The Craftsman, page 23
Modern capitalism began, Lewis Mumford has argued, in the act of systematically colonizing the ground. Networks of mines provided the coal that fueled the steam engine; the steam engine in turn begat mass transport and mass manufacturing.2 The technology of tunneling enabled modern sanitation systems, underground pipes diminishing the scourge of plague, and so helping to increase the population. The underground realm below cities remains today as important as in the past; tunnels now house the fiber-optic cables that exploit the resources of digital communication.
Modern mining technology derived originally from the bodily revelations of the scalpel. Andreas Vesalius, the doctor in Brussels who founded modern dissection, published De humani corporis fabrica in 1533. In 1540 modern technology for working belowground was codified in Vannoccio Biringuccio’s Pirotechnia, a treatise that urged its readers to think like Vesalius, using mining techniques that lifted plates of stone or stripped back strata of earth rather than simply chopping through them.3 Working in this way, Biringuccio argued, would follow the path of least resistance in going underground.
The end of the eighteenth century marks the time when planners felt it imperative to apply these mining principles to the realm under urban ground. The expansion of cities made it clear that transporting clean water and removing excrement required tunnels of a size that exceeded those of the ancient Roman city. More, the planners intuited that people might be moved around the city more rapidly underground than was possible on the tangle of surface streets. In London, though, the earth was an unstable mud mass; eighteenth-century techniques used to mine coal would not quite serve. Moreover, tidal pressure on the London mud mass meant that the timber supports used in hard rock or coalmines could not stabilize even relatively solid sectors of the earth. Renaissance Venice offered to eighteenth-century builders in London some insight into how pilings could float warehouses above mud–but not how to inhabit the mud itself.
Could these underground resistances be overcome? The engineer Marc Isambard Brunel had an answer. He had at age twenty-four left France for Britain in 1793 and sired the even more illustrious engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel. The Brunels treated natural resistance as their enemy, and tried to defeat it, when in 1826 father and son sought to construct a road tunnel under the Thames River, east of the Tower of London.4
The elder Brunel concocted a mobile metal house that allowed workers to build a brick-lined tunnel as the metal house moved forward. The house consisted of three linked iron chambers, each roughly a yard wide and seven yards tall, each pushed forward by a large screw-turn at its base. Within each compartment, men laid the brick sides, bottoms, and tops of the tunnel as the house advanced; behind the men in the front room came a larger army of masons to thicken and reinforce the new walls. On the advancing wall of the house, small slits in the metal allowed mud to seep through, relieving forward pressure; more men carried this mud away.
Struggling against, rather than working with, mud and water, they worked poorly. In a day, the underground house could advance only about ten inches along the tunnel’s four-hundred-yard path. As well as slow, the shield was fragile; it lay about five yards below the bed of the Thames, so that unusual tidal pressures could crack the first layer of walling, and indeed many workers died in the compartments when this occurred. Work stopped temporarily in 1835. The Brunels were, however, nothing if not determined. In 1836 Brunel père reconfigured the screw mechanism pushing the shield forward, and the tunnel was completed in 1841 (it opened officially in 1843). Fifteen years had been required to advance the four hundred yards underground.5
We owe to the younger Brunel everything from the invention of pneumatic caissons for bridges to iron-cage ships to the creation of efficient railroad carriages. The picture many people know of him is a photograph in which he poses, cigar in hand, top hat tipped back, slightly crouching as if ready to spring, against a background of massive chains hanging from the great iron-sided ship he created. It is the image of a heroic fighter, a conqueror, overcoming whatever stands in his path. But in his case, aggressive combat proved inefficient.
In the wake of the Brunels, others succeeded by working with water and mud pressure rather than fighting against it. This happened in a tunnel under the Thames built in 1869, safely and in little more than eleven months. In place of the Brunels’ flat wall, Peter Barlow and James Greathead designed a snub-nosed structure, its rounded surface more easily pushing into the mud. The tunnel was also smaller, a yard wide and only two and a half yards high, the size calculated in terms of tidal pressures–a reckoning lacking in the Brunels’ giant underground fortress. The new ovoid construction made use of cast-iron tubing rather than bricks for the tunnel structure. The rings of cast-iron were bolted together as excavation proceeded, the tube shape diffusing surface pressure. Practical results followed quickly; by magnifying the same ovoid tube-shape, new engineering made possible the beginnings of the Underground transport network in London.
The tubular form may seem self-evident technically, yet the Victorians didn’t grasp its human implications. They labeled the new solution the “Greathead shield,” generously crediting the junior partner; the moniker misleads because a shield still suggests a weapon in battle. It is certainly true, as defenders of the Brunels said in the 1870s, that without their initial example the alternative of Barlow and Greathead would never have come into being. Which is the point. Seeing that arbitrary imposition worked poorly, the engineers who came after the Brunels reimagined the task. The Brunels fought, Greathead worked with, resistance underground.
