FT: Make or break

Make or break

Review by Edwin Heathcote

Published: March 1 2008 00:13 | Last updated: March 1 2008 00:13

The Craftsman
By Richard Sennett
Allen Lane £25, 336 pages
FT bookshop price: £19.99

During the birth of the modern era, one word more than any other soaked into the rhetoric of late Victorian and Edwardian polemic – craft. From John Ruskin and William Morris to Adolf Loos and Walter Gropius, nearly every writer, teacher and critic defined their position in relation to craft as an existential reaction to the anonymity and inhumanity of industrial mechanical reproduction. It became the single defining theme of late 19th- and early 20th-century culture.

The machine, it was said, was destroying pleasure. Marx’s commodity fetishisation had become a vortex of manufacture and marketing, and consumer fashion demanded an ever-quicker turnover of shoddy, machine-made goods. The craftsman languished in his workshop, squeezing the last drops of pleasure of his art from a few final commissions for those few surviving men of wealth and taste.

Even the Viennese architect and theorist Adolf Loos, one of the harshest prophets of modernist reductivism, defended his shoemaker’s right to decorate his brogues (as Loos stripped decoration mercilessly from his own buildings) as a last bastion of humanity against the crushing weight of dumb industry.

But, after the industrial slaughter of the first world war, the machine seemed to have won. Craft was relegated to the realm of art and eccentricity. And there it still languishes, a perceived world of floppy pots and ropey brooches.

Richard Sennett’s previous analyses of contemporary cultural malaises covered everything from the decline of public space to the consequences of inequality for respect as a concept. In The Craftsman he launches an unusual and stimulating exploration of craft as a means of doing a single thing well, to focus on something other than ourselves, and therefore redeem some soulfulness from our barren lives.

At the heart of the book is an idea that work need not be about making money but can be about something more existential and profound. In a charmingly (and often slightly ramblingly) eccentric journey, Sennett takes a look at great craftsmen over the ages, from the workshops of Antonio Stradivari and of Renaissance goldsmiths to the strange set-up and motivations of the National Health Service. He takes us back to the creation of Diderot’s revolutionary Encyclopedie (1751-72) and isolates the egalitarian impulse embodied in listing roi (king) near rotisseur (roaster of meats). Sennett identifies the contrast that Diderot illustrates between the useful and the useless, between craftsmen – whose techniques are so extensively covered – and the dearth of anything produced by the idle rich.

In the same era Sennett takes us around the workshops of Promethean Jacques de Vaucanson, maker of the semi-mythical flute-playing automaton, a proto-robot able to play the instrument through a breathing mechanism. De Vaucanson moved on to a shitting automaton duck (ate food, digested, defecated). This was less successful but caught the eye of Louis XV, who commissioned him to create a robot to weave silk in order to bypass surly silkworkers and improve quality. De Vaucanson made the transition from visionary craftsman to maker of machines. With his loom (a later version could be operated by a donkey) De Vaucanson presaged the age of industrial production, the worker demoted to automaton.

A couple of centuries later Sennett takes us through a detailed comparison between two houses by the architect Adolf Loos and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Loos’s house is a crafted dwelling, layered and complex, Wittgenstein’s over-thought and overwrought, designed for abstract perfection not imperfect humanity. One is the work of a practised craftsman, the other of a theorist.

Sennett’s studies are the work of a resolutely public intellectual. The Craftsman, like the best of his books, takes an erudite, eccentric, ethical and enthralling route through culture, in this case the culture of making and production. His conclusions – slightly vague but always encouraging – suggest that craft and its cultural and ethical rewards are available to all of us, from the skills of mothering to plumbing. Contemporary discourse can float between the ineffable concepts of philosophy and the abstractions of maths and cyberspace; Sennett is keen to reconnect thinking with making, to revive the simple pleasure in the everyday object and the useful task. There is something here for all of us, even those just sitting in front of a computer.

Edwin Heathcote is the FT’s architecture critic

Comments

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