Adjacent Dialogues: The Art & Craft of the Machine

Frank Lloyd Wright - Hull House 1901

Sketch of the giant statue of St. Christopher which used to stand inside Notre Dame. Revolutionaries destroyed the statue in 1786.

In his lecture The Art and Craft of the Machine, given at the Art and Crafts Society Hull House, Chicago in 1901, Frank Lloyd Wright argues the machine is the new logical and modern tool for crafting beauty in art through all mediums. Wright uses the term of the machine referring to all technology and industry that were innovating economies and societies at the turn of the 20th century. He asserts through art and Architecture, the machine had come to represent a somber story of loss and mischief. He felt Architecture had evolved, prior to his declaration, as a tragedy of patronage, a sacrifice, a loss of craft and dilution of context in a changing world of sweatshops, printing presses, locomotive supply chains and metal forgeries. This important development in Wright’s philosophy and critical architectural theory exposes the romantic rationalism of the time by which people were exploiting the machine within new sensibilities of craft.2 The Art and Craft of the Machine can be dissected into two main points; Architecture as 1) mastery of craft and 2) a savior of democratic social hierarchies toward the idealized production of beautiful art. Wright accompanies his entire argument with temporal and cultural applications citing the likes of William Morris, Victor Hugo as well as making reference to "Democratic Art" both rationally and in a romanticized manner.

Art and Craft of the Machine famously represents a duality that was clear in architectural practice and theory. In a series of collected writings by Edgar Kaufman (the patron of Fallingwater) and Ben Raeburn, they state this idea succinctly,

“Before the turn of the century, young Wright was the leader of insurgent Midwest architects, men less interested in dogmas than in vital ideas. They were designers of homes as a rule, since an older generation preempted commercial and industrial commissions. Between them, the generations of Chicago architects were part of an original cultural manifestation, today, less famous than the earlier ‘flowering of New England’ in literature, but perhaps even more creative, certainly as enduring and influential.”

Art and Craft of the Machine pursues an internal conflict among its multifaceted arguments; an idealism toward the betterment of society contrasted with Wright’s dismissive feelings toward current representations of architecture as a reflection society itself.3 Wright’s lecture pursues an oscillation between mechanistic implementation of the machine and the romantic idealization of American society through the creation of art. He states, simplicity is the key to unlocking these ideals and they can be achieved through Nature. Nature with capital N, specifically with relation to an organic sensibility, is the pillar of this argument.4 Wright’s ideas of the orders of architecture neglect the classical vein because he rejects the roman and greek forms as only “abstractions” of nature. His ideals orbit Nature, as the centroid of architectural convention.5 He turns this arguement of Nature on its head and expands on how these opposing forces can complement one another towards the ideal of the betterment of society as a whole as well as a devotion toward a new Architecture. Kenneth Frampton, one of the most authoritative biographers on Wrights life and work makes  this idea clear in his catalogue of Wright’s writings.6 

“[Wright] Concluded by reversing the logic and by arguing that only intelligent application of machine production would be able to redeem the excesses of mechanization, that is to say, would be able to imbue the mercantile nineteenth century capital with the essence of a soul. Pp 17. Frampton, Kenneth, Wright's Writings: Reflections On Culture and Politics 1894-1959. From the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation.

Wright continually provokes the Machine as a tool for the modern artist while stressing the necessity for Nature as our singular moment of inspiration. In reading the transcript of Wright’s lecture at Hull House the romantic drama between Architecture and Art is clearly a declaration for change. Wright sees it as a catalyst in the search for beauty, economic solidarity and political unity. He laments a lack of substance and principle in American society, arts and industry. According to Wright, Architecture is the most noble material embodiment of peoples, societies, cultures and new characteristics of society. He had come to the realization that merely the perception of the machine in all industries, had belittled the strength with which Architecture might achieve its main goals. Despite this descent into hellish production, he assures us, there exist many strong opportunities to achieve our shining visions for the future for which he makes reference to modern casting of metal.7

