There has been a fair amount of hullabaloo recently regarding the joinery best suited for not only the stile and rail garden gates developed by CPW in the early 90's, but exterior assemblies in general. Exterior joinery is all about the properties of specific woods and their corresponding dimensional stability. There are emphatic do's and don't's far beyond what the site carpenter might understand, with his stackable designs. This is all we saw, for so many centuries, and continue to see day in and day out from renderings and blueprints sent to us from architects all over the country. Levels of an assembly applied to one another in a stacking sequence. This applies most traditionally to exterior pergolas and trellises and arbors, but as well to the Wood Fence and the Wood Gate. In time, and very little time at that, the various applied levels separate from one another. They cup and bow and warp and open to unsightly joints, while offering virtually no integrity to the lateral stability of the design itself. Large cumbersome 45-degree corbels and braces are incorporated into the design to help serve this end, and yet because they are jointed by nothing more than nails or screws, their effectiveness is, well . . . limited, not to mention downright unsightly.

For an eternity it was a struggle between the builder, raised for the most part under the scope of structures. Or the architect schooled in stress loads and spans and form. This pitted against the classical woodworker, apprenticing toward an entirely different genre. Two very distinct trades, crossing paths to some degree centuries ago with the traditional post-and-lintel framing methods of the New England Puritans and Amish, but long since separated and exasperated dramatically in the late 1940's with the onset of housing tracks that stressed speed and a nominal integrity for the sake of affordable housing.

To be sure, there are excellent contractors and carpenters among us today. Hold-outs who once served adequate apprenticeships and who offer a high level of workmanship and acumen within their trade. These however are an increasing minority. Over the past twenty years an entire generation has migrated into the tech industry for quick monetary returns, leaving a vacuum that is only now beginning to have an impact. Furthered by a prolonged economic drought that began in 2007 to reduce even more. Acknowledging those remaining builders and carpenters who are held to their own high standards, what remains is a slough of Johnny-come-latelies, ill-trained and ill-equipped to neither meet, nor carry on, the standards of their predecessors less than one generation removed.

For decades CPW has dealt with hundreds and hundreds of builders and carpenters over the years as potential installers for the assemblies shipped all over the country. You might say we, more so than most, have our finger on the pulse of a changing trade. A trade where the norm is now fielded by those who have simply not served an adequate apprenticeship to perform their work at a professional level. And when we do stumble upon the rare tradesman of an irreproachable workmanship and experience, they are immediately entered into the redox and referred happily to those prospective patrons in need of such.

Much the same with the sister trade of woodworking, cabinet-making, even furniture-making. For those who can afford a two-year apprenticing guild, their schooling is largely relegated to a tolerance that eschews the large rambling structural scope of a builder. We might compare it to the poet and the novelist. The poet fixated on the minutia of words and phonetics and the cadence of a phrase, whereas the novelist sees the large sweeping storylines and relevant themes and by the nature of this, is far less focused on the minutia of linguistics.

The woodworker understands tight joints and an array of joints appropriate for various purposes and a method of construction that has almost no commonality with the builder beyond the criteria of an end product that is structurally sound. They do not work in the same woods nor share the same toolry nor even a common ground on their workplaces; one in the field and all the unforeseen problems of site work, and the other in the controlled environment of a shop, where everything is within reach and there are few distractions and almost never the head-scratching issues that develop from retrofitting an old existing structure known specifically to the remodeler--who in our litany of tradesman within a trade, is as distinct from the builder as the short story writer from the novelist.

I was raised by a builder. A step-father who arrived on the scene when I was 6 or 7. A remodeler who turned builder who exposed me to every aspect of both the remodeling and home-building trades from the time I was a boy all the way through college. A builder who spent weekends and evenings on the phone scheduling electricians and plumbers and roofers and sheetrockers and painters and cabinetmakers and concrete crews and stone masons and tilers and who somehow managed to now and again strap on his tool belt and swing his hammer. Immersed in this world as a little kid left with the crews who took their lunch brakes to wallow in conversations as guttural as those of a longshoreman. Pornographic utterances, followed by a wink to the boss' 8-year old son.

But also, my step-father's father, who had a woodworking shop in his basement in Champaign, Illinois. A part-time furniture-maker who worked alone and without the confusion of coordinating others and from him, on Saturday mornings, I absorbed by comparison an almost Zen-like focus of an entirely different trade. A trade of 64ths of an inch and dry-fitted joints and re-cutting joints until the dry-fitting was a melding puzzle and the properties of wood itself. Properties that were largely of no concern to the builders in the field. What I learned is that the two trades seldom communicated with one another and how to the builder, the woodworker was another sub-contractor no different than the plumber or painter.

