books etc.

• book review: Nature Form & Spirit

  I buy a lot of books, and I get a lot of books as gifts, so they tend to really pile up at home. As anyone who has spent time in a big chain bookstore knows, there are a tremendous number of visual reference and coffee-table picture books on A&C homes and design out now, and a lot of them are pretty mediocre in terms of useability, although usually the photos are pretty decent. I’m going to start a series of regular reviews here, focusing on books a bit off the beaten path – the work of craftspeople, mostly, who might not be seen as directly part of the American and European A&C movements, but who are still important to those of us interested in A&C.

  Today I’ll write a bit about George Nakashima and a great book on his work that his daughter wrote and which was published a few months ago.

• book review: Bungalow: The Ultimate A&C Home

  

  Jane Powell and Linda Svendsen's Bungalow: The Ultimate Arts & Crafts Home is certainly the most attractive in their series (Bungalow Bathrooms, Kitchens, Exteriors) of coffee table picture books / fairy-tale idea books. In this new volume, the author and photographer have composed more of a paean to the Arts & Crafts bungalow than any type of descriptive deconstruction of the style and its endless permutations.

  Powell & Svendsen's obvious fondness toward this particular building style is evident on every page, in the images and the descriptions of the many homes chosen. Those homes range from the strictest single-story examples to a wide array of homes imbued with the local style of their own communities throughout the United States, Canada, England and elsewhere in the world.

  Part of the book is broken up into sections focusing specifically on regions and neighborhoods that embraced the bungalow and lent their own particular flavor: the suburbs of Chicago and Milwaukee and their Prairie-influenced bungalows; the Mission revival-influenced homes of Southern California (and the famous ultimate bungalows of Pasadena) and the wood-shingled homes of the San Francisco area that blend into that area's redwood and oak-filled hills; the wide-porched and columned stone-detailed homes of Memphis and the ornate and brightly-painted highwaters of Vancouver.

  However, the authors do recognize that bungalow style reached its fruition here in California, with such ingredients as clinker brick, the high-grain oaks of the Craftsman furniture movement, wrought iron and hammered copper, decorative stencil and tilework and even Victorian wallpapers all coming together at the right time to truly embody the best aspects of the Craftsman tradition in homes that are far more examples of a philosophy than just places to live.

  California, then, offers many of the finest examples of the interiors that fill the latter portion of the book – lush living and dining rooms, kitchens and baths that are sometimes spare and sometimes lavish in their decoration. It is here that the photography really shines: the rich colors, wood grain and other hallmarks of the Craftsman style are all on display, and Svendsen takes advantage of the lushness of these spaces in her well-lit and -composed images.

  The book is written with humor and warmth, never taking its subject matter too seriously, which is a welcome alternative to many other books in the genre that treat these buildings as museum exhibits before their original purpose (and, in most cases, only purpose) as homes. The A&C movement is predicated on the usefulness and comfort of these spaces, elements that are wasted on houses that are not actually lived in, and it is wonderful that the authors recognize this and put the vast majority of their attention on structures that have evolved inside and out since their initial construction, constantly changing and becoming even better examples of this last of the humanistic architectural styles.

  Certainly the finest examples of bungalow architecture are often well-served today as museums in their own right, and several restored masterworks that are now open to visitors are profiled in the last part of the book. Aside from the wear of years – negated in many cases by excellent restoration efforts – most of these homes did not age after their initial habitation, and have been frozen in time. Not so much examples of the A&C philosophy made alive as so many of the other homes in the book are, these are better seen as snapshots of the movement as it once was, or as some of the early and great architects and designers of bungalows wanted it to be.

  All in all, Bungalow: The Ultimate Arts & Crafts Home is a very large volume, perhaps better suited for table than shelf, as it is certainly more fun to leaf through its pages and imagine your own project becoming, over time, the kind of home that is pictured within its pages. It is a good read and an even better picture book, a great tool for planning a home or remodel. I am sure it would make a very attractive holiday gift for anyone even moderately interested in the Craftsman aesthetic.

  The only criticism I have is a petty one, something that only a graphic designer could see: with so many great typefaces and layout models coming out of the movement, why choose typefaces and a general style of typesetting that are in many ways the antithesis of the movement? But again, this is petty certainly not something that should detract from your enjoyment of this beautifully-written and illustrated book.

• book review: Sign Painters

  

  Just got a review copy of Sam Macon (a film director who is producing the film side of this film/book project) & Faythe Levine's terrific new Sign Painters from my friends at Princeton Architectural Press.

  If you want the two-word version, it's “Wow – buy!”

  This book is a fantastic resource for anyone interested in lettering – either machine or hand-set or painted. It is jam-packed with hundreds of big, full-color illustrations. Each section is an essay by a different contemporary signpainter and letterer, including luminaries such as Nick Barber, Gary Martin, Caitlyn Galloway, Ira Coyne, Josh Luke, and of course my favorite, the great teacher, letterer and typeface designer John Downer, all giving excellent advice to new letterers, rules to live by, and dropping brush-lettering science with every sentence.

