During the 19th century more and more machines
and factories arrived on the scene mass producing items that would normally be
designed and put together by a craftsman. John Ruskin felt the diminishment of
the importance and need of the everyday craftsman. To solve this social concern
he believed and advocated that in order to save the occupation, need, and
talent of the craftsman, society needed to do away with moving forward into industrialization.
He viewed machines and factories as acting as the modern day craftsman and no
longer would a craftsman and his individuality be needed to design and produce
great products. Spreading his philosophy to others, Ruskin was known as the
father of the arts and crafts movement. Many of the following architects and
their movements, Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus, Geritt Reitveld and De Stijl,
and Frank Lloyd Wright and Prairie Style home, agreed with his logics of the
importance of craftsmanship and the individuality of an artist, but at the same
time they agreed with Ville le Duc’s argument on adapting to their environment
and using resources of the time to design and produce their architecture. Their
integrated philosophy of both John Ruskin and Ville le Duc, helped transform
the face of the arts and crafts movement; no longer would an artist or craftsman
require a pen or pencil, a carving utensil, nor a paint brush but a machine to
complete a project.
Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus
When Walter Gropius was commissioned to design and build a
new school of Architecture and Applied Arts, not only did he design the
building itself but he also used his own resources, his Bauhaus students to design
and produce furniture that went into the building all the way down to the doorknob
in their shop classrooms. He believed that the “artistic culture was threaded
by the materialism of industrial capitalism and could only be saved by a
spiritual revolution
(Colquhoun, 2002, pg. 160).” In his case, the revolution
would be to step back into the mentality of a craftsman in order to rebel
against society’s custom of buying furniture with ornamentation of little
importance just for decoration produced by a factory. He wanted the Bauhaus to
display this following idea: “Let us conceive a new building of the future…architecture,
painting, and sculpture rising to Heaven out of the hands of a million
craftsmen, the crystal symbol of the new in the future
(Colquhoun, 2002, pg. 160).” He basically wanted to
create a notion that a work of art, like a simple piece of furniture, should be
designed and mass produced by a factory of craftsman, people like his students,
not by labored workers just trained to press a button to constantly replicate a
product. Many of his design concepts were influenced by the De Stijl movement
and Frank Lloyd Wright.
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| Bauhaus School of Architecture and Art |
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| An aerial view of the Bauhaus School |
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| An interior view of the school and its student develope furniture |
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| A Tea Pot designed by a Bauhaus student |
Garrit Rietveld and De Stijl Movement
Before he became an architect, Garrit Rietveld started out
as a furniture maker, which allowed him to design not only the exterior but also
the interior of his buildings; his most prominent design project that really emphasized
his design strategies and methods was the Schroder House
(Emmons & Mindrup, 2008, pg. 45). This house was designed and
built during the De Stijl movement, which many of the artists during this time
believed that architecture and art should be expressed through “functionalism,
with a severe and doctrinaire on the rectilinearity of the planes, which seem
to slide across one another like sliding panels.” All surface decoration was to
be eliminate except pure primary colors hues, black, and white
(Jirousek, 1995). Rietveld design for the Schroder
house stemmed from his red and blue chair and Piet Mondrian’s painting
Composition in red and blue. There is a really
strong connection between the building and the painting as if the building and
its furniture acted as a canvas for Rietveld to carry out his De Stijl ideas.
Every use of color and simplicit geometric form added functional purpose to the
design; he gained this influence and the inspiration to produce his own
furniture from Frank Lloyd Wright’s philosophies.
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| A painting done by Piet Mondrian called Composition in Red and Blue |
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| Furniture done by Rietveld |
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| Schroder House |
Frank Lloyd Wright and Prairie Style Homes
For many of his commissioned projects, Frank Lloyd Wright,
like the architects mentioned above, designed the structure of a building all
the way down to its door handle. As a prominent leader of the Arts and Crafts
movement, he believed heavily in John Ruskin ideas of upholding the individuality
and raw talent of an artist and craftsman but he also believed, “Art’ still
dominates, but it is now produced by the machine, not by the craftsman, and is
totally controlled by the architect working at his drawing board
(Colquhoun, 2002, pg 53).” The finished product of
everything that is produced by a machine depends on the person who is controlling
or designed the machine. These machines cannot operate and advance on its own
without somebody coming to fix it or tell it what to do. Therefore, a machine
would be more on a scale as a pencil, paper, or exacto knife when it comes down
to designing, and that is exactly what it was for Wright.
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| Robie House |
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| Robie House interior view |
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| Another Robie House interior view |
All of the architects list above where successful with
their designs and methods of designing the exterior and interior of a structure
using some type of machine, or in Gropius case factory; however, why did John
Ruskin not receive the same success in his methods and design? If these
architects would have continued to strictly commit to his philosophies, they
would have not been able to meet the demand of the consumer. The world has now
reach the industrial and technology age, and no longer do consumers have to
wait weeks, days, or even hours for the simplest necessities and luxuries to be
produced by the manufacturer. Surely the idea of a craftsman would have
vanished from this society, relying specifically on John Ruskin methods. Our
world needed some balance between the craftsmen and industrialization, which
could meet the demands of the people but also uphold the talent of the artist,
and these architects truly found this equilibrium.
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