- The ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement revived
and saved design from slipping into banal mass production.
The ideas of quality, pride in workmanship,
and design education remains part of our ethos as designers.
But the movement was doomed to fail or evolve
as technology and urbanization advanced.
At a time when new machines
and inventions were creating a dynamic
and progressive new way of life,
the Arts and Crafts movement promoted a return to the past.
This is admirable when faced with the negatives
of urban life and factory production, but not practical.
Some designers, like Louis Comfort Tiffany,
incorporated the new technologies like electricity
into their work.
Frank Lloyd Wright and Julia Morgan incorporated
modern engineering and materials in their building.
And Will Bradley used large-scale printing
to create his advertising and posters.
Other designers refused to acknowledge a new world,
and definitely maintained their practices
of handmade and unique processes.
Frederic Goudy and Bruce Rogers rejected
the European avant-garde and modernism until they died.
The maintained a pure vision of classical
and refined typography using handcrafted methods.
Architects Greene and Greene eventually went
out of business.
They insisted on every detail, down to a light switch,
be designed and produced individually.
This resulted in ever-increasing costs and missed deadlines.
The movement could not survive the terrors
of World War I in 1914.
The massive destruction and death made a classical book
of handmade paper and typography seem irrelevant.
The war expanded mass production
and created a generation looking to the new,
rather than backward to a Medieval past.
However, the Arts and Crafts movement did not disappear.
One of its first evolutions was Art Nouveau.
That took the idea of organic forms
and a reverence for nature,
but Art Nouveau allowed for more abstraction
and was designed to be mass produced
for a larger audience.
These forms could be applied to a poster,
desk, lamp, book cover, or subway station entrance.
The leaders of Art Nouveau were young and dynamic,
part of a new world of fast cars, urban life,
and challenging social conventions.
They invited machine production and a wider audience.
Any movement based purely on the rejection of the present,
embracing the past, is doomed to fail.
The world keeps moving forward,
and there are only so many ways to replicate the past.
Very quickly, the work will simply begin
to replicate itself.
But the Arts and Crafts movement introduced
several radical ideas that we continue to follow.
The studio method of design education,
learning by making with an expert, is how we teach today.
The designers of the movement correctly insisted
on the relationship between well-designed product
and our quality of life.
This led to the Bauhaus, based on the same idea,
but looking to mass production to create the work,
which in turn led to the way we look at design today.
We judge any kind of design by the standards
of being aesthetically pleasing, the highest quality,
cost efficient, and functional.
In the end, this is the greatest legacy
of the Arts and Crafts movement.