Nurturing Skill

I have been reading a book on small houses by Ernest Flagg, "Flagg's Small Houses, Their Economic Design and Construction, 1922". It is a fascinating book, at first for the drawings, and second for the proposition in the text, of an architect's world, entirely self contained, which, in addition to drawing and writing about, he seems to have made real, on Staten Island.

The premise is at best local, if not entirely delusional, in that his idea of "economic" differs from "economical" in its current usage today. His conception of small refers to architectural scale, rather than total size, and these houses are run by servants, so the economies talked about are not economies of necessity.

The drawings are amazing, in their penmanship, their layout, method of scaling, and conceptual completeness. The conceptual completeness hides that there are any number of geometric difficulties with the 3 dimensional forms as they are drawn in some of the designs, but the idea of altering the way residential design is presented on one sheet of paper, as a complete and large idea, able to be taken and built with all its architectural planning issues resolved is wonderful to see.

The drawings are schematic in their design, but the text of the book describes the method of thinking about their planning, construction and use. Seeing the whole together, they form a complete idea of houses which are tied to their culture and time as well as their site. Flagg presents his idea as somehow universal, although all the designs are planned for a single development on Staten Island.

Flagg designed these houses to have exterior walls made of a stone and concrete composite, where the stone facing was positioned inside a slip form as the concrete which would lock it in place was poured behind them. He made a point of describing the labor used to set the stones in the form as unskilled labor. The only consideration he stipulated as important was that the flattest side of the stone be placed against the face of the form. The resulting locked stone face would be pointed, assumably by more skilled workmen, although he minimized the difficulty, even of this step.

I have used a similar system to his, in my library project in Burdett, to make the rubble exterior walls. The difference was that my walls did not have any human arrangement to the material as it was put into the forms. Mine had some of the same intent as his; to reduce the construction time and to permit me to build the walls with people who did not have any of the necessary building skills before they started on the project. The people who helped me became skilled in this process as the walls progressed, just as Flagg's people must have become quite good at building his stone walls.

I do wonder about the motivation of reducing tasks in building to the point where they require only minimal skill. Is it to be able to govern the workers with minimal oversight? Is it to compress all needed knowledge into an amount that can be held by one or a couple capable persons, to be doled out as necessary to people who are not invited to to become connected with their work?

I think that the role of the architect in building is to be a repository for building methods and their reason, and that workers of general knowledge and skill in building should be employed to make particular buildings. The architect should be able to coach the workers to enhance their general skill to particular ones, to realise a well-built building while maintaining and enhancing the body of skills in the working population for the future. Stinginess in employing knowledge is a  false economy.