Woodworker's Journal 2004 Spring, страница 6

Photo at left: Ron Jennings, © Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Gift of Sydney and Frances Leu>is. Photo below courtesy of Craftsman Auctions Lambertrriite/David Rago and Jerry Cohen

The Roycroft crafters lived in a communal society in New York state, where their woodworkers produced pieces like the magazine pedestal at far left and the sewing stand shown in the photo at left.

connection to nature: leather, wool and linen fabrics were popular textiles. Natural elements appear in some of the decorative motifs as well; stylized florals and geometric repeats were both common.

In making their furniture and crafts, several Mission designers did use machines. They still paid homage to the Arts & Crafts idealization of handmade items, though, by courting at least a handmade appearance for any hardware or ornaments — like hammered copper drawer pulls.

Although Mission is most closely identified with furniture, some of the designers tried to extend these concepts to the houses that would hold the furniture. Stickley, for example, published Craftsman home plans that employed materials indigenous to their location: pine, oak and limestone in the Midwest, for example, and redwood in California.

The Prairie Style

This is where Prairie comes in. Like Mission, it's an offshoot of the Arts & Crafts movement. Prairie's strength, however, is architecture.

Prairie architects designed homes that fit into their natural surroundings — like low, horizontal houses that conformed to the flatness of the prairie. Blueprints provided interaction with nature through porches and patios, and rooms flowed into one another to encourage informal gatherings. Most important, however, was the concept of unity: between the exterior and the interior, between the interior and the furniture. 'The whole must always be considered as an integral unit," wrote noted architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

To create this unity — based on the Arts & Crafts desire for a harmonious whole — Prairie architects sometimes became Prairie furniture makers. Their creations were usually specific designs for specific houses, and they often incorporated Japanese influences.

Although Prairie furniture generally had a rectilinear, geometric base, it frequently displayed rhythmically repeated slats, radiated stretchers, mullioned

case pieces and an Oriental "cloud" shape in bracings. When brothers Charles and Henry Greene revealed the structure of their Prairie furniture, they did so in a delicate manner that owed more to Japanese aesthetics than the brash aspect of Mission's exposed construction.

Prairie architects, who had their heyday in the 1910s and teens, also moved away from the faith of the Arts & Crafts fathers on the subject of the machine. For them, machines represented not a symbol of the apple corrupting Eden, as they had to William Morris, but a tool that freed designers to concentrate more on creativity.

Photo courtesy of Craftsman Auctions Lambertvitte/David Rago and Jerry Cohen.

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Warm, natural or handworked materials were important to Gustav Stickley, who put a leather seat and cushions on the settle at left and copper pulls on the oak sideboard above.