Met History wrote:

> In a message dated 1/7/2005 12:49:30 PM Eastern Standard Time,
> [log in to unmask] writes:
>
>     For that you are required to get an Architect...and an interior
>     designer...maybe a flourist too.
>
> anyway, i am not focussed on why we "have" to get an architect (if we
> do); it is why we feel the need to hire an architect. c

c,

Try this book for an answer.

][<

 From Craft to Profession: The Practice of Architecture in
Nineteenth-Century America, by Mary N. Woods. University of California
Press, Berkeley, 1999. 265 pages. $50.00.

“Accounts of building collapses caused by the shoddy work of
unscrupulous builders and speculators filled the pages of the first
professional architectural journals. The subtext was the promotion of
the architectural profession as the only safeguard against incidents
like the collapse of a Massachusetts mill in the 1860s where the builder
had used sand rather than mortar.” (p 150)

Despite the use of the word craft in the title, From Craft to Profession
has very little to do with the means and methods of building – it has to
do with the craft of being an architect, a history of architecture as a
working profession in America. If you are curious as to how architecture
became a profession, and how the practice of architecture moved from
master builder, craft artisan, and single practitioner to collaborative
offices with a complex division of roles between design and business
administration, then this is a meticulously detailed, smooth reading,
and enlightening study revealing day-to-day operations, and struggles,
in the seemingly schizophrenic goal of individuals to distinguish
themselves as architects… let alone as professionals, as opposed to
enlightened brick masons or pencil-mad carpenters.

In one bias it is a story of how artisan builders with a mix of
intellectual aesthetics and class hubris attempted to distinguish and
separate themselves from the artisan builders that they in fact were – a
case study in niche marketing. On the early history of the AIA, “Only
one institution founder, Karl Reichardt, had any formal training in
architecture. Several men had office training, but the majority were
former master builders educated through craft apprenticeships.” (p 32)
Which goes to the maxim that the world belongs to those who invent it,
or, at least, to any of them that can get away with claiming that they do.

Ms. Woods, an architectural historian and Associate Professor of
Architecture at Cornell University, is scrupulous in her collection of
interesting and practical details that lend to portray the relationship
between craft and design, “In Upjohn’s mid-century office, copies were
made from inked drawings by placing two or three sheets underneath the
original and then pricking it with a pin. The draftsman used these
pinpricks as guides for the copies.” (p 139) And the reader is left to
speculate on the effect this hand practice of copying, as opposed to the
contemporary replication of digital 3-D space through laser scanning,
had then upon the design and construction of buildings, buildings now to
be restored. Not only was design regulated by the arc of a pencil, but
by the ability to prick the design through several layers of paper and
to have a memory, and the time free of distractions to remember, the
original motions of an arm in drawing the new environment.

Considering the number of preservation architects, and I am not an
architect but a builder who uses mortar on occasion, that lament their
lack of hands-on training, it is instructive to realize that at one time
there were in America acceptable ideas as to alternate educational
pathways, “Tuskegee, founded in 1881, stressed learning by doing as well
as studying. Students raised their food on the campus model farm, made
bricks at the campus brick kiln, helped with campus housekeeping and
maintenance, and constructed campus buildings.” (p 73) We can see in
 From Craft to Profession where in our past the ebb and flow of the
relationship between the building arts and the design professions come
close to each other and as mysteriously pull away, as if effected by the
strains of an outside moon – most often for reasons of harsh economy and
the necessity of individuals to survive.

All-in-all From Craft to Profession, though focused on a history of
architectural practice, provides a context from which to view movements
within the current industry of historic preservation. This book is a
sourcebook for the developing professionalism of architectural
conservators and the preservation trades, as well, it provides
reinforcement and depth of understanding to the preservation architect
against feeling the need to make new that which is old.

Ken Follett, book review that appeared in APT Bulletin, I do not
remember the vol or date

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