January 2009

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The nature of materials is of great consequence in Sennett’s argument. Hand-made bricks, originally of a size no bigger than the hand of the bricklayer, with their infinitely varied tones and surfaces were – are – considered ‘natural’ and in The Complete Body of Architecture Isaac Ware set brick against stucco, the latter a kind of admissible artifice representing ‘culture’. After all, stucco gave craftsmen new freedoms, leading to all kinds of novel skills. Thus the cult of the blemished is not always to be celebrated while overcoming technological difficulties is another kind of dexterity; the adjustment of the ‘wobble’ on the Millennium Bridge over the Thames was in fact a triumph, rather than the failure trumpeted by the press.

Sennett is no technophobe: he is always arguing for a technology that can serve as adjunct to and enabler of craft skill. This is not the untiring machine that degraded, then displaced, the human workforce, nor the mechanistic processes of work without satisfaction, as evidenced in state housing in the USSR, where newspapers (painted over) were stuffed into the interstices of imperfect window frames, or the troubling dislocation between hand and mind that over-dependence on CAD (computer-assisted design) can bring to architectural design. There is a thrill in the movement of pen and pencil over paper in the hand of a fine architect such as Renzo Piano – evidence of a creative mind in its circular process of developing an idea ‘drawing and making and then back again’. But Sennett accepts that the mindless commercial architecture of the 1960s and 1970s arose without CAD, imprisoned within the rigidities of the blueprint and at the Peachtree Project in Atlanta, Georgia, his chosen example of the dreadful, the grim result was generated by an over-determined brief.

The master craftsman may be in a class apart but the creative virtuoso inhabits a different universe. Benvenuto Cellini cannot be compared to Stradivarius, whose atelier focused upon his extraordinary skill but died with him, his secrets still only his. Sennett consciously avoids using the term ‘creativity’, considering that it ‘carries too much Romantic baggage’. He finds little appeal in the extraordinary flash of inspiration, the isolation of the genius, and admires the subtle approach adopted by Aldo Van Eyck, whose urban playgrounds were designed to emphasise ambiguity, clutter and incident, so distant from the deterministic view of Le Corbusier. The latter prized order at all costs, preferring to ease traffic flow rather than bend with the coincidence of daily life. Sennett has a particular and wholly sympathetic fondness for error; the flaw that points to the human hand, evidence of a maker not a conceptualist.