I have belonged to a group called the Timber Framer's Guild off and on since 1987. It was founded in 1985, and this is what they were about. "The Guild is a nonprofit organized exclusively for educational purposes, to provide training programs for timber framers, disseminate information about timber framing and timber frame building design, display the art of timber framing to the public, and serve as a general center of timber framing information for the professional and general public alike." - lifted from their website "about" page.
I recently received an email letting me know that my membership had lapsed (again) and for the first time sent a response other than renewing. The Guild has been going through some interesting changes over the past twelve years or so and at this point is more of a trade oganization than anything else. Below is my letter (email) response.
Hi Sue:
I’ll tell you truly that I don’t know how great I feel about where the Guild is going these days. It doesn’t keep me up at night or anything but as an on-and-off member going back to 1987ish and having known Joel, Ed Levin, the Beemers and a large number of the founding crew, the current vibe and seeming direction is not what I have embraced with at least relative vigor over the decades. I am of the impression that furthering the craft is a second place objective at best, or at least a second class subject, having been displaced by the primary focus of business.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against profits, far from it. Every business concern needs earn money or it rightly dies. It’s that there are any number of professional organizations and foundations that are great venues for discussing and discovering new and better ways to generate business and manage the business we have, while there are exactly one of these in the US that has been devoted to furthering the art and science of timber carpentry. From what I’ve seen over the past few years it feels as though the Guild no longer values the craft so much as the product, a critical distinction for me personally as I believe that without the broader foundation understanding of process (material selection, handling and preparation, various layout and cutout methods, system integration, etc) all I see the Guild becoming is an association of companies with CNC milling apparatus who pool resources to maximize profit.
I know I’m something of a dinosaur. I am reasonably fluent in several Western and Eastern layout and construction disciplines, almost all of which are rarely practiced anymore. I sharpen my hand tools and use them in the same manner that they have been used for hundreds and hundreds of years, and while I recognize that these abilities may have limited commercial value they still provide the foundation, if nothing else, for truly valuing mechanical processes that do the same work. Computer aided design has nearly displaced traditional layout and rendering in the professional world at this point and from my experience this displacement has not resulted in greater efficiencies at all, quite the opposite. Errors that were once caught at the story pole phase (if they made it that far) now show up in a finished product, at huge cost to remedy. A simple transcription error becomes a baseline in a CNC process and no one can possibly identify it until the mistake has cost hours and board feet at an alarming clip. The solution is most often to build proven CAD templates and use these exclusively in order to keep costs down, and in so doing we lose the ability that so many of us strove so hard to establish for so long - the ability to solve problems as they arise, or to elegantly alter the work to make the flaw a feature, or best of all to know, through experience and with a creative flair, make a silk purse out of a sows ear. The models I see framing companies embrace no longer value skill and quick thinking. Instead they worship technology. They bow down to repeatability. In so doing they force themselves in to the financiers clutches, needing to keep spitting out so many thousand square feet of frames at a predetermined rate per thousand in order to service the obligations on the technologies that drive the process. Seems all backward to me, and somewhat soul crushing.
Timber carpentry is challenging enough. Without people who come together to celebrate their skill and craft the craft goes dormant. I remember too well the many master craftspeople I met in my youth who in the post World War II era had no apprentices and whose trades and knowledge would die with them. We worked so hard to draw as much from the few who remained as we could and where that was not possible we reinvented what we had to in order to be able just to work as well as they did in 1900. Sometimes we did it. Eventually we found some success and in some very small ways maybe equalled or, rarer still surpassed the work that came before us. The Timber Framers Guild was all about that. I think it still should be. I believe that this is a necessary function if the trade is to survive, let alone thrive, in the US and elsewhere. We live in a world in which money has become the sole obsession of all. Having money, and maybe having more money is fine I suppose but valuing money over the things that can be dome with it is madness. I feel as though the Guild is going or gone that way.
I would love to hear your thoughts. Apologies for the lengthy response to your simple and concise email.
Yours,
Matt.
Anyone who bothers to read this is either really bored or just can't help themselves. If you made it and have a moment I'd like to know your thoughts.
Thanks.
