My dad was a stair builder his whole career until finally becoming a freelance carpenter after getting laid off. Stairs, like bricks, are probably another implement that us techies use daily with absolutely no appreciation for complexity and skill involved. Spiral staircases are an incredible work of craftsmanship, or at least they were. I used to go to the shop with my dad when I was a kid. They would rig up these big timber structures to wrap handrails and stringers around to form the spiral. He worked out the geometry on paper (or more likely on the timber itself) writing with flat pencils that he sharpened with his pocket knife. You couldn't just mass produce the handrails either. It took time, pinned to the template, for the wood to become permanently warped into a spiral.
Years later, I ended up getting a job as a 5-axis CNC operator in the same shop. My dad thought it'd be a suitable job for me because I was good with computers, so he introduced me to the foreman in the strait stairs side of the shop. I was only cutting stair stringers, so it was basically mind-numbing data entry on some crappy Visual Basic app and then running the CNC which frequently got hung and ruined materials. The spiral staircase end of the shop was also different than from what I remembered as a kid. They still had a couple of the old-school spiral staircases in production at any given time, but those were special order. How do they churn out mass produced spiral staircases for tasteless McMansions? They glue a bunch of chunks of wood together and use a CNC to route out the negative space. Of course the grain of the wood doesn't match up like spiral constructed from one plank. The product looks like dog shit. The CNC screws up a non-negligible percent of the time resulting in tons of wasted materials. I and all the CNC operators I talked to loathed the machines we operated. They were all crappy Chinese tech, and it felt like tedious babysitting, not craftsmanship. I'd rather be swinging a hammer than do that job again.
I wonder how the finances even come out ahead. Does no one care about how their house looks? They'd rather just cargo cult an ugly McMansion that was produced at the lowest cost possible? My dad is a curmudgeon about tech in general, but it's not hard to see why. He was a master craftsman, and because "the industry" was headed in another direction, he was eventually replaced by a bunch of button pushers that can produce a low-quality simulacrum the same thing at a fraction of the cost.
> They'd rather just cargo cult an ugly McMansion that was produced at the lowest cost possible?
Yes, very much. That's how a lot of trends and styles move "down market." The new consumers want teh appearance of what they see as wealthy/elite/etc. But they frequently dont understand, appreciate, or recognise, what actually goes in to the goods they're trying to copy. You'll see this everywhere from houses to clothes.
> Does no one care about how their house looks? They'd rather just cargo cult an ugly McMansion that was produced at the lowest cost possible?
Sure. Now put the build cost of the mcmansion of say $200k (plus land), vs your hand crafted mansion at $500k (plus land), and see what people really want.
In my country cookie cutter housing goes back over 100 years. The massive post-ww2 housing boom had the same design of houses springing up across the country, it allowed slum clearence and gave people cheap housing.
The main housing problem in the UK is the land cost/availability rather than construction cost thanks to every house not being bespoke. When land is allowed to be built on, half a dozen standard styles are dropped down on an estate of 500 new houses over a few years (dribbling out at the right level to maximise sale price and maintain the illusion of high demand low supply), but that was the same in the 00s, and the 80s, and even before then.
Now sure you can craft your own bespoke house with lovely hand-crafted artisinal features, but you're going to be paying a hell of a lot of money for it, and most people just want somewhere to live.
sure, except old houses sell for pretty high prices, implying there are plenty of people who want more than just a house.
I think there is a big difference between people without a house, who want to get on the lower rung of the housing ladder, and escape the poverty of renting (where rent costs more than mortgage payments, without any equity) versus those that have a house and want something better.
Cheap houses should be build (maybe even w/ government funding) to keep otherwise exploitative rentals competitive, but there should still be healthy competition & industry in higher quality housing.
I just ordered two all-wood staircases to replace the steel spiral monstrosity that was built into the house where I live from the beginning. It was unsafe, unstable and way too steep so they really had to go. But the stairwell is a weird shape, there is partial overlap with the front door and the direction of turn had to be reversed. Enter the master carpenter who spent a 1/2 hour to measure up the stairwell and who then proceeded to create two new complete stairs that fit to the millimeter and solved all of the weird problems in one fell swoop. It wasn't cheap, but given the challenges and the materials used, the fact that they will probably last another 60 years or so and that they look amazing I figure that it was well worth it.
