What is Craftsman?

The American Craftsman Style

Source: Wikipedia

The ”’American Craftsman Style”’, or the ”’American Arts and Crafts Movement”’, is an American domestic architectural style, interior design, landscape design, applied arts, and the decorative arts style and lifestyle movement that began in the last years of the 19th century. As a comprehensive design and art movement it remained popular into the 1930s. However, in the decorative arts and architectural design it has continued with numerous revivals and restoration projects through present times.

British origins

The American Craftsman style has its origins from the British Arts and Crafts movement which began as a philosophy and artistic style founded by William Morris earlier in the 1860s. The British movement was a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, with its disregard for the individual worker and degradation of the dignity of human labor.  Seeking to ennoble the craftsman once again, the movement emphasized the hand-made over the mass-produced.

The Arts and Crafts movement was also a reaction against the eclectic ‘over-decorated’ aesthetic of the Victorian era. It was an anti-Victorian movement, with William Morris a staunch socialist. However, the expensive fabrication and construction materials and costly hand-made techniques used meant that the created works of the movement were actually only serving a wealthy clientele, a seeming contradiction to its roots in the materialist dialectic and socialist philosophy. However the philosophy and aesthetics of the British Arts and Crafts movement inspired a wide variety of related but conceptually distinct design movements throughout Europe, as well as the ‘American Craftsman’ movement in North America.

United States developments

While the British movement was a response to the Victorian, the Arts and Crafts style’s arrival in the United States was precisely at the moment when the Victorian era was coming to a close. The American Arts and Crafts Movement did share the philosophy of the reform movement and encouraged originality, simplicity of form, local natural materials, and the visibility of handicraft. It was distinguished by being concerned with ennobling the modest homes of the rapidly expanding American middle class, which became the Craftsman Bungalow style.

Origins

1897 Boston exhibition

Craftsman and Floorplan

In the late 1890s, a group of Boston’s more influential architects, designers, and educators were determined to bring the design reforms begun in Britain by William Morris to America. Their first meeting, to organize an exhibition of contemporary craft objects, was held in January 1897 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA). Present at this meeting were local: museum trustees including General Charles Loring, William Sturgis Bigelow, and Denman Ross; art collectors and patrons; writers and art critics, such as Sylvester Baxter for the ”Boston Evening Transcript”; and artists and architects, such as Ross Turner and Ralph Clipson Sturgis.

They succeeded in opening the first American Arts and Crafts Exhibition in April 1897 at Copley Hall, featuring over 1000 objects made by 160 craftsmen, half of whom were craftswomen. Some of the exhibit’s supporters included: the founder of Harvard’s School of Architecture Langford Warren; social reformers Mrs. Richard Morris Hunt; Arthur Astor Carey and Edwin Mead; and graphic designer Will Bradley.  When consumers and manufacturers realized the aesthetic and technical potential of the Arts and Crafts style’s applied arts, the process with  craftsmen and designers for design reform in Boston commenced.

Society of Arts and Crafts

The exhibition’s success brought the formation of The Society of Arts and Crafts in June 1897, with a mandate to “Develop and encourage higher standards in the handicrafts.” The twenty one founders, including Charles Elliot Norton, focused beyond consumer sales marketing, focusing on the relationship of artists and designers to the world of commerce, encouraging them to produce work with workmanship and design of the highest qualities.

The Society of Arts and Crafts mandate was soon expanded into a credo which read:

This Society was incorporated for the purpose of promoting artistic work in all branches of handicraft. It hopes to bring Designers and Workmen into mutually helpful relations, and to encourage workmen to execute designs of their own. It endeavors to stimulate in workmen an appreciation of the dignity and value of good design; to counteract the popular impatience of Law and Form, and the desire for over-ornamentation and specious originality. It will insist upon the necessity of sobriety and restraint, or ordered arrangement, of due regard for the relation between the form of an object and its use, and of harmony and fitness in the decoration put upon it.