  An addendum includes plates from Charles Wagner's great Blueprint Textbook of Sign & Showcard Lettering, just as useful today as when it was written at the turn of the 20th century.

  I am not a signpainter – in fact, even after taking a dozen lettering courses, trying my hand at various types of calligraphy and showcard lettering and other varieties of hand-work, I'm a disgrace to the entire establishment of alphabetarians – but I am a metal, wood and digital typesetter, and I love letters. Even though I'll never set anything as beautiful as the hand-drawn work shown here, I'm immensely inspired by it, and my own (mostly digital) work will be informed by what I've seen and read in this volume.

  I recommend this very highly for everyone interested in display lettering, whether type or handmade. I usually check books like this out from the library, read & digest, and return. My bookshelves are finite and already overfull. But this one is a keeper, and I want to have it around to refer to for many years. Plus, at only $15 on Amazon (marked down from the usual $25), it's cheap for what you get.

  I look forward to seeing the film that accompanies the book!

• library week: Hearst Castle

  

  by Trey Ratcliff at www.flickr.com

• The Craftsman: issue 3

   
  

  The third item in our continuing series is Volume 1, number 3 of The Craftsman: December 1901 (3 meg PDF).

• The Craftsman: Issue 2

   
  

  The second item in our continuing series is Volume 1, number 2 of 
  The Craftsman: November 1901 (3 meg PDF).

• The Craftsman: Almost Every Issue, Now Online

   
  

  I've recently been gifted a large archive of every issue (bar two – issues 8 and 9 from the 1916 volume are missing) of Gustav Stickley's The Craftsman, beginning with volume 1, number 1 in October of 1901. I'll be posting one every few days for the coming weeks, starting with the first issue today. 

  Here you go: Volume 1, number 1 of The Craftsman: October 1901 (3 meg PDF)
  

  Thanks very much to the archival-minded friend – another big fan of the public domain – who passed these on to me!

• book: Shop Class as Soulcraft

  

  Last weekend, the NY Times Magazine included a short excerpt from a terrific new book by Matthew Crawford, a motorcycle mechanic with a Ph.D. in philosophy.

  Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work
  addresses issues of craft and work that will be important and thought-provoking to anyone interested in the philosophies behind the Arts & Crafts movement, and I look forward to getting my copy as soon as my local bookshop has it in stock.

  High-school shop-class programs were widely dismantled in the 1990s
  as educators prepared students to become “knowledge workers.” The
  imperative of the last 20 years to round up every warm body and send it
  to college, then to the cubicle, was tied to a vision of the future in
  which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a
  pure information economy. This has not come to pass. To begin with,
  such work often feels more enervating than gliding. More fundamentally,
  now as ever, somebody has to actually do things: fix our cars, unclog
  our toilets, build our houses.

  When we praise people who do work that is straightforwardly useful, the praise often betrays an assumption that they had
  no other options. We idealize them as the salt of the earth and
  emphasize the sacrifice for others their work may entail. Such
  sacrifice does indeed occur — the hazards faced by a lineman restoring
  power during a storm come to mind. But what if such work answers as
  well to a basic human need of the one who does it? I take this to be
  the suggestion of Marge Piercy’s poem “To Be of Use,” which concludes
  with the lines “the pitcher longs for water to carry/and a person for
  work that is real.” Beneath our gratitude for the lineman may rest envy.

  This
  seems to be a moment when the useful arts have an especially compelling
  economic rationale. A car mechanics’ trade association reports that
  repair shops have seen their business jump significantly in the current
  recession: people aren’t buying new cars; they are fixing the ones they
  have. The current downturn is likely to pass eventually. But there are
  also systemic changes in the economy, arising from information
  technology, that have the surprising effect of making the manual trades
  — plumbing, electrical work, car repair — more attractive as careers.
  The Princeton economist Alan Blinder argues that the crucial
  distinction in the emerging labor market is not between those with more
  or less education, but between those whose services can be delivered
  over a wire and those who must do their work in person or on site. The
  latter will find their livelihoods more secure against outsourcing to
  distant countries. As Blinder puts it, “You can’t hammer a nail over
  the Internet.” Nor can the Indians fix your car. Because they are in
  India.

  If the goal is to earn a living, then, maybe it isn’t
  really true that 18-year-olds need to be imparted with a sense of panic
  about getting into college (though they certainly need to learn). Some
  people are hustled off to college, then to the cubicle, against their
  own inclinations and natural bents, when they would rather be learning
  to build things or fix things. One shop teacher
  suggested to me that “in schools, we create artificial learning
  environments for our children that they know to be contrived and
  undeserving of their full attention and engagement. Without the
  opportunity to learn through the hands, the world remains abstract and
  distant, and the passions for learning will not be engaged.”

