Good Work: Masters of the Building Arts

(whirring, scraping) (hammering lightly) (scraping lightly) (snaps)

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EARL BARTH: The Barths been in plastering in New Orleans from the 1850s. Leon Barth came from Nice, France. On his way to the United States, he stopped in Haiti, and he met my great-great-grandmother, Ora Devallier. And he came here to America, and he was a plasterer naturally. My dad was a plasterer, Clement. And his dad, Antoine, was a plasterer. But it was something for you to have sons to be plasterers. And it was like a legacy, like, who had the most sons on the job, you know. That was something. If you had four sons, "Oh, I have five sons." And if you wasn't a plasterer, then they wanted to know what was wrong with you. You got this other part back here, Hurchail?

HURCHAIL

Gonna make it seven feet long and 19 inches wide. BARTH: In this house here, a lot of the crown molding fell off over the years. So they called me in to reproduce-- they don't want anything new-- they want me to reproduce what they have in that entrance. There's some of them say I'm crabby. I don't want you coming with a fancy method. And if this is a little crooked, let's say it's out an eighth of an inch, keep it out an eighth of an inch. Match what's up here! (drilling) (talking in background) BARTH: My daddy used to tell me, you hit that wire, should sound like a banjo. Hit that wire, then you know it's tight. Well, this is Todd, this is Louis Soublet's son, Todd Soublet. That's Hurchail, that's my son. That's my grandson, this is Jamie. Yeah. And that's Dwayne Martin down there. He's the one that makes the mixes. If the mix is wrong, then we all wrong. (scraping) BARTH: You notice he's getting it nice and smooth. See how smooth that is? So when the plasters get up there'll be no lumps. This is going in the lathe. A lot of people say, "Well, how do it hold in that little hole?" This goes... see the lathes are like this, and that plaster get in there and key over that. That's a key. What am I gonna do with this hawk? You take the hawk, you lean it... (scrapes) Right... Got to tilt that hawk. Let's see you do this for Grandpa. Just like that, very light. That's it, very light. (scrapes) That's it, back. Very good. Hey! What happened there just now? I mean... I didn't tilt my hawk. That's it, very light. Okay, very light. I like this little trowel, Todd.

TODD

That was my daddy's trowel. BARTH: That's your daddy's? Oh, Louis Soublet is with us today. (chuckles) The magic is still there. BARTH: That trowel have a lot of magic in it. Trowel's been around a long time on a lot of jobs, yeah. Guard it with my life. Most of the tools I use, I have my own, but since he passed on, I find myself using his, you know? I just like using them. That way he's still with me. Still with me. BARTH: Pop that line, Hurchail, while we resting. Are you ready?

HURCHAIL

Yeah, ready to go. All right, you all together, all right. Now we ready. We got a good... good person running our buckets. This is Trudy Barth Charles. She been plastering since she's three. Remember what we said about cleanliness, Jamie? If you don't clean these tools up, then you get trouble, man. Nothing but trouble. I have Jamie, who's very young and very eager, as you see. I think in four years from now, Jamie will be as good as they come. So he's our hope. Get up there, get on the mold, Jamie, you're not on nothing, come on. You're not on nothing, Jamie, you ain't near yet.

TODD

Come on, don't stop, don't stop. BARTH: Take your time, that's it. Things are gonna start to shaping up. Push it, don't stop, don't stop. Watch yourself, watch yourself. BARTH: You all gotta remember, this stuff is swelling up. So we gotta get this mold over there, because as it dries, it swells. You can feel the heat. So it's not a question of, "Oh, we can take our time and come back later." You come back later, you ain't gonna be able to push this mold. That's what later gonna do for you. Now you're coming, Tru, now you're coming. Now you're coming, darling. Oh, yeah. That's Trudy Barth! That's Trudy Barth Charles! Oh, yeah! Coming through. (scraping) BARTH: Whoa, whoa. Give me a bucket.

