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- Title
TOWARD AN ECOLOGY OF ARCHITECTURAL CRAFT.
- Authors
CRISMAN, PHOEBE
- Abstract
Craft--making something skillfully--is experiencing a resurgence in architecture and more broadly across industrialized cultures. The words "craft," "artisanal," and "maker" seem to be everywhere: craft beer, artisanal bakeries, and maker spaces. Craft thrived around the turn of the twentieth century in the Arts and Crafts response to rapid industrialization, and again in the 1960s as an act of resistance to growing consumption and the military-industrial complex. The "material turn" in cultural theory and recent bestselling books bestow a renewed value on physical processes in an increasingly abstract world. The 2007 reprint of Pye's classic work of 1968, The Nature and Art of Workmanship, Sennett's The Craftsman (2009), and Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft (2009), and The World Beyond Your Head (2015) all lament the lack of connection to the material world and propose possible redemption, or at least reconnection, through craft. Yet two seemingly divergent conceptions of craft--handcraft and digital craft--struggle for legitimacy and furious debates ensue. What if we thought about architectural craft as we understand ecology, with a resilient relationship between continuity and change? Not a dichotomous division or this will kill that, but an ongoing adaptation to fluid relationships between a diversity of processes of making (both by hand and digital) and their larger effects in the world? Architectural craft, like all craft, is a process and set of relationships within a complex system and its surrounding context. Systems thinking can facilitate an evolving, hybrid approach to craft, allowing us to reconsider what craft means in the process of design, drawing, and making. Developing a deep and diverse material curiosity and appreciation of the knowledge embedded in objects is a first step. An ecological understanding of architectural craft might help us to find creative and humanizing ways to shift the visual and economically driven architectural paradigm to a more connected and sustainable one.
- Subjects
CRAFT beer; ARCHITECTURAL design; TKALCIC Bengert (Company); BEER industry; BREWERIES
- Publication
Dialectic, 2018, Vol 6, p10
- ISSN
2333-5440
- Publication type
Article