Makers

Head and Hand

The American College of the Building Arts blends liberal arts courses and building-trades training in a four-year degree.

By Joel Hoekstra
November 6, 2025

Winter 2026

Craft Communities

Free To Read

Photo courtesy of Andrew Cebulka

ACBA woodworking professor Charlie Moore with student Dashiell Bennett.

One morning last summer, Joseph Kincannon, a professor at the American College of the Building Arts in Charleston, South Carolina, stopped amid his classroom rounds to marvel at the noise. Roughly a dozen students were hunched over shoebox-sized blocks of Alabama limestone, transforming the pieces into ornamental rosettes destined for use in a nearby architectural project. The rhythms—hammering, tapping, and clanging—were like a long-forgotten symphony, the sounds of a nearly lost art.

“No two carvings look exactly alike,” Kincannon tells his students. He encourages them to put a bit of creativity—but not too much—into their rosette designs. “The lion heads on an old building might look exactly the same, but each of them will be slightly different,” he notes. “Each takes on the characteristics of its carver.”

Similarly, the graduates of the American College of the Building Arts earn a certificate as valuable as any other college diploma—but their education is distinctly different. The ACBA is the only accredited institution in the US to offer a four-year degree that integrates a liberal arts education and building-trades training. Students take courses in such core curriculum subjects as math, science, literature, and foreign languages, as well as electives in traditional building arts, including blacksmithing, masonry, woodworking, and plastering.

A teacher and a student work together on a stone carving

Photo courtesy of Andrew Cebulka

Joseph Kincannon, chair of stone carving at American College of the Building Arts, tutors student Noah Pasquinelli.

The school got its start in the 1990s, after Hurricane Hugo ravaged the Eastern Seaboard. Historic cities like Charleston, seeking to restore their architectural charm, discovered that carpenters, builders, and metalworkers with knowledge of traditional trades were in short supply, and few craftspeople retained the knowledge or the skill to repair centuries-old architecture. In 1999, a group of preservation-minded civic leaders in Charleston founded the School of the Building Arts. Five years later, the school added a college-level curriculum and changed its name, awarding its first bachelor’s degrees in 2009.

Traditional academics are given an artisan spin by the college’s faculty. World history, for example, leans heavily into architectural periods, and materials science courses focus on how wood and metals perform in changing conditions. The liberal arts and the trades are integrated; the activities of head and hand are inextricably linked.

The school attracts a rare breed: students who are primarily interested in the building trades but want a college degree. The faculty numbers just 30, and the student body—at 150 enrollees—isn’t much larger. But ACBA’s alumni have gone on to work at Mount Vernon, the US Capitol, and other historic sites. Countless others have joined studios focused on the building arts or launched their own businesses in the building trades.

Kincannon learned how to sculpt stone in New York City in the 1980s, laboring alongside English stone carvers imported to America to work on the (still-unfinished) Cathedral of St. John the Divine. He says carving stone by hand changes his students: “At first, they come into class reliant on their phones and always looking at screens. But after a couple of weeks, I find they don’t do that anymore. Carving requires concentration. It slows them down. It takes time. It’s absorbing and meditative.”

Students who participate in the school’s woodworking program spend their first semester focused solely on working with hand tools. Each student gets a set of chisels, handsaws, hand planes, and so on. “They learn how to cut joinery and do dovetailing—it’s very 17th- and 18th-century,” jokes Charlie Moore, who joined the faculty in 2015. “But when they learn to do the work by hand, they understand the mechanics more intimately.”

Of course, modern methods and technologies have their place in contemporary construction, Moore says, but he goes on to stress that what ACBA does best is teach students to appreciate how their heads and hands are linked. “Working with your hands allows you to make creative changes on the fly. You can respond to the material, you can deviate from the original design,” Moore says. “In some cases, it’s even faster to do things by hand than by using a device you have to plug into a wall.”

Joel Hoekstra is a Minneapolis-based writer and editor who specializes in design and architecture topics.

Photo courtesy of Andrew Cebulka

Weighted hammers used in the stonecarving process.

Visit the American College of the Building Arts online.

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