\The V&A Academy of Artisanal Crafts
Thesis Book\Thomas Chee
Crafts Vault
Advisor: Peter W. Ferretto
CRAFTS VAULT THESIS ON THE ROLE OF MODERN MUSEUMS IN RETRIEVING THE LOST TOUCH OF CRAFTSMANSHIP by Chee King Hei Thomas (1009603732, MArch 2) architckh@gmail.com / thomas-chee.com Supervised by: Peter Winston Ferretto
2 A thesis submitted to the School of Architecture, CUHK in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Architecture School of Architecture The Chinese University of Hong Kong May 2016
Content
4 6 8 12 18 23 26
Dissertation
The Last Craftsman & Manifesto Crafts Industry The Victorian Victoria & Albert Museum Site Process Design
28 32 42 52 58 74 88
Project
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Abstract Acknowledgement Introduction Human Hands in the Era of Machine The Showing Device The Project Bibliography
Abstract
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This thesis investigates how the advancement of modern technologies and mass manufacturing process initiated by the First Industrial Revolution two hundred years ago have shaped the common demand for highly efficient and low cost production in the modern world as an opposition to the slower and more traditional way of manufacturing with hands, which is suggested in the essay as a critical reason leading to the gradual deterioration of the artisanal skill inheritance around the world and the increasing concern in preserving it. Through studying the Arts and Crafts movement happened during the Victorian Period of the United Kingdom after the Great Exhibition in 1851 inspired by influential English social thinker and art critic John Ruskin, the essay then tries to depict the on-going cross-disciplinary social movements, especially in the Western world, that have happened in response to the predominant Internationalism and Modernism to promote the sense of local identity, self-help and to rebuild and rediscover the spirit of craftsmanship as depicted by Richard Sennett in “The Craftsman”. Meanwhile, the essay by studying the history and theory of transformation of museums from many privatized “Cabinets of Curiosities” to the modern “White Cube” prototype as expressed by Brian O’Doherty, argues the “experiential and performing exhibits” as an indispensible element of modern
Keywords: Craftsmanship, experiential, workshops, exposition, archive
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museums to cater the growing interest in public involvement and intellectual sharing; and the ineptitude of the prevalent universal white cube space within them in fulfilling the suggested goal to display the process of making involving highly specific spatial and lighting requirement and to invite interaction rather than isolation. The thesis concludes by using my design project of a proposed extension of the Victoria & Albert Museum in North Kensington, London, as an illustration of the role of modern museums in retrieving the important knowledge and common wealth of crafts that have lost in the process of urban development back to the city and to promote a new typology of experiential museum which would make traditional crafts relevant to the 21st century. Keywords: Craftsmanship, experiential, workshops, archive
Acknowledgement
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I want to thank my thesis advisor Peter Ferretto who has been guiding and inspiring me from M1 studio to the thesis project and keeping me believe in myself through the ups and downs of the working process, especially during my exchange in the University of Cambridge when I need to get myself accustomed to the new environment and the new way of representation. I must make my great gratitude to Professor Nelson Chen for organizing and making the exchange program possible and Isabel Wong for helping me with my trip to the UK. I also need to thank Patrick Hwang, Maing Minjung and Professor Gu Daqing for their kind contribution and suggestions in the development of my thesis topic. In Cambridge I particularly thank my tutor Ingrid Schroder and Aram Mooradian for their patience and inspirational comments for my research. I would also like to thank Lucy Hartley for assisting my journey and accommodation in Cambridge, Stan Finney for IT service and assistance and the Sir Arthur Marshall Fund that makes my attendance to Professor Richard Sennett’s lecture possible. I must also thank Henrich Zelinka for giving me a chance to be trained as a blacksmith in his workshop and sharing his experience of being one. Last but not least I want to thank my friends Clara Cheung, Luke Kon, Melanie Miao, Cameron Cavalier, Janis Atelbauers, Fay Huang and all who give me advice in Cambridge; Fiona
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Tsui who has been my great exchange partner; Sherly Leung, Tommy Kan and Jenson Choy who has made my wonderful thesis classmates and all my friends who have accompanied me along my journey of architectural studies. Finally, I must take this occasion to express my thank you to my dearest family for their support and care without whom this thesis would not be possible.
