Hewn and Hammered

library week: Hearst Castle

by Trey Ratcliff at www.flickr.com

The Craftsman: issue 3

 

The third item in our continuing series is Volume 1, number 3 of The Craftsman: December 1901 (3 meg PDF).

The Craftsman: Issue 2

 

The second item in our continuing series is Volume 1, number 2 of  The Craftsman: November 1901 (3 meg PDF).

The Craftsman: Almost Every Issue, Now Online

 

I've recently been gifted a large archive of every issue (bar two - issues 8 and 9 from the 1916 volume are missing) of Gustav Stickley's The Craftsman, beginning with volume 1, number 1 in October of 1901. I'll be posting one every few days for the coming weeks, starting with the first issue today. 

Here you go: Volume 1, number 1 of The Craftsman: October 1901 (3 meg PDF)

Thanks very much to the archival-minded friend - another big fan of the public domain - who passed these on to me!

book: Shop Class as Soulcraft

Last weekend, the NY Times Magazine included a short excerpt from a terrific new book by Matthew Crawford, a motorcycle mechanic with a Ph.D. in philosophy.

Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work addresses issues of craft and work that will be important and thought-provoking to anyone interested in the philosophies behind the Arts & Crafts movement, and I look forward to getting my copy as soon as my local bookshop has it in stock.

High-school shop-class programs were widely dismantled in the 1990s as educators prepared students to become “knowledge workers.” The imperative of the last 20 years to round up every warm body and send it to college, then to the cubicle, was tied to a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy. This has not come to pass. To begin with, such work often feels more enervating than gliding. More fundamentally, now as ever, somebody has to actually do things: fix our cars, unclog our toilets, build our houses.

When we praise people who do work that is straightforwardly useful, the praise often betrays an assumption that they had no other options. We idealize them as the salt of the earth and emphasize the sacrifice for others their work may entail. Such sacrifice does indeed occur — the hazards faced by a lineman restoring power during a storm come to mind. But what if such work answers as well to a basic human need of the one who does it? I take this to be the suggestion of Marge Piercy’s poem “To Be of Use,” which concludes with the lines “the pitcher longs for water to carry/and a person for work that is real.” Beneath our gratitude for the lineman may rest envy.

This seems to be a moment when the useful arts have an especially compelling economic rationale. A car mechanics’ trade association reports that repair shops have seen their business jump significantly in the current recession: people aren’t buying new cars; they are fixing the ones they have. The current downturn is likely to pass eventually. But there are also systemic changes in the economy, arising from information technology, that have the surprising effect of making the manual trades — plumbing, electrical work, car repair — more attractive as careers. The Princeton economist Alan Blinder argues that the crucial distinction in the emerging labor market is not between those with more or less education, but between those whose services can be delivered over a wire and those who must do their work in person or on site. The latter will find their livelihoods more secure against outsourcing to distant countries. As Blinder puts it, “You can’t hammer a nail over the Internet.” Nor can the Indians fix your car. Because they are in India.

If the goal is to earn a living, then, maybe it isn’t really true that 18-year-olds need to be imparted with a sense of panic about getting into college (though they certainly need to learn). Some people are hustled off to college, then to the cubicle, against their own inclinations and natural bents, when they would rather be learning to build things or fix things. One shop teacher suggested to me that “in schools, we create artificial learning environments for our children that they know to be contrived and undeserving of their full attention and engagement. Without the opportunity to learn through the hands, the world remains abstract and distant, and the passions for learning will not be engaged.”

A gifted young person who chooses to become a mechanic rather than to accumulate academic credentials is viewed as eccentric, if not self-destructive. There is a pervasive anxiety among parents that there is only one track to success for their children. It runs through a series of gates controlled by prestigious institutions. Further, there is wide use of drugs to medicate boys, especially, against their natural tendency toward action, the better to “keep things on track.” I taught briefly in a public high school and would have loved to have set up a Ritalin fogger in my classroom. It is a rare person, male or female, who is naturally inclined to sit still for 17 years in school, and then indefinitely at work.

book review: Icons of 20th-Century Landscape Design

My colleague Jay Dickenson was kind enough to review Katie Campbell's new book for Hewn & Hammered:

Katie Campbell, Icons of Twentieth-Century Landscape Design, Frances Lincoln Limited, Publisher, 2006

In her new work, Icons of Twentieth-Century Landscape Design, Katie Campbell presents significant landscape designs created during the past century that, she believes, challenged the accepted form, use, and meaning of created landscapes. Campbell describes traditional attitudes toward landscape design, at least before the twentieth century, as alternating between the poles of classical formality and romantic naturalism. Fittingly, each of the twenty-nine sites featured in Icons eschews this rigid classical/romantic dialectic.

As a whole, Campbell’s subjects share neither style, nor location, nor philosophy (though each of the works in Icons emerges from the Western tradition of landscape design). However, Campbell is able to group the sites found in Icons according to broad and sometimes overlapping themes, such as nature worship (Stockholm’s Woodland Cemetery, Wright’s Falling Water, or Portland’s Lovejoy Plaza) and environmentalism (Eggborough power plant); nationalism and anticolonialism (Brazil’s Ministry of Education and Mexican designer Luis Barragán’s Las Arboledas); artistic (the Barcelona Pavilion, Park Guëll, and Bentley Woods); and allegorical (the Kennedy Memorial and Salt Lake’s Spiral Jetty).