MAN

Let's go, come on. BARTH: Just catch it on the end. That's bought and paid for. Okay. (church bells tolling) Well, Peter worked on the St. Louis Cathedral. Dad worked on the St. Louis Cathedral. My brother and I and all our cousins, at one time or another. You can see it, for the layman who wouldn't quite understand what we do, when you go to church and you look up at those ceilings, they look so beautiful, I wonder, do they ever stop to think, "Well, who done that work?" Somebody, some plasterer done that work. (jazz music playing) All this cement plaster. All this on the top of those columns or what... (talking in background) When you walk around in New Orleans, in Louisiana, you can bet Barths had something to do with it. Several buildings, in my experience, I found Peter's name, Clement-- anywhere my family worked, we'd leave our mark. Sometimes they'd see me just scratching behind a wall, they think I'm nuts. But I'm looking, I'm looking to find this mark. It's the mark of identity. (jazz music continues) Just made 24 hours ago. (talking in background) The master, he goes into the intricate parts of plastering, he's like a violin player, the lead violin player in the symphony orchestra. He's telling them when to hit and to follow him. He fine-tunes the plastering. In Creole, you'd say that's soign. So ign. BARTH: Soign. a, c'est jolie! That's pretty! (choir singing)

DIETER GOLDKUHLE

I see windows starting out as an opening in a wall, which admits light. And we, as stained glass people, trying to harness that light. We can color the light by way of filling the opening with colored glass. They are not static during the course of the daily cycle of the sun. You have different moods. It can be smoldering, it can be subdued, it can be brilliant. By revolving around the sun in a 24-hour cycle, it has a tie to the universe, to the solar system. And that, to me, is just such a powerful connection with the larger "out there." And to me, that's really the spirituality of a stained glass window. I have been collecting bits and pieces and sheets of glass all my life. And I get excited when I go to the warehouse where this material can be bought. And it's fatal to go there, because I always end up with so much more glass than I initially wanted to buy. And it just begs me, "Purchase me." (chuckles) And then I bring it home and I put it in these bins. And every now and then, I get my thrill by taking it out of the bin and holding it against the light. And I must say, it's absolutely beautiful. (chuckles) And that's the relationship I have with, an intimate acquaintance with my glass stock now. I do not design my own work, so I have been quite content with working with a number of artists in a collaborative effort to be somehow the midwife to the window-- comparable to what a builder is to an architect, a musician to a composer. And I feel also that I am married to the material, which I just adore and have the greatest respect for. The skill comes only by repeated... doing it over and over again, so that it becomes second nature. For instance, the glass cutting, I don't think about, you just do it. (snaps) When people see how glass breaks, they're just in awe by that aspect, that you can shape glass, or cut glass. But that comes only from the length of time I've been doing this. (organ music playing) I have been making and restoring stained-glass windows for the Washington National Cathedral for 37 years. I have been involved in one way or another with over a hundred windows here. And I think that's almost half the windows here in this building. (organ music continues) The window I am proudest of, for the National Cathedral, is the west rose window. (organ music continues) It floats in that dark wall high above the nave window. When you see it in the morning, it is predominantly blue. Then as the sun shifts over to the west, it can become fireworks with the fading western sun. It becomes like a red pumpkin, or an orange blazing pumpkin up in the sky. (organ music continues) I consider myself a glass man. I enjoy working on the making of new windows, as well as preserving windows that deserve to be preserved. This rubbing gives me a record of the lead pattern, so when I start taking it apart, I will have the order in which the pieces fit back in. And I re-assemble the panel over this rubbing. And it's, in fact, like a roadmap. You know exactly where to go. Yeah, I consider this restoration work like a patient that needs some surgical help. So I consider this my operating table. (chuckles) You don't want to approach it with a heavy hand. You want to respect the object and don't want to be too invasive. These windows developed buckles, and that's not unusual for most of the leaded glass windows, that over time, they get soft in their knees. And this bulging process does not stop, it will continue to put pressure on these largest pieces of glass and eventually, they will break. The glass itself is in excellent condition. There's no deterioration of the glass. And I would hope, with the additional reinforcing it gets, that it will not have to be worked on again for hopefully a century, if not more. Well, that would be... I don't want to be presumptuous, but it would be wonderful. (chuckles) In combination with lead and glass and limestone settings, you have a wonderful harmony of an ideal marriage of material. And I see the glass as a thin membrane, translucent, transparent, in an opaque massive masonry wall. There's just such a polarity between the massiveness and this thin, fragile membrane which is in general not more than 3/16th, an eighth of an inch thick, which is fragile as well as strong, at the same time. (choir singing) The end product is absolutely the culmination, to come to the space and set it in place where it is designed for. There is a reward for doing it from beginning to end. It's a total expression of yourself, and the satisfaction that comes from that and a certain pride to doing it as well as I can. But it's also just to see something grow, to see something handmade, to give birth to that, and that's what I'm working for. (drilling) (drilling continues)

