*D.L. James House, Carmel Highlands,* 1920. COURTESY OF THE CALIFORNIA STATE ARCHIVES.

In his 1996 book, The Eyes of the Skin, Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa recounts a visit to the D.L. James House in Carmel, Calif. Designed and hand-built in 1918 by the brothers Charles and Henry Greene, Pallasmaa felt moved to kneel down and touch the stoop with his tongue [1]. Taking pains to communicate what he regarded as the material and textural power of what described as the “delicately shining white marble threshold of the front door,” Pallasmaa’s intimate encounter with the building is emblematic of his life-long investigations into the role of the senses in the experience of space. That he felt moved to use his tongue in order to gain a better understanding of the stone threshold, as opposed to simply looking at it, is telling, if unexpected.

And yet, anyone who has visited a museum or gallery will have experienced the thwarting but necessary presence of signs warning people against reaching out and touching. Similarly, when walking on the seashore, few can rarely resist the urge to bend and pick up a perfectly rounded pebble or piece of sea glass worn smooth by the tides. Here, discussion should not focus on tactile desire —that apprehension and understanding are often aided by the physical encounter and the obtaining of material knowledge — but as to what it is about the existence and physicality of certain objects.

Pallasmaa’s particular encounter with the polished stoop — immediate and natural — serves as a beneficial starting point for a consideration of the “power” of the handmade. Crafted things, in contrast to objects created through mechanized processes, seem to possess a status that turns on the fact and recognition of the direct human agency of their origin.

What is it about objects born of a maker’s working of materials into form that renders the produced object with a status different from those created through industrial, mechanical and hugely scaled processes? Since industrialization, what is reductively but usefully called “craft” occupies both the space of longing (the cultural and temporal specificities of what exists as the past), occasioned by the aesthetic genericization of material life wrought by modernization and the space of sentimentality.

Commentaries about craft have long emphasized that it is in the deep, often cross-generational, repositories of knowledge about materials and making that the integrity and cultural standing of the handmade object is derived. Writers — including the Japanese art critic Yanagi Sōetsu, British furniture designer and academic David Pye, American labour historian Richard Sennett and historian and curator Glenn Adamson — have sought to explain how craft (meaning crafted objects and craftsmanship) is ontologically distinct from other categories of human-authored things. This is as much because of the pre-industrial histories of human making and because the handmade is about restoring ideas of the historical continuities of making. These ideas have been occasioned by mechanization, mass production, and what Marx explained to be the alienation of industrial capital. People, through becoming the makers of the tools they need, not only take control of their environments but also their destiny.

Although perhaps too broad and imprecise, craft as the category of objects often too loosely defined by their mode of production, does occupy a place in material life. The handmade links makers, audiences and users to their sensory selves and to the past, meaning a point and place in history which, even if not necessarily understood in detail, is about notions of material need, the seasonal cycles and the predictable duties and rhythms of life, about community and about mourned ways of being.

To be sure, Pallasmaa’s act of homage and validation was also one of excavation and reclamation. If the crafted object has power, it is a power that resonates with the viscerality of emotions as opposed to encouraging rational appreciation. The physical quality of a work of craft — including the visible marks of makers (the results of working wood by hand, for example), the variations in the form and texture of serial objects (the subtle, often near-imperceptible differences in the application of glazes and shapes of serially thrown vessels) or the countless other tangible, defining aspects of handmade objects, exist as affirmations of creativity, capacity and purpose.

That craft can be viewed through the rosy lens of nostalgia, as if the existence of a handmade object in the context of the machine-made mass produced goods, is about a type of escapist time travel misses the point. The implicit longing in such sentimental feeling is less about the enduring presence of craft than about the larger concerns that attend any contemplation of contemporary globalized and materially rapacious society.

The crafted object stands fully on its own. The power of the object is because of the connections that are at the ready to be formed between an admirer or a user and the thing itself. And it is here where the implications of craft can be fully experienced. As Adamson has wisely noted, craft, what he calls a “social adhesive,” is a “means of connecting with fundamental issues and ideas about art, history and humanity” [2] — something to which the Greene Brothers and Pallasmaa could attest.

[1]. Pallasmaa, Juhani. The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. London: John Wiley and Sons, 1996, 59.

[2]. See Ashley Christie, “Craft as Catalyst: An interview with craft scholar, Glenn Adamson”, Mingei International Museum, (21 February 2022), n.p., https://mingei.org/stories/design/glenn-adamson

This article was published in the Fall / Winter 2023-2024 issue of Studio Magazine