“There is the process of modern casting in metal - one of the perfected modern machines capable of any form to which fluid will flow, to perpetuate the imagery of the most delicately poetic mind without let or hindrance - within reach of everyone… Multitudes of processes are expectantly waiting sympathetic interpretations of the master mind.” pp 67 Wright, Frank Lloyd, Ben Raeburn, and Edgar Kaufmann. Frank Lloyd Wright: Writings and Buildings. New York:

Horizon Press, 1960. Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Library of Congress Catalog Number: 60-11169

Interestingly this excerpt is a similar remark made by Vitruvius in his second book which also mentions the power of heat to melt iron.  Despite Wrights own publicly remarked aversion to classical tendencies, he maintains a foundation of these thoughts in order to explain that new systems and processes only wait for the artistic mind to grasp their true potentials. Ultimately, the betterment of society and a bolstering of a new creative soul are the most pressing matters when speaking of the machine.8 He recalled his passion for the monuments of the Aztecs and Mayans while lamenting Victor Hugo as his inspiration for seeking work with Louis Sullivan. Specifically he notes the ways in which mankind had harnessed its strength of abstraction through earth architecture.9 

9 Wright, Frank Lloyd, Ben Raeburn, and Edgar Kaufmann. Frank Lloyd Wright: Writings and Buildings. New York:

Horizon Press, 1960. Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Library of Congress Catalog Number: 60-11169

“Those long slumbering remains of lost cultures; mighty primitive abstractions of man's nature - ancient arts of the Mayan, the Inca, the Toltec. Those great American abstractions were all earth-architectures: gigantic masses of masonry raised up on great stone paved terrain, all planned as one mountain, one vast plateau lying there or made into the great mountain ranges themselves.” from A Testament 1957

Architecture had once been successful in achieving power through primitive tools but then the nature of construction with its emphasis on plastic processes stressed a new kind of tool and mastery of the machine. Engines of transportation, industry and war had taken the position of value that art once held in previous history. In 1901, artists and kings no longer held the praises of society, instead it was the barons of industry. Wright exasperatingly declares the tragedy of the loss of value in beauty itself despite an increasingly commercialized society wanting for nothing. He calls all art forms, sacred to humanity, now prostitute in American cities.10

“somewhere-somehow-in our age, although signs of the times are not wanting, beauty in this expression is forfeited-the record is illegible when not ignoble. We must walk blindfolded through the streets of this, or any great modern American city, to fail to see that all this magnificent resource of machine-power and superior material has brought to us, so far, is degradation. All of the art forms sacred to the art of old a re, by us, prostitute.

Wright questions how a nation established on contemporary democratic ideals of freedom and individual worth can mask all of its important buildings with Gothic, Greco-Roman or Renaissance architectural maquillage - whose essential tool was the slave.11 

“The machine these reformers protested, because luxury which is born of greed had usurped it and made of engine of enslavement, deluging the civilized world with ubiquity, which plainly enough was the damnation of craft” pp78

The paradox, in Wright’s mind, compounds in the way modern architects sought the needs of the current age and derived an Architecture from a past age - knowing nothing of the needs of this antiquity. He finds this ill placed reliance on the past for the solutions to the future, a curse. Art should be the promotion of the finest degree of craft and production of a national machine age sensibility. These imitations are copies and copies they remain until continually diluted by the machine and reproduced until nothing remains but an emaciated, nostalgic, mirage of what was once vital and powerful.12 

“with the immediate result that no ninety-nine-cent piece of furniture is salable without some horrible botchwork meaning nothing unless it means that art and craft have combined to fix in the mind of the masses the old hand-carved product as the neplus ultra of the ideal. Thus is the wood-working industry glutted, except in rarest instances. The whole sentiment of early craft degenerated to a sentimentality having no longer decent significance nor commercial integrity; in fact all that is fussy, maudlin, and animal, basing its existence chiefly on vanity and ignorance.” FLW Pp 87

Imitation  had  infected  the building and architecture was no longer Architecture but merely buildings. Wright takes an unforgiving stance against this imitation and proposes the machine not as the evil from which this has derived but instead the savior of this urban organism, starving for beautiful things. 

