Peter Buchanan
Craft was the theme of the second day of Ghost 13, sandwiched between Place and Community. Before focusing on craft, it is worth briefly exploring why Brian MacKay-Lyons might have chosen this particular trinity. What links place, craft, and community, beyond their obvious centrality in MacKay-Lyons’s own life and work?
With the waning of the simple certainties of modern architecture, and after the anything-goes pluralism of postmodernity, architecture in general, as opposed to that represented at Ghost 13, has rather lost its bearings and seems ungrounded, without a sense of larger purpose or context. Ultimately this derives from modernity’s overly exclusive emphasis on the objective, the realm of scientific materialism, at the expense of the subjective, particularly culture. Among other things, this led to modern architecture’s reduction of human occupation to function, our actions as understood by detached observation, rather than considered as dwelling or habitation, words resonant with subjectivity.
Thus a modern building is a functional device, Le Corbusier’s machine à habiter, subservient to the user, of value only when used and obsolete afterward. This is very different from premodern buildings, which are cultural artifacts that are mediators (thus more elevated in status than mere functional devices) between us and the world, both natural and manmade. The rhetorical devices and ornament rejected by modernism connect us with the long march of history and our ancestors, with myths of origins and so on, while also addressing the future and our descendants. They thus embed the building and its occupants in local culture as well as in much larger temporal and spatial contexts than does modernity’s fixation with the short term and disinterest in context. (Postmodernity might have rekindled an interest in context, but its engagement with culture remains superficial.) Modernity’s reductionism inevitably leads to the creation of autistic buildings shaped only around their internal workings and to the dismissal of larger impacts on the environment as mere externalities—hence the destructiveness of modernity and modern architecture. This is why we have no chance of advancing to sustainability without reappraising the role of culture and starting the long process of regenerating it.
As with critical regionalism—a theme introduced by Kenneth Frampton on the first night and in the air throughout Ghost 13—place, craft, and community all refer to something local and preexisting and so embrace a larger spatiotemporal realm than typifies modernity. Place is axiomatically local and long preexists the architect’s transformation of it; place also extends far beyond the confines of the site. All crafts have long traditions, including an expertise with local materials, as well as specific tools and ways of working. Like place, these traditions need to be respected, even when introducing innovations. Community too is local and usually preexists the architect’s involvement; even if it does not, it is something forged slowly in the long term.
Place, craft, and community are all intrinsic to culture, which is local, imbued with traditions of making, and sustained by communal narratives that vivify place and craft practices. As with culture, these are all intrinsic to how we create ourselves and acquire depth and meaning. Place is intrinsic to identity, as are craft and community: patient craftsmanship shapes who you are and contributes to the formation of true character; community is essential to self-knowledge—you only know yourself to the degree you are fully known by others. Thus attention to Ghost 13’s organizing trinity is required for a fully embedded architecture to which people can relate in depth.
Having set this context, let’s narrow our discussion to craft, although in a broader sense than many architects understand it and than MacKay-Lyons probably intended.
Many, if not most, architects associate craft with the construction and detailing of buildings, with the handling of materials and the way materials are brought together—with what some may see as the realm of the artisan. Important as these are, this is much too narrow a notion of craft, which pertains to all aspects of architecture. The composition of a building is crafted—the external massing as well as the disposition of and flow between its spaces. Hence the plan in particular is honed until its logic and life can be gleaned at a glance. Often, too, elevations are drawn and redrawn until they combine, say, a certain vivacity with an easy repose. It is within this larger context that the narrower notion of craft then finds its true place, perhaps unifying the design and making it more legible. Some successful architects, as part of what ensures success, also craft the narratives of their lives. This gives them and their works deep roots in such things as personal and family history, in the locality and its past, as well as an empowering trajectory into the future. And more than a few architects self-consciously craft their public personas.