  A
  gifted young person who chooses to become a mechanic rather than to
  accumulate academic credentials is viewed as eccentric, if not
  self-destructive. There is a pervasive anxiety among parents that there
  is only one track to success for their children. It runs through a
  series of gates controlled by prestigious institutions. Further, there
  is wide use of drugs to medicate boys, especially, against their
  natural tendency toward action, the better to “keep things on track.” I
  taught briefly in a public high school and would have loved to have set
  up a Ritalin
  fogger in my classroom. It is a rare person, male or female, who is
  naturally inclined to sit still for 17 years in school, and then
  indefinitely at work.

• book review: Icons of 20th-Century Landscape Design

  
  My colleague Jay Dickenson was kind enough to review Katie Campbell’s new book for Hewn & Hammered:

  Katie Campbell, Icons of Twentieth-Century Landscape Design, Frances Lincoln Limited, Publisher, 2006

  In her new work, Icons of Twentieth-Century Landscape Design, Katie Campbell presents significant landscape designs created during the past century that, she believes, challenged the accepted form, use, and meaning of created landscapes. Campbell describes traditional attitudes toward landscape design, at least before the twentieth century, as alternating between the poles of classical formality and romantic naturalism. Fittingly, each of the twenty-nine sites featured in Icons eschews this rigid classical/romantic dialectic.

  As a whole, Campbell’s subjects share neither style, nor location, nor philosophy (though each of the works in Icons emerges from the Western tradition of landscape design). However, Campbell is able to group the sites found in Icons according to broad and sometimes overlapping themes, such as nature worship (Stockholm’s Woodland Cemetery, Wright’s Falling Water, or Portland’s Lovejoy Plaza) and environmentalism (Eggborough power plant); nationalism and anticolonialism (Brazil’s Ministry of Education and Mexican designer Luis Barragán’s Las Arboledas); artistic (the Barcelona Pavilion, Park Guëll, and Bentley Woods); and allegorical (the Kennedy Memorial and Salt Lake’s Spiral Jetty).

  Yet the thrust of the book is not thematic. Campbell addresses each site individually through both written description and analysis and through visual imagery. Campbell’s writing is lively an accessible. And, in keeping with Icons’ “coffee table” format, the photographs and illustrations are colorful and, for the most part illustrative. My only complaint is that, in some instances, Icon lacks images sufficiently detailed to match Campbell’s precise analysis. For example, in describing Gaudí’s use of allegorical and ethnocentric imagery at Park Guëll, Campbell references “large stone spheres, suggestive of rosary beads,” and “a red and white band … which suggests a cigar band — a whimsical reference to Guëll’s interests in the tobacco industry.” Yet, in scanning the full-page prints and inset photos that accompany the essay, one unfortunately finds neither cigar band nor rosary beads.

  Campbell acknowledges that her selection of sites to include in Icons was necessarily idiosyncratic, and, certainly, Icons excludes other twentieth-century works that deserve to be called “icons” of landscape design. For this reason, the book is sure to provide grist for the expert to grind. Yet, Campbell’s writing is accessible and oftentimes general. The novice reader, unschooled in modern or contemporary art, philosophy, or design, will surely find Icons a richly educational read.

• book review: Craftsman Furniture Projects

  

  Craftsman Furniture Projects: Timeless Designs & Trusted Techniques From Woodworking’s Top Experts

  My colleague Derek Martin, an experienced and very talented woodworker, recently offered to review a book I received from the kind folks at Woodworkers’ Journal:

  Thank you for the opportunity to read and give my brief review of Craftsman Furniture Projects.

  I will start out by saying that I not only enjoyed the easy reading, but I also found myself distracted by the illustrations as I thumbed my way through the book. The book is loaded with diagrams, templates and pictures. Many more visual displays are also included to show exactly what is being done which can be especially useful if it’s your first time trying a particular procedure. Finished products are also displayed to show you what you are working towards at all times. So the use of illustration in this book along with descriptive detail made it an A+ for me.

  One of my favorite items was the use of old woodworking tools and the brief explanation of what their purpose was on the project. Some were tools that can still be very useful today such as the wood marking gauge used to drawl more precise lines while performing the layout of a rabbet joint on a piece of stock. Simple tools like this can be found, usually when you’re not looking for them, at garage sales and flea markets and I have developed a habit of collecting and using such items rather than their newer and cheaper counterparts.

  Throughout the book you will find sections called Quick-Tips and Technical Drawings. These brief paragraphs are hints and tips that outline safety, accuracy and workarounds for each project.

  This issue includes nearly twenty beautiful furniture pieces that can be constructed in any decently outfitted woodshop. I would recommend this book to any beginner who wants to try their hand at building sturdy and eye-catching furniture or any master craftsman who thinks he’s seen it all.