Meet the architect who wants to revive the lost craft of barn building Architect Robert Somerville explains how a once-dwindling craft can bring modern communities together Carpenter and architect Robert J Somerville, has just launched a book on barn building Credit: David Rose Nobody knows exactly how wooden village barns were built, which is strange when you consider how they look from the outside: simple, sturdy and viewed with a little romance, so naturalistically constructed as to appear more closely related to the woods they came from than their modern sheet metal cousins. In a few generations we have lost our knowledge of how to build these barns.