I have long wrestled with many of the ideas he does yet never come close to arranging it in a pattern understandable to anyone else. This book is a seminal work on the subject.
My belief can be summed up with the phrase 'making is thinking'. It is the reason I find no duality, other than in the structure of language, of 'designing' and 'making'. We do one thing in a certain way. Class prejudice drawn from a perceived hierarchy is based on the seperation of theory and practice, (working with hand or with head), false distinctions that cloud our thinking and ruin lives.
Romans drew on the Greek distinction of theory and practice to legitimate their domination. The Craftworker slaves dwelt in an anonymous space between worker and personal service.
I strongly recommend this to anyone interested in making things, in fact anyone interested in humanity.
Every page makes you sit back in awe, savouring the pleasure of understanding washing over you like some wonderful drug. Like cerebral speedballs mainlined in to both hemispheres where most craft theory leaves you bogged down in word porridge.
A lifetimes thought has gone in to this book. Concepts that Pye or Dormer would stumble around, spending whole books with, always just beyond their reach, just past their peripheral vision he nails with a few words.
There is a biological reason why coordination between unequal members works. This led me to question if the spectrum of disparate finger strengths and the reasons why this is successful has social implications. Such 'domain shifts' keep falling forth once you are in Sennetts mindset. A domain shift, for example; Christopher Wren saw experiments injecting coloured and poisonous fluids in to dogs veins, this enabled him to promote one way systems in to urban planning for London after the great fire.
The 'fraternal hand', the lesson of minimal force represents finger restraint among stronger digits, the crux of physical coordination, this must have social refection. A team of equally skilled technicians is not as successful as a varied group.
After each chunk I found myself reluctant to move on, wanting to wallow in my new understanding, fearful of forgetting details yet each subsequent part developes his ideas further.
One part I struggled finding complete agreement on was CAD. Intuitively I think that rolling an idea round with a pencil, back and forth from mind to paper explores the unmade object far better. It is the mistakes and the resulting pain, having to laboriously redraw that developes the vision.
In learning a musical instrument it is the mistakes and the rush of joy when you get it right that steer you and preserve attention. This sort of learning is not fassionable as it is hard.
CAD with its' swift ignorance does lead to bland results. I have been asked to accept something advanced by the CAD faithful, that I can not see. Their belief is so strong I have come to feel quite alone. Novelty and laze blinds them.
I almost gave in to CAD, so dogmatic have been the claims, that I began to question why I made furniture at all. CAD ranks alongside routing MDF for unpleasantness as a part of the job , unsurprisingly they often go together.
CAD freed up drawing so that those without skill could create a simulacrum of a drawing and a such we saw a democratising of skill. Such special effects may shock for a day but look dated very quickly. We may get there, these are early days. And of course, CAD should not be judged as a replacement for sketching, we can use both.
University education has been rendered all but obsolete by Wikipedia.
People no longer mate in the normal way but book each other on the internet and engage in bedroom gymnastics that we could not have drewamed of back in the 70s.
So why can't CAD replace drawing?
No comments:
Post a Comment