What It Means To Build
Thinking Through Materials
My step-dad could spot trouble on a job site right when he showed up. He hopped out of his truck and breathed in those everyday construction aromas. Sawdust kicked up as the table saw sliced through lumber. Concrete dust coating the foundation like a thin blanket. Diesel smoke drifting from the excavator. Beneath the routine stuff, he always noticed the off notes. That bitter sting from wiring getting too hot. The odd chemical hint of concrete dumped with too much water. The absence of the steady hammering that should have been coming from the framing crew.
I stood there watching him survey the place, his gaze following the crew like he was piecing together a puzzle. Nothing like scanning words on a page. He caught the concrete team loafing by their rig at ten on a Tuesday morning, not hustling to finish the pour. Electricians fumbling wire pulls out of order, all stiff and unsure, the kind that screams poor setup or not knowing the plan inside out. Then that weird hush in the spot where framers ran into some foundation surprise and ground to a halt.
What did he figure? The job itself clues you in ahead of anyone speaking up.
My stepdad quit high school early. Across the quarter-century I have known him, he never cracked open a textbook for the core tricks of his trade. Catch him tallying board feet mentally, though. He factors in length and width and thickness, throws in waste allowance, and beats my calculator every time. The numbers I savor working out gradually? The math I love and have to work through step by step? He processes it instantly.
I used to think this was just experience. Certainly, there was something to be said for the practice of a multiple decade career. Spotting patterns after years seeing builds come together. The closer I looked, though, the clearer it got that he drew on skills I had not run into before. He juggled four layers of thought at once. The actual layout taking shape. The step-by-step flow of jobs and scheduling. The on-the-spot hurdles like rain or supplies or workers showing up. How it all held up years down the line. How did that knowledge sink in? I still wonder. No fancy software guided him through those twists, not like the tools I lean on for most things.
Before medical school, I worked construction for about six months. It was tough work. The problem-solving, coordination, and pressure management I learned proved invaluable in medical school and clinical rotations. I saw firsthand how similar the core cognitive demands were to surgery while noticing how society tends to prize that doctor know-how far above the builder kind.
Watch a general contractor work and you are watching someone orchestrate what research has shown can be up to 90% of the construction work performed by specialized subcontractors. Every trade has its own expertise. Its own timeline. Its own way of reading the same set of blueprints.
The electrician sees power distribution and circuit loads. The plumber sees water pressure and drainage flow. The HVAC tech sees air movement and thermal zones.
The general contractor has to hold all of these perspectives simultaneously while managing the client relationship, permit requirements, and the dozen other variables that can derail a project. I have watched them juggle phone calls about delayed deliveries while pointing out electrical conflicts to the sparky, all while keeping one eye on the weather forecast that could shut down tomorrow's concrete pour.
It is quite the cognitive orchestration. And unlike surgeons, who get to work in sterile, controlled environments with specialized equipment and institutional support, construction professionals develop this expertise while dealing with weather, unpredictable site conditions, equipment breakdowns, and constantly changing variables.
My grandfather, a finish carpenter, could run his hand along a piece of wood and tell you not just the species but how it had been cut, how long it had been drying, what stresses it would handle. He'd tap a board with his knuckle and listen to the sound it made—the hollow ring of dry lumber versus the dull thud of green wood still heavy with moisture. Cedar smelled different from pine, and both smelled different when they'd been sitting in a humid warehouse versus properly kiln-dried.
Every board had a personality, he'd tell me, his calloused fingers tracing the grain, feeling for the subtle ridges and valleys that indicated how the tree had grown. When he cut a joint, the saw moved in smooth, deliberate strokes, and I could hear in the sound whether he was cutting with or against the grain. His movements were precise but never rushed—decades of muscle memory guiding the angle of the chisel, the pressure of the plane.
You could see him thinking through his hands.
The way he'd pause mid-cut, head tilted slightly, listening to what the wood was telling him. Sometimes he'd frown and adjust his approach without a word. The material was always teaching him something.
I'm sure I might be romantically anthropomorphizing the relationship the contractor and the materials. I do think it's sophisticated material intelligence that develops only through years of direct, tactile engagement. You learn that concrete "tells you" when it's ready through subtle changes in sound and texture. You understand how different metals expand at different rates and plan your connections accordingly. You recognize the particular way drywall dust settles that indicates someone's been cutting corners on ventilation. You can't learn it from textbooks or YouTube videos. It emerges only through sustained practice in real conditions where materials don't behave exactly as specified and you have to adapt.
Growing up academically focused, I pursued an education that further insulated myself from blue-collar paths. Yet I've known friends who earned degrees, then chose construction. I have a friend who graduated with a degree in education, taught for one year, then left to build a subcontracting business. Another friend with a theater degree ended up starting a construction company. Before medical school, I read two books by Dr. Mike Collins, an orthopedic surgeon who spent years as a construction laborer before that work led him back to medicine. A coworker eventually challenged him about wasting his life doing construction, but maybe that coworker had it backwards. Maybe those years weren't wasted but were teaching him types of expertise he couldn't have learned any other way. One of my favorite theologians, Stanley Hauerwas, worked as a bricklayer for years and credited his experience as foundational to becoming a formidable academic.
These are complex cognitive achievements that deserve recognition alongside more traditionally academic forms of knowledge. We conflate prestige with complexity—prizing theoretical abstraction over blue-collar expertise. Theoretical understanding gets tenure while material engagement gets minimum wage. The social status we attach to different types of work might need reanalyzing.
A highway construction worker I read about described how the work changed his relationship to landscape and infrastructure. He used to drive over bridges without thinking about them. Now he sees the engineering, the planning, the hundreds of decisions that went into every span and support. He understands what it takes to build something that lasts.
This is knowledge that reshapes perception. Once you understand how buildings are made, you see the world differently. Once you've managed the coordination required for complex projects, you recognize the importance of construction orchestration everywhere. Once you've cultivated material knowledge, you notice the quality of construction in everything around you.
These people illuminate possibilities for human expertise that exist far outside traditional academic frameworks. Their daily engagement with their craft creates ways of seeing that help me understand my own relationship to making, coordinating, and building lasting things. And perhaps most importantly, they demonstrate that wisdom and sophistication can emerge anywhere people commit deeply to their work — whether that's in a sterile operating room where you hear only the beep of monitors and your own breathing, or on a muddy job site at dawn where the air smells of diesel and fresh lumber and the day's work stretches ahead with all its problems and possibilities, ready to be built upon.