IV

Let us now turn to industry. The medieval order was disrupted in

America before it could fully take root. As a result we have no

craft-tradition that is properly native, with the exception of the

shipbuilders and furniture-makers of New England, whose art has been on

the wane since the second quarter of the nineteenth century. We have

covered up this deficiency by importing from generation to generation

foreign workmen, principally Germans and Italians, in whose birthplaces

the art of using wood and stone has not been entirely lost; but we

are still far from having created an independent craft-tradition

of our own. If art is the fine efflorescence of a settled life,

invention is the necessity of the roving pioneer who every day faces

new difficulties and new hazards; and accordingly we have devoted our

energies to the machine, and to the products of the machine. All that

we cannot do in this medium we regard as “mere” art, and put it apart

from the direct aims and practices of everyday life.

Our skill in working according to exact formulæ with machines and

instruments of precision is not to be belittled: socially directed it

would put an end to a hundred vapid drudgeries, and it would perhaps

give the pervasive finish of a style to structures whose parts are

now oddly at sixes and sevens. Unfortunately for us and for the

world in general the machine did not come simply as a technological

contribution: it appeared when the guild had broken down and when

the joint stock company had gotten its piratical start as a Company

of Gentleman-Adventurers. As a result, our mechanical age was given

an unsocial twist; and inventions which should have worked for the

welfare of the community were used for the financial aggrandizement

of investors and monopolizers. In architecture, all the skill of the

technologist and all the taste of the artist have become subservient

to the desire of the financier for a quick turnover of capital, and

the ground landlord for the maximum exploitation of the land. The

sole chances for good workmanship occur when, by a happy accident of

personality or situation, the patron asks of the architect and engineer

only the best that they can give.

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 reënter 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 is an obvious case where commercial

monopoly runs contrary to economy and where the benefits of modern

technology are forfeited in the working of our financial system. Once

we understand that modern industry does not necessarily bring with it

financial and physical concentration, the growth of smaller centers and

a more widespread distribution of the genuine benefits of technology

will, I think, take place.

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 naïve

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 occasional man of talent, like Mr. Samuel

Yellin, the iron-worker, will survive; but the great run of craftsmen

do not.

Now, with due respect to the slickness and perfection of the best

machine-work, we enjoy it because of the use that it fulfills: it may

incidentally achieve significant form, but no one retains a pickle

bottle, beautifully shaped though Messrs. Heinz and Co.’s are, for this

reason: it was meant for pickles and it vanishes with the pickles.

This is not merely true of today: it is true of all ages: the common

utensils of life return to the dust, whereas those things that hold

the imprint of man’s imagination--the amphoræ of the Greek potters,

the fragile crane-necked bottles of the Persians, the seals of the

Egyptians--are preserved from the rubbish heap, no matter how frail

they may be or how small their intrinsic value.

There is something in man that compels him to respect the human imprint

of art: he lives more nobly surrounded by his own reflections, as a

god might live. The very rage of iconoclasm which the Mohammedans and

Puritans and eighteenth-century liberals exhibited betrayed a deep

respect for the power of art; for we destroy the things that threaten

our existence. Art, in a certain sense, is the spiritual varnish

that we lay on material things, to insure their preservation: on its

lowest terms, beauty is justified because it has “survival value.”

The fact that houses which bear the living imprint of the mind are

irreplaceable is what prevents them from being quickly and callously

replaced. Wren’s churches are preserved beyond their period of

desuetude by Wren’s personality. This process is just the opposite to

that fostered by the machine-system, and it explains why, in the long

run, machine-work may be unsatisfactory and uneconomical--too quickly

degraded.

Art, in fact, is one of the main ways in which we escape the vicious

circle of economic activity. According to the conventional economist,

our economic life has but three phases: production, distribution,

and consumption. We work to eat so that we may eat to work. This is

a fairly accurate portrait of life in an early industrial town; but

it does not apply to the economic processes of a civilized community.

Everywhere, even in regions of difficulty, something more comes out of

production than the current income and the current saving of capital:

sometimes it is leisure and play, sometimes it is religion, philosophy,

and science, and sometimes it is art. In the creation of any permanent

work of art the processes of dissipation and consumption are stayed:

hence the only civilized criterion of a community’s economic life

is not the amount of things produced, but the durability of things

created. A community with a low rate of production and a high standard

of creation will in the long run be physically richer than a modern

city in which the gains of industry are frittered away in evanescent,

uncreative expenditures. What matters is the ratio of production to

creation.

Here lies the justification of the modern architect. Cut off though

he is from the actual processes of building, he nevertheless remains

the sole surviving craftsman who maintains the relation towards the

whole structure that the old handicraft workers used to enjoy in

connection with their particular job. The architect can still leave

his imprint, and even in the severely utilitarian factory he can take

the simple forms of the engineer and turn them into a superb structure

like Messrs. Helmle and Corbett’s Fletcher Building in New York. To

the extent that honest engineering is better than fake architecture,

genuine architecture is better than engineering: for it strikes the

same esthetic and humane chord that painting and sculpture appeal to

by themselves. The freedom to depart from arbitrary and mechanical

precedent, the freedom to project new forms which will more adequately

meet his problem are essential to the architect. Up to the present he

has been able, for the most part, to exercise this freedom only on

traditional buildings, like churches and libraries and auditoriums,

which are outside the reaches of the present commercial regime and have

therefore some prospect of durability.

But before the whole mass of contemporary building will be ready to

receive the imprint of the architect, and before the handicrafts

re-enter the modern building to give the luster of permanence to its

decorations and fixtures, there will have to be a pretty thoroughgoing

reorientation in our economic life. Whilst buildings are erected to

increase site values, whilst houses are produced in block to be sold

to the first wretch who must put a roof over his family’s head, it is

useless to dwell upon the ministrations of art; and, unfortunately, too

much of our building today rests upon this basis and exhibits all the

infirmities of our present economic structure.

From the aspect of our well-to-do suburbs and our newly-planned

industrial towns, from the beginnings of a sound functional

architecture in some of our schools and factories, it is easy to

see what the architecture of our various regions might be if it had

the opportunity to work itself out in a coherent pattern. For the

present, however, it is impossible to say with any certainty whether

our architects are doomed to be extruded by mechanism, or whether they

will have the opportunity to restore to our machine-system some of

the freedom of an earlier regime; and I have no desire to burden this

discussion with predictions and exhortations. But if the conclusions we

have reached are sound, it is only the second possibility that holds

out any promise to the good life.