Introduction
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We are living in an era of transient memory, a generation of segmented history. Technologies that are recognized as cuttingedge and things that are considered new today could become obsolete tomorrow. The series of Industrial Revolutions initiated from the eighteenth century Europe have shown in front of eyes of people around the globe countless miracles in technology and inventions. The First Industrial Revolution introduced steam engines that mobilized mass manufacturing of patterned textile and cast iron possible; the Second Industrial Revolution happened between 1840s to 1860s had given rise to steel as a high strength material in construction, railways for long-distance mass transportation, petroleum for fuel and production of plastic, and electricity that lighted up the world and further accelerated the speed of mass production and technological evolution; the Third Industrial Revolution or the “Digital Revolution� between 1950 and 1970 started to turn analog, mechanical and electronic signal into digital data leading to a greater and greater presence of computer and artificial intelligence in human life and help integrate production by processing enormous amount of information in an extremely short period of time. In the present, we are moving on to the Fourth Industrial Revolution or what the German government 1 claims as Industrie 4.0 when traditional centralized production is shifted towards decentralized and independent manufacturing
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with a sophisticated cyber-physical network that can manage and evolve itself. It is very likely that artificial intelligence will continue to replace human’s presence in every aspect of production: from design, analysis and examination to fabrication, reproduction and refinement in the future. Some even suggested that before the end of this century 70 percent of today’s occupations would likewise be replaced by automation and most of the jobs in the future would be unknown to us now similar to the situation in the early nineteenth century US when 70 percent of Americans were working as farmers after which 2 nearly all the agricultural works were done with machines. Indisputably, with the advancement of technology and machinery basic living requirements were secured and people could focus more on creating new things to further improve their living standard. Modernism, moreover, brought a whole new mass transportation experience to the public allowing people to migrate from rural areas into city, resulting in an ever growing urban presence and rapid globalization. While people moving at an ever increasing speed to the center of cities, accepting all kinds of new inventions and beliefs, inevitable problems arise such as over population, pollution, social-economical discrepancy and hierarchical inequality. Despite voices questioning the advent of urbanization and technological transformation of cities running at an alarming rate, society could not withstand the enormous temptation of urban development and the ecstasy of enjoying the new with decreasing cost owing to mass production. In the last decade, the appearance of virtual social network and personal digital
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products further intensified the speed and process of evolution, affecting every angle of human lives around the whole world almost instantly. In the midst of a consumerist society on steroids, the obsession to consume and the associated infinite generation of waste have built a vicious cycle that will potentially haunt society for a long time to come and ultimately be difficult to alter. Things that were once given meaning witnessing generations of cultural development, traditional skills and knowledge that were depended on to make a living, would end up as waste to be forgotten becoming extinct losing their historical meanings and cultural significance. Hence, at a time when people in the future were asked to look back on their recent history, their background and their cultural values, they might find nothing other than pieces of fragmented memories and seemingly un-related stories. They would have no choice but to believe that what they could enjoy now was the sole outcome of self-evolution of artificial intelligence without any chance to peek into the “good old days” when humans discovered from making mistakes. As Richard Sennett translated John Ruskin’s idea for “flamboyance” in Gothic Stonework from The Stone of Venice, a good craftsman is excited in and 3 is willing to risk losing control over his or her work as people make discoveries in accidents while machines break down when losing control. While it is important to treasure and preserve our cultural heritage of long time ago we must also remember that what we have lost in the most recent past, our identity and our vernacular culture embedded in our own hands are indeed
Germany Trade & Invest, Industrie 4.0 – Smart Manufacturing for the Future (Berlin: Germany Trade & Invest, 2014), 6. 2. Kelvin Kelly, Better Than Human:Why RobotsWill- And Must – Take Our Jobs, Wired Magazine, 24th December, 2012. 3. Richard Sennett, Machines, The Craftsman, (London: Penguin Books, 2009), 113. 1.
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equally important. It is the idea to preserve the losing artisanal craft skill in the modern realm with architectural intervention that has triggered my thinking for this thesis project. The thesis starts with a research on the events and movements that have happened in the United Kingdom after the First Industrial Revolution when two opposing sides for and against the changes of society emerged. Then the research focuses on the theoretical aspect of the appearance of museums and how they have evolved in time with varying social-political background and practical reasons. The final part of the essay tries to, by proposing a museum design for black smithy in London, suggest a new typology of museum building that is specific for the modern time which can bring back the lost touch of craftsmanship to the center of the city.