NICK BENSON

The thing about these inscriptions is that I design them to be very easily legible, and so legible that people can come up and they read them in a breeze, and they don't think twice about it. Then they focus mainly on the content rather than the letter itself. That's the funny thing about good lettering, is that people don't even see it. They don't really understand it, they take all for granted. So my job here is to make something that people take for granted, because it works so beautifully that they don't even think twice about it. (violin playing) The thing about the John Stevens Shop is that we do not only the physical carving of this inscriptional work, but the design, too. And that is... is not typical. But we are convinced, and I think justly so, that if you have one person who understands the entire process of both design and carving, you're going to wind up with the best work. This is a broad-edge pencil. With this, I can approximate what the broad-edge brush does. There's a nice flat, what we call a chisel-edged end to it. And I initially start my layout on brown paper, sketching fairly quickly in order to give the inscription a sort of loose, natural feel, the aesthetic of the arm movements that come naturally from generating these forms. And then when I'm done with that tool, I then go in with the broad-edged brush. And I brush the lettering. And I'll make subtle changes to the characters themselves, but this gives me a rough outline of where I want to put my forms. So... I'm trying to do a version of the Roman capital letter that the Romans, 2,000 years ago, established with this broad-edge brush. Now, in order to make some version of that letter, which was so successfully developed by the Romans, it takes a lot of skill and time to understand these movements, and the subtleties that go into all of these, these strokes. The more time you spend making letterform with this tool, the better a carver you become. Because you understand what it takes in order to make the letter with the brush, so you understand the strokes of the brush. And then when you carve, you're carving, again, with the brushstroke in mind. The limitations of what you're able to do in any given material dictate how you're going to approach any given inscription. When we're working in slate, we can carve incredibly refined, you know, heraldic achievements and things like that, the detailed little pieces of work, because I know the stone can do that. In granite, lettering in granite, what I end up doing is, I make the letter quite heavy, because I know the granular quality of the granite needs a heavy character in order to carry, visually. The funny thing is, though, is when you look at the letter once it's carved, it doesn't look particularly heavy, it looks... it looks right. (hammering lightly) We have steel hammers for granite, and we have zinc hammers for slate, and we have brass hammers for marble. So you have a whole run of chisels and they're all laid out there so you can see what you need to grab at any given point. We need all kinds of different shapes of chisels. (machine whirring, scraping) Our shop started in 1705. And there were eight generations of the Stevens family who ran the shop. And in 1926, my grandfather bought the shop from the Stevens. He changed things around a bit. He revived the old tradition of carving, headstones, in particular, by hand, and drawing out the letterform by hand. (playing tune) My father took over the shop after my grandfather died and he continued on in the same tradition. And now it's, it's my turn. I look at the work of my grandfather, I look at the work of my father, and I just think, "How can I ever be as good as those men were?" You know, there's so much emotion wrapped up in doing this work that comes down through the generations, you look at all of the work that's come before you, and it's really daunting. (violin continues) This cemetery, the Common Burying Ground here in Newport, is just a parade through the history of the Stevens shop. For my grandfather, he loved walking around the cemetery, and because he was, he had such a great eye, artistically, he could look at all of these old colonial stones and see them for what they were, which is incredibly strong individual pieces of art. So this is my initial lettering for the National World War II Memorial. What's really important about this, is that when I look at this letter, this black letter on the white page, I understand that it's going to have a completely different look once it's carved in stone. So what people would look at as, "Wow, that's quite a heavy weight "that you have on this letter, and these strokes are really quite thick," I understand that when these letters are going to be carved in the very large-grain granite of the National World War II Memorial, the net effect will be that they will look far leaner and much more elegant. (violin playing) At one point, there was a monument maker who came in and was looking at these letters, and he said to me, he said, "Geez, there's not a straight stroke in those things." I said, "Yeah, that's what you want. "You don't want a single, straight stroke in these things, "because the sweep, "the emulation of the brushwork, is what gives the letter its vitality." (violin continues) (drilling grows louder) The memorial is being built, and as it's being built, you're in the middle of it trying to get done what work you want to get done. When you're involved with over 200, 300 workers, trying to put down granite pavers, pouring concrete forms, moving cladding around, moving bronzework, doing all kinds of chemical treatments on this, and that, and the other thing, and you're trying to get done your work, it is like a... It's like a dance. Believe it or not, staining letters is a skill in and of itself. When you try it out, you realize, "Wow, this is kind of difficult," then you realize, "No, this is really difficult." It's just moving quickly, knowing how much to get on the brush, how to get it consistent. You're actually... you're not really going up to the corner, you're staying just shy a very, very little bit, because what happens is, when you get to the corner, if the lithochrome goes up over the corner, it bleeds into the rest of the stone. So the nice thing about this stain is that it's translucent. So you can see the quality of the granite through the stain. It's incredible to think of the family's legacy-- my grandfather's work designing the inscription on the Iwo Jima Memorial, and then my father's work on the FDR, the Kennedy Memorial, his work at the National Gallery of Art, his involvement with Maya Lin in picking the typeface for the Vietnam Memorial, his hand-carving of the beginning and ending dates on the Vietnam Memorial. All these things are just amazing to, to think of and to look at, while I was there carving the inscriptional work on the World War II Memorial. Just to think about the family's thread running through DC and this wonderful legacy that I am now a part of... proudly a part of.

