
A master builder or master mason is a central figure leading
construction
Construction are processes involved in delivering buildings, infrastructure, industrial facilities, and associated activities through to the end of their life. It typically starts with planning, financing, and design that continues until the a ...
projects in pre-modern times (a combination of a modern expert carpenter, construction site supervisor, and
architect
An architect is a person who plans, designs, and oversees the construction of buildings. To practice architecture means to provide services in connection with the design of buildings and the space within the site surrounding the buildings that h ...
/
engineer
Engineers, as practitioners of engineering, are professionals who Invention, invent, design, build, maintain and test machines, complex systems, structures, gadgets and materials. They aim to fulfill functional objectives and requirements while ...
).
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, ]
Conceptual Structural Design: Bridging the Gap Between Architects and Engineers
' (2003), p. 29-30. with an 1887 source describing the status as follows:
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
William Camden (2 May 1551 – 9 November 1623) was an English antiquarian, historian, topographer, and herald, best known as author of ''Britannia'', the first chorographical survey of the islands of Great Britain and Ireland that relates la ...
wrote in his of "those Wings in Architecture, which the great Master builders terme ''pteromata''".
Later in the same work, Camden writes:
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:
References
Construction and extraction occupations
{{job-stub