Human Hands in the Era of Machine
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On 1st May 1851 at Hyde Park, Queen Victoria declared the opening of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations which signified the height of the First Industrial Revolution and the British Empire. Within five months six million people, making up to one third of the total population 4 in Britain at that time, visited the event. The world fair was a great success which generated an enormous revenue that could allow Prince Albert to purchase the area now known as South Kensington and develop a new museum and educational hub there with the establishment of the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum, the Royal Albert Hall and the colleges. Meanwhile, the exposition also helped building up the British Empire’s reputation as the world leader of industry, with not just the over fifteen 5 thousand contributors and the hundred thousand exhibits of new technologies and design products alone, but mainly the over 550 meters long Crystal Palace building. Designed by famous gardener and architect Sir Joseph Paxton, the Crystal Palace utilized the most advanced technologies at that time in manufacturing steel and plane glass to create building modules that could be replicated and put in place by workers in a short period of time. The thin steel frame profiles and the large amount of natural light penetrating through the glass skin also distinguished itself from all the institutional and exhibition
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buildings built with bricks and stones before, including the selection committee’s design. The pioneering way of categorizing exhibits according to region, material and nature of use within the square grid system also became the prototype of numerous “Crystal Palace Copies” around the world such as the 1853 exhibition in New York, the 1854 Glaspalast in Munich, the 1855 Exposition Universelle in Paris and the later trend of building museum buildings as a way of educating the public in the United Kingdom. The event could be seen as a political tactic for the British Empire to prove to the whole world its economic power and control, but at the same time it also helped to redirect the British peoples’ impression of the new changes brought by the industrial revolution from the negative side of air and water pollution to the positive image of pure technological advancements and national proudness, especially when the visitors were mainly local as contrasting to the international nature of the exhibitors. While most people at that time praised the exhibition and the Crystal Palace for the innovations and the unprecedented scale involved, not to mention Queen Victoria who had been a frequent visitor throughout the five-month fair after the inauguration, voices arisen trying to break away from the splendor of machine age persuaded by the monarchy and to bring human craft back under the spotlight. The Great Exhibition, as described by Richard Sennett, was a century’s great celebration of the industrial cornucopia while the Crystal Palace was merely a giant greenhouse displaying a massive collection of modern machinery and industrial
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products that where produced primarily to show that people 6 had the ability to mass manufacturing them. The industrial cornucopia created by the sudden surplus in production power with the emergence of machine had raised much concern and protest from the side of physical labors, artists and craftsmen. Among them, English writer John Ruskin was the one who had been continuously battling with the new concept of mechanical dominated civilization. Mobilized by machine production, equal quality products could be produced in any quantity requested. However, as perceived by Ruskin the high efficiency of production might not necessarily lead to a better life, rather the machines sacrificed the quality of products and gave rise to excessive consumerism and waste. In 1845, British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli’s novel Sybil, or The Two Nations, while depicting the inequality to the working classes in England unveiled the wasteful life of the upper classes with their overabundance of wealth and material. After 170 years, this situation has only exacerbated with a broader genre and a higher quantity of wastage, from food, fashion to electronic gadgets and vehicles. Apart from the generation of waste, “the quality of products” or in Walter Benjamin’s words “the Aura” as he revisited the topic of losing authenticity in work of art by mechanical reproduction in the 1936 essay: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, was the most significant issue which Ruskin seen as deteriorating. In searching for authenticity in architecture, Ruskin’s admiration for Gothic architecture and his opposition to standardization and order in Classical architecture in The Stone
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of Venice may provide some clues to his ideal in architecture and craft as a whole. In Ruskin’s theory, rather than sharing the same view of Gothic architecture as barbarous German style 7 as Giorgio Vasari mentioned in “Lives of the Artists” , medieval Gothic architecture was a relationship, an organic bonding between humans and the nature. In the construction process of a Gothic architecture such as a church, it usually required the concerted effort of the whole community to participate and share the works. Sculptors might spend years after years to finish the stone ornament on the façade with their own hands and tools. However difficult the construction work might seem, Ruskin argued that the workers could still enjoy the process and their lives because Gothic provided them with liberty to work, a freedom to imagine, to express their personalities 8 and to make mistakes. While buildings constructed with mechanically manufactured components such as the Crystal Palace were in fact a modern version of Classical architecture that he condemned, as controlled standardization depriving workers of creativity and uniqueness. To further illustrate his principle on ideal architecture, Ruskin in his essay “The Seven Lamps of Architecture” provided seven “Lamps” as a guideline for anyone who wanted to pursue architecture and to master artisanal crafts to follow. The seven lamps included Sacrifice: dedication for doing the best for its own sake; Truth: honesty in treating materials and structure based on their characteristics and nature; Power: Design based on understanding in the forces of nature and guided by them; Beauty: Ornamentation inspired by nature; Life: Artisanal crafts with challenges and mistakes
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rather than lifeless mechanical productions; Memory: Culture and spirit embedded in the history of a place, similar to the idea of Genius Loci conveyed by Christian Norberg-Schulz in 1980; and Obedience: the apprenticeships, which was to learn from the masters and at the end create your own chef D'œuvre, the masterpiece. John Ruskin’s writings had greatly influenced individuals and movements later that shared similar ideology in opposing the new era of machine and standardization, such as the PreRaphaelite Brotherhood founded by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1848 which tried to bring art back to the pre-Raphael and Michelangelo period when the dominant theory of drawing and composition of High Renaissance, or the mechanistic approach of creating art, had not emerged; English poet and textile designer William Morris who re-invented the way of wallpaper printing and introduced the Pre-Raphaelite’s fine detail reference to nature in the pattern design; the Arts and Crafts movement that had significantly influenced the decorative art, furniture and architectural design around the world until the 1930s; and the Self-Help culture that blossomed in the late twentieth century with people appreciating self-inventions and re-discovering the beauty of artisanal crafts by making things themselves.9 At the present, we are already more than two hundred years from the origin of the First Industrial Revolution. Machines that were once as frightening as Frankenstein for some have become an indispensible part in everyone life today. While pure nostalgic actions in reviving the medieval way of living
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would be irrelevant for the present world in which benefits in the improved standard of life brought by the contribution and effort of numerous inventors now and from the past should never be omitted, we could still take a lesson from what Ruskin and other activists have conveyed us and prevent the spirit of artisanal craft from being overshadowed by the prestige of new mechanically produced products by preserving it and showing it to the public.
