Forget the bogus idea of a skills shortage. Instead we should ask how much we will pay for quality

We get most of these decisions right most of the time, and those few we get wrong tend to be inconsequential. When it comes to valuing building work, however, we face an altogether different scale of consequence if things go wrong. After all, we will have to live with the results of poor architectural judgement for a long time.

There’s a greater risk in buying architecture than in buying a routine building, and it requires the time and skills of tradesmen as well as architects. Over the centuries the construction industry has developed subtle strategies for finding more predictable ways of reconciling craft and manufacturing – such as spending time to select manufactured masonry products with the skilled people who will turn them into walls, and who have proven their worth on previous occasions.

There is no substitute for paying for the right people to be supplied with the right materials in the right way. It is too easy for unconfident and reckless architects, or their clients, to complain that it is impossible to employ tradesmen to do the job they imagine they have the budget for. That supposed ‘skills shortage’ is invariably a myth. There is, instead, a shortage of people who are willing to pay for quality in men, women, and materials.

The fact is that too few consultants care at the design stage about what it takes to lay 1,000 common facing bricks a day. They invent awkward cavities and convoluted detailing which frustrate the bricklayer. They should care: the number of bricks a brickie can lay determines whether or not he can pay his mortgage.

Bricklayers competing at lowest price on a chaotic housing site; walls programmed to be built mid-winter; bricks barely inside British Standard, if not actual seconds; a design where the walls have to be cut around non-brick sized British Standard windows. This is no way to build houses that will have much durability, or beauty.

Contrast this with the high architectural end of masonry, such as a beautiful brick arch, where the craftsman is paid for the quality of the detail, not by the square metre.

This is the 21st century. We should not be requiring any person to be laying more than a few hundred bricks a day, while ensuring they can make a living and do a good job at the same time.

After all, a few more days spent on walling will help the brick, block or stone building last a lot longer, and look better while it does so. This used to be a measure of civilisation, long before the industrialisation of democracy. There are mud bricks made in Ur from 3000 BC, and beautiful glazed bricks from ancient Babylon in the British Museum, a legacy of Georgian housing outside, and Victorian railways on the way to and from the museum. If we want to leave any such legacy we should celebrate and pay the cost of employing crafts men and women. It is a small price in the historical view.

This has nothing to do with ‘traditional’ or ‘modern’ construction. We should forget the bogus idea of a skills shortage, used either cynically or naively to promote modern methods of construction.

We should also ignore those traditionalists who imagine a world without manufacturing. Instead we should ask how much we are willing to pay for quality. We can achieve quality in design using manufactured building parts, but at some point we must also recognise that the qualities we want from hand-made construction on site require an investment in the durability and beauty of something useful.

Faster and cheaper is not always more efficient. Slower site work for higher pay is an investment in time worth making if we want to raise ‘building’ to ‘architecture’. It is an investment in civilisation more immediately valuable than all the rhetoric about ‘sustainability’. Craft supported by manufacturing is an indication of the civility of any society, and one that an Andrea Palladio, or a Vitruvius before him, aspired to achieve.