No way you could automate that kind of ingenuity. So, props to your dad, and there are more people like him still doing this work today.
Tech is not always an improvement, but not due to the reason described in the comment above.
His negative presentation obscures an obvious fact: lower prices create the miracle of accessibility - people who could have never afforded the previous generation can now afford the new one, and in some cases their lives are changed for the better.
I know most of us here are snobs, but let's not forget that only the King of France would have had access to colorful non-itchy clothes back in the day, and now everyone can have them.
It may not spotlight the fact that lower prices facilitate accessibility, but I'm not oblivious to it. I definitely don't want to exchange cheap cotton knit t-shirts with hand-woven garments that cost me a month's labor or something. However, only considering the consumer-side satisfaction is characteristic of our culture's obsession with consumerism and economy at the cost of everything else. We all have to work, even with ever increasing tech we work probably more than anytime in history. I don't believe we're going to hit some inflection point where suddenly humans will be freed from labor. There is satisfaction to be found in craft and honing skill. If we delegate all that to machines that spit out crummy imitations, and humans are relegated to the mind-numbing task of babysitting a glitchy piece of tech, clearing a paper jam and hitting reset all day, I think that is a net loss for life satisfaction. Who cares if you can own a shitty McMansion when what you experience during majority of your wakeful life is mind-numbing frustration?
At a higher price you can still find craftsmanship. But now, as always, you have to afford it.
And regarding consumerism, it's not only consumerism. Washing machines and fridges and freezers and microwaves changed the way we lived. Especially washing machines and fridges made our lives much easier and better.
I'm also not a Luddite, so if it seems I'm making a vast anti-tech argument, I'm truly not. It's easy to get drawn into a futurism vs tradition argument, but I don't want to take either side in that debate. I love tools and I love inventions that amplify a human being's power and effectiveness. But there are tools that are miserable to use, produce horrible results, but are just enough to be acceptable and offer The Business enormous cost savings (or sometimes just the illusion of it). I don't have the energy to try and write a manifesto right now for which tools fall into either camp, but maybe some day.
I like writing code, and I think a lot of other people do too. But it's not just that I like writing the code and want it to be as low-level and arcane as possible. Give me a language that lets me be more expressive and accomplish more and I'll be all the more happy to adopt this tool and incorporate it into my craft.
But, imagine The Business decides that coders writing code is just too expensive, so we've purchased an AI that dials into all the conference calls stakeholders have regarding a project, and subsequently it can generate all the code necessary to meet the requirements. Well, kind of. After sitting in on the meetings, it can instantly generate the code that would have taken a dev team a whole quarter, and then send it over to QA. The only catch is that code is spaghetti and the defect rate is really high. Still, The Business only needs 25% of the coders that it used to have. But their job is a little different now. They don't write code per se. They just QA and fix bugs. The code is horrible, there's no design or architecture to speak of, it's hard to debug, and fixing defects is mind-numbing. But, at the end of the day, the low quality product is still good enough to sell, everyone else in the industry is doing it too, and besides, the cost savings is too huge to ignore.
No one has to "write" code anymore. Did our lives get easier and better? What is the ultimate end of easiest and best? No one has to do a thing and minimally acceptable food shows up when we're hungry while we continually slurp down personalized, proceduraly generated sitcoms?
But that also ignores quality of life (as a result of work) and general work conditions. Working in a mine for an hour (or a hunter stalking prey, or working in a field) is not the same as an hour sitting in an office.
> where suddenly humans will be freed from labor
If by labor you mean physically intensive work, we are already there, most people live sedentary working lifestyles. If you mean any type of work - perhaps not, but at the same time "The Devil finds work for idle hands" so I'm not sure it's desirable, humans need something to do, and bored teenagers often cause mayhem.
> humans are relegated to the mind-numbing task of babysitting a glitchy piece of tech
Not sure how overseeing a brick-laying robot is more/less mind-numbing than laying the bricks yourself.
> clearing a paper jam and hitting reset all day
exactly the case with self-checkout, and the job doesn't seem more/less boring to me than working a checkout. At least the self-checkout machines improve over time.
