VI.

Arts and Crafts and Related Movements

The Arts and Crafts Movement, which began in England around 1860 and continued into the first decade of the 20th century, shared many of the ideas of art nouveau. The movement’s earliest proponents reacted against cheap manufactured goods, which had flooded shops and filled houses in the second half of the 19th century. The Arts and Crafts ideal they offered was a spiritual, craft-based alternative, intended to alleviate industrial production’s degrading effects on the souls of laborers and on the goods they produced. It emphasized local traditions and materials, and was inspired by vernacular design—that is, characteristic local building styles that generally were not created by architects.

English designer William Morris, who led the Arts and Crafts movement, sought to restore integrity to both architecture and the decorative arts. The Red House (1859) in Kent, designed for Morris and his family by English architect Philip Webb, demonstrates the architectural principles at the heart of the English movement. The unpretentious brick façades were free of ornament, the ground plan was informal and asymmetrical, and the materials were drawn from the area and assembled with local building techniques.

Spurred by the experience of furnishing his home, Morris set up a studio with several associates, including Webb and English artists Dante Gabriel Rosetti and Edward Burne-Jones. They designed everything—from wallpaper to stained glass, books, and teapots—according to the highest standards of craftsmanship. The idea of the house as a total work of art, with all of the interior objects designed by the architect, emerged from this studio and remained standard practice throughout the Arts and Crafts movement.

In Scotland, Mackintosh designed the Glasgow School of Art in two phases, which reveal a dramatic shift from his early art nouveau phase to the Arts and Crafts aesthetic. The building’s asymmetrical front (1897-1899) featured a range of styles and curving art nouveau ironwork. The rear of the building (1906-1909) presented something quite different: To light the artists’ studios within, Mackintosh opened up the façade with tall windows set into an austere masonry grid. Spare, simple, functional, and breathtakingly different, this elevation predicted many of the qualities that came to be associated with modern architecture after World War I (1914-1918). Inside, the library, with its soaring interior space, dark wood, and exquisitely crafted furniture and lighting fixtures, revealed Mackintosh's fascination with Japanese architecture and design.

Mackintosh's influence spread across the European continent to Vienna, Austria, where architects Joseph Maria Olbrich and Josef Hoffman and painter Gustav Klimt formed a group known as the Vienna Secession after they had seceded from the tradition-bound Viennese Academy of Fine Arts. Olbrich designed a headquarters and exhibition space for the group, a white block topped with a dome of gilded, wrought-iron leaves. Hoffman eventually became the leading architect of the Secession movement and with painter and designer Koloman Moser founded the Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshop) in 1903. This artists’ cooperative was dedicated to the production of furniture and other household objects.

Viennese architect Otto Wagner, an early proponent of art nouveau styles, designed one of the most important early modernist buildings in Vienna, the Postal Savings Bank (1904-1906). Its sleekly engineered interior featured a ceiling of glass panes framed in aluminum and luminous ceramic tile wall surfaces.

A Japanese Secession movement that arose in 1920 demonstrates the global reach of architectural ideas in the 20th century. This fledgling organization, composed of architects Mamoru Yamada, Sutemi Honiguchi, Mayumi Takizada, and Kikuji Ishimoto, signaled the first appearance of the modern movement in Japan, where modernization inevitably was connected with westernization. The group was also influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright, who built the Imperial Hotel (1915-1922) in Tokyo.

The Deutscher Werkbund (German Work Union), founded in 1907 by Hermann Muthesius, Peter Behrens, and Fritz Schumacher, differed from the other Arts and Crafts movements by allying artists and architects with industrialists. The Werkbund's ambition was to bring the talents of artists to bear on industrial products. The most fruitful alliance was that of Peter Behrens with the German electricity company, Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft (AEG). As AEG’s architect and chief designer, Behrens produced lightbulbs, radiators, stationery, lamps, and fans, in addition to factory buildings and a large housing complex for company workers near Berlin. The Werkbund also worked to transform the education of craftspeople so a body of skilled artisans would be available to carry out its designs.