Week 3: The Separation of Working from Doing – ‘The Case for Working with your Hands’ by Matthew Crawford.

Things are too perfect? Is it the small imperfections in items which give them an unquantifiable sentimental value to us? If you were to fully align one’s self with the views and ideas of Matthew Crawford, one could well arrive at an answer of yes to both questions. Many have before. Most famously, one of the art world’s favourite sons, John Ruskin in his comparison between the gothic and renaissance architecture of Venice. Ruskin felt the ordered geometry of the renaissance Piazza San Marco was soulless when compared to the crafted individualism of the gothic Doges Palace.

As an argument purely based on the desire for, and appreciation, of buildings, products or even artworks made with either single craft or as mass produced in factory it could always boil down to basic human preference. This is why Crawford focuses more on the argument that the falling use of craft and ‘working with your hands’ is driven upon us by a political system. He uses the phrase ‘alienated labour’ to describe how, by being tasked to produce one small function or specialism in the production line, people have been reduced to ‘doing’ rather than working. If to accept, as Crawford has, that this is a symptom of a certain political thinking maybe we would come to the same conclusion that “of course”, what is traditionally in America known as ‘white collar work’, due to advances in technology and methods, will inevitably follow suit.

Looking through life today it is not difficult to pick up examples of where traditionally white collar work has been marginalised, such as clerks in a bank replaced by computer systems or to look at designers, consistently being further and further specialised to create a world of ‘Pseudo-creatives’. However Crawford’s suggestion that Trades still give your creativity seems actually to be much more similar to the pseudo-creatives of the design world.

So, whilst Crawford’s predictions may be starting to come to fruition, what if we look past his political biased and start to question whether the marginality of work is actually an inevitable part of a capitalist system. As explored in previous weeks, in a capitalist market, a products value is set by its exchange value, not its use value. In order to help boost a products exchange value the product has to be made as cheaply as possible (whether this is achieved by saving time or materialistic cost is irrelevant), this is why production lines and modern techniques which allow quality controlled products to be produced whilst eliminating production costs have become the normal. In order for a capitalist market to return to a system where each object is created by a craftsmen, the economy would have to revert to a world where the price of a product is determined by its ‘use value’. When each object is specially crafted for one particular use and is valued accordingly.

Where does Architecture fit in? Architecture in its purist form is concerned with creating a space to perform its function as well as possible. Modernism was built around the dictum ‘form follows function’. Therefore it would be fair to say Architecture (not to be confused with the construction itself) is still a truly creative industry as the product is sold using its exchange value. However, in a world of globalised fashions, pressure from developers for returns and the rise of the ‘starchitect’, is architecture moving further and further towards being distributed on its exchange value. And does this mean the start of the production line? We have all heard stories of large practices and divides between concept, development and technical teams. Is architecture being consumed into the system, is the industry becoming ‘collectively stupider’ as we specialise closer and closer?

It is worth noting at this point that it would not be the first time Architecture has considered the issue. The arts and crafts movement of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, led by William Morris, has previously attempted to revert to a more bespoke and individually crafted approach. And yet presently, as the modern capitalist economy progresses exponentially, are we past the tipping point? With an ever growing demand on financial return being prioritised over how well the building reacts to wither physical or emotional briefs the ship may have sailed.