So what is craft? It is a skill at working with a particular medium over which mastery is gained through patient, repetitive practice. Because both parts of this definition are crucial to any proper understanding of craft, they bear repeating and expanding: craft entails working in a particular medium, which has its own characteristics to be understood and respected; the crucial feeling for and mastery of that medium is only arrived at through patient repetition, closely attentive to those characteristics.
There are a multitude of mediums in which craftsmen work. These range from physical materials such as the clay, wood, leather, wool, and various metals typically associated with crafts (the products found in craft shops) to physically intangible words (in prose, poetry, plays, scripts for film and television, and physical performance in reading and acting), music (both composition and performance), and software and computer games. In architecture such media include, among many others, form and space and light and structure; the choreography of circulation, building materials, components, and joints; and the diverse processes of on-site assembly.
More important than defining and listing these mediums, both difficult tasks, is to understand that they take time to explore and master. The long process of acquiring mastery brings benefits beyond a mere capacity for virtuosity that, if showy or intrusive, is probably a betrayal of the spirit of craftsmanship. The gradual refinement of skill, the dexterity in manipulating the medium, not only develops that crucial deep feeling for the medium but also the discrimination on which sure aesthetic judgment is founded. With constant repetition and practice, the skill, along with the innate knowledge and intuitive discernment it brings, becomes embodied or unconscious knowledge, so that it can be applied to the highest of standards almost without conscious thought.1
All experienced designers must be familiar with the phenomenon of “thinking with the fingers.” You have finished a design and are happy with it; the plan looks pretty much perfect. Then you start to loosely resketch it, the fingers retracing the form virtually without thought—and almost without noticing it they depart from what had seemed the final plan, easing a corner, altering an angle, clarifying a latent but unnoticed visual echo. The rough sketches of Alvar Aalto, with their tentative shaky lines from a soft pencil, lightly held and barely guided, illustrate this process vividly. Suddenly the plan has a new sense of flow and life, of coherence and wholeness. Then the conscious mind kicks in, to ponder the improvement and how it was achieved, and to consider whether it might be taken further. This results in the steady advance characteristic of mastering a craft and crafting a design, which brings together head and hand, conscious mind and intuition.
Once a craft is mastered, of course—after, in today’s familiar term, investing ten thousand hours—it is not necessary to constantly revise and refine each work. Instead you draw on your accumulated skill and powers of discernment as an instantly available, almost unconscious, embodied knowledge. Thus jazz musicians, after years of practice (or “woodshedding,” as they refer to it), can spontaneously improvise. And Frank Lloyd Wright could speedily conjure a seemingly endless sequence of masterful new designs—“shaking them out of my sleeve,” as he claimed. Pablo Picasso, too, could knock out several drawings and a couple of paintings on the same day, each of a visceral intensity that comes from precision of concept and color mixed with the spontaneity of speedy brushwork, all mastered through years of playful work. Another consequence of this mastery, which probably most architects have witnessed, is the ability of an experienced designer to just glance at someone else’s plan and see that something is wrong or unresolved. Or, equally quickly, to see that decreasing or enlarging the sizing and spacing of rafters, say, would both animate and better integrate a design.
One mark of a well-crafted work is an air of inevitability or “rightness”: it might be highly inventive and original, yet it never looks overly contrived. So crafting a design is a process of distillation and synthesis as much as of elaboration, of eliminating the inessential and so burnishing an understated and enlivening richness. It also involves knowing when to stop, whether elaborating or refining. Some buildings take the quest for precision too far—particularly of construction and detail, but also of overly prescriptive planning—and tip over into preciousness or a life-sapping perfectionism. It is instructive to notice that some of the most lovely and moving works from the past, such as humble vernacular buildings, acquire some of their vivacity from irregularities and imperfections. From this patient, iterative design process, the resulting building acquires crucial qualities that, by appealing to more than the eye and the conscious mind, engage the user over the long term at some deep, if subliminal, level. This is because in this process of honing, the whole designer—including the body, instinctual reflexes, and the unconscious depths that constitute most of the mind—becomes invested in both the process and the final work. In turn this evokes some recognition and response, often only at an unconscious level, in the whole of the person who encounters the work.
