It is true that the movement of the last hundred years has been away from handicraft; but a hundred years is a relatively short time, and at least a part of the triumph of machinery has been due to our naive enjoyment of it as a plaything. There is a wide difference between doing away with hand-labor, as in sawing wood or hoisting a weight, and eliminating handicraft by using machine tools for operations which can be subtly performed only by hand. The first practice is all to the good: the second essentially misunderstands the significance of handicraft and machinery, and I must dwell on this point for a moment, since it is responsible for a good deal of shoddy thinking on the future of art and architecture.
V
On the human side, the prime distinction overlooked by the mechanists is that machine work is principally toil: handicraft, on the other hand, is a form of living. The operations of the mechanical arts are inherently servile, because the worker is forced to keep the pace set by the machine and to follow the pattern set by the designer, someone other than himself; whereas the handicrafts are relatively free, in that they allow a certain leeway to different types of work and different ways of tackling a job. These distinctions are bound up with a difference in the forms that are used; and it is through these esthetic differences that we may, perhaps, best see how the personal and mechanical may be apportioned in the architecture of the future.
The key to handicraft esthetics, it seems to me, is a sort of vital superfluity. The carpenter is not content with his planed surface; nor is the mason satisfied with the smooth stone; nor does the painter impartially cover the bare wall: no, each worker must elaborate the bare utilitarian object until the capital becomes a writhing mass of foliage, until the domed ceiling becomes the gate of heaven, until each object gets the imprint of the fantasies that have ripened in the worker’s head. The craftsman literally possesses his work, in the sense that the Bible says a body is possessed by a familiar spirit.
Occasionally, this elaboration passes the point at which it would give the highest esthetic delight to the beholder; nevertheless, the craftsman keeps pouring himself into his job: he must fill up every blank space, and will not be denied, for carving wood or hacking stone, when it is done with a free spirit, is a dignified and enjoyable way of living. Those of us who have become acclimated to industrialism sometimes find the effulgence and profusion of craftsmanship a little bewildering: but if our enjoyment of the portals of a medieval cathedral or the façade of an East Indian house is dulled by the myopic intricacy of the pattern, our appreciation of the craftsman’s fun and interest should be heightened. Granting that art is an end in itself, is it not an end to the worker as well as the spectator? A great part of craftsmanship needs no other justification than that it bears the mark of a joyous spirit.
When we compare an ideal product of handicraft, like a Florentine table of the sixteenth century, with an ideal product of mechanical art—say a modern bathroom—the contrasting virtues and defects become plain. The conditions that make possible good machine-work are, first of all, a complete calculation of consequences, embodied in a working drawing or design: to deviate by a hair’s breadth from this calculation is to risk failure. The qualities exemplified in good machine-work follow naturally from the implements: they are precision, economy, finish, geometric perfection. When the workman’s personality intervenes in the process, it is carelessness. If he leave his imprint, it is a flaw.
A good pattern in terms of the machine is one that fulfills the bare essentials of an object: the chairishness of a chair, the washiness of a basin, the enclosedness of a house, and any superfluity that may be added by way of ornament is a miscarriage of the machine-process, for by adding dull work to work that is already dull it defeats the end for which machinery may legitimately exist in a humane society; namely, to produce a necessary quantity of useful goods with a minimum of human effort.
Craftsmanship, to put the distinction roughly, emphasizes the worker’s delight in production: anyone who proposed to reduce the amount of time and effort spent by the carver in wood or stone would be in effect attempting to shorten the worker’s life. Machine-work, on the other hand, tends at its best to diminish the inescapable drudgeries of production: any dodge or decoration that increases the time spent in service to the machine adds to the physical burden of existence. One is a sufficient end; the other is, legitimately, only a means to an end.
Our modern communities are far from understanding this distinction. Just as in art we multiply inadequate chromolithographs and starve the modern artist, so in architecture a good part of machine-work is devoted to the production of fake handicraft, like the molded stone ornamentation used in huge Renaissance fireplaces, designed frequently for small modern apartments that are superheated by steam. In turn, the surviving worker who now practices handicraft has been debased into a servile drudge, using his skill and love, like his predecessors in Imperial Rome, to copy the original productions of other artists and craftsmen. Between handicraft that is devoted to mechanical reproduction and machinery that is set to reproduce endless simulacra of handicraft, our esthetic opportunities in art and architecture are muffed again and again. An