4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.
Appleton & Company, Appletons' annual encyclopedia and register of important events of the year: 1862. (New York: D. Appleton & Company. 1863), 412. Liza Picard, The Exhibits,The Great Exhibition, The British Library Richard Sennett, Machines, The Craftsman, (London: Penguin Books, 2009), 110 &111. .Vasari, G, The Lives of the Artists, (Oxford: Oxford University Press (Oxford World’s Classics), 1991), 117 & 527. John Unrau, ed. Robert Hewison, Ruskin,TheWorkman and the Savageness of Gothic, New Approaches to Ruskin, (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1981), 33–50. Micki McGee, Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover culture in American Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 22.
The Showing Device
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Museum is the architecture for preserving and showing. Before the appearance of museum buildings, precious items were collected by the upper classes for their own interest and personal taste. During the Renaissance and Baroque period, with a view to try showing-off their collection to their guests, the upper classes began to build up “wunderkammer� or the cabinets of curiosities in their houses. Since the main purpose of the cabinets of curiosities was to provide a space for storing and showing objects, it was very common that cabinets might contain an indiscriminate collection of rare objects with completely unrelated backgrounds. This type of juxtapositions of mutually unrelated but intriguing objects triggered imagination of the viewers, which broke the boundaries of geographical and historical backgrounds and manifested as hidden links between them. As Jan C. Westerhoff quoted Horst Bredekamp’s view on the Cabinets of Curiosities, the devices served to provide an opportunity for experimentation in 10 merging form and meaning. Wunderkammer theorist Johann Daniel Major also expressed that the perceived disorder of objects in the cabinets built visual bridges to emphasize the 11 playfulness of nature through the associative power of sight. In the eighteenth century, revolutions in technology, science, philosophy, religion and monarchy initiated the age of Enlightenment in Europe that led to liberation in both the
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physical and intellectual world. People started to realize that through their imaginative power, observation and experiment they might be able to understand and reproduce the truth of nature without solely relying on the words of priests. Linkages between collected objects thus transformed from mere instant fantasy of the observers into a possible universal truth that could permanently describe the rules of the world. It was this intention to make connections and to “make sense of � individual creations of nature which engendered the enthusiasm in classification. As argued by Immanuel Kant, systems of classification are artificial and invented by human understanding and interpreted into nature in order to bridge 12 the chasm of representation. Although people may not have an ultimate proof of whether nature conforms to one system of classification or not, in an attempt to make sense of things we must assume the nature is regulated by a system that human understanding can grasp.13 Michael Foucault further elaborated and related the idea of classification with museum buildings which also started to appear in the eighteenth century that museum is a space of representation made possible by the deliberately created space between human system of thought and the collected items instead of pure curiosity and the rise of capitalism and colonialism.14 Contrasts to the cabinets of curiosities, while there exist private museums that only serve the interest of individual collector, museums are fundamentally designed for the public. The spatial quality of museums and the arrangement of exhibits then become important for the public to learn the system of classification and the thought of nature
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that the owners want to express through their interpretation. In “The Museums of the Last Generation” Ignasi de Sola-Morales mentioned that “When art and knowledge are no longer the exclusive property of the prince and priest, but are placed directly in front of the astonished eyes of the citizens, there must exist the organized transmission of these symbolic values.’15 During the Victorian Period, museums became a crucial part of political agenda in both showing the Imperial Britain’s consideration for the lower classes by providing education with them through free access to a physical encyclopedia of things, and at the same time imposing the government’s interpretation and values of nature and history onto the general public which were gradually gaining power that threatened the existence of the one ruling power. At the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington London, exhibits are organized and displayed with the architecture itself. While at one level items are arranged according to their geographical origins around the world, showing the power of colonialism of the Imperial Britain; at another level exhibits are displayed following a category system of materials and techniques in consecutive rooms which helps delivering knowledge of the design and the production process to visitors. Across the Exhibition Road stands the Natural History Museum which also organizes collections in a taxonomical way with the central space acting as an index to the museum catalogue and the entire building layout to promote the narrative of universal truth of nature and science.16 In contrast, the Pitt Rivers Museum in the University of Oxford organizes its anthropological and
