Arts & crafts

About this book

Recoiling from the mechanization brought by the industrial revolution, late-nineteenth-century designers in England and America urged a return to the fine craftsmanship exemplified by medieval craft guilds. Leaders such as John Ruskin, William Morris, and Gustav Stickley asserted that in honest handwork and spare, simple spaces a life of true beauty could be found. Arts & Crafts brings back the turn-of-the-century era of Morris and Stickley, of bungalows and built-ins, by detailing the period's history and its architecture, designers, furnishings, fashions, arts, and key buildings. It takes us on a tour of the movement's icons: Morris's Red House, Greene and Greene's Gamble House, and Wright's Prairie houses; Rookwood pottery and Tiffany glass; The Craftsman and the Morris chair - all simple yet beautiful designs that never went out of style.