Craftsman Bungalow

The Craftsman

In the United States the Arts and Crafts style incorporated locally handcrafted wood, glass, and metal work creating objects that were both simple and elegant.  In architecture, reacting to both Victorian architectural opulence and increasingly common mass-produced housing, the style incorporated a visible sturdy structure, of clean lines and natural materials.  The movement’s name American Craftsman came from the popular magazine, “The Craftsman,” founded in 1901 by philosopher, designer, furniture maker, and editor Gustav Stickley. The magazine featured original house and furniture designs by Harvey Ellis, the Greene and Greene company, and others.  The designs, while influenced by the ideals of the British movement, found inspiration in specifically American antecedents such as Shaker furniture and the Mission Revival Style, and the Anglo-Japanese style.  Emphasis on the originality of the artist/craftsman led to the later design concepts of the 1930s Art Deco movement.

Craftsman architectural design

Bungalow Floor Plan

Several developments in the American domestic architecture of the period are traceable not only to changes in taste and style but also to the shift from the upper- to middle-class patronage.  The American Victorian typically took the form of a two-story square house with a hip roof disguised behind a variety of two-storied bays, with an assortment of gables as well as octagonal or round turrets and wraparound porches presenting a complex facade.  Typically, the basic square house was also complemented by a back wing complete with its own entrances, and a stairwell that housed the kitchen, pantries, and scullery on the first floor and the servants’ quarters on the second.  Fitted with inferior-quality woodwork and hardware, and noticeably smaller bedrooms and lower ceiling heights, the Victorian kitchen-servants’ wing embodied the aristocratic class distinctions of the Old World.

With the large bays, turrets, and rear wing removed, the front porch simplified, and the ceilings lowered somewhat, it is not difficult to see how the American Foursquare developed from the common American Queen Anne.  The middle-class housewife of the era would not have domestic servants (at least not live-in ones) and would be doing much if not all of the housework herself, as well as watching the children.  These added roles made it important that the kitchen be integrated into the main house with easy sight lines to the common areas of the main floor (the dining and living rooms) as well as to the back yard.  Commonly, the butler’s pantry of the Victorian Era was replaced with dining room cabinetry that often consisted of “built-ins”, which gave home designers the opportunity to incorporate wood and glass craftsmanship into the public aspects of the home.

Bungalow interior

Another common design development arising from the class-shift of the time was the built-in “breakfast nook” in the kitchen.  The Victorian kitchen of the previous era was separated from the family view and daily routine. It typically had a work table (having the equivalent purpose of the modern countertop) at which the servants would eat after the family meal was served and the kitchen tidied.  The Victorian kitchen had no “proper” place for a family member to sit, eat, or do anything else.  Again, as the housewife of the Craftsman era was now preparing the family meals, the Victorian kitchen gave way to one designed as the heart of the family’s daily life.  The breakfast nook often placed under a window or in its own bay provided a place for the family to gather at any time of the day or evening, particularly while food was being prepared.

Common architectural design features

A Craftsman Bungalow in Orange, Ca

• Low-pitched roof lines, gabled or hipped roof
• Deeply overhanging eaves
• Exposed rafters or decorative brackets under eaves
• Front porch beneath extension of main roof
• Tapered, square columns supporting roof
• 4-over-1 or 6-over-1 double-hung windows
• Frank Lloyd Wright design motifs
• Hand-crafted stone or woodwork
• Mixed materials throughout structure

The Original Craftsman Movement

Source: The Craftsman Farms Foundation, Inc. 2005

GUSTAV STICKLEY (1858-1942) so synthesized, romanticized and popularized the Arts & Crafts style of architecture during the first two decades of this century that today the style is known generically as “Craftsman.” However, only a house originating from plans published by Stickley through his magazine The Craftsman can be a true Craftsman Home. He published descriptions and drawings of homes in this magazine beginning in 1901. In the January 1904 issue, he featured the first official Craftsman Home and announced that henceforth the magazine would feature at least one house a month, and subscribers could send away for a set of plans for one house from the series per year, free of charge.

The Craftsman plans offered the average American family a house that was a home, based on the bedrock virtues of beauty, simplicity, utility and organic harmony. Stickley believed that the “nesting instinct” was “the most deep seated impulse” of humankind. He wrote in the magazine:

The word that is best loved in the language of every nation is home, for when a man’s home is born out of his heart and developed through his labor and perfected through his sense of beauty, it is the very cornerstone of his life.