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archaeological collections inside one single space thematically rather than chronologically. The significance of the architecture itself becomes less prominent, and the different sized glass boxes holding a high density of objects turn out to be the main showing device that classify and relate. Despite the difference in the genre of collected items and the method of display, all the above three museums that were constructed in the Victorian time carried the same essence which shares with museum buildings today, the sense of isolation. In museums the collected objects are exhibited in an artificial space created and isolated from the constraint of time and external environment. The common typology of top-lit or windowless museum space disconnects visitors from any references to context, time and identity, allowing them to clear their mind before being re-introduced with new knowledge and 17 conception of space-time within the whole world. Because of this specific and practical reason for space making for exhibiting objects, museums very often adopt a self-contained and defensive expression that constitute a unique visual impact to the surroundings. Although museum buildings originated from the experience of collecting and imaginative association in wunderkammer may not require as high degree of isolation as galleries which, described by Brian O’Doherty as un-shadowed, white, clean and artificial space or simply as “white cube” that subtracts from the artwork all cues that interfere with the fact of it being “art” 18, as flexibility was persuaded as the new standard of museum architecture by the Modern Movement from the 1930 onwards, the threshold differentiating
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museum space from gallery space turned obscure. While Pompidou Centre in Paris and New National Gallery in Berlin provide open container space for achieving flexibility, many contemporary museums choose “white cubes” as the universal solution for hosting exhibition inside which exhibits are seemingly viewed as holy figures worshiped in temples and churches refraining from contact with anybody. Certainly as the programmatic requirement of museum buildings becomes more and more complex in the last few decades highly versatile white cube space may be a sustainable and economic answer, this alienation of viewer from the exhibits in modern museums, 19 however intensifies people “fear of touching” that could subsequently depriving them of interaction with the unknown and making the intention of experiential museum which focuses on the process instead of the end product of making as inert objects extremely unlikely to achieve. Moreover, as will be discussed in the following section regarding my design proposal of museum extension to the existing Victoria and Albert Museum for crafts, the claimed universality of white cube space would be inadequate in accommodating and representing the highly spatial specific nature of the work of craft, it is therefore critical for architects to rethink how modern museums in the future could manifest as the catalyst for preserving and showing the losing touch of craft to people situating in this machine dominated world rather than neutral white rooms that continue to mummify the spirit of crafts making into dead objects.
As a direct result of the 1851 Great Exhibition, the Victoria & Albert Museum was one of the largest and most visited crafts and design museums in the whole world. In recent years, owing to the continuous increase in the number of exhibits, the museum was undergoing expansion works near the Exhibition Road and planning for a new building for contemporary design and crafts at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. Because of its nature as an important crafts institution in UK, it made sense to propose an extension of the museum specific to artisanal crafts so as to test the idea of experiential museum allowing visitors to get very close to the origin of the beautiful artifacts that they could see in the V&A. Unfortunately, after an in-depth research on the possibilities of building an extension nearby, the result showed that because of local historical conservation laws, altering the original building or the streetscape would become not plausible. Hence the design project was commenced on a piece of wasted brown field site at North Kensington that was within the same borough of the V&A but belonged to a completely different neighborhood. The site was situated on the land left behind by the Kensal Green Gas Work which once was providing heating for the surrounding areas for the whole 20th century. Since the site was surrounded by a heavy railway track, a canal and the Kensal Green Cemetery isolated from the city center, it was left empty
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The Project
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owing to its low economic value even in the wealthiest borough in London. Thus the design, while providing extra space for the Victoria & Albert Museum to store and display its collection, aimed at revitalize the site and benefit the neighborhood in North Kensington that was relatively poor and notorious of high crime rate. The building itself was inspired by the spatial experience of the Victoria & Albert Museum which was full of excitement and unexpectedness with dramatic changes of interior spaces and relationships between the visitors and different sized exhibits. On the outside, the brick-cladded building provided a massive but subtle presence to the neighborhood juxtaposing to the railway tracks, the river, the cemetery and the enormous steel gasometer structures which recorded the industrial history of the Victorian London. Inside the building people could travel freely though exhibition rooms where they could look down glass windows viewing craftsmen working in workshops specific to various types of crafts. Contrary to modern museums where artifacts became icons and attractions, in the design the making process of artifacts and the craftsmanship were the keys. Here time ran slower in front of visitors’ eyes. Patience and sustain, the sound of each hammer strike echoed by the brick vault, connecting the craftsmen and the visitors even they were separated spatially‌ Rather than drawing a solution to the problem, the design tried to provide a new perspective, a new way of seeing how museum of crafts should be like in the future. While museum building of crafts, as mentioned previously, should not be
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restricted in a white cube if the true identity and characteristic of the crafts were to be explored by visitors thoroughly, a crafts museum in modern time should also bear the responsibility of conveying the future generations the philosophy behind the art of crafts, that is fragile but capable of differentiating human from a machine.
