Square rule timber framing is a development upon scribe rule timber framing. In Scribe rule, sides of a building are laid out at once with all their pieces. The pieces are levelled, and lines are drawn between every piece. From conception, every piece is considered to go into the whole. Why all this trouble? Well, hewing timbers sucks. You don't always get things straight, and you definitely don't always get timbers to the dimensions you'd like. So, you match all the pieces together.

Square rule came about in the Americas. It's a uniquely American thing, because we came up with squares.

Well, at least, we popularized them.

Take the timbers you've hewn, pick two nice faces on them, then ignore the bad faces. Make all the measurements from these good faces. In this way, you will be removing material down to a "perfect timber within". You will be getting to the ideal timber.

This means, especially on large buildings, [stacked voice effect] interchangable parts.

Which is another thing we Americans popularized. Legend has it that Thomas Jefferson met a certain gunsmith, Honore Blanc, who was making parts in a very different way than other craftsmen at the time. He was making jigs for production, and fixtures to check his parts against. He wasn't testing triggers against stocks and making one-off pieces like his predecessors, he was testing triggers against trigger fixtures, and stocks against stock fixtures, so that you could take apart ten muskets, scramble the pieces, and put them back together and have a functioning musket.

Now, today, this is just how we do things. This is the American mode of manufacturing - we make parts to their ideal form. But at the time, this is revolutionary.

Square rule is doing the same thing. We're not checking our mortises and tenons against each other; we're checking them against standard measurements. Against blueprints, or at least mental blueprints.

The consequences of this shift, we all know. This enabled further division of labor, and paved the way for the assembly line. The guy making triggers, or the guy making a tie beam here, doesn't need to understand the overall assembly. He just needs to understand the requirements for his part.

[PAUSE]

We could lock everyone up in little isolated rooms, hand them a blueprint, and everything would fit together just fine and dandy. The guys cutting the timbers need not even be present for raising day.

[WALKING INTO A ROOM AND HANDING SOMEONE A BLUEPRINT, THEN SHUTTING THE DOOR]

Well, maybe the worker wouldn't be so happy about this.

Locked by yourself, lacking an understanding of the overall vision, is no way to be. This is a surefire way to increase despondency. Acedia. Disinterest.

Why the emotional turmoil? They did their work well. They should take pride in their work! They can measure it and inspect it with better tools; they should have greater appreciation of their own work, not less, surely.

Is information enough?
Is this pursuit of the perfect timber, of pure form, enough?
Do we need more technological gizmos to increase the enjoyment?
[VIDEO OF CHAIN MORTISER]

[TIMELAPSE - SPED UP A LOT A LOT]

No, we desire higher truths - we desire to see the telos of our handiwork; we desire to know if what we did worked in the final application of it. Because as analyzable and individualizable as man is, he is not meant to stand alone, just as each of these timbers is not meant to stand alone. They are meant to fit together in relationship.