Yet the thrust of the book is not thematic. Campbell addresses each site individually through both written description and analysis and through visual imagery. Campbell’s writing is lively an accessible. And, in keeping with Icons’ “coffee table” format, the photographs and illustrations are colorful and, for the most part illustrative. My only complaint is that, in some instances, Icon lacks images sufficiently detailed to match Campbell’s precise analysis. For example, in describing Gaudí’s use of allegorical and ethnocentric imagery at Park Guëll, Campbell references “large stone spheres, suggestive of rosary beads,” and “a red and white band ... which suggests a cigar band — a whimsical reference to Guëll’s interests in the tobacco industry.” Yet, in scanning the full-page prints and inset photos that accompany the essay, one unfortunately finds neither cigar band nor rosary beads.

Campbell acknowledges that her selection of sites to include in Icons was necessarily idiosyncratic, and, certainly, Icons excludes other twentieth-century works that deserve to be called “icons” of landscape design. For this reason, the book is sure to provide grist for the expert to grind. Yet, Campbell’s writing is accessible and oftentimes general. The novice reader, unschooled in modern or contemporary art, philosophy, or design, will surely find Icons a richly educational read.

book review: Craftsman Furniture Projects

Craftsman Furniture Projects: Timeless Designs & Trusted Techniques From Woodworking's Top Experts

My colleague Derek Martin, an experienced and very talented woodworker, recently offered to review a book I received from the kind folks at Woodworkers' Journal:

Thank you for the opportunity to read and give my brief review of Craftsman Furniture Projects.

I will start out by saying that I not only enjoyed the easy reading, but I also found myself distracted by the illustrations as I thumbed my way through the book. The book is loaded with diagrams, templates and pictures. Many more visual displays are also included to show exactly what is being done which can be especially useful if it’s your first time trying a particular procedure. Finished products are also displayed to show you what you are working towards at all times. So the use of illustration in this book along with descriptive detail made it an A+ for me.

One of my favorite items was the use of old woodworking tools and the brief explanation of what their purpose was on the project. Some were tools that can still be very useful today such as the wood marking gauge used to drawl more precise lines while performing the layout of a rabbet joint on a piece of stock. Simple tools like this can be found, usually when you’re not looking for them, at garage sales and flea markets and I have developed a habit of collecting and using such items rather than their newer and cheaper counterparts.

Throughout the book you will find sections called Quick-Tips and Technical Drawings. These brief paragraphs are hints and tips that outline safety, accuracy and workarounds for each project.

This issue includes nearly twenty beautiful furniture pieces that can be constructed in any decently outfitted woodshop. I would recommend this book to any beginner who wants to try their hand at building sturdy and eye-catching furniture or any master craftsman who thinks he’s seen it all.

Minneapolis neighborhoods profiled in new book

A recent article by Ellen Tomson in Minneapolis' Pioneer Press describes local historian and author Larry Millett's research and subsequent book on Minneapolis' historic neighborhoods. excerpt:

Larry Millett biked the streets of St. Paul and Minneapolis for three summers to produce his latest book, (the) AIA Guide to the Twin Cities, the first major neighborhood-by-neighborhood handbook of its kind.

But the foundation of his 665-page book was decades of research and writing about the Twin Cities, first as a Pioneer Press reporter, columnist and critic, and then as author of Lost Twin Cities, Twin Cities Then and Now, and Strange Days, Dangerous Nights, all which focused on local structures and events.

"The book is the result of three years of work and, in a sense, it's the work of a lifetime since I've worked here all my life," says Millett, 59, who grew up in North Minneapolis and has spent much of his adult life in St. Paul.

Ted Wells' Living Simple: a new book

My single favorite writer on architectural and design issues is Ted Wells. Unlike here, where I'm constantly filling in the space between interesting issues with notes of very minor importance, Ted's  puts articles up on Living Simple only when he has something to say. He's a really good writer and teacher (and designer, of course; that is his primary profession), and in my few conversations with him I've learned a lot about architecture and our responsibility to art.

Living Simple's motto is "Do your work. Be honest. Keep your word. Help when you can. Be fair." Even when Ted is critical - as he sometimes is, especially of communities (and homeowners) who are unable or unwilling to maintain architectural and aesthetic responsibility or historic character through either a lack of education or simple greed, or historic homeowners who are dishonest or inattentive stewards of their homes - he is always fair, and takes his responsibilities seriously. He even writes on his personal website that his "most important job is helping guide the stewardship of notable historic architecture, art, built and natural landscapes, and thought and culture."

Ted has a new book coming out next year with Gibbs-Smith, one of the world's best publishers of books on American architecture and design. Ted and John Ellis are currently finishing up work on the book, which is about the mid-century modernist architect Harwell Hamilton Harris. Twenty-two of Harris' homes will be profiled in the book, which will be published next year.

new books, April 2007

A number of books which look like they'd be very interesting to Craftsman (and other old-home) aficionados have been released recently. I'll try to get my hands on copies of some of these for full reviews. If you are a publisher and would like to have your book reviewed here, drop me a line.

• Vintage Cottagesby Molly Hyde English
• Dream Porches and Sunrooms by Michael Snow
• The Green Self-Build Book by Jon Broome
• Arts & Crafts Furniture by the editors of Wood Magazine
• Cabinetmaking: Design & Construction by William P. Spence
• The Homeowner's Guide to Managing a Renovation by Susan Solakian
• The Reclaimers: A Complete Guide to Salvage by Sally Bevan
• Charles Rennie Mackintosh: The Complete Furniture, Furniture Drawings & Interior Designs by Roger Billcliffe
• Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings by Edward S. Morse
• California Mediterranean by Melba Levick
• Rustic Fireplaces by Ralph Kylloe
• Wooden Houses by Judith Miller
• The New Bungalow Kitchen by Peter Labau
• Wood: Contemporary Houses in Wood by Joaquim Ballarin
• Creating a New Old House by Russell Versaci
• Craftsman & Other Timeless Dream Homes by Designs Direct Publishing
• California Romantica by D. J. Waldie and Diane Keaton