Repertoires of architects and mountaineers. A study of two professions

This thesis studies the emergence of two crafts and argues that the ways in which a craft develops into a well defined discipline with rules, principles and techniques that underpins its practice, is dependent upon an underlying quest to master it and to become a master craftsman. It will show how mastery had several different modes but also that the repertoire of techniques that forms it has the capacity to cross both historical and disciplinary boundaries. It does so by examining two disciplines, architecture and mountaineering, and the way in which they emerged as professional practices during the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries and also how they individually attempted to master the craft of building and the craft of climbing, respectively. The two disciplines each tell a (hi)story of anempts to master the craftsman's activity and the space within which the activity takes place but, here, the two are conjoined, not only as a metaphorical comparison but also materially through stone. Much of the content of this thesis has arisen from seeing one discipline through the eyes of another, and through weaving their (hi)stories together into one. The different modes of mastery grappled with in separate chapters represent !he ways in which the disciplines were theorised, practiced, graphically and verbally described, imagined and finally how they made use of aesthetic sensibilities, with each mode of mastery being derived from an attempt to solve spatial problems. In order to trace the identification of skills and techniques within the two disciplines, the texts investigated focus predominantly upon those books that could be defined as instruction manuals in addition to many of those that were written in the immediate lead up to the idea that practical instruction could be written. Thus the material e.xamined stems both from narrative as well as instructional texts. Through examining these different modes of mastery, a close relationship between architecture and mountaineering, and between two different centuries, is mapped out. The texts investigated include those by Antonio di Pietro Averlino (Filarete), Sebastiana Serlio, Philiben Delorme, John Ruskin, John Ball, Alfred Wills, Frederick Burlingham, Clinton Dent, George Abraham, Geoffrey Young and Kun Diemberger.