Course: Unit XVI Craft
This unit addresses the meaning and identities associated with all forms of making: craft and manufacturing; digital fabrication and handmade; bespoke and mass production; functional and decorative; practical and poetic. Given the global pandemic, in particular, the unit will develop a stance on making that has a reciprocal relationship with people, place, culture, environment, context, materiality, sensuality and experience within the context of ‘stay local’.
The perception of craft is often associated with nostalgic and romantic visions of handmade, virtuoso artefacts made using age-old tools and sold at regional fairs under the premise of being made by a certain person in a specific place. However, the notion of ‘craft’ today is far more wide ranging from words, food and clothes to vehicles, infrastructure and architecture. In the words of Christopher Frayling (2011), ’craftsmanship has again become fashionable’ and therefore reinvented? Yet although historically craft has been linked with concepts of making and skill, derived from the old English word craeft (strength or skill) the word and act of craft is no longer so easily defined. Dormer (1997) observes that throughout its history there has been a ‘disjuncture between its etymology and the constituency it is expected to represent’. He cites the October 1906 edition of the ‘Craftsman’ journal which includes articles on: ‘Books, cabinet making, city planning, etching, opera, painting, poetry, vernacular industries and religion’. In architecture, craft is often pitched against, confused and interchanged with the world of manufacturing yet in Samuel Johnson’s 1773 dictionary definition its meaning includes: ‘manual art or trade’ and a craftsman could be ‘an artificer, manufacturer, a mechanick’. In the Arts and Crafts movement it was strongly associated with the political left, characterized by John Ruskin and William Morris’ socialist stance; while the Bauhaus founders saw craft as a political means to achieve human equality. As witnessed by an increasing number of architects and the ethos inherent in the state of Vorarlberg, Austria, this unit proposes the notion of architect as maker and designing through making with a focus on critical making: What does it mean to make? How can making influence the associations with place and people? The theses developed in this Unit will demonstrate the meaning, process and influence of craft within a modest scale, highly refined architectural proposition.