JOHN CANNING

We're working here at Trinity Church in Copley Square, Boston. This project is the restoration of the tower. The church was completed in 1877, and it was a collaboration of the great architect H.H. Richardson and the great John La Farge and his crew of artists, whose names are inscribed over the main arch of the sanctuary. Many of the areas have been painted over in the past, and some of the decoration has been inappropriately painted over with different colors, and our job is to reinstate the correct colors and decoration. What we have on site is all the primary colors and the earth colors. And one of the tricky and most important colors we have is the La Farge red, which was the theme of the entire color scheme. So now there has been a lot of research and exposures of original and indeed some existing colors that have been untouched. And so we are matching these colors and, in particular, the colors in the design in the corner. I started my apprenticeship as a painter and decorator in my hometown of Glasgow, Scotland, some 45 years ago. I always remember that period as a very happy period-- being part of a family, if you will. The elder tradesmen looking after the apprentice, almost like a father- or an uncle- -son or -nephew relationship. I worked with tradesmen who were around, perhaps, the turn of the century, or at least the 1920s. So it could perhaps be said that I have an accumulated experience of about a hundred years. And very often, I see old finishes and I can immediately identify them, because I remember, from 40 years ago, I remember someone teaching me that.

CANNING-RICCIO

I served an apprenticeship through my father, and I think I served it exactly the way that he had described he served his apprenticeship, but I think I did it with more hours. I started out working with my father since I was very young. We actually had a shop in our basement, and my father would bring some of his work home, some of his drawings. He actually let me cut a few stencils or dap along at some of the paintings or the artwork he was working on. I actually got to see how things worked firsthand, so I was introduced to it very early. I'd say I was probably, kindergarten, when he would drag me along on jobs.

CANNING

La Farge put together a team of artists to execute this work. And indeed, it's a very painterly-type decoration. Not as rigid and as precise as a tradesman's work would be. Our task repainting these panels is to follow the same brushstrokes in the same manner that it was originally executed. What distinguished this is a free hand and nice rhythm and flow. However, these artists must have had a tremendous perspective when they were doing this, because although areas look to be uneven and a little bit ragged, when this is viewed from a hundred feet down on the floor, it is just, they're just so beautiful and vibrant. And they're just... they're singing. There's been such a tremendous work of restoration that I think in future, this is going to be identified as the restoration period here in the United States. Now, we have been very fortunate where we've been able to work on world-class historic buildings, such as Grand Central Station, the Connecticut state capitol, the Michigan state capitol, the Rhode Island state capitol. We've also worked in many theaters-- Radio City Music Hall, perhaps, is the most famous. We've worked in many historic churches, such as the Battell Chapel at Yale University, and of course here at Trinity Church in Boston. We feel privileged to have worked on these historic buildings. And I guess I personally look at myself as being a link between the past, the present, and the future. Get that black edge, there. That's it, that's good. What gives us the most pride and satisfaction is the old adage "a job well done." (bells tolling)

