That’s a late 1800s industrial building, looking up at the underside of an upper floor. The first thing that needs to be said has nothing to do with the point of this post: the joists are about twice as deep as they look like here. If you look closely, you can see the ledger strips that are nailed to the sides of the joists to support the flooring between the joists. Usually you see this detail when the floor has been deafened either to (as the name implies) rescue sound transmission or to make the floor better able to carry tile finish.
On to the real point: this floor represents the transition of construction technology to the modern age. Specifically, the joists are attached to the header running left-right with bridle irons rather than the traditional mortise and tenon joint. Mortise and tenon joints, even crude ones that are not meant to be seen, require some skill from the carpenter making them; bridles replace that with a piece of prefabricated metal.
You can argue that the bridle replaced skill in carpentry with skill in ironwork, but that was only true for as long as the bridle were made by blacksmiths bending iron strap. By the last decade of the 1800s, and maybe earlier, bridles were being made in factories by semi-automated machines, twisting and cutting the strap to standardized sizes. You could argue that those machines replaced skill in carpentry and blacksmithing with skill in making machine tools, but there were far fewer people employed making those machines than there and been as joiners.
When we talk about technology advancing, what we’re talking about at the early stages of the process is machinery replacing artisans, often with a loss of quality, at a lower price. Since I enjoy many of the results of that process, I’m not going to say it’s always a mistake, but we should see it for what it is.
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