An Elite Trade School

By blending college education with a traditional form of craftmanship education, the American College of Building Arts guides students to build tables, armor, community, and hope.

My brow furrows as I contemplate the table in front of me. It is a maze of 40 lengths of wood fit together in a complex series of dazzling angles and joins. The legs of the table wear a clear polyurethane coat while the supporting cross beams are stained a rich walnut color. This contrast is visually appealing but also serves to highlight the precision of the cuts and the perfection of the joins.

An amateur woodworker of many years, I’m particularly curious about how some cuts manage to bring the minor support beams into an almost knife-like point, which would surely have broken any wood I’ve ever attempted to work with.

Leaning over to the beaming young man standing beside the table, I ask “How did you do that?” He is eager to tell me. The table is his own alteration of a plan he found for a Japanese sawhorse. The joins that have me in contemplation were cut using a very delicate saw that is only made in Japan. He shows me the original Japanese plan and his own version of it, which resembles an architectural blueprint. To me, both plans are an incomprehensible maze of angles, beams, and guides. But this student reads it with fluency and excitedly explains every aspect of the conception and execution of this exquisite table.

This table is only one of many projects on display at the student showcase for the American College of Building Arts (ACBA). The range of projects is remarkable. Students are showing off timber framed buildings, bookshelves, plaster columns with volutes in Corinthian style, stone carved statues, wrought iron chandeliers. Everywhere you turn there is skill on display and the craftsmen behind them sharing their strategies and journeys of creation.

In town for the 2023 graduation, I toured the school, speaking to students and teachers, examining dozens of fascinating, unique, and functional works of craftsmanship. There is something very peculiar about ACBA that doesn’t make it feel like your regular college. No one in this school is burning time. No one is here because they were looking for a college degree. They came here for an education, but the response to the education they are getting here tells me that they are actually seeking something bigger and more important. 

To understand what they are looking for, we must understand the foundational ethos of this school. The ACBA was not created because someone had an abstract love for beauty and craftsmanship. It was created to address a specific need.

In 1989, Hurricane Hugo hit the city of Charleston and damaged a number of the historic homes and buildings. Many of these structures date back to the very founding of this country and were built in a city filled with craftsmen skilled in working with stone, iron, timber, plaster, and slate. 

As the building owners set to repairing the storm damage, they quickly found that there were simply not any local workers with the skills to restore the structures. In the instance of a damaged slate roof, one homeowner had to import slate laborers from Wales to perform the repair work.

Ordinarily, this kind of missing skill on now-esoteric materials would be a burden that would obsess someone in isolation as they worked to keep up their own older property, but Hugo’s damage brought the reality of the missing craftsmen to the minds of many of the citizens of Charleston who were concerned with preserving the architecture and style of the city’s historic buildings. 

In order to develop a home-grown set of craftsmen who could provide the kind of skills that are found primarily in Europe, the school founders sought inspiration from Les Compagnons du Devoir, a French organization of craftsmen and artisans that has been operating for centuries. This organization drives a 10 year educational program that involves intense academic training in mathematics, art, and history while working on physical projects intended to tease out their suitability for the highest levels of expertise and craftsmanship in a wide range of fields from carpentry to pastry chef.

While the hope of creating an American Les Compagnons was an aspiration, the founders of the ACBA realized that, for the purposes of marketing and (importantly) financing and student aid, they would need to somehow squeeze this intense 10 year education into the mold of a 4-year bachelor degree program.

One strategy to accomplish this was to cut out the more meandering elements of the average 4-year degree program. When students are required by the accreditation organizations to take a history course, most university students are offered a buffet of history to choose from. They could learn about early American history or a history of western civilization, African history, the Renaissance, the Middle Ages, Roman, Greek, Chinese, or Sumerian history.

ACBA doesn’t offer those courses. They require their students to study architectural history. When the accreditation committee requires two semesters of science, students cannot choose biology or physics, but must study material science so that they will understand how their chosen materials will change, reinforce, or degrade in relation to temperature, time, and use. For the language credit, only Spanish is offered because that is the language students will most need in the industry of construction and restoration.

In this way, ACBA requires students to bring a laser focus to their craft. Every class points them back to the work they will be doing with their hands. In this school there is no education for the sake of education. Everything here is about learning in order to build. If something is important enough to make it into the classroom, it is meant to reinforce the end goal, which is to educate better craftsmen.

Far from being constricting, this purpose infuses the school with meaning and the students can sense it. They know they are being trained not to graduate but to be a person who can build something. That is the electric energy that crackles through the walls of this building.

That energy, and the students’ accompanying eagerness, is contagious. The physical campus itself is bursting with creative work. You can’t walk 10 feet down a hall without passing some beautiful and functional work of art. When the school had need of a gate for a wine cage, the students collaborated, designed, and delivered.

The main building itself gives the sense of a warehouse that has been gradually filled with so much creativity and experimentation that it is spilling out into the parking lot.

And it is literally spilling out into the parking lot. When I walked around the main campus building I find student-created timber projects for holding coal that will be used for the blacksmithing class. There are tons of carved stone outside that were transported from Texas and are waiting to be assembled into a magnificent carved fountain.

Faculty once asked the students to build a bench swing for the outside patio. In some way, the result was predictable. If you ask a student who is majoring in timber framing to build a bench swing, you’re going to end up with a bench swing that will stand in defiance of hurricane forces.

