Joe’s monosyllabic shrug masked strong feelings, and immediately I could see that this construction project was not going to escape the edginess that traditionally crops up between architects and builders, a complicated set of tensions rooted in real differences of outlook and interest and, inevitably, social class. On building sites all over the world, architects are figures of ridicule, their designs derided for their oddness or impracticality and their construction drawings, which on a job site are supposed to have the force of law, dismissed as cartoons or “funny papers.”