Frank Lloyd Wright romanticizes the carcass of Architecture as it was. He craves something better, more beautiful, original and of its own time and his antagonistic tone likens him to the commander slamming his shield against an invading force which has already sacked much of the countryside. Similar to William Morris, Wright believed in a handicraft ideal.13. However, he does not maintain the revival of hand craftsmanship.14 

“Wright never became academic nor classical, despite a command of the style, and never believed in reviving hand craftsmanship, as his famous early paper, The Art and Craft of The Machine, demonstrates.” pp 38

Wright, Frank Lloyd, Ben Raeburn, and Edgar Kaufmann. Frank Lloyd Wright: Writings and Buildings. New York:

Horizon Press, 1960. Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Library of Congress Catalog Number: 60-11169

He argues for the machine in a way that was unlike the nature of the machine at the time. Tangentially, he saw, in it, a vast opportunity for creation and good. Outside Chicago, few had faith in the power of the machine and industry to effectively care for the worker and his craft. A spokesperson from the Art Institute of Chicago argued concurrent with Wright stated, ”It is the quality of mind and not the machine which produces ugliness”.15 

Boris, Eileen. Art and Labor: John Ruskin, William Morris, and the Craftsman Ideal in America, 1876-1915. Ann Arbor: U.M.I. Dissertation Information Service, 1988

Wright continues in his lecture to explain the ways in which Architecture had died and revived through history and he bashes all classicism saying the Renaissance was the sunset not the dawn of architecture.16 

"The book is about to kill the edifice. See how architecture now withers away, how little by little it becomes lifeless and bare. How one feels the water sinking, the sap departing, the thought of the times and people with drawing from

it. The chill is almost imperceptible in the fifteenth century the press is yet weak, and at most draws from architecture a super abundance of life, but with the beginning of the sixteenth century, the malady of architecture is visible. It becomes classic art in a miserable manner; from being indigenous, it becomes Greek and Roman: from being true and modern, it becomes pseudo-classic. It is this decadence which we call the Renaissance. It is the setting sun which we mistake for dawn. It has now no power to hold the other arts; so they emancipate themselves, break the yoke of the architect, and take themselves off, each in its own direction. Sculpture becomes statuary, the image trade becomes painting, the canon becomes music. Hence Raphael, Angelo, and those splendors of the dazzling sixteenth century." pp79

Wright makes a slightly abashing reference to his contemporaries who he clearly empathizes with like Morris but who received architecture as a “decaying, died out” art form needing preservation.17 There is even subtle reference to Victor Hugo's character Claude Frollo, who said "the book will kill the edifice" He emphasizes the near certainty of the decline of Architecture if nothing is done. In only this small statement, Wright seems to implore his audience of the urgency for action as he says the book is about to kill the edifice" with nearly 150 years having passed since Hugo wrote his desperate words of the preservation of medieval architecture from desecration by french revolutionaries.

Wright states the ways in which the machine can be a way for architecture to find its lost meaning as something relevant and substantial and a means for the artist to reassert himself as the master of his tool - the machine - rather than a cog in its mechanics. Wrights asserts that Architecture, although distracted by politics and economy in the mundane consistency of the revivalist styles prior to 1900, can be mass produced with intent, becoming more functional and finding beauty or even the sublime by proper mastery.

Man has been given an even more potent tool, that of the Machine. It had up to this point a scientific tool and furthermore science only being a tool itself. But ever creative, the machine had then tremendous potential to be a creative tool. FLW From A Testament 1957. 18

Wright, Frank Lloyd, Ben Raeburn, and Edgar Kaufmann. Frank Lloyd Wright: Writings and Buildings. New York: Horizon Press, 1960. Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Library of Congress Catalog Number: 60-11169

This tool most specifically can begin to alleviate the crutch the artist had endured as a person who employs lifelong skills to create wonderfully articulated ideas of beauty for those who might patron their skills without regard for their wellness.

