Made for Modernity - Crafts of the machine Age
There were two points in time where "handcrafted" met "machine-made." The first was during the Industrial Revolution, when the goal was to make mass-produced items look like costlier, hand-crafted objects. By the 1920s, architects, designers, and craftsmen were attempting to reverse the process, and even handmade items were marked, on purpose, by technology.
This period of time is the subject of an exhibit at the American Craft Museum in New York. "Craft in the Machine Age 1920-1945" focuses on the crafts of a post-war society that saw technology as the probable savior of the world.
The exhibit contains Libbey crystal decanters that resemble laboratory glassware and cocktail shakers in the shape of an artillery shell, along with a Paul T. Frankl bookcase that immediately brings to mind a skyscraper, another one of the motifs of the time.
As we find ourselves moving into another period of history when technology is being expected to solve so many of our problems and make our lives easier, it's interesting to look back and compare how an earlier age felt about the same prospect.
