1. The great teacher

    The good teacher imparts a satisfying explanation; the great teacher unsettles, bequeaths disquiet, invites argument.

  2. The categories of good

    We need to turn to a fresh page. We can do so simply by asking—though the answers are anything but simple—what the process of making concrete things reveals to us about ourselves. Learning from things requires us to care about the qualities of cloth or the right way to poach fish; fine cloth or food cooked well enables us to imagine larger categories of 'good'.

  3. The details of construction

    The housing developments in the Moscow suburbs were built mostly in the decades after the Second World War. Laid out as enormous chessboards, the suburbs stretch to the horizon across flat land sparsely planted with birch and aspen. The architectural design of the suburban buildings was good, but the state had not been able to command good-quality work. The signs of poorly motivated workers appeared in the details of construction.

    1. ​Designing detail​

    Good design does not necessarily imply a good product, or good work.

  4. The lure of inspiration

    The lure of inspiration lies in part in the conviction that raw talent can take the place of training.

  5. I don't think you understand

    The physicist Victor Weisskopf once said to his MIT students who worked exclusively with computerized experiments:

    When you show me that result, the computer understands the answer, but I don't think you understand the answer.

  6. Impossibly coherent

    ...what gets lost mentally when screen work replaces physical drawing.

    Drawing in bricks by hand, tedious though the process is, prompts the designer to think about their materiality, to engage with their solidity as against the blank, unmarked space on paper of a window.

    Computer-assisted design impedes the designer in thinking about scale, as opposed to sheet size. The object on-screen can indeed be manipulated so that it is presented, for instance, from the vantage point of someone on the ground, but in this regard CAD is frequently misused: what appears on-screen is impossibly coherent, framed in a unified way that physical sight never is.

  7. Bodily reality

    To do good work means to be curious about, to investigate, and to learn from ambiguity.

    In the Fordist model of medicine, there must be a specific illness to treat, the evaluation of a doctor's performance will then be made by counting the time required to treat as many livers as possible and the number of livers that get well. Because bodily reality doesn't fit well inside this classifying model, and because good treatment has to admit experiment, a not insignificant number of doctors create paper fictions to buy themselves time from the bureaucratic monitors. Doctors in the NHS often assign a patient a disease in order to justify the time spent on exploring a puzzling body.

  8. Awareness and knowledge

    In the higher stages of skill, there is a constant interplay between tacit knowledge and self-conscious awareness, the tacit knowledge serving as an anchor, the explicit awareness serving as critique and corrective.

  9. The journeyman

    The apprentice goldsmith was place-bound while learning how to smelt, purify, and weigh precious metals. These skills required hands-on instruction from his master. Once the apprentice had locally presented his chef d'oeuvre, however, he could move from city to city as a journeyman, responding to opportunities. The traveling goldsmith journeyman made his presentation élevé to the corporate body of master craftsmen in foreign cities. Through his managerial talents and moral behavior he had to convince these strangers that he could become one of them. This migratory dynamism was built into medieval goldsmithing.

    Sedentary guilds, by contrast, appeared to him insert and 'corrupt'. The good master, in his words, "presides over a traveling house."

    Never really thought about the etymology of the term 'journeyman' – literally, someone who journeys in search of new places to refine their craft.

  10. Building generations

    How did the builders of Salisbury Cathedral achieve this astonishing construction? There was no one single architect; the masons had no blueprints. Rather, the gestures with which the building began evolved in principles and were collectively managed over three generations. Each event in building practice became absorbed into the fabric of instructing and regulating the next generation.

    A pattern language in practice.

  11. A thousand little moves

    Missing in these analyses is a reconstruction of the workshops of the master—more precisely, one element that has irretrievably gone missing. This is the absorption into tacit knowledge, unspoken and uncodified in words, that occurred there and became a matter of habit, the thousand little everyday moves that add up in sum to a practice.

    The most significant fact we know about Stradivari's workshop was that he was all over it, popping up unexpectedly everywhere, gathering in and processing those thousand bits of information that could not signify in the same way to assistants who were doing just one part.

  12. Mirror tools

    A mirror-tool is an implement that invites us to think about ourselves. There are two kinds of mirror-tools. These are the replicant and the robot.

  13. A quiet and contented mind

    The Encyclopedia sought to get its readers out of themselves and into the lives of artisan craftsmen in order to clarify good work itself. Throughout, the volumes illustrate people engaged sometimes in dull, sometimes in dangerous, sometimes in complicated labor; the expression on all the faces tends to the same serenity. About these plates the historian Adriano Tilgher remarks on the "sense of peace and calm which flows from all well-regulated, disciplined work done with a quiet and contented mind."