It is important to consider any one theory from any person as a historical and specifically sequential endeavor. This piece of highly chronological writing is no different. Wright was only 34 years old and his bravado as an established starlet of the architectural world is obvious despite his confidence and certainty in what he speaks of. This in no way discounts the strength with which he delivered this lecture nor the ideas presented. In many ways the vigor and certainty displayed in his discourse is quintessentially his own. He stands well above many historically and did in his time. He knew how to make embellishment and exaltation and integral part of his expressions and the verbosity of his prose is not without candor and virtuous intent. His nature of pushing past even the most accepted status quo is availed even more so when you consider that Wrigt declined Daniel Burnham’s offer for all expenses paid to the Ecole and Rome for 6 years in 1893. Wright turned Burnham down because of his lack of faith or as Wright says “being spoiled” in the classics.19 

Wright pursued an individualistic approach to architecture inspired by Louis Sullivan’s resolve. He displays an arrogant desire to proclaim something universal and socially beneficial of the machine similar in style to the Marxists Art and Crafts figures but without such emphasis on a socialist upheaval. He maintains his elitist attitude against selling out and doing things cheaply despite the logical ease with which American citizens benefited from mass production. Wright focused on a more democratic and specifically American ideal of Architecture and discounted many of William Morris’s ideas on the machine. Wright did not so much desire social upheaval as was the vogue in Europe but instead found solace in the order of the world and the levels of social hierarchy. In some ways it is notable to realize that Wright designed radical architecture to maintain a traditional order within a turbulent and quickly changing social and global climate.20 

“Wright believed that we needed radical means to protect conservative ends. Maybe that is the clearest way to put it. The Europeans, of course, wanted radical means to achieve radical ends, and that was the difference between them.”

"LECTURES." Paul Goldberger. Accessed April 25, 2019. http://www.paulgoldberger.com/lectures/frank-lloyd-wright-at-hull-house-on-the-art-and-craft-of-the-machine/.

Morris and others in England involved in Arts and Crafts were focused on radical design for radical change. One clear difference in the radical nature of both lineage of architectural thought has to do with the cultural heritage that exists in both countries. In collected papers by Morris published in 1902, one whole chapter is devoted to Art and Industry of the Fourteenth Century.21 There is an inherent sadness and nostalgia to Morris’s entire argument about the past of English Architecture and industry. He looks back with remorse on the ways in which the worker was valued and not taken advantage of. Morris like others in Europe promoted Marxism for its relative sociological messages of equality and improvement of the lower class. Wright offers his own somber tone about the worker in The Art and Craft of the Machine. The key difference is that Wright does not really care about the worker.22 

"Architect's Utopia," Schapiro would argue that although Wright and Brownell's book avowedly treated relations between "Architecture and Social Life" (as indicated in the title of the first chapter), that relation had been reduced to another form of pseudo- morphism: mirroring or reflection. Similarly eliding historical and socioeconomic analysis, Wright-"the specialist in new environ- ments"-assumed that architecture had an independent role in shap- ing social life, and this assumption of autonomy had given rise to a "visionary confidence" that enabled the architect to believe himself able to "correct society on the drawing board."30 Moreover, Wright's Broadacre City-his home for the "urban refugee"-along with his later project of "redemption by rural housing," provided Schapiro with a platform to critique the architect's model of "deurbanization" as undemocratic. Schapiro noted that while this ideal was shared by socialists and anarchists, in Wright's project it involved putting those dispersed refugees to work within industrial profit ventures that overlooked "the question of class and power." And, more disturbingly, Wright's antiurban sentiment was allied with an anticosmopolitan one.” pp 12

Scott, Felicity D. "On Architecture under Capitalism." Grey Room, no. 6 (2002): 45-65. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1262615

Wright designed homes for many wealthy patrons. Morris sought to make beautiful artifacts for common consumption. Many contemporaries of Wright and all of those he mentions specifically in his lecture such as Morris, Ruskin and Tolstoy found the artists oppressed and maltreated in the capitalist greed of growing global markets.23 Many European counterparts to an American Arts and Crafts found the artist marginalized in the pursuit of beauty, and oftentimes, forgotten or taken advantage of by the end of the process. Tolstoy in his theories of arts in 1897 even asks what costs and sacrifice must the artist endure for his work to be substantiated amongst an oligarchy of wealthy, ill concerned, aristocratic elite.24

In Russia and England the sweatshops and “scamping” of the laborer in architecture and many crafts caused distress and mistrust of the machine as a means for barons of industry to save profits and create objects of imitative nature with lesser value but marketed as the same. Wright believed the means through which traditional artifacts might be joined were no longer of value because of the way in which the world had changed. He found labor to be a necessary aspect of the creative process and states the machine can now enable the artist to hold in his hand the power to create vastly more intricate objects in half the time.

