The contractors are unconscious, I dare say, of the large cross they've erected, as I look on, on the left-hand corner. They continue to go about their work, scurry up and down levels, and occasionally swing from these rods like monkeys in their own jungle-gym. Their antics reminds me of those black and white photographs taken by Lewis Wickes Hine in 1931 of the Empire State Building under construction, where migrant workers traversed steel beams unsecured with no harnesses. Now, unlike then, it would be a death-defying stunt, with the risks assessed, that a David Blaine-type might do. Or you'd think so. But these fellas across from me have been cavorting for weeks without any safeguards. There's a couple of woolly hats and occasionally a high-vis jacket and tool belt on display, whilst the mechanisms they employ to winch metal sheets and other building materials are almost as rudimentary as those used in the olden days.
Perhaps I'm wrong then to assume this crude crucifix was an unplanned occurrence, that it wasn't instead deliberate like an amulet to ward off evil, though I really can't imagine any one of them if cornered say over a pint in a pub (another stereotype!) would confess to such an superstitious act. Maybe there's an unspoken, yet followed, law, as there are in most male clans, which says: it stays within the building trade. And construction is after all a man's job. Or a tough woman's, because I think you'd have to be tough (and physically strong) to work in that game. I wouldn't want to and couldn't do it, but some women would take to it like a duck takes to water. Nothing I think should be off limits for any person of any gender, and yet I still stand by my opinion that construction speaks to the 'male'. The masculine side within all of us, though it's more pronounced in others as it is with being left or right-dominant.
Yes, there's something quite caveman-ish about building. It evokes the same kind of imagery, well, in me at any rate. It's mostly out of doors, it's practical and requires brutish strength as well as agility and manual dexterity. It's mathematical, it's mechanical, it's creative. And it's risky, with the kind of dangers our primitive brain relates and has adapted to. It's a trade for doers, not pen-pushers of which I am one.
For someone not so inclined to manual labour, it's fascinating watching men at work and seeing a building rising from ground level or being converted to flats or into a restaurant, as well as the way in which it changes the landscape – where you live and where you work. Even in the distance sometimes, I can see the outlines of cranes or at night the red light that signals them to aircraft.
Everywhere you turn there is development and re-gentrification, which personally I'm ambivalent about or indifferent to, and yet I admire it as a form of work, art even. Because I lack those skills, those learned or inherent, and that motivation to want to take a concept on paper to a solid structure which is not just sound but also visually appealing and in keeping with the area, so that those who make it happen seem like a different breed. Peoples that I want to understand and yet am intimidated by, as much as I am by what they create in all its developmental stages. It's the seemingly impossible made possible with grit and know-how, the likes of which may be transformed by but won't disappear with digital technology since it's a trade that needs bodies not robots.
In summation, I think we'll wind up valuing construction to a greater degree than we do now if the future continues in the direction it's heading, particularly when skills in other fields are on their way to being obsolete. We should never have changed tack and placed academia above the vocational for in doing so we've not only sidelined people but also left a pool of others unprepared for this transference of labour. The platform we've started from should be a support rather than lead to misadventure years later.
Picture credit: Steel Construction, Empire State Building, 1931, Lewis Wickes Hine, NYPL Digital Gallery
