It is this side of exaggeration to say that today a building is one kind of manufactured product on a counter of manufactured products; but with a difference; for the internal processes of construction are still, in spite of all our advances, handicrafts. An interesting result, as Mr. F. L. Ackermann has pointed out, follows from this fact: namely, that the pace of building tends to lag behind the pace at which other goods are produced under the machine-system; and if this is the case, the quantitative production of buildings is bound to be too low, while their cost is bound, by the same process, to be disproportionately high.
The remedy seized by the engineer, as I have pointed out, is to introduce the process of standardization and mechanization wherever possible. This heightens the pace of building, and by and large it quickens the rate of deterioration in the thing built: both processes increase the turnover of buildings, and so tend to make the art of building approach the rhythm established by our price-system for the other mechanical arts; since, under the price-system, the manufacturer must create a continued demand for his products or risk flooding the market. The two ways of creating a demand are to widen the area of sale or to increase the rate of consumption. Shoddy materials and shoddy workmanship are the most obvious means of accomplishing the second end; but fashion plays a serious part, and maladaptation to use, though less frequently noted, cannot be ignored.
All these little anomalies and inconveniences have come with machinery, not of course because the machine is inherently wasteful and fraudulent, but because our social order has not been adapted to its use. Our gains have been canceled, for the reason that the vast expansion of our productive powers has necessitated an equally vast expansion in our consumptive processes. Hence in many departments of building, the advantage of machinery has been almost nullified; and if handicraft has been driven out, it is less because it is inefficient than because the pace of production and consumption under handicraft is so much retarded.
When Ruskin began to agitate for the revival of handicraft it looked as if our industrial system were bound to triumph everywhere, and as if Ruskin’s protest were the last weak chirp of romanticism. At the present time, however, the issue is not so simple as it seemed to the builders of the Crystal Palace; nor are the choices so narrow. What seemed a fugitive philosophy when applied to the machine by itself has turned out to be a rigorous and intelligent criticism, when applied to the machine-system. The use of the machine in provinces where it has no essential concern, the network of relationships that have followed the financial exploitation of machinery—these things have led to a revolt, in which the engineers themselves have participated. It is not machinery alone that causes standardization, we begin to see, but the national market; it is not the machine that makes our cheaper houses blank and anonymous, but the absence of any mediating relation between the user and the designer—except through the personality of the builder, who builds for sale.
Apart from this, in certain industries like wood-turning and furniture-making the introduction of the gasoline engine and the electric motor has restored the center of gravity to the small factory, set in the countryside, and to the individual craftsman or group, working in the small shop. Professor Patrick Geddes has characterized the transition from steam to electricity as one from the paleotechnic to the neotechnic order; and intuitive technological geniuses, like Mr. Henry Ford, have been quick to see the possibilities of little factories set in the midst of the countryside. Mechanically speaking, the electric motor has in certain industries and operations placed the individual worker on a par with the multiple-machine factory, even as motor transportation is reducing the advantages of the big city over the small town or village. It is therefore not unreasonable to look forward to a continuation of this development, which will enable groups of building workers to serve their immediate region quite as economically as would a multitude of national factories, producing goods blindly for a blind national market. With direct sale and service, from local sawmills and local furniture-making shops, the older handicrafts themselves might reenter once more through the back door—as indeed they have already begun to do in response to the demands of the wealthy.
I am not suggesting here that handicraft is likely to replace machinery: what I am suggesting is the immediate and tangible possibility that machinery itself may lend itself in its modern forms to a more purposive system of production, like that fostered by handicraft; and under this condition the antagonism and disparity between the two forms of production need not be so great as they are at present. In a little valley I happen to be acquainted with, there is enough running water to supply five families with electric light from a single power plant; unfortunately, five families cannot combine for such a purpose in the state I am speaking of without a power-franchise; and so the only source of electric light is a distant commercial power plant using coal. Here