  14. The limits of language

    The question of human limits was posed to Diderot the moment he, as it were, rose from his armchair. His method for finding out how people worked was, like a modern anthropologist, to ask them:

    We addressed ourselves to the most skilled workers in Paris and the kingdom at large. We took the trouble to visit their workshops, to interrogate them, to write under dictation from them, to follow out their ideas, to define, to identify the terms peculiar to their profession.

    The research soon ran into difficulty, because much of the knowledge craftsmen possess is tacit knowledge—people know how to do something but they cannot put what they know into words. Diderot remarked of his investigations: "Among a thousand one will be lucky to find a dozen who are capable of explaining the tools or machinery they use, and the things they produce with any clarity."

    What we can say in words may be more limited than what we can do with things. Language is not an adequate 'mirror-tool' for the physical movements of the human body.

  15. This is how I lived

    Rather than convey "be like me," better parental advice should be more indirect: "This is how I lived" invites the child to reason about that example. Such advice omits "Therefore you should..." Find your own way; innovate rather than imitate.

  16. Entropy

    Imperfect, handmade glass has virtues: these are irregularity, distinctiveness, and what the writer refers to vaguely as 'character'. The two sets of images for glassblowing are thus inseparable; only by understanding how something might be done perfectly is it possible to sense this alternative, an object possessing specificity and character. The bubble or the uneven surface of a piece of glass can be prized, whereas the standard of perfection allows no room either for experiment or for variation.

    There is only one way to be perfect. There are infinite ways to be good.

  17. Seven lamps

    Ruskin's Seven Lamps of Architecture provided seven guides, or 'lamps', for the troubled craftsman, guides for anyone who works directly on material things. These seven are:

    1. The lamp of sacrifice: The willingness to do something well for its own sake.
    2. The lamp of truth: The truth that 'breaks and rents continually'; Ruskin's embrace of difficulty, resistance, and ambiguity.
    3. The lamp of power: Tempered power, guided standards other than blind will.
    4. The lamp of beauty: Which for Ruskin is found more in the detail, the ornament—hand-sized beauty—than in the large design.
    5. The lamp of life: Life equating with struggle and energy, death with deadly perfection.
    6. The lamp of memory: The guidance provided by the time before machinery ruled.
    7. The lamp of obedience: Obedience to the example set by a master's practice rather than by his particular works; otherwise put, strive to be like Stradivari but do not seek to copy his particular violins.
    1. ​125 Best Architecture Books​
  18. I am here

    I am here, in this work.

    A maker's mark is a peculiar sign. Ancient brickwork established presence through small details marking 'it': the detail itself.

    The great historian of bricks, Alex Clifton-Taylor, observes that what most counts about them is their small size, which just suits the human hand laying a brick. A brick wall, he says, "is therefore an aggregation of small effects. This implies a human and intimate quality not present to the same extent in stone architecture."

    1. ​Most cities were mostly built by improvisation​
    2. ​The joy of the humble brick​
  19. Get a grip

    The hand is the window on to the mind. — Immanuel Kant

    American slang advises us to "get a grip"; more generally we speak of "coming to grips with an issue." Both figures reflect the evolutionary dialogue between the hand and the brain.

  20. Sublime tools

    Getting better at using tools comes to us, in part, when the tools challenge us, and this challenge often occurs just because the tools are not fit-for-purpose. In both creation and repair, the challenge can be met by adapting the form of a tool, or improvising with it as it is, using it in ways it was not meant for.

    The all-purpose tool seems a special case. In its sheer variety, a flat-edged screwdriver admits all manner of unfathomed possibilities; it, too, can expand our skills if only our imagination rises to the occasion. Without hesitation, the flat-edged screwdriver can be described as sublime—the word sublime standing, as it does in philosophy and the arts, for the potently strange.

  21. Crafting repair

    Repair is a neglected, poorly understood, but all-important aspect of technical craftsmanship. The sociologist Douglas Harper believes that making and repairing form a single whole; he writes of those who do both that they possess the "knowledge that allows them to see beyond the elements of a technique to its overall purpose and coherence. This knowledge is the 'live intelligence, fallibly attuned to the actual circumstances' of life. It is the knowledge in which making and fixing are parts of a continuum."

    Put simply, it is by fixing things that we often get to understand how they work.

    1. ​Its place in the web of nature​
  22. When history moves on

    Much twentieth-century urban planning proceeded on the principle: demolish all you can, grade it flat, and then build from scratch. The existing environment has been seen as standing in the way of the planner's will. This aggressive recipe has frequently proved disastrous, destroying many viable buildings as well as ways of life bedded into urban fabric. The replacements for these destroyed buildings have also, too often, proved worse: big projects suffer from overdetermined, fit-for-purpose form; when history moves on, as it always does, tightly defined buildings can soon become obsolete.

