Paydirt

“He who works with his hands is a laborer.He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman.He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.” – St. Francis of AssisiPlaying in the dirt is important. Really. Because the willingness to “get one’s hands dirty” (a deliciously loaded idiom) is a required component of any design process, and the value of doing so is a central premise of the pedagogy of design|build. Dirty hands are complex socioeconomic symbols, for they simultaneously belong to the image of the brute, unsophisticated laborer and to that of the ethical soul made honest through physical work. They are evidence of activity, of being busy, while they are also interpreted as interlopers in the refined, even monastic world of the mind.Design|build exists at the confluence of these ideas about how we understand and value the actions of the mind and the body in architecture. Its popularity as an educational and professional modality is surging alongside the number of hours logged by laser cutters and 3D printers, machines that have stilled some of the work of our hands but not our love of physicality or desire for material contact and understanding.This paper is a foray into the discourse about what it means to think through our hands, how our direct involvement with the stuff of building informs how we design, and how the movements of our bodies (our work outs) shape space. It is also a meditation on the long-standing political, religious and legal narratives of judgment that continue to accompany this discourse – narratives that include references to appetite (“dig in”), disease (“wash your hands”), and ethics (“the devil finds work for idle hands”).

Volume Editors
Sergio Palleroni, Ted Cavanagh & Ursula Hartig

ISBN
978-0-935502-94-7