engleski

CRAFTSMANSHIP: A Tool for Recovering the Materiality of the Physical Environment

William Morris believed in what he called “socialism from the root up”: the fundamental change brought about by spontaneous popular revolution. Disappointed with the poor effects of his short political engagement he was rather soon to return to his creative venture: the rhetorical construction of a utopian, happier society that would achieve its satisfaction through creative work. His description of the “society that would produce to live and not live to produce” appears a somewhat strange medievalist-progressive marriage of John Ruskin’s romanticist view of medieval labor with Karl Marx’s dialectic of history. Morris understood the indivisibility of an age—its social system and its physical form—clearly. indifferent to machines, he simply did not see any trace of technological progress in them. the “sentimental socialist’s” Arcadia was historically defeated. yet, faced firstly with the fall of state socialism, the subsequent decline of social democracy, and more recently the collapse of the global neoliberal economy, now, in the context of the threat of global warming and environmental change, we may look for another more sustainable vision of the physical environment to deal with. What we probably need is less a constructed utopia and more a practical vision of a consensus society based on a sensible relationship to natural resources. the present deceleration of the processes in the built environment may give us some time to reflect upon the threatened materiality of the physical environment in general and of our profession in particular. in our own time, Richard Sennett finds his craftsmanship’s philosophical home within (American) pragmatism. its playground is not an idealized society to come but the real, physical environment humans inhabit. Sennett’s sound pleading for cultural materialism beyond doctrinaire Marxist simplifications is certainly worth architects’ attention. the urge to “do the job well for its own sake, ” as opposed to “doing the job just to get the job done, ” along with an interest in the process around making things, resonates with what architecture is actually about—from a single brick to the totality of our physical environment.

Work, Craft, Craftsmanship, Architecture, Public Space

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