Philip Bess, Toward a Renewed Culture of Building (via FPR)

But what of your own lives as craftsmen and craftswomen? The future is unavoidably uncertain, but I think you can take comfort in the knowledge that good traditional building practices promote a number of inter-related goods: environmental, economic, moral, philosophical, urban, and spiritual. Allow me to elaborate.

There are environmental goods that follow from building traditionally. “Sustainability” is today’s buzz-word, but the most sustainable thing architects and builders can do is to make durable buildings that together make walkable, mixed-use towns and cities. Traditional buildings are durable in part owing to the quality of craftsmanship with which they are made, and in part owing to the materials out of which they are made—materials typically close to the condition in which they have been taken directly from the earth: stone, clay, wood, lime, sand, metals. These are the pre-modern low-embodied energy material elements of your respective crafts, and most people recognize that these materials—being from the earth and in something close to their natural material condition—when transformed and properly employed and maintained will both endure over time and will look good doing so. And when these building materials come from local rather than distant sources, the long-term sustainability of the built environment is enhanced even further.

There are economic goods that follow from building traditionally. Setting aside the macro-benefits of being an integral part of a complex society of production and exchange, simply at a micro-level both the skills and the work habits you possess will be always in demand in one way or another, at one scale or another. We may be facing economic hard times of indefinite length, but as traditional craftsmen, you are far better prepared than most to survive and even flourish in such an economic environment. This is no small point.

Here’s something you may not have thought about: there are moral goods that follow from practicing the traditional building arts. Practices such as yours are incubators of moral virtue, because they embody shared standards of excellence to which both practitioners and would-be practitioners aspire. As a novice being initiated into a practice, becoming a successful participant in that practice requires you to develop moral virtues such as honesty, courage, justice and prudential judgment. If you do not develop these character virtues, it will be impossible for you to succeed in your practice, not least because learning the requisite skills requires the exercise of such virtues. Don’t misunderstand: being a good person requires much more than being a good craftsman. But there is honor among craftsmen, and becoming a good craftsman necessarily entails acquiring certain virtues also essential to becoming a good person.

There are philosophical goods that follow from building traditionally, because when you fashion iron or carve stone, lay a foundation or plaster a wall, erect a timber frame or square up an opening, you have no time for and no interest in modern philosophy. Traditional builders instead naturally incline to Aristotelian metaphysical realism, and disincline to subjectivist notions of truth and beauty, which is the ideology of people unacquainted with craftsmanship and its full implications. You, however, know that matter is real; you know and respect its properties; you know what good work is. You know something true about the world.

There are urban goods that typically follow from building traditionally. As traditional builders in a world of slapdash construction, you few are a community unto yourselves. At the same time however, you are members of a larger community, for whom you are builders and makers of places. We call these built places towns and cities; and traditional builders typically come to acquire certain characteristics common to persons who live in towns and cities. The Greek word for city is polis, and Latin doubles down with the words civitas and urbs. Though the etymology is sometimes direct and sometimes indirect, it helps explain why those who live closely together in cities develop sophisticated divisions of labor that include not only builders and architects, but also police, why in their encounters with others city-dwellers are typically polite, why in both their shoes and manners residents of cities are polished, why city-dwellers are in fact civilized, and sometimes even urbane.

Finally, there are spiritual goods that follow from building traditionally. Notwithstanding the mundane purposes that good buildings satisfy, the highest purpose of the building arts is beauty. What can one say objectively about beauty in a culture where it is widely taken for granted that beauty is subjective? Whether painting or photography or music or sculpture or buildings, our encounter with something beautiful pleases us almost instantly. We have an intuitive understanding that beautiful things are well made; were they not, we would not understand them to be beautiful. Beautiful things somehow both embody clearly and reveal the essence of the thing they are. Beautiful things appear to us complete; we would never think of changing them, and they could not be altered but for the worse. Beautiful things not only attract us, they make us grateful. Beautiful things judge us; they change us, and make us want to be better than we are. Beautiful things elevate us.