“The Evolution of the Craftsman?”

AboutAn illustrated essay from Yale's architecture journal *Perspecta* arguing that the rise of industrial technology and new materials in the "Machine Age" threatened to displace the traditional craftsman, but that a new generation of "artist-engineers" — working in dams, grain elevators, bridges, and transmission towers — recovered a genuine architectural discipline from pure engineering, and that the craftsman's sensibility remains essential to giving such abstract forms real aesthetic life. The text is built from quotations (Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier) interleaved with a long sequence of paired historical and contemporary photographs illustrating the argument, ranging from the Brooklyn Bridge and Crystal Palace to Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation and Wright's Johnson Wax buildings. Louis Sullivan's Bayard Building in New York (1898) is included among the photographic exempla of enduring architectural quality achieved through craft, alongside Philip Johnson's Glass House and Mies's Lake Shore Drive apartments.

PURL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0079-0958%281955%293%3C64%3ATEOTC%3E2.0.CO%3B2-J