  23. Details first

    The identification a good craftsman produces is selective, that of finding the most forgiving element in a difficult situation. Often this element is smaller, and so seems less important, than the larger challenge. It is an error in technical as in artistic work to deal first with the big difficulties and then clean up the details; good work often proceeds in just the opposite fashion.

  24. Walls and membranes

    All living things contain two sites of resistance. These are cell walls and cell membranes. The cell wall is more purely exclusionary – a boundary; the membrane permits more fluid and solid exchange – a border.

    Most pervasive in the modern city is the inert boundary established by highway traffic, cutting off parts of the city from each other. Working with resistance means, in urbanism, converting boundaries into borders.

  25. The ground plane

    Whereas Corbusier relegated streets to traffic functions, the ground plane represented to Van Eyck the realm in which people 'learn' cities. The placement of benches and bollards, the height of stepping-stones, the ill-defined separations of sand, grass, and water are all tools in that learning, an education in ambiguity.

    1. ​If children are transferred from a lively city street​

    The best way to see a city, to understand it, is on your feet. Not on a tour bus.

  26. Most cities were mostly built by improvisation

    In Architecture Without Architects, Bernard Rudofsky documented the ways in which most cities were mostly built by improvisation, following no consistent formal design. Building was added to building, street to street, their forms adapting to different site conditions in the process of extension.

    Rudofsky thought that this hidden order is how most settlements of poor people develop and that the work of improvising street order attaches people to their communities, whereas 'renewal' projects, which may provide a cleaner street, pretty houses, and large shops, give the inhabitants no way to mark their presence on the space.

    1. ​I am here​
    2. ​Non-architects​
  27. Oddity and peculiarity

    The experienced doctor, as one would expect, is a more accurate diagnostician. This is due in large part to the fact that he or she tends to be more open to oddity and peculiarity in patients, whereas the medical student is more likely to be a formalist, working by the book, rather rigidly applying general rules to particular cases.

  28. Relentlessness deformed it

    I am not interested in erecting a building, but in presenting to myself the foundations of all possible buildings. — Ludwig Wittgenstein.

    But in a note of 1940 to himself he wrote that the building "lacks health" or "primordial life".

    In the construction of a house for his sister in the Kundmangasse, Wittgenstein's striving for an ideal perfection rendered the object lifeless. Relentlessness deformed it.

  29. Necessity

    Loos's need to respond positively to the difficulties he encountered appeared in the errors that occurred during the construction of the Villa Moller. When the foundations were not laid as specified, he could not afford to dig them up and start again; instead, Loos thickened the form of one side wall to accommodate the mistake, making the thickened wall and emphatic side frame for the front. The formally pure properties of Villa Moller were achieved by working with many similar mistakes and impediments Loos had to take as facts on the ground; necessity stimulated his sense of form. Wittgenstein, knowing no financial necessity, had no such creative dialogue between form and error.

  30. The narrative of its making

    Getting things in perfect shape can mean removing the traces, erasing the evidence, of a work in progress. Once this evidence is eliminated, the object appears pristine. Perfection of this cleaned-up sort is a static condition; the object does not hint at the narrative of its making.

  31. The good craftsman

    The good craftsman...

    ...understands the importance of the sketch—that is, not knowing quite what you are about when you begin.
    ...places positive value on contingency and constraint.
    ...needs to avoid pursuing a problem relentlessly to the point that is becomes perfectly self-contained.
    ...avoids perfectionism that can degrade into a self-conscious demonstration.
    ...learns when it is time to stop.

  32. To do just one thing well

    The skills society is bulldozing the career path; jobs in the old sense of random movement now prevail; people are meant to deploy a portfolio of skills rather than nurture a single ability in the course of their working histories; this succession of projects or tasks erodes belief that one is meant to do just one thing well.

  33. Manual labor

    Artisanal craftsmen have proved particularly promising subjects for job retraining. The discipline required for good manual labor serves them, as does their focus on concrete problems rather than on the flux of process-based, human relations work. For this very reason it has proved easier to train a plumber to become a computer programmer than to train a salesperson; the plumber has craft habit and material focus, which serve retraining. Employers don't often see this opportunity because they equate manual routine with mindless labor.

    1. ​Making coal miners into programmers​
  34. Multiple choice

    Intuitive leaps that open up a problem are impossible to test using multiple-choice questions. These leaps are an exercise of associating unlikely elements. There is no correct answer to the question "Are city streets like arteries and veins?"

  35. Hephaestus

    Hephaestus in ‘Vulcan forging the Thunderbolts of Jupiter’ (1636-1638) by Peter Paul Rubens.

    The clubfooted Hephaestus, proud of his work if not of himself, is the most dignified person we can become.