This passage in engineering history raises first of all a problem in psychology that, like a cobweb, needs to be swept away. A classic proposition in psychology has been that resistance begets frustration and, taken a step further, that frustration begets anger. Here is the impulse to smash to bits the pieces in a do-it-yourself kit that don’t fit together. In the jargon of the social sciences, this is the “frustration-aggression syndrome.” Mary Shelley’s Creature embodies the syndrome even more violently; her Creature is driven to kill by frustrated love. The connection ultimately linking frustration to violent behavior seems good common sense; it is common sense, but it does not make good sense.
The frustration-aggression syndrome derives from the reflections of nineteenth-century observers, notably Gustave Le Bon, on revolutionary crowds.6 Le Bon set aside the specifics of political grievance and emphasized the fact that pent-up frustrations swell the numbers of people in crowds. Unable to discharge its anger through formal political channels, the crowd’s growing frustration becomes like charging a battery; at a certain moment, the crowd releases this energy through violence.
Our engineering example makes clear why the behavior Le Bon observed in crowds is not an apt model for labor. The Brunels, Barlow, and Greathead all had a high tolerance for frustration in their work. The psychologist Leon Festinger explored such toleration of frustration, under laboratory conditions, by observing animals exposed to prolonged frustration; he found that rats and pigeons, just like engineers, often became adept at sustaining frustration rather than going berserk; the animals organized their behavior to make do, that is, at least temporarily, without gratification. Festinger’s observations drew on earlier researches by Gregory Bateson on the toleration of “double-binds,” frustrations from which there is no exit.7 And a recent experiment with young people who are shown true answers to questions they have first answered falsely presents another side of tolerating frustration; they will sometimes continue to probe and poke at alternative methods or solutions even though they are now presented with the correct answer. Not surprising: they want in these instances to understand why they got the answer wrong.
Certainly the mental machine can grind to a halt when faced with too much resistance, or for too long, or resistance that admits of no investigation. Any of these conditions might well induce a person to give up. Are there then skills that allow people to dwell, and productively dwell, in frustration? Three skills stand out.
The first draws on the reformatting that can inaugurate a leap of imagination. Barlow records that he imagined himself swimming across the Thames (a revolting thought in that age of untreated sewage). He then imagined what inanimate shape would most resemble his body: his body was more like a tube than a box. This is an anthropomorphic assist to reformatting, and it resembles the human investment we noted in honest bricks–but with the difference that the assist here aims at problem solving. The problem is recast with, as it were, different protagonists, a swimmer instead of a channel in water. Henry Petroski makes Barlow’s point much more largely: without recasting resistance, many strictly defined problems remained impossible for the engineer.8
This skill differs from the detective work of tracing an error back to its source. Recasting a problem with a different protagonist is a technique to be employed when that detective work reaches a dead end. At the piano we do something akin physically to what Barlow did mentally when, faced with an intractably difficult chord in one hand, we play it with the other; a change in the fingers used to make the chord, a different hand-protagonist, often provides insight into the problem; frustration is then relieved. Again, this productive address to resistance could be likened to making a literary translation; though much can be lost in moving from one language to another, meanings can also be found in translation.
The second response to resistance concerns patience. The frequently noted patience of good craftsmen signals a capacity to stay with frustrating work, and patience in the form of sustained concentration, we have seen in Chapter 5, is a learned skill that can expand in time. But Brunel was also patient, or at least determined, over many years. Here a rule can be formulated, opposite in character to the frustration-aggression syndrome: when something takes longer than you expect, stop fighting it. This rule operated in the pigeon maze Festinger contrived in his laboratory. At first the disoriented pigeons banged against the plastic walls of the maze, but as the birds proceeded further, they stopped attacking the walls even though they remained confused; they trudged more composedly forward, still not knowing where they were going. But this rule is not quite as simple as it seems.
The difficulty lies in judging time. If a difficulty lasts, one alternative to giving up is to reorient one’s expectations. In most work we estimate how long it will take; resistance obliges us to revise. The error might seem that of imagining we could accomplish a task quickly, but the wrinkle is that we have to fail consistently to make this revision–or so it seemed to the author of The Art of Archery. The Zen master offers his counsel to stop fighting specifically to that neophyte who fails again and again to hit the target. The patience of a craftsman can thus be defined as: the temporary suspension of the desire for closure.
From which follows a third skill in working with resistance that I am somewhat embarrassed to state baldly: identify with the resistance. This might seem a vacuous principle, suggesting that to cope with a dog that wants to bite, think like a dog. But in craftwork, identification has a sharp point. Imagining himself swimming in the filthy Thames, Barlow responded more to the flow of water than to its pressure, whereas Brunel focused on the least forgiving element–water pres-sure–and fought against that bigger challenge. The identification a good craftsman practices 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. Thus, at the piano, when faced with a complicated chord, the tilt of the palm is a less difficult point of entry than finger-stretch; the pianist is more likely to improve by responding positively to this detail.