JOE ALONSO

We're builders. We are the guys who were actually setting the stone blocks on the cathedral. You had the stone carvers who did all the wonderful carvings and sculptures on the building, and then the masons-- our crew, the building crew-- did the actual setting of the limestone and the construction of the cathedral. When you get onto a building like this, a monumental building like this, I mean, that's... You know, you're taking large, several-ton blocks of stone, setting them with a quarter-inch joint, extremely precisely at heights of, you know, hundreds of feet. In my experience, there's nothing more challenging than this. It is the ultimate masonry job, there's no doubt about it. (bells continue) The stone masons have to go by the architect's drawings. And this is a stone-setting drawing that we used during the construction of the west towers up above us here. Every stone, every block of stone, every piece of stone on the arch, everything has an assigned number and very specific dimensions that have to be followed in order for all of this to tie in together. It is a big jigsaw puzzle. They give it to us on paper and we have to put it together. (metal clanging) (pulley clicking) Okay, that's good, Andy, thanks. If you look throughout the cathedral, the specified joint thickness between the stones is a quarter-inch. So what we use to help us hold that quarter-inch dimension-- well, the slang term that we have is buttons. If I didn't put these lead buttons under it, the mortar would squish out, it would ooze out, and before you know it, the wall would get away from you and everything would be out of whack. (bucket scraping) So the next step then is to thoroughly wet the mortar, and you can see why I put those little ridges, why I fluffed the mortar bed. Those little ridges are there to kind of hold the water. And on a hot day, you probably got about two minutes to get this stone to where you want it. We finished the new stone setting in 1990, and since 1990, we've been involved in just the care and restoration and preservation of the entire cathedral, which is really a... just an awesome responsibility to care for the work of the many generations of masons that came before us. I love looking at that history and seeing those masons, and just seeing their work. I mean, the work itself speaks to me. They sort of set the standard for us, and at least I felt that when I was up there. It had to be as good as their work-- you had to uphold that. (scraping) (metal clicking) (clanking) (thudding) Setting stone is like mathematics in motion, constantly checking our dimensions, laying things out properly. Just the size of this building requires every course of stone that you lay to be very precise. (hammering) Being off a 16th of an inch may not sound like much in one course of stone, but you multiply that, and before you know it, that wall will get away from you, and it has. One instance is on this southwest corner of this south tower. We would constantly be checking the elevations of the courses. Always seemed to be a little high on the corner and just a little out of square. But knowing that that existed, whenever we were working on that corner, we knew to keep the joints a little bit tighter, humor in that, that corner-- and that's kind of another term that we use, you're humoring the stone. And, you know, you'll see that in other parts of the cathedral. I walk around the old parts of the building that were built, you know, generations before me. You know, you see things, you see little things that... I know what that mason did to make it work, and to anyone else it looks beautiful, it looks perfect. I can see what he did and I just think, "Oh, that's pretty neat." You know, he did it, and so did we, but this whole cathedral, the reason it looks so beautiful and perfect is, I think, because of all the masons and all the skill that came in, and all the fudging and humoring that we had to do in order to make the architect's drawings work. We use what's called a bucket trowel in this type of work. I found this trowel actually here at the cathedral. We were doing some work way back on the apse for a little while. You've got those great big limestone vaults that go down deep-- it's like a cavity in there-- and I noticed this trowel sitting there, just kind of, the handle was rotted away and the metal was rusted. But I retrieved it, wondering whether it fell out of the mason's hand and fell down into the bottom of that vault, and just never was retrieved until I climbed down there and got it. The mason was a righty, just like me. You can see the way there's just a little bit of a flare going up that way from dipping it into the mortar all these years, which really makes it cut into the mortar nicely. I mean, they're very small, subtle things, but I can feel it. It just feels, I've used other trowels before or whatever, but it's just something, this one just feels right-- it feels right in my hand. The most thrilling moment of my career here at the cathedral has to be September the 29th, 1990, which was the day we set the final stone, the final finial on this cathedral. And, again, I thought of the ghosts, I guess, of all the masons that came before me, were up there, too, and maneuvering that big finial into position and checking it and making sure it was level and true, and then Canon Feller announcing that the stone was set and the cathedral was completed. That was just an unbelievable day. (bells tolling) This cathedral is here, and even though we'll be anonymous, our work, the work that I did, the work that the many other craftsmen did here, is going to remain for other people to see for, for generations to come, and that means a lot to me. (hammering lightly)