Nothing short of a wrecking ball is going to destroy this thing. It is the Hercules of patio swings. But it the detail in the swing that took me aback.

The wrought iron chains that hold this swing on its massive frame were not made of standard links. Each link is different. The links are circular, oval, some twisted into a spiral shape, others into an elegant figure eight. Each link was replicated across all four chains for the sake of symmetry but each one was unique.

Every subsequent link was a tactile declaration that a real person spent time thinking about how this specific link should look. Someone hammered a scalding iron rod until it bent to their vision of how this chain would present itself to the world. The artists who did this were building something strong and beautiful, but they were also being playful about it.

That playfulness permeates the school. You hear it from the students and you see it in their work. It is the joy of creative play that recalls our time as children. Before someone told us to sit still and be quiet, we drew and painted and sawed and built. We hammered random boards together and whittled sticks. With no one around to reprimand us, we built things for fun.

That sense of fun is bursting out of the ACBA. But you can see from their curriculum and in their students that they are taking that childish creative sense and helping their students focus it toward a practical end. You can see it all through the campus and in the eyes of the students. There is an eagerness to create. 

With the pieces commissioned by the school, there is a blend of function and creativity that screams out to us that the person who made this made it with care, skill, and attention to detail. But they were also having fun. They found this joy in their creation and, with a project untethered from formal academic or commercial restraints, they explored their abilities and the artistic possibilities of the medium.

The capstone event has students and projects separated out by type. I walked over to the blacksmith bellows and discover exquisitely detailed iron and stained glass chandelier hanging from the rafter.

Another stroll takes me to the student pulling tight the leather thongs on his hand crafted suit of armor. As a lover of intricate tactile art, I was drawn to the plaster and masonry room. The studio is littered with plaster cast animals, hands, heads, and intricate column capitals.

At the center of this workshop is Iris Howe, a graduating stone mason. She stands quietly composed with her hands behind her back before three intricate stone capstones. One is a dark mottled gray, worn by age and the elements. The other two are a clean light gray, freshly carved with long clean-cut stems. The weathered object was once a capstone on the National Cathedral in Washington DC, broken from its perch by an earthquake in 2011. During her internship at the Cathedral, Ms Howe worked with their resident stone mason and so impressed him with her talent that they gave her this capstone to take back to Charleston and carve replacements that will stand atop the church for many years to come.

At this graduation event, the students stand with pride before these works of enormous accomplishment, born of these years of diligence and study. They are looking forward to getting out of school not because they can take a break from their labors but so they can peruse them more intensely. They can’t wait to build the next thing.

The optimism from these students stands in stark contrast to the experience of their generational peers. In his recent book “The Anxious Generation”, Jonathan Haidt (

After Babel

) write that we’ve seen enormous increases in the number of kids from this generation who say that they “have no chance at a successful life” and that “life often feels meaningless.” Haidt notes that this view of the world often follows from a disconnection from physical activity and interactions with a physical world that bring risk, connection, and hardship.

It isn’t just the prospect of a job or the expectation of economic security that leads these students to such a sense of optimism and purpose. There is something in this act of creation that seems to nourish their souls. This sense of meaning and purpose in craftsmanship is something I keep bumping into in my search for what exactly it is that is lifting up their lives in such a way.

We find hints of this fulfillment of the human soul across a range of investigations into the human condition. Christian mystic and philosopher Simone Weil notes that the work of the laborer is one of the core needs of the human soul. “A man should often have to take decisions in matters great or small affecting interests that are distinct from his own but in regard to which he feels a personal concern. He requires to be continually called upon to supply fresh efforts.” The work of these students from their time at the ACBA could hardly be more suited to fulfill that role.

Additionally, as the school is physically situated in the city of Charleston, the students become intimately familiar with the need for their work in the context of a city, her residents, and the history it represents. As

Matthew B. Crawford

writes in “Shop Class as Soulcraft”:

When the maker’s activity is immediately situated within a community of use, it can be enlivened by direct perception. Then the social character of his work isn’t separate from it’s internal or “engineering” standards; the work is improved through relationships with others. It may even be the case that what those standards are, what perfection consists of, is something that comes to light only through these iterated exchanges with others who use the product, as well as other craftsmen in the same trade".

This activity of creation and the fact that it lives within this rich social context makes the coursework and craftsmanship at ACBA an antidote to cynicism and a rebuke to nihilism. It as if someone planted a fresh sapling in the heart of this old city.

While touring the school with the school CFO, Chad Urban, we found ourselves in the lobby admiring some of the wood and plaster restoration examples. A woman walked through the door and spoke to the receptionist, who pulled Chad aside. The woman was looking for someone to plan and build a timber frame project on her property and needed them to start as soon as possible. Chad gently informed her that they could take down her number and have her on a waiting list for the next available craftsman, but even their newly graduating students were booked out for work for the next 6 months.

This sense of excitement from the students isn’t just about creativity and art and play. They find purpose in engaging the physical world and the beauty of their craft and becoming masters of it, but this is helpfully reinforced by a community around them that sees the quality of their work and wants to see more of it. They can see that they are needed, their skills are appreciated and in demand. They’ve learned that there is a unique satisfaction that comes from bringing new things into this world.