10. Jan C. Westerhoff, AWorld of Signs: Baroque Pansemioticism, the Polyhistor and the Early ModernWunderkammer , Journal of the History of Ideas Vol.62, No.4 (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 644. 11. Horst Bredekamp, The Love of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine:The Kunstkammern and the Evaluation of Nature, Art and Technology (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1955), 73. 12. Sarah Beth Lord, 'Representing Enlightenment Space'. in S MacLeod (ed.), Reshaping Museum Space: Architecture, Design, Exhibitions. (London: Routledge. 2005), 147. 13. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 185. 14. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (London: Routledge, 1970), 130. 15. Ignasi de Sola-Morales, The Meaning of the Architecture in Museum. In Josep Montaner and Jordi Oliveras, The Museums of the Last Generation. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), 7. 16. Sophia Psarra, The impact of Layout. in S MacLeod (ed.), Reshaping Museum Space: Architecture, Design, Exhibitions. (London: Routledge. 2005), 81. 17. Richard Toon, Black box science in black box science centres. in S MacLeod (ed.), Reshaping Museum Space: Architecture, Design, Exhibitions. (London: Routledge. 2005), 29. 18. Brian O’Doherty, Inside theWhite Cube – The Ideology of the Gallery Space. (San Francesco: University of California Press. 1999), 14-15. 19. Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone – The Body and the City inWestern Civilization. (London: Faber and Faber Limited. 1994), 18
Bibliography
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.
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9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.
Appleton & Company. Appletons' annual encyclopedia and register of important events of the year: 1862, New York: D. Appleton & Company. 1863. Barbara J. Black. On Exhibit-Victorians and Their Museums, Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2000. Brian O’Doherty. Inside theWhite Cube – The Ideology of the Gallery Space, San Francesco: University of California Press. 1999. Christopher Hobhouse. 1851 and the Crystal Palace: Being an Account of the Great Exhibition and its Contents of Sir Joseph Paxton and the Erection, the Subsequent History and the Destruction of His Masterpiece, London: John Murray, 1837. Germany Trade & Invest. Industrie 4.0 – Smart Manufacturing for the Future, Berlin: Germany Trade & Invest, 2014. Horst Bredekamp. The Love of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine:The Kunstkammern and the Evaluation of Nature, Art and Technology, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1955. Immanuel Kant. Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987. Jan C. Westerhoff. A World of Signs: Baroque Pansemioticism, the Polyhistor and the Early ModernWunderkammer , Journal of the History of Ideas Vol.62, No.4, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. John McKean. Joseph Paxton & Charles Fox. Crystal Palace: Joseph Paxton and Charles Fox, London: Phaidon, 1994. John Unrau, ed. Robert Hewison. Ruskin, TheWorkman and the Savageness of Gothic, New Approaches to Ruskin, New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1981. Josep Montaner and Jordi Oliveras. The Museums of the Last Generation, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986. Michel Foucault. The Order of Things, London: Routledge, 1970. Micki McGee. Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover culture in American Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Nicholas Zembashi. The Legacy of Exposition, London: Architectural Association School of Architecture, 2012. Richard Sennett. Flesh and Stone – The Body and the City inWestern Civilization, London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1994. Richard Sennett. The Craftsman, London: Penguin Books, 2009. Roger Miles & Lauro Zavala. Towards the Museum of the Future - New European Perspectives, London: Routledge, 1994. S MacLeod (ed.). Reshaping Museum Space: Architecture, Design, Exhibitions, London: Routledge. 2005. Liza Picard. “The Exhibits,The Great Exhibition” The British Library, 21th December, 2015. Kelvin Kelly. “Better Than Human:Why RobotsWill- And Must – Take Our Jobs” Wired Magazine, 24th December, 2012.
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Project
The Last Craftsman
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01\
In a speculative future when artificial intelligence and virtual reality replaced all the production processes and human activities in the real world, there exisited one last craftsman creating crafts with his hands, slow but firm, mourning the human's surrender to machine.
01\The Last Craftsman
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Manifesto
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02\
Archive\ People start to turn craft skills into digital data and store it in physical memory that can be read and learn again in the future. Here comes the Archive in which all the craft skills from the world are collected and stored underground permanently leaving only a monument above the ground signifying the death of the old world and the beginning of the new world. Exposition\ In a world dominated by mechanical produciton, traditional artisanal craft becomes more and more precious. People start to organise crafts fairs to allow the celebrations of human handmade products and the ways of producing them. Then here comes the Exposition in which all the craftsman from the world come together to show their own skills to people and to get inspiration from others. Workshop\ In order to transfer the old wisdom of handmaking to the next generation people start to continue making things with their hands inside their homes secretly. Here comes the Workshop in which internal space of ordinary houses is corrupted and transformed into workable space to perform and to teach various crafts while no one from the external world has ever noticed.