To be sure, focus on small, yielding elements is a matter of attitude as much as procedure. The attitude derives, I think, from that power of sympathy described in Chapter 3–sympathy not as touchy-feely love but just the disposition to turn outward. Thus, Barlow did not approach his engineering difficulty hoping to find something like a fault in an enemy’s defenses, a weak point to exploit. He dealt with the resistance by selecting an aspect of it that he could work with. Faced with a barking dog, you do better to hold your open hand in front of it than to bite back.
The skills of working well with resistance are, in sum, those of reconfiguring the problem into other terms, readjusting one’s behavior if the problem lasts longer than expected, and identifying with the problem’s most forgiving element.
Making Things Difficult
Skin Work
At the opposite pole of encountering resistance, we may make things difficult for ourselves. We do so because easy and lean solutions often conceal complexity. The young musician who strips off the Suzuki tapes from a string instrument makes things hard for himself or herself for just this reason. Modern urbanism offers a kindred, and richer, instance of making things difficult. This case concerns a building familiar to many readers, Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. The work of building it contains a story not evident to the visitor’s eye.
When the leaders of Bilbao commissioned an art museum in the 1980s, they hoped to stimulate investment in a tired port. Shipping had declined in Bilbao, and the city had darkened and decayed through generations of environmental abuse. Gehry, whose impulses are those of a sculptor, was chosen in part because Bilbao’s leaders realized that yet another tasteful glass-and-steel box of a museum would not send a distinctive signal of change. Yet the site they had chosen made this signal difficult to send: though next to water, the location was enmeshed in a spaghetti of roads cooked up by past, poor urban planning.
Gehry has long sculpted buildings of metal, a pliant material suited to the challenge of bending over and around the tangle of streets. Here, he wanted to roll out his metal in a quilted pattern, to crinkle the light bouncing off the building and so soften its enormous mass. Lead copper was the material that would have most easily and cheaply suited Gehry’s design; its fabrication in large sheets is fairly straightforward. But this metal is outlawed in Spain as a toxic material.
The path of least resistance would have been corruption. The powerful patrons of the project might have bribed government officials to permit lead copper or changed the law or obtained an exemption for the star architect. The officials and the architect accepted, however, that lead copper poses environmental hazards. So Gehry searched for another material. “It took,” he has written, with a certain restraint, “a long time.”9
At first his office experimented with stainless steel, which didn’t reflect, as Gehry wanted, the play of light on the curved surfaces. In frustration he turned to titanium, which had “warmth and character” but might prove too expensive and had rarely before the 1980s been used to sheath buildings. The titanium produced for military purposes, principally airplane parts, would have cost a fortune and was never meant for architectural work on the ground.
Gehry visited a factory in Pittsburgh where such titanium was rolled out, seeking to alter the way the metal was made. Gehry says, a little misleadingly, “We asked the fabricator to continue to search for the right mix of oil, acids, rollers, and heat to arrive at the material we wanted”; the phrase “right mix” is deceptive because he and the other designers did not know exactly what they wanted at the start.
Moreover–and here was the harder technical challenge–new machinery had to be created. Gehry had at hand rollers designed to press molten steel into sheets, but these rollers were too crude and too heavy, especially when he decided he wanted a fabric imprinted with a quiltlike surface to break up reflected light. In order to roll precisely, the cushions that held the rollers had to be rethought; the new cushioning mechanism was imported and adapted from hydraulic shock absorbers in automobiles.
This domain shift only raised more difficulties. The composition of the metal now had to be explored in concert with the rolling tools, Gehry and his team at each stage judging both aesthetic and structural qualities. This took a year. Eventually the fabricators produced titanium alloy sheets, rolled out in the quilted pattern, a third of a millimeter thick. These sheets are both thinner than stainless-steel plates and less rigid, giving a bit in the wind. Light does indeed crinkle and flutter on the quilted surface; the ribbed sheets also proved immensely strong.
The spirit of craftsmanship steering this material investigation was more flexible than that of mere problem solving. The fabricators had to rethink a tool–the rollers, which were imported from another machine and reimagined as a metal-weaving loom. Investigating the composition of the titanium itself was more straightforward, proceeding by controlled variation of its elements. It’s hard to know what the technicians thought and felt in staying with this demanding task, but we do know something about Gehry’s mental processes. He found this experi-ence–and I use the word advisedly–enlightening.
Once he could make and use quilted titanium, Gehry writes, he began to rethink his assumptions about stability, the most fundamental aspect of building design. He realized that “the stability given by stone is false, because stone deteriorates in the pollution of our cities whereas a third of a millimeter of titanium is a hundred-year guarantee.” He concluded, “We have to rethink what represents stability.” Stability can mean–counter-intuitively–thin rather than thick, or undulating rather than rigid.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this museum’s backstory is what the architect gained by making all these difficulties for himself about the building’s skin. By working on a surface he came to question a basic aspect of structure. Certainly, simplicity represents a goal in craftwork–it’s part of the measure of what David Pye calls “soundness” in a practice. But to make difficulties where none need be is a way to think about the nature of soundness. “It’s too easy” is a test of “there’s more here than meets the eye.”
