Arts and Craft Movement

By Dempson Haney

The Arts and Crafts Movement by Elizabeth Cumming gives a detailed history of the Arts and Crafts movement. It looks at its beginning, the manufacturers that arose from it, architects that practiced it, and the principles or meaning behind it.

The arts and crafts movement began just as the Industrial Revolution was underway. The idea behind the movement was to bring well handcrafted products to the consumer at an affordable price. The improvement of design standards increased after the publication of “The Seven Lamps” by John Ruskin. Ruskin along with William Morris were pioneers in the Arts and Crafts movement. Morris’s goal was to bring good affordable design to the general public. Besides well crafted affordable products, the movement also believed that the everyday items that could now be mass produced needed to reunite the spiritual with the everyday. Lethaby, architect and historian, wrote, ‘the message will be of nature and man, of order and beauty, but all will be sweetness, simplicity, freedom, confidence and light, all terms used at the time not only in application to architecture but to describe the quality of life.’

English architect Augustus Pugin created three basic rules of architecture, the first being structural honesty, originality, and third being the use of regional material. It was believed that the use of country materials provided enough of a color range to work from. Halsey Ricardo, architect, wrote in 1896, ‘colour enough to set off and harmonize with the palette served by nature.’ The Edinburgh congress dubbed texture as a quality of the arts and a condition of architecture.

Increasingly number of architectural firms began to design and manufacture the crafts and furnishings for their clients. The rise of product designers and manufacturers was also beginning. One example was a London firm by the name of Kento and Co. started designing and producing furniture for architecture in 1890. Morris believed in taking a raw material and turning it into a finished product. Ruskin on the other hand saw the beauty in the imperfection of materials.

The consumer market was now wanting more than crafts and moving towards house furnishings. Architects were redefining interior spaces with crafted doors, windows, and floors. At this time they were searching for architectural and industrial craftsmen who were skilled in producing unique and original work. The industrial age was making the mass production of these furnishings a reality. From 1902-1905, the middle class demand for the crafted furnishings lead to “The Studio to the Art Workers Quarterly”.

“Morris wanted art and humanity to be restored to workmanship and designer to be motivated by a sense of social purpose and responsibility.” (Cumming 97) The Arts and Crafts movement did not reject architectural style but rather embraced the past’s qualities that had potential to evolve over time. Renzo Piano once said that he looks to the past for inspiration for his work. His finely crafted work doesn’t astatically resemble the past but rather conceptually emphasizes it. Arts and craft style was not a style of its own. It took shape based on its region. In the US the west coast looked at Spanish missions, the Midwest’s inspiration and backdrop were the prairies, and the east coasts precedents were the English and Colonial.

A side note, Wright’s high back dining room furniture created a room within a room. By enclosing the dining table with high back chairs, it brought a more personal confrontation. Griffin was Wright’s site supervisor and office manager. He is also responsible for much of the site design the harmonized Wright’s work with its context. Sadly the majority of the Arts and Crafts movement is thought to have ended during the First World War. It was believed that the lack of sociological ideas had left the craft movement bland and un-meaningful.