Same. I used to be absolutely starry eyed about the endless possibilities of digital tech. Now anytime I see computers getting involved where they previously were not, it's just a cost savings measure resulting in a severely inferior product that is just above the threshold of being unsellable. An example that comes to mind is information and entertainment itself. Humans used to curate content for us to consume, but more and more we're being entertained by machine-curated feeds with low quality content. The endless stream-of-conscious format of infiniscrolls and recommendations and 'related' or 'relevant' content is vastly inferior to carefully human-curated hierarchies of information.
Couldn't agree more. The smartphone enabled a few very unique scenarios, like car sharing, and made everything else worse. It didn't use to be the case that you had to enter a PIN code, resist distraction from half a dozen notifications and hope you had got the power management right the night before when you wanted to read the morning news, but now that's the norm, just to give one example.
I don't have notifications, my phone has a fingerprint reader, and I get the news from the radio which turns on at 7am anyway. It might be the norm for you, but it doesn't have to be. Turn off your phone and charge it in the kitchen.
I think people care more than ever how their house looks, and that is exactly why they buy "ugly McMansions".
I mean why else would you buy a McMansion, other than for the look. From a construction point, most aren't built to last. From an architecture point they aren't great "machines for living in". From an economic point they're neither frugal or a great investment.
Bottom line is the main reason people by a McMansion is because they care more than anything how their house look, and whether you or I like it they really want a house that looks like a McMansion.
I don't know anything about spiral staircases or masonry I build commercial furniture offices, libraries, courtrooms, etc.
Wondering how finances come out ahead is silly. Take for example take a CNC beamsaw. It does one thing cut straight lines. A person stands in front of it (or a robot but smaller shops it's a person) and puts a board on the machine. The machine grabs and executes a series of cuts. Then you take the parts it spits out rotate them feed them back in the machine to cut the other way. A person standing at a cabinet saw can do the same thing, faster even, with a nicer finish... for the first 10-20 cuts. The machine gives the same 95% quality cut every time in the same amount of time from cut 1 to cut 10,000.
When my shop first got one I by myself cut twice as much material in 1/5th of the time as it took 3 workers on cabinet table saws. And I actually had enough downtime while the machine was running to also put the parts through an edgebander to put a finished veneer edge on the cut parts at the same time.
The 3 CNC machines I run now don't screw up often and waste time or material. Even when there is a problem it's actually often due to user error. I just had to spend some time fixing our 5-axis machine because the operator accidentally left some loose material in it which a sensor on the machine detected to prevent the machine being damaged. The emergency stop it triggered ruined the part and the machine stopped so fast that the machine racked and I needed to re-calibrate it. But that is fairly unusual. Maybe instead of crappy tech they should have bought quality machines? Or maybe the machines were fine and someone should have invested in software instead of a crappy vb script? Or maybe the operators just needed more training?
A master craftsman can use a machine to create the same quality of work in less time if that is the goal. You can steam bend a board and then 5-axis machine it to create a very complicated edge detail that would be tedious to do by hand. Or you can glue blocks up with different grain directions and materials so the completed railing has an interesting design that would be impossible to create otherwise. Or even spend some more effort gluing up those blocks to make a better grain match.
The reason they are gluing up blocks and machining them is because it is cheaper and faster for an okay quality. Almost no one buying the "McMansion" staircase was going to buy your bespoke custom master craftsman spiral staircase. I work in a shop that makes all custom-built to order furniture. Sometimes potential clients call and have sticker shock when they hear the price or sometimes they need to furniture sooner than we can build something custom. They just go and buy something they can live with from a larger company that mass produces a furniture line where they will have inventory.
I don't see an issue with making something affordable for people who want it. I'm not even sure anything is lost, there are still people who will want the high quality product and someone will be there to supply that.
There is whole world between button pusher and master craftsman. Master craftsmen that embrace the technology can expand what is possible. And a button pusher cannot exist unless there is a master craftsmen to do the setup work.