31 02\Manifesto
Crafts Industry
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03\
After the 2008 global financial crisis and the subsequent credit crunch, the UK has been facing the most severe economic downturn for 60 years since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Small business such as self-employed crafts makers and artists especially feel the pressure of the changed economy as the demand for crafts products and art pieces shrink with the decrease in general UK people spending. Meanwhile, the rise of new technologies for production such as the 3D printing technology has become increasingly tempting for manufacturing business and construction industry in the midst of an uncertain economic environment owing to the great reduction of material cost, the high efficiency of performance and the versatility in production. It is speculated that the new manufacturing technologies will soon replace many traditional way of making for the sake of reducing cost and improving revenue, which can futher tighten the living prospect for full-time makers who are specialised in their skills and less resilient to the changing markets.
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03\Crafts Industry
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04\
Artisanal Crafts refer to craft work produced mainly by the use of hands and tools. The above crafts syntax shows how the artisanal crafts culture performs in UK according to a survey conducted by Crafts Council UK in 2012. The inner ring shows the perceptions of crafts by 416 respondents with 28 descriptive words. The outer ring shows the relative popularity of crafts in the crafts industry of UK.
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04\Artisanal Crafts Syntax
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05\
Different from traditional “white-box� exhibition space in modern galleries that are uniform and similar, work spaces for craftsman are specifically arranged and designed so as to fulfill different physical requirement of making different types of crafts. The above diagrams illustrate nine common artisanal crafts work spaces in their relatively most basic forms.
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05\Working Space
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06\
Modern craftsman training still retains traces of medieval guild system through which people must completed before being recognised as a master craftsman. The guilds were formed by a three-tiered hierarchy of masters, journeymen and apprentices. Usual apprenticeship took seven years to complete, after which journeymen could work for another five to seven years in practice until a chef d’oeuvre eleve or masterpiece was created as a pre-requisite for taking up master’s place. The guild system guarantee the authority and monarch of the crafts masters and their professions
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06\Guild
Victorian
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07\
Blacksmithy involved the heating of iron to moldable temperature (800 to 1200 degrees Celsius) and forging into shapes for various purposes, including tools and weapons in Medieval period and decorative architectural components such as railings, balustrades and fireplaces after the16th Century. In the 1880s the Arts and Crafts Movement renewed the interest of wrought iron decorative works in Britain, until the 20th Century when Modernism swiftly declined the use and making of architectural ornamentations.
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07\Blacksmithy
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08\
The Victorian Era (1837-1901) was a period of prosperity, peace and nationalism. The great demographic transition from rural area to cities, the first industrial revolution, the success in colonialism and the increase in bourgeois led to national confidence and a common interest in the act of collection as a display of power. From the cabinets of curiosities to national museums, the Victorian Britain made arts and crafts visible everywhere in their daily life by transforming and fusing them with architecture, reminding themselves always their own wealth and human’s ability in manipulating the nature with the pair of hands.
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08\Victorian Era
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09\
The series of Industrial Revolutions initiated from the eighteenth century Europe have shown in front of eyes of people around the globe countless miracles in technology and inventions.In the present, we are moving on to the Fourth Industrial Revolution or what the German government claims as Industrie 4.0 when traditional centralized production is shifted towards decentralized and independent manufacturing with a sophisticated cyber-physical network that can manage and evolve itself. It is very likely that artificial intelligence will continue to replace human’s presence in every aspect of production: from design, analysis and examination to fabrication, reproduction and refinement in the future.
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09\Industrialization
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10\
The pollution problems and over-population caused by the rapid industrialisation of cities and the lost of authenticity in products mass manufactured by machines had led to criticisms from around Europe. Among them was English writer John Ruskin who had been continuously battling with the new concept of mechanical dominated civilization and influenced generations of thinkers and movements in persuading the return to nature and human hand creation, including Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, William Morris, the Arts and Crafts movement and more.
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10\Ruskinism
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11\
In the late 19th Century, the success of the London 1851 Great Exhibition had triggered a series of international competition of holding international expositions. Many countries around the world built their own version of the "Crystal Palace" to show off their wealth and technological advancement in making steel and glass that were still very new to the global construction industry.
11\The Great International Exhibitions
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12\
Situated at the center of London, the now commonly known South Kensington was once the location for the first International Exhibition of Works of Industry in 1851 and the most important educational hub of the United Kingdom in the Victorian Period. Led by Prince Albert, spouse of Queen Victoria, and Henry Cole a site at the southern end of Hyde Park was chosen as the destination for holding the Great Exhibition. Named after Prince Albert, the Albertopolis is now the place for numerous museums and eduational institutions with high international reputations, including the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Science Museum, the Natural History Museum, the Royal Albert Hall, the Imperial College, the Royal College of Music and the Royal College of Art, and continues influeuncing the world with its majestic collections of knowlege, crafts and expertise.
