[apprenticemason]

Most of the freeway walls you’re referring to are made using concrete forms and not block. I would feel extremely sorry for the company and the masons that would need to create block walls that are miles long, in no shade, during California’s summer.

I’ve worked for a masonry company for about four years and recently started my apprenticeship to become a brick block and stone mason a year ago. Working in this sector has made me truly appreciate the amount of work (Work = force*distance) that goes into any masonry. You see brick block and stone EVERYWHERE but what you might not realize is each brick, each block, each stone, has to travel from their source to their final destination. Usually that’s done by someone like me; if we’re lucky, we’re using M2 mobile hydro units coupled with a boom lift to reach whatever heights we need to hit. If we’re not so lucky, we’re building scaffolding by hand, stocking everything by hand, mixing mortar (in a mixer) by hand and using buckets to get the mortar where it need to be. It’s truly mind boggling and back breaking work. I realize this is an emerging technology but some of the masons I work with could reproduce work very close to this, maybe not mm accuracy but close enough where you’d never see the difference. And 3 months to lay ~15,000 bricks is an INSANELY long time. To put that number into perspective, a crew of 5 guys with average skill (3 masons, a laborer, and an operator making mud), given no extra equipment besides a mixer could pound out about 1000 brick in a day. That’s including everything from setup to cleanup.

Some of the guys I work with have been a mason for 40 years and they posses some incredible skill and can create amazing things and damn they’re fast too. The sad fact of the matter is most blueprints don’t want fancy masonry work anymore. It’s too cost prohibitive. We charge about $25/square foot of stone that’s without added arches or keystones or corbels etc; that also doesn’t include material costs (mortar, stone, tar paper, mesh, staples, etc). One experienced mason can throw up 100 square feet in a day, sometimes more given the differences in material. I wish we got contracts to create the beautiful buildings like in downtown Chicago or Milwaukee but it’s too much of a numbers game with real estate developers now. No one wants to pay us to create art, just slap it up and go man go!

With all that being said, man I’d like to have some time to play around with this tech! Or at least get to be the guy that holds the camera all day ;) looks like a breezy job compared to what I do everyday.

[jacquesm]

Super comment. I always use the example of masons whenever people complain that computer programming is hard work. Laying bricks is hard work, and not all that easy either. If you have basic bricklaying skills then you will be able to appreciate much better the kind of work and craftsmanship that goes into what may look like an average building.

Be careful with your back!

As for your comment on the economics: the main reason that old buildings looked so ornate and beautiful to our present day eyes is that at the time the labor costs and costs of materials were a small fraction of what they are today, and cost overruns were very common. On a relative scale the cost of building has gone up substantially which leads to every building being put up with the least amount of labor and the cheapest materials that can be found. If brick is used at all (instead of the ugly stone strips, which is a material which I think ought to be prohibited) it is in a decorative rather than a structural manner, the building itself will be made out of concrete.

The only place where you'll find some room to really use your skills is in restoration work as well as the houses for the rich. Almost everything else, including commercial buildings is done to a very tight budget.

[VBprogrammer]

> I always use the example of masons whenever people complain that computer programming is hard work. Laying bricks is hard work, and not all that easy either.

I have worked some pretty tough summer jobs. Working in a garden centre it was normal to spend a whole day moving bricks and slabs from delivery pallets onto nicer retail pallets. While objectively it's much harder physically, it also much easier to guage progress and perhaps mentally more rewarding than having spent a whole day trying to wrestle a few bytes of information into the desired form. Even when you think you have succeeded you have a reasonable chance that something unexpected will come back to bite you in the ass.

[wiz21c]

Thanks for such a comment. I was hoping for it. I'm no mason but I've seen some of them work in my house. You just need to live outside university to understand that "innovation" in masonry requires a bit more than a funny augmented reality setup.

Manual work is usually the result of thousands of years of practice. And masters in their job are truly masters. That is, they do things you can only understand when you have reached some of their proficiency. I'm sad many people do not appreciate the quality of the job they do because "it doesn't look that difficult; you don't need a phd to do it".

I'm very respectful of these people (except that when you need a professional, somehow, they're always hard to find and just never start on schedule :-) just joking)

[nocman]

Thank you for taking the time to reply to this. This was one of the most interesting replies I've read in a while here.

[sriram_malhar]

Thank you for the most interesting response. I didn't think masons would find anything of interest on hacker news, but I'm glad to be proved otherwise.

[rhapsodic]

Props to you. I used to work as a carpenter, and I see the world differently because of it. When I walk down a city sidewalk past a brick building, I can picture what it was like, in say, 1910, when the brick facade was being laid. I'll look at a brick and wonder if it was hot, or cold, or rainy or sunny when that particular brick was bumped into its final resting place by the handle of the trowel, and I'll wonder what the mason had on his mind when he laid it.

When I used to build staircases, it always gave me pause to think that people not yet born would be walking up and down those stairs long after I'm dead. And that's the nature of your work. Your work product will outlive you by decades, or possibly centuries.

[leoedin]

In my loft someone has written their name in mortar on the chimney, along with the year - 1949.

It's amazing to think that person, probably relatively young when they built this house just after the war, is now either dead or pushing 90. A whole life lived with their name in the loft.

[wiz21c]

Some parts of my house are 200 years old (according to architect). That's truly mind blowing to see that it's still up !

Fun fact : when your house is so old, you have to take care of it the old way too... It's more expensive and nobody wants to do the job 'cos it's always trickier than new houses :-)

[jacquesm]

This is from the 12th century:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e0/Overzich...

[Karto]

Come to Europe, masons' ghosts are all over... I used to live cheaply in a simple downtown appartment in a mediterranean city. Year carved in stone : 1724.

[leoedin]

I live in Europe! My house is not old for the area, and there's millenia of documented history for this spot. It used to be an observatory!

But it's still interesting - on a personal level - to think about the lives of the people who built it.