Much current art and architecture elevate concept over craft, whether as conceptual art or postmodern architecture. The latter is most illuminatingly understood as illustrating (representing, in the jargon) some theory or concept. (The notion that historic “quotes” produce populist architecture is only one such theory.) But just as conceptual art cannot hold the attention beyond the time it takes to “get” the idea, neither can theory-driven or “critical” architecture ungrounded in the mastery of craft elicit a rewarding long-term engagement. Too often, elevating concept over craft results in a lack of interest in both materiality and construction (thus many postmodern works, such as the early houses of Michael Graves and Peter Eisenman, are made of crud—Sheetrock) and in working through a design to where it enriches prolonged familiarity. Theory and concept, even those much less spurious than those entertained by most postmodernists, cannot invest depth or create truly satisfying artifacts if not also grounded in the mastery of craft so as to speak to levels beyond that small portion of mind, the conscious, and resonate with the unconscious and the body. Freud called dreams “the royal road to the unconscious,” but it is through craft that the unconscious becomes a resource to be drawn on in creating compelling works and performances.
The quietly commanding presence of a well-crafted building, and the relationships that such buildings elicit with us, cannot be fully conveyed by illustrations in a book. Yet those who read drawings well can sense many of the qualities that result from well-crafted plans. Shaping these was once a skill central to modern architecture but is now a vanishing art, replaced by diagrammatic layouts or spurious shape-making. It thus seems apt to briefly discuss two beautifully crafted plans, one of an unbuilt project for a yacht club for Rio de Janeiro by Oscar Niemeyer and the other the Rovaniemi Library by Aalto. These contrast dramatically in character, partly in responding to very different programs and context. One is for hedonistic pursuits in the tropics and opens up to the views and the breezes that would waft through it; the other is a place of quiet study in a place of frigid winters and is introverted and softly lit from above. And although both plans are organized around pronounced processional routes on a diagonal bias, there are further contrasts.
With the yacht club, a predefined rectangular space below a sweeping roof is minimally articulated to host a range of activities in perfectly judged sequence and relationship to each other, and several of the articulating elements are curved to add dynamism to the flow of space and elicit a relationship with the people whom they guide and propel. Note particularly the choreographed flow from the open entry: you enter with the view over the bay ahead and down through a slot in the floor to the boat slips, are then greeted on the left by a forward-projecting curved wall, guided between people at the bar and those at tables overlooking the bay, and then presented with a flourish (ta-da!) into the middle of the restaurant/nightclub.
Aalto’s library is almost the antithesis of Niemeyer’s yacht club. Instead of loosely partitioning a given volume, the enclosing, embracing exterior form of the library is generated by the movement and activities within and the sculpting of the light from the large clerestories. From the wind lobby, where you immediately engage the building intimately in the act of shaking hands with its tactile door handles, you bear right across a clattery tile floor to be hushed as you step onto the library carpet. Like the control desk, the fan shape of the library distorts in recognition of the oblique entry. Indeed, the back wall seems pushed outward in response to your momentum and by the pressure of your gaze as you move into the room, much as a soap bubble distends with the direction of the breath, while the indents between the bays assert a countervailing pull inward to shorten the spans of the main beams.
If the curved elements of the yacht club propel the movement of space and people, the building also hangs back somewhat. By contrast, the engagement elicited by the library is much more intimate. This goes beyond leaning on the continuous countertops, including those that form reading desks capping the bookshelves around the sunken reading areas, and handling the books on the crammed shelves. As the forms of the building lead you through it, with tactile elements falling to hand just where you reach for them, it is almost as if you were breathing the building into form with your movement and gaze, your exhalations pushing the reading bays outward and your inhalations prompted by the constricting indents. The illusion of intimate participation in the formation of the building creates an extraordinary sense of identification with it.
