Question

what do you think is the most important contribution the arts and crafts movement made to architecture and design, and why?

Answer 1

While a great part of Europe was under the Industrial Revolution, the British movement Arts and Crafts proposed a return to the creative handcraft, rethinking our esthetic and social relation with objects. Stores were filled with items that were mass-produced by industry. The design and the personal relation between artisans and their work was lost, while consumers have been induced to by ordinary objects.

In 1888, a board of theorists and critics formed the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society. Society has promoted many publications about the artistic value of the crafts and the importance of their esthetics. They also organized exhibitions where artists/craftsmen could expose and debate the role of objects. William Morris and his daughter May, Walter Crane, T.J. Cobden-Sanderson, Ford Madox Brown, Henry Wilson, among others, were the main members of the movement and the society.

Morris was the most active and also the most complete artist of that movement. He had designed objects and graphics but also had an expressive production in architecture. His esthetics were responsible to inspire many other movements that were reclaiming the role of art per se. His constructions were considered the first examples of modern architecture that giving its first steps. The Art Noveau considered one of the avant-guard movements had inspired Morris’ architecture.

But the apex of Arts and Crafts legacy was the adoption of the Society beliefs in a modern school of arts. During the 1920s, the German School Bauhaus, in Dachau, gathered artists to teach modern art, design and architecture using the Arts and Crafts beliefs, mainly the one that claims the esthetic experience an object can offer.