Humanity, he suddenly exclaims, has now become another cog in the growing machinery of the 20th century. The Machine had grown to be the very basis of the infinite force that is civilization itself.25 

“Look out over the modern city at nightfall from the top down-town office building, and you may see at a glance the machine has become, how interwoven it is in the warp our civilization, its essential tool indeed, if not the very of civilization itself” pp 90

This force of cities and buildings inspires Wright - as an agitator - he wrought out of the depiction of the decrepit corpse of consumerism, a vital, pulsating and visceral image of contemporary cities and their opportunities. Wright very abruptly juxtaposes the evil of the machine with all its splendor and glory as a living breathing thing. Machines have created cities and they are the pinnacle of the infusion of life into material things. He draws on similar veins of thought by theorists such as Viollet Le Duc and Semper who marveled at technological progress for the advancement of artistic or more expressive means of craft or tectonics.26

Wright further explains how communication has differed and maintains his fascination with Victor Hugo, “The book killed the edifice”27. Architecture used to be a means for

cultures to represent and proclaim physically the values and beliefs in space. The book with its speed and ease now replaced discourse as the obvious way of communicating ideas. He finds the machine as the new avenue for architecture to recapture its place as the director of all arts. He mentions around the middle of his speech, the way in which the architect used to be a star in the orchestra but with the machine can now orchestrate the entire show.28 This proves to be wildly correct by contemporary standards as the architect can now model, draught, order, ship and have installed nearly completed homes in the form of frames, panels, windows, 3D printing, and many other varied and advanced modern building practices.

Frank Lloyd Wright makes many highly contestable claims. His lecture, of course in his own style of oration, is riddled with embellishment and not so subtle elitism . He abhors the cheap and quickly produced imitative materials and even diminishes those who can not see value in well made idealistic art as “magpie”. However, the machine was the catalyst of the great American economy with rising populations in cities by 1900. Despite conditions of the worker, industrialization had taken a strong hold in American culture and society. The devaluation of artistic means with the more economical and rational approach of mass production, made products of artifacts.

Wright in a demanding tone asserts the necessity of art, beauty and architecture in Hull House among community leaders and creative colleagues. Hull House was made up of idealistic agitators in search of meaning and betterment of American society and found such topics urgent. Despite these lofty ideals it is worth mentioning that many of the members were wealthy intellectual types who may have had very little true cause behind their lectures and motives. Member, Jane Addams was criticized by such opposing cultural figures as Tolstoy for her dress and ill connection to those she sought to help.29

Despite the endless contradictions which plagued society, art, architecture and the uses of the machine itself, Wright very aggressively and passionately urges to quickly adapt and take advantage of the opportunities that exist for the artist in collaboration with the machine. Through vast, seemingly infinite, natural resources and cultural complexity the machine yields equally impressive and potentially boundless potential. Wright was a strong advocate for the machine and his words have found their way to ring just and true still now. His lecture remains relevant in our contemporary confrontation with technology. The machine has proliferated as far as a foundling Artificial Intelligence which has rapidly been deployed throughout every conceivable industry today. It is clear Wrights personification of the machine and forward thinking have foreshadowed much of the same contradictions and conflicts we might encounter with the many new faces and places of the machine.30

With the varied and sophisticated digital tools available now, organic and complex Architecture emerges, often becoming iconic in its expression of powerful technocratic cities. The Machine has become one with every single facet of organized, sophisticated life. The logical and even expressive nature of this lecture continues to yield appropriate commentaries on modern and contemporary expressions of architecture.

Bibliography

1. Boris, Eileen. Art and Labor: John Ruskin, William Morris, and the Craftsman Ideal in America, 1876-1915. Ann Arbor: U.M.I. Dissertation Information Service, 1988

2. Bressani, Martin. (1996). The Life of Stone: Viollet-le-Duc's Physiology of Architecture. Any Magazine. 27-34.

3. Frampton, Kenneth, Wright's Writings: Reflections On Culture and Politics 1894-1959. From the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation.

