Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates how the practical skills of crafting professionals interact in dialogue with technology and planning in a high-tech building project. Through dialogue, a new relationship between doing and thinking is sought in the building.

Paper long abstract:

This is a close study of craftsmanship in action at a Norwegian building site, making wooden 9-floor tower blocks. While the building process is highly technologized, with extensive use of automatization and digital planning tools, the use of massive wood as the main material calls for traditional craftsmanship. In this situation the role of traditional building crafts is redefined. We approach this as a new relation between the doing and the thinking of building practice. This new relation is particularly visible in the ambition to engage the hands and heads of crafting in dialogue with technological systems and engineers, in a continuous development of building plans.

The paper analyzes this dialogue with particular attention to the way in which the hands-on world of craftsmanship, characterized by logic of doing, engages with the techno-theoretical world of the building plans, characterized by mathematical logic. In this dialogue, we find that the language of craftspeople is minimalistic. By few words, much of the meaning rests on a large sphere of tacit knowing enfolding the skills of the craft and the ever changing materiality of the building site. The ability to point to the world of doing is essential in for the thinking of the dialogue.

The paper describes a possible path for the traditional crafts in high-tech building, where the relationship between making and thinking is enhanced in formalized dialogue. This study is empirically based on participatory observation among craftspeople in the building process.