I was looking for a nice coffee table recently. I decided to try the unfinished wood furniture store, most of it made by the Amish or Menonites. I'm handy enough to stain but not equiped to build a table myself so I figured I'd save a few bucks doing the finish. Most the tables weren't our style but finally found one that looked great and was some real quality oak. Asked for the price and just about crapped my pants. We stopped by Ikea on the way home and bought probably the nicest table they had for a quarter of the price. The nicer Ikea table will be able to make it through any moving we do in the future but it most certainly won't be an heirloom like my parent's old oak stuff.
I want try my hand at some furniture building in the future but just don't have the space or some of the standard tools for it now.
That is also something people don't think about. Solid wood is great because it's easy to fix, but it's heavy and hard to move. Also it's less stable than a plywood and has to be taken care of.
We had a customer with a reception desk that had solid wood 5-piece raised panels in it. One of the panels cracked, so we sent them a new one under warranty and over 3-4 years it cracked more times. We finally sent someone to try to figure out the issue.
It was winter and the building was unusually warm and humid. The desk was positioned in front of the front door in a way that whenever it was opened the panel would get hit with an large blast of dry cold air. After convincing them to replace it with a more stable plywood raised panel simulacrum we haven't heard of an issue since.
Thanks for your take on it, I really don't want to be the anti-tech curmudgeon so I'm sincerely happy to read a different perspective. Especially your last paragraph makes me feel better. Maybe it's because CNC technology has come a long way since 15 years ago, or more likely because the staircase company I worked for were just cheapskates willing to strip mine their company's reputation. I feel like I had to recalibrate the damn thing hourly. The vacuum that held the stringers in place was not strong enough, so they would break loose and end up jamming the routing bit constantly. Having PTSD thinking about it.
Well CNC technology has come a long way. The 5-axis machine we purchased was actually cheaper in absolute $ than the 20 year old 3-axis machine we were replacing it with.
But yes vacuum clamping is still annoying. There are of course strategies like onion skinning, leaving tabs. On nesting machines I often cover the table with laminate if I'm running small parts and need to prevent vacuum loss through the spoil board.
Most people that I talk to that brought CNC into a shop haven't seem to have laid anyone off but instead seem to be able to retrain people and grow sales because of the new capacity it brought.
Although if there are people who are actually button pushers and legitimately bring nothing else to the table I think their time is limited. I wish I could find the video but last year our CNC vendor sent me a video of a concept manufacturing cell using an autonomous guided vehicle. It blew my mind. There was no operators or conveyors just robots cutting a whole lot of different sized parts of of different material at the same time. The parts got stacked on a pallets which the AGV drove around to the different operations. They were even showing off handling non rectangular parts with no problem.
Probably not that expensive either I was thinking maybe $2 million based on the prices of machines I knew and... wildly guessing at the price of the robotics. Expensive but imagine 15 more years?
Edit: sorry that was unreasonably snarky. I know you're looking for pictures. The CNC-milled kind that I am talking about are easy to find. Google image search 'curved handrail cnc.' I'm actually having a hard time finding pictures of classic steam-bent curved handrails amongst tons of content marketing from bendywood and contractors. If you happen to tour an antique house with curved, wooden handrails, study the way they look. it's usually one long beam, maybe with carved, ornamental caps at the end. I don't really know when the change took place, but if you look at any house built at least since the nineties, the handrail (if not painted) will look like a bunch of disjoint blocks stuck together.
Ahh, so one continuous block of wood following the grain vs sliced together chunks that will bring to mind Frankenstein's monster.
Hmm, I wonder if you can feel the difference when you rub your hand over it if it's just polished, probably not if painted. So perhaps people who want polished wood for their staircase might go for the older style even if it's more expensive?
Yea, flubbed on the screenshots bit, was just thinking images of stairs and as I expected them to come from your computer my brain clearly went to screenshots instead of pictures =)...
There are, on the other hand, ways to combine the old and the new harmoniously. I'm building a cabinet on stand, and because there are drawers behind a door, the pulls need to be inset.
Carving the undercut by hand is pretty time consuming (i.e. unprofitable). But I have access to a CNC router. I laid out a template in FreeCad, and cut it out. Using template bushings and an edge fluting bit with the bearing boss ground off, I can cut the pulls with the undercut in a couple minutes each. And they come out more regular than doing them by hand.
I'll admit that I'm not much of a carver, but I don't think I could get the time per pull down anywhere near that while maintaining the same consistency even with a lot of practice.