4. Goldberger,    Paul    "LECTURES."   Accessed   April   25,   2019.

http://www.paulgoldberger.com/lectures/frank-lloyd-wright-at-hull-house-on-t he- art- and-craft-of-the-machine/.

5. Hamington, Maurice, "Jane Addams", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), forthcoming URL =

<https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2019/entries/addams-jane/>.

6. Lambourne, Lionel. Utopian Craftsmen the Arts and Crafts Movement from the Cotswolds to Chicago. New York, NY: Van Nostrand, 1982.

7. Levine, Neil & Wright, Frank Lloyd, 1867-1959 (1996).The architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright. Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J ; page 6,

8. Lloyd Wright, Frank. (1908). In the Cause of Architecture. The Architectural Record. xxiii. 155-220.

10.1016/B978-0-85139-352-0.50007-5. This chapter discusses the text of different letters that were exchanged between architects regarding various efforts and their accomplishments in the field of architecture. The chapter also outlines that upon leaving the office of Adler and Sullivan in 1893, Frank Lloyd Wright and his long-time friend Cecil Corwin set up a private practice in the Adler and Sullivan-designed Schiller Building in Chicago. That incident, and how he felt about it, was indicative of how highly he held the practice of architecture, not just as a mere profession but as a great art, as a sacred obligation to design beautiful structures in which others would live and work. It was clear that by 1900 his work was fully developed, having matured in the houses that sprang up across the Midwest prairie in and around Chicago, beginning with the Winslow residence in 1893. It is pointed out that the most important single event in the history and growth of modern architecture in Europe was the publication of the work The Completed Buildings and Projects of Frank Lloyd Wright by the publishing house of Ernst Wasmuth, in Berlin, 1910.

8. McCarter, Robert. Frank Lloyd Wright Critical Lives. London: Reaktion Books

Ltd, 2006.

9. Morris, William. Architecture, Industry & Wealth: Collected Papers. England: Chiswick Press, 1902.

10. Morris, William, Manifesto of the Society for Protection of Ancient Buildings. “Restoration,” in The Atheneum, n 2591, (June 23, 1877), 807

11. Reed, Peter, William Kaizen, and Kathryn Smith. The Show to End All Shows: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Museum of Modern Art, 1940. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2004.

12. Semper, Gottfried. The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

13. Scott, Felicity D. "On Architecture under Capitalism." Grey Room, no. 6 (2002): 45-65. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1262615

14. Scully, Vincent J. "Romantic Rationalism and the Expression of Structure in Wood: Downing, Wheeler, Gardner, and the "Stick Style," 1840-1876." The Art Bulletin 35, no. 2 (1953): 121-42. doi:10.2307/3047474.

15. Tolstoy, W. Gareth Jones, and A. Maude. What Is Art? London: Bristol Classical Press, 1994.

16. Vitaud, Laetitia, and Laetitia Vitaud. "Back To Craftsmanship: Lessons from the Arts and Crafts Movement." Medium. June 06, 2017. Accessed April 25, 2019. https://medium.com/want-more-work/back-to-craftsmanship-lessons-from-the

    -arts-and-crafts-movement-e1aa5f09ec16.

17. Wright, Frank Lloyd. An Autobiography. Petaluma, CA: Pomegranate Communications, 2005.

18. Wright, Frank Lloyd, Ben Raeburn, and Edgar Kaufmann. Frank Lloyd Wright: Writings and Buildings. New York: Horizon Press, 1960. Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Library of Congress Catalog Number: 60-11169

19. Wright, Frank Lloyd. "The Art and Craft of the Machine." Brush and Pencil, Vol. 8,    No.    2    (May,    1901),    pp.    77-81,   83-85,   87-90.

    https://www.jstor.org/stable/25505640

20. Wright, Frank Lloyd, "The Art and Craft of the Machine," from Modern Architecture: Being the Kahn Lectures for 1930 (Princeton, 1930), pp. 7- 23. https://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/mtdavis/243/wright/Lecture.pdf