Topics
of Interest
The
American Arts and Crafts Movement
During
the last three decades of the 19th century the British Arts and Crafts Movement
emerged as a broad-based artistic reform movement. A reaction against
the excesses of Victorian ornamentation and detail, the movement was built
around the philosophical writings of William Morris and John Ruskin. By
simplifying the design of furniture, architecture and utilitarian objects
to what could be produced by hand from good artists and artisans, the movement
sought to reunite the worker with the beauty, craftsmanship and utility of
their respective trades.
The American Arts and Crafts Movement, began in this country around 1896,
when two enthusiastic American proponents, Elbert Hubbard and Gustav Stickley,
focused on creating new lines of handcrafted furniture based on honesty
and simplicity. Both men wrote and published extensively about the beauty
of their simple forms of furniture with simple chamfered boards free of excessive
ornamentation and with exposed tenons and other expressed simple joinery.
By 1901, Stickley began publishing "The Craftsman" a monthly magazine
which quickly became the voice of the Arts and Crafts Movement in the United
States and thus disseminated in this country the principals of the Craftsman
philosophy, that the use of arts and crafts objects in the home environment
must be linked to the methods of their artisans and the social fabric under
which they were produced.
By 1904 Stickley had broadened his scope of his magazine to focus on the ideal
of "The Craftsman House". The work in southern California
of the architects, Charles and Henry Greene, fascinated him in particular.
The Greene brothers, were schooled in their teens at the Manual Training
High School of Washington University in Saint Louis, a school strongly influenced
in the philosophies of Morris and Ruskin. Later they studied architecture
at MIT and began practicing architecture in Pasadena, California in 1893.
For the next decade, their work in the Pasadena area was one of experimentation
with simple geometric forms expressed with honest and straightforward details.
The wood detailing found in Japanese architecture would also strongly
influence their work during this decade.
By 1903, a new style was emerging in their work which would come to be known
as the "California Bungalow" style. The homes they designed
during this decade generally included a studied series of low-slung gables
with ample overhangs, expressed projecting beams, wood angle braces and rafters.
The home's exteriors usually expressed natural wood and shingle materials,
as well as stone and masonry. The interiors were completed with exquisite
wood detailing and joinery, unlike any wood interior expression found anywhere,
before or since. While these homes were larger than what would become
popularized as the "bungalow style", their work assembled and expressed
virtually all the elements that would make up this popular style.
In 1908, Sears Roebuck in their widely distributed mail order catalog, began
selling house plans with the material for these homes in precut building kits.
The best selling of these kits were for variations on the "basic
bungalow", and thus the "California bungalow" began to appear
in neighborhoods, from coast-to-coast. The "bungalow style"
continued to develop and proliferate through-out the teens and twenties, until
the stock market crash of 1929, which would end most of the interest in the
arts-and-crafts bungalow, until its recent resurgence and re-interpretation.
Many of the older neighborhoods in Asheville, which were built between 1900
and 1930, were very influenced by the arts-and-crafts style. Many of
the homes in these local neighborhoods are outright examples of the arts-and-crafts
bungalow. Those that are not outright examples are mostly of a regional
style which includes clipped gables, pebble-dash stucco, German siding, and
Victorian detail mixed with arts-and-crafts detailing
The interest in the arts-and-crafts style and detailing is very strong today.
In Asheville, this interest is fueled by a national Annual Arts-and-Crafts
Conference held at the Grove Park Inn each February. Some are suggesting
that today's interest comes from a human need for "knock-on-wood",
fine craftsmanship and detailing as an antidote to living in a virtual internet
world, in a similar way that the arts-and-crafts style of 100 years ago was
an antidote to the dehumanization of the industrial revolution.
Recommended
Reading:
1) Greene & Greene,
The Passion and the Legacy
Randell L. Makinson,
1998
2) The Bungalow: America's
Arts and Crafts Home
Paul Duchscherer
and Douglas Keister, 1996
3) American Bungalow Style
Robert Winter and
Alexander Vertikoff, 1996