Sadly this is a global phenomenon. The same thing can be seen in, for example, movie/music industry as well. And we have to assume that the same holds in other fields as well..
I wonder if we can generalise the lost quality and attribute it to a lack of case by case application human ingenuity and experience that an experienced craftsman brings to the trade.
Or may be we can attribute the loss of aesthetics to the financial gain it brings. There is no free lunch, and somethings got to give to make gains elsewhere. And it is inevitable that when one of those two things is extreamly measurable (finance) and the other extremely un-measurable (aesthetics), the measurable thing always ultimately wins.
> may be we can attribute the loss of aesthetics to the financial gain it brings.
That's an element, but another big element is specialist-subject education.
If you are an old-money guy, you can spend your life figuring out the best attributes of everything around you, and pursuing excellence in what you own. Your parents and grandparents can educate you in what a great staircase looks like, and you can spend weeks going from shop to shop until you find the right thing, or hire a carpenter to make it for however long it takes to be "just so".
If you are somebody who's just made their money, and maybe are still neck-deep into the rat race, you don't know anything about staircases and you have no time, nor contacts, to educate yourself on what it should look like. Developer shows you the staircase, it looks alright, sold.
More and more people are chained to their day job for longer and longer. More and more people are coming up in the world and buying stuff they don't know anything about, enriching companies targeting the mass-market more than specialist ones. This is nothing new: in the XX century we've seen this happening for anything from clothes to cutlery. In a way, it's a good thing: objects become more and more efficient and functional, eschewing aesthetic values that are somewhat irrational and often just classist. It's true, though, that we lose a cultural element.
I'd love to see a study done on this. What you you wrote made me think of Phaedrus slowly losing his mind trying to define quality in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Quality goods are still available, even if they are buried in the marketplace of cheap disposable goods and hard to find amongst all the noise of advertising and sponsored content.
What worries me more is the receding availability of _quality work to be done_. If you've ever worked with tools and materials, I mean physical ones, you know. It's among the most satisfying experiences in the world to feel the sensation of being good at (and becoming better at) something through practice. To be able to select the materials you use and discern their quality. To feel a familiar and trusted tool manipulating the materials to produce something. Those things are innately pleasurable.
McJob robot babysitters that only intercede when the machine screws up, overseeing the production of low-but-acceptable-quality products at a predictable pace is, in my mind, a dystopia. Getting a Bricklayerbot 2000 unstuck a few times per hour is not the kind of skill I can imagine being pleasurable to hone. There's a very low ceiling on the craftsmanship there.
Yeah, but for every craftsman, there's 10 people who just want a job that can make them a good living. That's really just how the world is.
There will always be people who take great pride in their work and enjoy doing the best job they can with the tools & materials they have. But they will always be a small minority.
Years later, I ended up getting a job as a 5-axis CNC operator in the same shop. My dad thought it'd be a suitable job for me because I was good with computers, so he introduced me to the foreman in the strait stairs side of the shop. I was only cutting stair stringers, so it was basically mind-numbing data entry on some crappy Visual Basic app and then running the CNC which frequently got hung and ruined materials. The spiral staircase end of the shop was also different than from what I remembered as a kid. They still had a couple of the old-school spiral staircases in production at any given time, but those were special order. How do they churn out mass produced spiral staircases for tasteless McMansions? They glue a bunch of chunks of wood together and use a CNC to route out the negative space. Of course the grain of the wood doesn't match up like spiral constructed from one plank. The product looks like dog shit. The CNC screws up a non-negligible percent of the time resulting in tons of wasted materials. I and all the CNC operators I talked to loathed the machines we operated. They were all crappy Chinese tech, and it felt like tedious babysitting, not craftsmanship. I'd rather be swinging a hammer than do that job again.
I wonder how the finances even come out ahead. Does no one care about how their house looks? They'd rather just cargo cult an ugly McMansion that was produced at the lowest cost possible? My dad is a curmudgeon about tech in general, but it's not hard to see why. He was a master craftsman, and because "the industry" was headed in another direction, he was eventually replaced by a bunch of button pushers that can produce a low-quality simulacrum the same thing at a fraction of the cost.