PATRICK CARDINE

I probably could have ended up in any number of crafts or trades. I love working with my hands, I love making things, and have done woodwork and tried various things, but there's nothing as magical and intoxicating as forging hot metal. And just the combination-- the artistry, and the technical, you know, challenge of learning how to do it. Just the raw power of the machinery is exhilarating, as well. To take something so hard and lifeless and to be able to manipulate it, move it, make it do what you want, and just transform it, and that for a young man, just the power, the feeling of that was amazing. We're a job shop, so we do architectural hot-forged metal work. So we do gates, grilles, a lot of railings. We do a lot of residential work, but we also work in commercial and institutional buildings, as well. So we do all sorts of scale work, from very large, that may take six months to a year to complete, to something that we can do in a few hours, and we like all of it. (scraping) I'm sketching out an architectural grille. It's very organic, we're using a lot of different leaf forms. We're using tendrils in a couple of places, we're using sort of a bay leaf form, some acanthus leaves, a water leaf, really nice rosettes. And each one of these pieces requires different skills to produce. I really enjoy drawing this full scale. You know, we could do this on a little 8 x 11 piece of paper, or you can draw on the computer, but to be able to pick up a piece of soap stone and draw this out on a steel table, there is something about the tactile movement of your body that I find sort of brings out a certain creativity, and... I feel it. Every time you start to hit a hot piece of metal, it usually does something you don't want it to do. So you hit it in one place and then it misbehaves in another place. So you have to know where to hit it to make it to do what you want it to do. If you're bending a scroll, for example, it's a very simple, basic operation in blacksmithing, but it's actually not that easy to get a nice clean, smooth scroll without flat spots. But you have to know where to hit it, where to hit it on the anvil, where to hit it in the tooling, how hard to hit it. So you have to get it just right all the way around. You always are correcting, correcting what you've just done. So you may take three forging blows, five forging blows, then you may pull it over to another part of the anvil and take three or four corrective blows. So it's always three steps forward, two steps back. You have to strike while the iron's hot, so there's heat in that metal, and you have to move fast. You know you're not even... it's almost subconscious. The memory is almost in your limbs to know what to do with the hammer. There's a whole artistry of movement. I love the craftsmanship of forging the metal, making it go where you want it to go. It's not an accident, being able to make two of the same thing. You know, the old blacksmith said, he said, "Well, I can make one of anything. "It's being able to make the second one, "and make it look just like the first one, that makes you a good craftsman." So, you know, as I've gotten older in this, it's really the combination of elements all coming together that I find really exciting. (scraping lightly) (tapping) Samuel Yellin, one of the great blacksmiths of the 20th century, considered you to be a great smith if you not only produced great work, but you had to produce great work fast. Because almost anybody can take all day to make a leaf, but can you make, you know, 250 of these leaves in a day? Your skill level is directly related to your speed. Well, I think the creative process, coming up with an idea and then having the skill and the ability to actually execute it and bring it to life, it's bringing something that's intangible into a tangible reality that people can enjoy and touch and feel and hold and experience. It's really like magic. (flute playing)

ALBERT PARRA

My love with adobe and the earth, my beginnings in Old Albuquerque, New Mexico, was really a gift. Don Gaspar Garcia and his brother, they were the adobe makers. They would make the bricks, and they were also the adobe builders. And as a child going to early-morning mass, they were working already making bricks. And my interest was always looking at these bricks being made, formed. And finally one day, Don Gaspar says, "Que estas viendo? "What are you looking at? "What do you want? Do you want to work? You want to learn?" "S, yes, I do, I want to do this." And I would spend hours with that gentleman working and laying adobes, or making adobes, and it was a constant dialogue all day about the hard work, how this felt, how laying this adobe meant something to him, everything, all the soul of that adobe, because he had made it. Little did I know my apprenticeship, all those long hours with Don Gaspar, there was a reason for learning all this, and the reason is the morada. (tolling) (talking in background) (bell continues) (man praying in Spanish)

PARRA

The major proportion of all these people here are all hermanos. They are the brothers that belong to this morada. (all praying in Spanish) We all arrive and we all pay our respects for all that were here before us, and all that were responsible for this morada, so it's thanks-giving that we're all here. (all praying in Spanish) (man speaking Spanish) (chopping)

CHARLES CARILLO

What I'm doing is, I'm adding this dirt that's already been sifted, and it's beautifully sifted, local dirt, and I'm adding it to the mixer. The straw really acts as a binder, a fiber in the mud so that it gives it strength. But it also acts as a wick-- as it starts to dry, it wicks away the water. And this is a thing you don't want to add too much of. Then you have soup. Do you need something?

