Master builder

{{Short description|Official overseeing building operations}}

{{Other uses|Master Builder (disambiguation){{!}}Master Builder}}

File:Inscription at the main door of the historical school of the master builder in Zittau.jpg.]]

A master builder or master mason is a central figure leading construction projects in pre-modern times (a combination of a modern expert carpenter, construction site supervisor, and architect / engineer).

Historically, the term has generally referred to "the head of a construction project in the Middle Ages or Renaissance period",Olga Popovic Larsen, Andy Tyas, [https://books.google.com/books?id=8H2q0KUZeOsC&pg=PA29 Conceptual Structural Design: Bridging the Gap Between Architects and Engineers] (2003), p. 29-30. with an 1887 source describing the status as follows:

{{quote|A master builder is recognized as such, not only for his ability to rear a magnificent structure after plans prepared by the architect for his guidance, but because of his ability to comprehend those plans, and to skillfully weave together the crude materials which make up the strength, the harmony, the beauty, the stateliness of the edifice which grow in his hands from a made foundation to a magnificent habitation.The Inland Architect and News Record (1887), Volume 9, p. 43}}

The term has also been applied to more broadly include "designers and builders of large-scale construction work who learned their trade in a more formal way than the builders of primitive forms in pre-technological societies... from the times of the Egyptians and Sumerians until (and in some cases beyond) the Industrial Revolution". The phrase has been in use since at least 1610, when William Camden wrote in his {{lang|enm|Britain, or a Chorographicall Description of the most flourishing Kingdomes, England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the Ilands adjoyning, out of the depth of Antiquitie}} of "those Wings in Architecture, which the great Master builders terme pteromata".{{cite book |first=William |last=Camden |translator-first=Philemon |translator-last=Holland |translator-link=Philemon Holland |title=Britain, or a Chorographicall Description of the most flourishing Kingdomes, England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the Ilands adjoyning, out of the depth of Antiquitie |page= 14|place=London |year=1610 |url=http://www.philological.bham.ac.uk/cambrit/fronteng.html }} Later in the same work, Camden writes:

{{quote|And Peter is as sure a gate, for them to passe thereby.

This is a rocke remaining firme: a Master builder hee...{{cite book |first=William |last=Camden |translator-first=Philemon |translator-last=Holland |translator-link=Philemon Holland |title=Britain, or a Chorographicall Description of the most flourishing Kingdomes, England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the Ilands adjoyning, out of the depth of Antiquitie |page= 227|place=London |year=1610 |url=http://www.philological.bham.ac.uk/cambrit/fronteng.html }}}}

Like other trades, master builders were initially trained through lengthy apprenticeships to persons already having that status, often beginning in boyhood, and the "secrets of the Master Builders were often jealously guarded, and treated as sacred knowledge". A 1926 source stated:

{{quote|To become a Master Builder an architect must not only be possessed of the theoretical knowledge of engineering and a knowledge of the details of building construction, but he must become the devisor of methods of construction.Proceedings of the Annual Convention of the American Institute of Architects, Volume 59, p. 145.}}