children and grandchildren flow in and out of its door, playing on a homemade swing set and poking at the wildlife. From the first moment that the house is built, the savage natural world (and the sometimes savage people in it) will beat upon it tirelessly.
So whence comes the origin of the modern aesthetic shift? A number of factors are probably involved, but I suspect that a revolution is underway. A coup d’etat, not just against homeowners, but against the entire world of homes and homebuilders. If I’m right, this revolt now infects the already oversaturated market with its propaganda, slowly building the intellectual architecture it requires from each of us (for its success depends upon customer demand). The revolution requires that the customer be made to desire the poison being offered, or to at least find it financially irresistible.
As even the cost of bricks and baseboard are unaffordable for many, customers have had to make compromises. Land became more expensive, as did wood, labor and permitting. Bricks had to be replaced by vinyl siding. Carpets became cheaper than hardwoods. Custom work had to be replaced by the prefabricated and the plastic. Appliances became more flash, more glitter, and less value, lower quality (yet somehow with more expense). Indeed, EVERY corner of the market has become inflated (especially since the pandemic); this, of course, includes the cost of building a home1. So, in our hopelessness, in our natural desire for peace, we did what we could do - we changed ourselves. We resigned ourselves to different designs, cheaper materials, ‘better’ (more locally suicidal) prices, and we dreamily dazzled the internet with the ideals of the modern home - a shiny new lie to cover up the economy we are all quietly beholden to.
“If indeed a culture enshrines its soul through the things it makes, then we are in deep trouble, for our collective soul is clearly very sick.”
As with so much of our society, our culture is gradually shifting in its political temperament. Representative democracy, once seen as the only reliable route to the protection of individual liberty, has been called into question (both in its reliability and functionality).
Democracy conceptually requires conversation, variety, and (I dare say) localism. Yet some envision a democracy of a more global and liberal sort. Such a community is by nature homogenized, standardized, mass-produced, and vying for social dominance. Adam Smith writes that such is the “kind of community that includes everyone as an abstract individual, and no one as a concrete person”2. Abstract is precisely the right word, I think. Not just for the conception of the oxymoronic “global individual”, but for the international style now so common in urban centers.
Does it seem far-fetched to connect political movement with architecture?
“Democracy’s essence is the people's self-government and autonomy based on their own rights, and its characteristics are demonstrated through equality and participation. If democracy means a more equitable way of public life in architecture, then, this way of life is dependent on the homogenization of the building's spatial structure, with open, transparent, and functionally diverse public spaces.”3
[Xiaohang Hou]
The architectural world -and, incidentally, the trade world- is being democratized. Some cultural force has supervised the aesthetics of the modern mind in this movement from the local to the global. And with this cultural-historical movement, many master craftsmen have been left behind. It turns out that our aging masters, these treasure troves of history and excellence, are chronically local. They can’t help but consider the local culture, environment, temperament, religion and taboos of their own neighborhoods and parishes. A home designed for Norway simply won’t be the same as one designed for Georgia. A structure perfect for the Carolina's won’t be the same as one designed for California. As our dear friend Hadden Turner (another brilliant writer), put it, the “embodiment of place in a product is impossible for the standardised, globalised machine to replicate”. And how could it? Masters are creations of the local family, the local church, the local voter base, and the local economy. They recognize, far better than most, that the first economy in all the world is the one in their childhood home.
“A local tradesman fits their creation to the "particularities" of his or her place; responding to the needs of the locality and drawing upon the availability and limitations of local resources. Their craft is an expression of their particular place and that is why it can be a masterpiece - for there is nothing else quite like it in all the world.”
[Hadden Turner]
Here, Hadden has hit the proverbial nail on the head - a masterpiece is a masterpiece because it is unique! Uniqueness is born of locality, of individuality, and of participation in the inspirational, spiritual work of creation. The globalization of the trades, therefore, is crushing to the local tradesman; it takes his art and cheapens it (both literally and metaphorically).
The world, it turns out, is full of local, natural masterpieces. The Grand Canyon, the Great Barrier Reef, The Aurora Borealis and the Himalayas are made so very special because they are not experiences available to every locality. The master craftsman is no less special, no less local.
As history unfolds, I can’t predict what the future will look like, though I suspect we will discover that the commercial market is more limited than it lets on. Though the old generations of masters are now thin and gray, they are not gone. They still must work for their bread, and still raise up reluctant young men to replace them. The architectural coup d’etat now globally playing out can only go so far in crushing the local soul.
The western church, for centuries, strove to keep its world catholic - rigid doctrine, dogmatic uniformity. But look how the church has evolved! Look at the local beauty in which it thrives and grows, and look at the differences among its many peoples. Tradesmen, like Christians - like people - are not creatures of rigidity, but liberty; we are not products of a world, but of a family, a faith, and a community.
How could our craft be any different?
For the readers pleasure, here’s a short collection of poems on the trades, the neighborhood, and the American lawn!
And finally, here’s a link to my latest project:
https://www.nahb.org/news-and-economics/housing-economics/national-statistics/framing-lumber-prices
https://eyeonhousing.org/2024/02/residential-building-material-price-increase-to-start-2024
https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2024/05/review-of-holston/
https://www.archdaily.com/983939/how-can-architecture-be-democratic
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Such a wonderful piece, making a grand sweep across the trades, philosophy, political thought, economics, architecture - and you have such a lilting, ornate (but not gaudy) prose.
I really enjoyed reading this. And not just because I was generously quoted and linked lol You could remove my bits and it would still be a joy to read.
Fantastic read, sir.
Many people close to me are builders and tradesfolk, and I pretend to dabble in such things myself.
This really hits.