MAN

Mud.

CARILLO

Mud, mud, mud, okay, here we go.

PARRA

This building is called a morada, and it's a chapter house of the Penitente community. The Penitentes are the oldest surviving fraternity from the Old World in the New World. There's 80 moradas within the state of New Mexico and southern Colorado, 80 chapter houses. And everyone takes care of their morada in their own way. (man singing in Spanish) (singing) (singing continues) (mixer whirring) (talking in background) (singing in Spanish) This is the real meaning of community. Everyone says, "Why do you guys do that every single year? "Why don't you just get a stucco company and have it done with cement, and it's over?" It could be, it would really be over. It would... that'd be the end. Because this building would die, it wouldn't breathe. It's been breathing for... We're getting close to 300 years old here. And it breathes all the time, it breathes with the season, and it breathes life into all of us-- myself, Hermano Richard, Hermano Dexter, every single one of us looks forward to coming here and working together. It's a must that we do this. Even this year, we had extensive winter, driving rains, very wet snow. We have larger than usual holes in the wall.

JIMMY TRUJILLO

Of course, when it swells, when the ice swells, this is going to pop it right off, so there's areas you can see, like right here, this color here shows one year, this one another year, red one shows another year, and then you get back to another color here.

PARRA

It's all about maintenance, if it's... because if it's going to make it onto its 300th anniversary, we have to keep this up, we have to keep it going. And, of course, it's all integrated with what goes on inside. It's all tied together, it's... it's part of the story. It's the journey of faith.

DEXTER TRUJILLO

I'm smoothing our favorite place to sit here at the morada when we're meditating. Mm-hmm. This bench goes back, way, way back, for meditation, to sit and pray and greet people. This is the welcome committee bench. (chuckles) You know, this makes everybody feel like they're at their house, 'cause it's free to sit on here and just breathe in God's sacred world, I guess you would say.

PARRA

We're paying respect to all the ancestors-- all their efforts, all their time. Imagine if we wouldn't be doing this. Their time would have been lost, it would have been in vain. So it is a form of respect to all those that did this a long time ago. (scraping) (scraping) And we're out of mud.

MAN

Charlie! More mud! (speaking Spanish)

PARRA

Let's go, sweetheart!

CARILLO

Don't get so mud! (men shouting playfully)

PARRA

Come on, baby cakes! My mud! Come on! (man calls in Spanish) This event of plastering the morada takes place once a year. Every time we work on it, we feel like we are working with ancient earth that surrounds this morada, every time we pick it up from the ground up and put it back on the wall. That's the way we feel, we're bringing it back up. (bell tolling) (bell continues)

CANNING

Throughout history, and whether it be the paint trade, or the stone mason's trade, or the carpentry trade, good craftsmen always put their mark on a work, and it would be very close to the ceiling. No one else would ever see it except the tradesmen. It's not meant to be seen.

BENSON

Just across the bridge from where I was working, my grandfather's design for the inscription on the Iwo Jima Memorial was there. And then there next to the Tidal Basin is my father's work on the FDR Memorial. And there I was, you know, in the shadow of the Washington Monument, carving away on the inscriptions of the World War II Memorial, so the legacy's really, it's amazing. That constantly hit home and it was a wonderful thing to experience. BARTH: Well, my mind is crowded with plastering, and that's my dream-- my dream is my grandson, my dream is to get plastering apprenticeship moving in the city, and I'm going to fulfill that. That's my destiny, to get that done.

ALONSO

I've been in this trade now 25 years, and that generation of masons that I learned from, they're gone, and I guess it's us now-- me, now that I think about it-- who are the new generation that has to pass on the knowledge, and I hope that we're up to the task.

CARDINE

There's tremendous rewards and fulfillment, on the inside, that you've accomplished something, that you have worked through this process and spent years and years learning it. And there's a lot of inner fulfillment from that.

GOLDKUHLE

Perfection is absolutely an elusive goal. And the closer you get to it, the more you see it vanishing, and I think that will never stop. And I don't think that I will ever give up that effort to get just a little bit closer.