Arts & Crafts

What this cluster covers

Arts & Crafts was an argument about who makes a building. From the 1860s onward, designers in Britain — Morris, Webb, Voysey, later Lethaby — set the visible hand of the maker against the anonymous output of the factory, and they made that argument in plan, joinery and tile rather than in manifestos alone. The result is a body of work where a staircase newel, a leaded window and a garden wall are treated as the same order of problem as the roofline.

On the continent the same impulse turned decorative and structural at once: Jugendstil in Munich and Vienna, the Secession's flat pattern and gold, Art Nouveau's iron tendrils in Brussels and Paris. What links them is not a style vocabulary but a method — material worked close to the eye, ornament derived from construction, and a house planned outward from the hearth instead of inward from a facade.

Stories filed here look at how those buildings actually stand up and weather: lime mortars and breathable renders, hand-cut joinery tolerances, tile and stained glass as light control rather than decoration, and the long afterlife of the movement in twentieth-century domestic architecture. The craft questions are still live ones for anyone repairing this fabric today.