“A building is like a body,” he said. It has a skin. It has a skeleton. It has a vascular system—the plumbing. It has a breathing system—the ventilation. It has a nervous system—the wiring. All together, he explained, projects today involve some sixteen different trades. He pulled out the construction plans for a four-hundred-foot-tall skyscraper he was currently building and flipped to the table of contents to show me. Each trade had contributed its own separate section. There were sections for conveying systems (elevators and escalators), mechanical systems (heating, ventilation, plumbing,
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