So it's no wonder their trade secrets remained secrets. It's no wonder the woodworker never understood the nature of assemblies and structures and stress loads and working on site with portable tools drawn from a toolbox mounted to a pick-up truck. The very idea of their constructions being subjected to sleet and snow and hurricanes and tornadoes and urinating dogs is beyond the acceptable scope of the woodworker. And the builder, who who could no more conceptualize the notion of a controlled interlocking haunch tenon than a layman plucked from the crowd. The notion of matching grains for glue-ups and constructing an assembly without fasteners or brackets and the exorbitant time it required to create something so small, if compared to . . . to a barn.

And perhaps this alone explains why exterior assemblies and structures have remained the domain of the builder. A methodology following the same methodology practiced in building a porch or a deck or a framed wall. Layers upon layers stacked upon one another and fastened by screws or nails or bolts and later, by screwguns and nailers driven by compressed air. Accomplishing their structural and lateral rigidity with cumbersome 45-degree corbels or heavy-gauge iron bracketing as if a pergola or trellis were a barn. The heavy, muscular, over-wrought aesthetics of generations upon generations of exterior assemblies built on the predicate of builders who are not woodworkers or woodworks who are not builders and how the two traded methodologies as if they were Republicans and Democrats. How the woodworker might be confused with something he built in his shop being shipped from the temperate climate of San Francisco to Mississippi or Hawaii, where the relative humidity is a major, major factor on just how long his work will survive the dramatic expansions and contractions of regional climates. The dramatic disparity of regional climates separated often by 3,000 miles from the shop where it was built. My step-grandfather's shop did not pay.

Nor did languishing in the attic beside my mother, an artist and painter, enthralled by the act itself of brush strokes and the accumulations of enough strokes developed into a concept and of course, the drunken odor of oil paints. it was the job sites that paid. Job sites that changed like revolving doors until by the time I was of college age, I could frame a house--it's walls and jack rafters and stairs. I could shingle a roof, pour and smooth a concrete driveway, lay a stone wall, shingle a side-wall, sheetrock and tape the walls, lay the stone or linoleum tile, build the cabinets for the kitchen and bath, run the romex, hand-cut the miters for the casings and trim, and build the gate and fence. By that time I leaped at the opportunity to leave it all and relished the idea of five years in college. Five years bouncing from architecture to art to design under Buckminster Fuller to anything at some juncture that kept me and everyone I knew from being drafted. But graduation from Southern Illinois University came and three days later I left for a San Francisco where I knew no one. Not a soul. Where in those days Folsum Street was one long string of woodworking shops when shops could actually afford to locate in San Francisco. A mecca of woodworkers who owned and controlled what is now known as the trendy SOMA district.

Years passed, experimenting and gathering techniques and slowly learning to combine the apprenticeship that began as a boy, sharing his tutelage between the ancestry of a builder and that of a woodworker. Developments were accomplished. Innovations in design were made. Backlogged schedules. By the mid-80's, children were arriving, cute as buttons, and Charles relegated himself to the shop exclusively, closer to the 'Buttons', and concentrated on developing a line of studio furniture, along with the help of the newest Prowell apprentice, #2 son Benjamin, swaddling about the shop in his diapers.

Missing the encounters of site work and all that that entails, Charles returned to the landscape of job sites in the mid 90's with the eventual development of what began with the stile and rail Garden Gate. The result of more than two years of prototypes. Who would think such a simple premise would take two years? A simple premise that was apparently too complex to have been initiated by anyone else. The right wood and the right grade of wood; the right joinery to bear the gravity-laden weight of the product for decades; the right joinery to allow expansion/contraction; the right methodology to allow self-drainage; to allow free expansion/contraction that would alleviate the stress compounding from variable climates as a free and floating entity; the proper hardware at a time when there was no proper gate hardware; and not to overlook the medley of designs that mimicked a signature that spoke from a single aesthetic source. And quickly, the same methodology was brought to a modular fence panel and to a driveway gate and to an arbor and to a bench and swing and to lighted columns and about the only thing braking the growth was the dependency on site builders to what they could and could not be expected to reliably install on the site.

Let's have a look at a hierarchy of joints, drawn from Charles' decades of indentured apprenticeship. Some of them common and recognizable, and some of them closer to performance art

But first, let's start with this. An image of Charles' left hand. As a lefty, it's a fairly important hand. And if you'll notice, after decades of cutting joints, all his fngers are in their proper, original place. On this, his left hand, as well as his right hand. Missing digits and surgically repaired digits are always the result of one of two factors: #1) An increasingly hurried pace of work. (Learn to work at one pace, and only one pace, no matter the time of day or the urgency of a deadline. When they speak of Zen and the art of woodworking, it's all about pace. Establishing your pace.) #2) Attempting a procedure that simply feels wrong. An odd cut or unorthodox approach alerted by your sixth sense. A warning you should listen to. Stop, step away, and reconfigure how better to set up the procedure. Templates? Jigs? It's often the odd manuever that results in what we call a freak accident.