One thing about architecture is that your work is very tangible. I like being able to drive around the San Francisco, Vancouver, and Seattle areas and see “my” projects. One of them is what is likely the ugliest second story additon in Berkeley, that I did while I was at school, should have been torn down years ago. I occasionally stop in a and talk to the client who, for some reason is still happy with it thirty years later. I wish he would hire me to fix it.

I do appreciate Crawford’s viewpoint about work and the different types of thinking involved. Like Hayden, I have purposefully maintained my own “blue collar” skills. I have found the thinking involved in that work incredibly satisfying. Working for 12 hours restoring a 1917 bungalow requires a certain type of thinking. That level of focus served my “knowledge work” well. (God knows the physical effort certainly helped me sleep better than I ever have writing articles!)

Bill Roorbach wrote an essay, “Into Wood”, for The Atlantic several years ago describing his own experience in dealing with these two types of work.

I think Crawford has contributed a valuable perspective about work. I’m enjoying his thought-provoking points. I’ve known many brilliant people who work in the trades who laugh about their “dirty little secret”- they have big brains, make good money and find the work infinitely satisfying. Sure some of the work may be “dirty”, but that’s relative compared to the “dirty” aspects of some knowledge work!

Compelling physical work involves the body. Of the individual practicing it, there may be a vast spectrum of possibilities and potentials ranging from the industrial cog who turns the screw all the way to the sculptor who writes poetry in stone.

Some questions might be thus: where is the body of the subject? Of the object? For myself as a bodyworker (Rolfer) what I experience everyday are people whom are professionally disembodied if not dissociated. They can twitter but barely stand on their own two feet.

I think the notion of manual labor as meaningful work speaks to a deep alienation between we modern humans and our environments. It speaks to a need for relationship that nurtures the human creature. We do not know very well how to touch or be touched by the world around us.

I sometimes get to the end of my day and wonder what did I really do. Since I can’t physically point to anything, it can sometimes feel like the day has been wasted.

The real difference in the “knowledge worker” as opposed to the physical worker is scale. A human can only physically do so much while a knowledge workers ideas and work product can scale beyond their capacity (look at the Internet). Accomplishments might manifest themselves less frequently but when they hit, they can hit big.

I once noticed that many of the metal sculptors I knew had learned to weld in the shipyards, or even still worked there for a day job, so the artist/blue collar line can be hazy. I have a cabinetmaker friend who graduated from Reed, a notoriously cerebral school — I suspect all of those dorm discussions about Nietzsche somehow affect his furniture.

Richard talks about this in the Rise chapter “the machine shop and the hair salon”. tpk-nyc is right, status is a big part of it. Welding an abstract form gets a lot more respect than welding something that is actually useful.