If the yacht club represents an emancipatory functionalism, in which use is set free and only partially defined, the library represents a participatory functionalism, in which it seems that your very presence shapes it. These are just two of several approaches to serving function and evoking a relationship with the user found in mid-twentieth-century modern architecture, most of which are now largely forgotten. Both plans share an extraordinary, masterly precision, the product of accumulated prior experience by their architects as well as crafting through constant resketching. The result is a distilled and enriching synthesis that elicits relationships with the buildings at many levels, including those below the threshold of conscious awareness, even if you are consciously struck by the beauty and sense of inevitability both designs achieve.
Everything discussed above has profound implications for educating architects—including my introductory comments, the educational implications of which are beyond the scope of brief comment. Although ever more building materials are available, students have fewer opportunities to play with and experiment with them—to explore how to work them, how much they bend before creasing, how they feel in the hand or when the body leans against them, and so on—knowledge once intimately acquired of a small range of materials in the workshop and on the building site. Also, to move too soon from sketching on paper to the computer, or starting immediately on the computer, also robs the student or architect of the tactile and tentative groping and slow emergence of form, perhaps through a blur of smudged or overlaid lines, possible with soft pencil on paper.
Probably the biggest challenge to education is that all these dimensions of craft are best learned one to one, in an apprenticeship situation or an approximation of it in the academic studio. They cannot be taught in lectures or any multimedia format. This is particularly true of the craft of design, which you learn by sitting at the same desk and watching how someone who has mastered the craft thinks with his or her fingers, perhaps tracing patterns of movement and the pockets of activity they both connect and stir to life, then placing barriers where required and ensuring none where interaction between activities is preferred, and so on.
It is also only from the experienced that the student can learn about craft in the narrow sense in which many architects think of it, asking questions such as: What sizing and spacing of a component works best visually as well as structurally, and best harmonizes (or contrasts) with other such elements? How pronounced or played down should the junctions be? Should corners be rounded off or square, and if rounded, at what radius, and should the radius of the corners all be the same? No matter how talented a student is, he or she is bound to learn much from someone who has been pondering such judgments for years. And these are far from trivial points: they profoundly affect how a building feels and the quality of relationships it elicits.
But where to find such teachers, particularly when their skills are prized in practice, and how to find them in sufficient numbers now that schools and classes are so large? Also, in recent years schools have tended to hire academics who have pursued intellectual study on their way to doctorates rather than mastering the crafts of design and construction. In some schools this has led to a deep and unhealthy schism between the tenured academic staff and the part-time design tutors who are not around long enough for protracted personal engagement. The Ghost Lab workshops were an invaluable chance for deep immersion in learning how to handle tools and a limited range of materials, but they were not long enough to hone the craft skills that can be developed with such knowledge as a base. Yet the Ghost 13 works exemplify what can be achieved through the mastery of craft and so serve as inspiration to pursue such mastery.
To heal the ruptured world that is the legacy of modernity, much needs to be brought back into “right relationship.” For architecture this means responding and becoming integral to place, even bringing the myriad forces that shape and act on it (from history to climate) into visible focus. Creating right relationship also requires mastery of craft, not just making things well, but giving due, yet not excessive emphasis, to each constructional component so that everything comes together in a deeply satisfying whole, one that rewards prolonged attention but does not insistently demand it. Bringing people back into right relationship with each other and the rest of the world means continuing to respect the individualism and privacy that modernity overemphasized, but also returning the many opportunities for harmonious and mutually beneficial interaction with other people and nature that modernity tended to suppress.
As Thomas Berry said, “The world is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.”2 Only by recognizing that will we come into right relationship with and be at home in the world, rather than alienated outsiders exploiting it.
1 See Juhani Pallasmaa, The Thinking Hand (West Sussex, UK: John Wiley & Sons, 2009), for a superb discussion of all this, especially the chapter “Embodied Thinking,” which students would benefit from reading with deepening understanding at intervals through their studies.
2 Thomas Berry, “The Meadow Across the Creek,” in The Great Work: Our Way Into the Future (New York: Bell Tower, 1999), 82.
