The bricklayer building my house may have the most incredibly aesthetic application or mortar during the process, but all I care about is the wall staying up.

Are they practising an art? Surely. Is it relevant? Nah.

▲

dofm 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You're not British, right?

The National Masonry Academy in the UK literally has a course on "fine art bricklaying".

Bricklaying is absolutely art, and the wall staying up for any period of time is actually a consequence of it.

I think coding is art; nothing I've ever done with coding is anywhere near as artistic as the Ouse Valley Viaduct.

People who think bricklaying cannot be art simply haven't been around enough old brick buildings.

▲

brailsafe 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

So who do you hire if all you'll see is a wall that is up? The one that seems to care whether it'll stay up after they're gone, or the one who's objective it is to get it up for the price you want to pay?

"You've got to make the back of the fence, that nobody will see, just as good looking as the front of the fence. Even though nobody will see it, you will know, and that will show that you're dedicated to making something perfect." — Paul Jobs

▲

hug 12 hours ago | parent [-]

The person you hire can be an artist of the highest degree, making the prettiest fence on the planet, caring about the project the entire time, and it could fall down in a brisk wind.

Half shaved alcoholic Barry could slap some bricks together with a cigarette hanging out his mouth and it’ll last a century.

Aesthetics and utility are not always as correlated as you might hope.

▲

brailsafe 16 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

The actual appearance is less important than the sentiment towards quality, to me anyway; who is it for? I wouldn't buy a house unless I could buy one that I'm happy to live in and that the builder can be happy for me to live in. It's a statement about intent, design, and care. The fact that it actually looks gnarly may not be important, but when nearly all of the houses built in the last 50 years do look like nobody put any thought into it, I start to wonder who's thinking about anything but putting up arbitrary walls to sell without thinking much about what the process yields. Quality feels foreign, there's always this inkling I have that whatever I buy, at any cost, is going to disappear next year or break or have some obvious oversight that got kicked to the side because a deadline came up. It's the focus on horizontal scalability without having attempted to make it better first.

▲

dofm 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Half shaved alcoholic Barry could slap some bricks together with a cigarette hanging out his mouth and it’ll last a century.

No, not really.

▲

ahartmetz 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Drinking "a few" beers used to be very common at construction sites. It's not anymore. (Germany)

	▲	dofm an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, but that is not what I mean. Walls that are "slapped together" do not often last a century. It's really a misunderstanding of how much effort went into buildings that have, and how much apprenticing time was needed. Modern brickwork that is "slapped together" is even less likely to last.