Jeremy Wayne Tate, who regularly posts thought-provoking tweets on culture, posted the following observation:
My father-in-law is a builder. It is difficult to get his attention in a magnificent space because he is lost in wonder. We were in a cathedral together years ago and I asked him what it would cost to build it today. I will never forget his answer… “We can’t, we don’t know how to do it.”
I was very intrigued by this as my father also used to be a builder (bricklayer) up until his retirement. And this tweet reminded me of what architecture requires; how it requires pain, sweat, and even death.
So, on this Father's Day, an appreciative post on architecture and the labor that makes it happen (see this Twitter thread for a shorter version).
Whenever my father saw very intricate architectural structures like the cathedral ceiling that Tate linked to, he'd wince and say "So much work!" Anything this complex meant working to a much tighter deadline with less room for contingencies as the companies he worked for did not take sufficiently into account how much longer fine work like this take.
One time, we were visiting a cathedral in my home city of Ghent (Belgium) together with a friend of my father, an engineer who designed gluing materials. The friend looked up at the ceiling and the walls and the intricate stained glass, and asked him what he thought of it, being a builder.
My father replied the usual, “So much work.”
“But don't you stand in awe of all that beauty? Can't you appreciate it? You know more than me what it takes,” the friend replied, taken aback.
My father said, “It's well done, for sure, but I just think of the work and the deadline. I don't envy these people!"
At the time, I was about twelve years old and very interested in art. I was disappointed in my father. I thought that, unlike these refined middle-class people, he could not appreciate beauty.
But now, I understand his consistent denial of the beauty of intricate architecture. We tend to see the end product, but we forget the process and the price workers pay for this. The price is pain, sweat, disability, and even death.
When I think back of our childhood, I mostly remember my father leaving in the morning at 5 AM (long before we got up, I rarely knew him to leave), with a fantastically large lunchbox filled with sandwiches (you need a lot of energy for this job). In the evening he would often come home late, as he also went socializing in bars with his co-workers (this steady consumption of cigarettes and alcohol also took its toll). He would have dinner, which my mother had prepared, and then he would sink inside the sofa, very tired, and watch TV.
The image of my father fixed in my mind is one of perpetual exhaustion. At age forty, he had to see a specialist for persistent back pain. The specialist said "your back looks like that of a 65-year-old. You really need to do something else to spare your body.” But it was not easy to shift jobs. He tried to pivot to fork truck lifting but did not succeed in the exam. As a foreigner with Dutch as a second language and no high school diploma, finding a job that was physically less exerting was not easy, to say the least.
He was the breadwinner of our family. There was always a strong push for my sister and me to excel at studying, as this was the working-class ticket out of manual labor. It wasn't easy because Belgian education was quite racist at the time, so my sister and me had to prove ourselves double. Fortunately, he is now retired (which he did at the age of 60, which seems young but is not for a job like this) but he has multiple health issues as a direct result of the job.
Ghent, the city I grew up in, had lots of interesting architecture in different styles, from Medieval to Art Nouveau to more modern styles. I would sometimes ask my father how it was done.
My father always at least had some idea of how it was done, and how these works could be achieved with a relative low level of technology, where to put the scaffolding, and how many men would work at a time, and how much time would be typically involved in a job like that (probably he underestimated this as earlier architecture had fewer ready-made parts).
My father was involved in several renovation projects. He would often say how renovation is difficult work that is less fun and slower to do than to build from scratch. Here are some images of the restored St Peter's Station in Ghent (the part he was involved in completed in 1998). All that beautiful stone differentiation, both inside and out, was so much work. And it was done by artisans, skilled people who knew what they were doing.
Fortunately, Belgium has strong health and safety regulations. Nevertheless, when you see old magnificent buildings, you can be 100% sure that people got severely injured and others died in the process. My father witnessed two of his colleagues die while working. One person fell from a great height died and instantly on the scene, another person got crushed by some machine. My father came home in shock and clearly upset. There was no psychological counseling, nothing except us and his colleagues to commiserate (I tried to look up these accidents to try to find when this happened, but this sort of accident is so unimportant that there is no online trace).
Once my father got a heavy beam on his head giving him a head injury and lingering headaches for many years. On several occasions, fingers and limbs were crushed... I have seen things, it's not pretty. Think about that when you see those beautiful buildings (or any buildings!)
We may look at great buildings of the past and then conclude, as Tate does (at least implies), that people in the past were better, more skilled, just overall greater than we are now. But one thing these conversations have helped to make me think is that there is great continuity between those builders of the past, and builders today. They were not mindless automata but skilled artisans with a good understanding of how architecture works. Yes, the understanding of a builder is different from an architect but it is skill and knowledge.
My father would sometimes curse architects, "Don't they know how things are actually built!” Or conversely he would say, appreciatively, about a new project "This is an architect who understands masonry. It's going to be smooth."
So on this father's day, I want to remember and be proud of all the beautiful works my father made and that you can still see in Ghent. For example, he was involved in the renovation of the Opera House in Ghent. I see meanwhile it will need to be renovated again and works will start next year, this is a perennial issue with old buildings. Each renovation is a compromise between authenticity, functionality, and changing demands of standards for safety and security in buildings.
We got tickets to the opera for our family when the job was completed (so thoughtful of Ghent opera), but unfortunately, my father didn't want to go and felt out of place. I was heavily disappointed. This brings me to another element of the builders that is not appreciated. They make all this beautiful work (and note, you cannot automate most of it, all that stone differentiation is manual and requires great skill). They made buildings they often could not enjoy.
There are all sorts of class and other barriers that prevented and prevent working-class folk from enjoying the fruits of their labor. So, at the very least when we enjoy beautiful buildings, including century-old cathedrals, spare a thought for the builders.
There's a line of thought (Ruskin in English) that sees something socially virtuous in this kind of demonstratively handmade architecture, particularly in the Gothic models. In his weird Romantic reading, the continuity of craft between the fine masonry and the grand proportions reflects an organic society, with a unanimity of feeling organized by religion and social hierarchy, etc. But your father's story suggests there may have been just as much "alienation" in that social world -- we don't need to read the carving of the grotesques etc. as a sincere expression by the craftsmen.