Craftspeople were trained by masters in a time-honoured and orderly way. They started as apprentices, learned enough to become journeymen (sorry but journeypeople isn't a word) at which time they were expected to gain knowledge through travel. Hence the name. This practice is still used in some parts of the world; carpenters in Germany are expected to travel for at least a year before they can become masters. They also have a customary costume so they are easy to identify when you see one working in North America. When the rank of master is attained, they become eligible for membership in their guild and start taking on apprentices of their own. The amount and sophistication of knowledge that is carried and maintained in this way is astonishing. I studied (all too briefly) under a master who had apprenticed in Germany after the war. His father, also his master, knew all their tools would be smashed or stolen when the allied armies captured their town so they hid one plane iron, one chisel, and one saw. From those three tools they were able, with the help of a blacksmith, to rebuild all the tools necessary for them to practice their profession and began rebuilding their town. This guy could make anything with the simplest tools; he was awesome. He was also a great teacher. Every day I worked with him I heard the same things, "Why would you do it like that?" and "Always with you the most difficult way!" He criticized everything I did and the closest he came to a compliment was, "Satisfactory, I suppose."
I might make him sound like a hard-case impossible to work for but it was the opposite. Since I knew he could fix any mistake I made and would never approve of anything I did, I had no fear of trying new things. When I messed up, or got myself into a difficult situation, I'd hear, "Why would you do it like that?" and he'd show me the next step. I think he liked me because I appreciated the old way of doing things and took extremely good care of my tools. He might have thought I was a jerk. It didn't make any difference; his job was to teach me, not to be my friend. I have very few regrets in life (a kind of predisposition not an indication I have had a blameless and perfect existence) but one is I blew my back before I completed my apprenticeship. 2 or 3 more years with him, plus another 20 or 30 years of working constantly on improving my skills, and I might have become as skilled as he is. Then I could have started working with apprentices of my own.
The world doesn't work that way anymore. I read part of the instruction manual printed by the Cabinetmakers Guild in England around 1800. The first page instructs apprentices to cut several hundred board feet of choice timber and stack it in a specified manner so that, 10 or 12 years later when they are competent to start using it, the lumber will be "seasoned" and ready for them. Now a Cabinetmaker's ticket takes 6 semesters of classroom experience and 3000 hours of on the job training. 3 1/2 years. Most of it spent at a table saw or a shaper. Those people who are trying to keep traditional ways of doing things, that immense pool of knowledge compiled over thousands of years, alive do so at a substantial financial penalty to themselves. If they are lucky, they find a few collectors who will pay for the time it takes to make beautiful things that will last a lifetime. Most wind up working another job to sustain themselves. But since furniture is, even at its very best, a relatively inexpensive proposition, they have a better chance of maintaining their skills than most other trades. Even an expensive piece of furniture is cheap next to a building.
I remember a case in my hometown, London Ontario, of a restoration of a building on the Campus of the University of Western Ontario. The building was of stone, in a style common for prestige buildings at the time it was completed. There was no masons in Canada capable of handling that kind of stonework - ubiquitous across the province and the country only 150 years earlier. Specialist were flown in from Ireland, at great cost, and public outcry, to complete the restoration.
So, the sum of human knowledge has been growing continuously, minus a few notable set-backs, for 6000 years until the last century. We have been losing skills at an astonishing rate in the last hundred years. In the last 50 years we have lost the last generation of tradespeople trained to do things that would have been considered basic at any time in the previous 5 millennia. Every mason could lay an arch with brick for at least the last 3000 years. Really fancy ones with complex geometries got popular in Europe about 1000 years ago. Try getting a mason to do it now. And I'm not bad mouthing masons; I may not care overmuch for the organization but as a trade they are top notch. Check out this list for examples of architecture and construction we can't achieve anymore.
Try finding someone who can carve stone or a good waller (someone who can make a wall by stacking stones without mortar). Take a look at any prestigious building more than 200 years old and count the things we are no longer capable of doing.
It isn't just prestige buildings we are losing the ability to make. My father was a tool and die maker. He was also the person who started teaching me about making things. To a tool and die maker, cabinetry is kind of a joke. They work by the rule of ten, I worked by the business card. To me, a joint was tight enough if I couldn't fit a business card in any of the gaps (this was when I was just starting out). To my father, plus 0 minus 1/1000th of an inch was a reasonable tolerance. A human hair is 3/1000ths. And the rule of ten is "The tool made to make a part must be ten times more accurate than the part. The instrument used to check the tool must be ten times as accurate as the tool." So at that point you are working with tolerances that required their own system of measurement. The guys who taught him could make things of extraordinary accuracy by hand, judging by touch and by eye. It sounded super-human to me and it still does but I have never questioned the fact of it. The ability to tell if a steel plate is flat to within 1/3rd of a human hair just but touching or looking at it is of questionable relevance but it leads me to wonder what else we have lost and what we were once capable of.
I'm going to sound like a grumpy old bastard for a second here but my experience is these days people don't really give a fuck when it comes to building things. When I visited the American Folk Art Museum (a wonderful building in NYC with its fate currently undecided but possibly subject to immanent demolition) the architect I was touring it with wondered aloud how the contractors possibly got concrete that good in North America. Good concrete shouldn't be too much to ask for a high prestige building in North America's first city but it is. Tadao Ando used to keep two separate concrete crews competing against each other - that's how he got such consistently fantastic concrete. But that's Japan and they have a very different ethic about craft than we do.
I don't know how to end this. Part of me wants to beg and plead everyone to stop buying shit from big retailers like Ikea and, instead, invest in heirloom quality pieces by people who actually know what they are doing. But how can I say that seriously to people who live in a city where you have earn enough to be in the top 10% of all Canadian households just to afford a "normal" house? For most of the people I know, extravagance is a dinner in a restaurant with linen rather than paper. They can't drop $10K on a piece of furniture. So I suppose this is nothing but a lament. I believe skill deserves to be celebrated. I believe you should never reach a point when you stop getting better at what you do. And I believe all the systems, all the organizations, all the efficiency experts who have somehow conspired to leave me in the minority are wrong and dangerously so. Wrongerous or dangeroung. Or something.
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