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12\Albertopolis
Victoria & Albert Museum
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13\
Museums provide space for storing and displaying collected objects and crafts, but in a form of the end products of the master craftsmanship, then what the space should be to display the skill, the process and the spirit of craft making which is now going to become extinct in the midst of global challenges of economy, politics, mass manufacturing and new technologies?
13\Victoria & Albert Museum
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Roof level of Victoria & Albert Museum, South Kensington, London
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Central courtyard, Victoria & Albert Museum, South Kensington, London
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Cast Court, Victoria & Albert Museum, South Kensington, London
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The Raphael Cartoons, Victoria & Albert Museum, South Kensington, London
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Site
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14\
In the Victorian Era, Britain had undergone an unprecedented population growth and rapid urbanization due to the higher fertility and lower mortality rates and the agricultural and industrial revolution which allowed a sustainable improvement of livng standard and demographic growth. Starting from the city center of London on both sides of River Thames, people expanded their living radius pass Westminster and gradually occupying Kensington and Chelsea in the 19 Century. Now the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea has become the smallest but most densely populated area in London.
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14\Urbanization
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15\
The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea is a place of disparity and disconnection. While on one hand it is the wealthiest borough in the whole UK and has a high density of important public museums and educational institutions, it has the one part to the north from city center, like an isolated island, as the location of poverty and crime. The highly residential attribute of the Borough also makes the place a quite castle at night when museums close and houses’doors shut.
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15\Borough
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16\
The site of the project is located at the north west end of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and within two kilometers reach from the museum hub at South Kensington. The site was chosen owing to the difficulties in expansion in the center of city under conservation and the linkage to the Victoria and Albert Museum within the Borough. At the same time, the brownfield site left behind by the Gaswork Company carries the historical meaning of the dying out of old technology and industrial significance in London and the opportunity for the retrieval of the lost touch of crafts in modern world by the proposed project.
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16\Site
Railway line next to the gas work site, North Kensington, London
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Entrance road leading to the site, North Kensington, London
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Kensal Green Cemetery, North Kensington, London
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The Grand union Canal, Paddington Branch, North Kensington, London
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Private house transformed from an old water tower, North Kensington, London
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The Gasometer structure, Paddington Branch, North Kensington, London
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Gasometer structures at the site, North Kensington, London
A boat docking on the canal, North Kensington, London
Local residents queuing up for buying meat, North Kensington, London
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A man sitting next to the canal, North Kensington, London
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Social housing groups near the site in Kensal Green, North Kensington, London
Steel bridge overcrossing the railway, North Kensington, London
Ladbroke Grove Station North Kensington, London
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Raymede Tower, a social housing tower in Kensal Green, North Kensington, London
Process
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17\
Concept models studying how repetitive vault tunnels can create different self-supporting structures and interal spaces.
17\Study models of the design structure
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18\
1:200 model studying the new vault structures the relationship with there internal space.
18\1:200 study models
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Vault corridor model study
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Archive space model study
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1:2000 site model studying the relationship between the proposed design and the site context.
19\1:2000 site model
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View from the river looking towards the design
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View from the social housing area looking to the site
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1:250 cast concrete model studying the solid and void realationship of the building and its overall form.
20\1:250 cast concrete model
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Process of casting concrete model
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Elevation 2 of the 1:250 concrete model
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Elevation 1 of the 1:250 concrete model
Design
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21\
Site plan showing the V&A Academy of Artisanal Crafts siting on the site at Kensal Green in North Kensington, London.
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21\Site Context
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22\
An overall site plan showing the connection between the original Victoria & Albert Museum and the new extension in the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea, London.
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22\Connection
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23\
Inside the new V&A building workshops for craftsmen are designed according to the specific spatial requirements for different types of crafts.
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23\Workshops
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24\
The design is composed of three levels: the archive on underground level, temporary exhibition and workshops on ground level and permanent exhibition on first level.
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24\Compositions
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25\
Ground floor plan showing the relationships between the entrance landscape, the riverside walkway, the gasometers and craftsmen accommodations and the V&A Crafts building.
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Floor plans and level connection diagrams describing the visitors' exploring path inside the museum and the connections between the workshops and the basement service space.
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Building cross sectional drawing showing the spatial relationship inside the museum between the exhibition rooms, the workshops, the service space, the carpark and the entrance landscape.
101 27\Cross section and main elevation
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View of the V&A Crafts from the canal
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View of the V&A Crafts from the Kensal Green Steel Bridge
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View of the V&A Crafts from the gasometers
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View of the V&A Crafts at the entrance
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View of workshops from the observation deck
View of the permanent exhibition room
View inside the crafts archive
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View of the archive main hall
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28\
Photos showing the final models of V&A Crafts and the process of design from the concept to the building of internal space and system.
109 28\Final models
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