Architecture Words 12: Stones Against Diamonds by Bardi Lina Bo

Author:Bardi, Lina Bo [Bardi, Lina Bo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Architectural Association
Published: 2014-07-26T16:00:00+00:00

INDUSTRIAL ART (1958)

Today there is a certain confusion surrounding the idea of craftsmanship, the artisan and the folk artist. There is a whole literature (we do not want to use the word rhetoric) on the subject. What is craftsmanship? It is the expression of a particular time and society – of a worker who has some capital, however modest, which enables him to work raw materials into a finished product that he can then sell on, bringing him both material profit and the spiritual satisfaction that comes from conceiving something and making it with your own hands.

But what is a ‘craftsman’ today? It is someone who makes something, a specialist with no capital of his own who hires out his labour to whoever is providing the raw material, be it an individual client or a business owner, and who receives a wage in return for the work that he carries out. He is thus a member of the so-called proletariat. And what is folk art, when it is genuine? It is Art, with a capital A. Which brings us to the question: is there a valid justification for government interventions into this contemporary realm of pseudo-artisanal production?

Obviously not, because such interventions would deprive the craftsman of his raison d’être , the satisfaction of being able to work artistically – to create an object, own it materially, and sell it on. Italy, Spain and Portugal excel in this kind of paternalistic protectionism, spawning various pueblos or instituti d’arte artigianali – real houses of horrors, catalogues of mediocrity.

But this is not the main problem. The most pressing problem that faces us is the divide between the technician and the workman – a divide that arose when the age of craftsmanship came to an end.

The architect who designs a building does not mix with the bricklayer, the carpenter or the ironworker, and the same divide exists between the designer of household objects and the ceramicist or glass-blower, or the furniture designer and the joiner. Each to his own. The technical draughtsman has an inferiority complex about the limits of his practical experience, while the labourer is demeaned by the lack of ethical satisfaction in his work.

To get to the heart of this issue, one could start to collect all existing artisanal material – old and new – in a given country, creating a vast living museum, a Museum of Craftsmanship and Industrial Art, that would illuminate the historical and popular roots of a nation’s culture. This museum could be completed with a school of industrial art (art in the sense of métier ) in order to foster contact between technicians, draughtsmen and makers. The school could express, in a modern way, what craftsmanship used to be, and prepare a new generation to engage, not with future utopias, but with reality as it exists and as we know it, to set right the situation we find ourselves in, where the architect in his studio is unaware of the realities of the construction site, where

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