Mission Furniture's Style | A Brief History

Mission Furniture's Style - A Brief History

Mission Craftsman Furniture

"Mission Style" is a generic term often used to refer to Mission Revival Style architecture, the architecture of the Spanish missions located throughout the Southwestern United States and Mexico, or to the design elements of the American Arts and Crafts movement.

Mission Style can also refer to:

Spanish Colonial Revival Style architecture
The furniture and architecture of Gustav Stickley
The architecture of the Prairie School, including Frank Lloyd Wright's Prairie Houses

The American Craftsman Style, or the American Arts and Crafts Movement, is an American domestic architectural, interior design, and decorative arts style popular from the last years of the 19th century through the early years of the 20th century. As a design movement, its popularity remained strong until the 1930s, although in the decorative arts it continues to experience numerous revivals until the present day.

British origins

The American Craftsman style has its origins in the earlier British Arts and Crafts movement which dates back to the 1860s. The British movement, which spawned a wide variety of related but conceptually very distinct design movements throughout Europe, was a reaction to the degradation of the dignity of human labor resulting from the Industrial Revolution. In many ways it was a reaction against the over-decorated aesthetic and disregard for the worker of the Victorian era.

American developments

While the British movement was a Victorian-era phenomenon, its translation to the American setting took place precisely at the moment when that era was coming to a close. It can be said that the American movement that also emphasized craftsmanship was also a design reform movement that encouraged originality, simplicity of form, local natural materials, and the visibility of handicraft, and was concerned with ennobling the more modest home of the rapidly expanding American middle class.

Interior design developments

Boston exhibitions

In the late 1890s, a group of Boston’s most influential architects, designers, and educators, determined to bring to America the design reforms begun in England by William Morris, met to organize an exhibition of contemporary craft objects. The first meeting was held on January 4, 1897, at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) to organize an exhibition of contemporary crafts. When craftsmen, consumers, and manufacturers realized the aesthetic and technical potential of the applied arts, the process of design reform in Boston started.

The first American Arts and Crafts Exhibition opened on April 5, 1897, at Copley Hall featuring over 1000 objects made by 160 craftsmen, half of whom were women. Some of the supporters of the exhibit were Langford Warren, founder of Harvard’s School of Architecture; Mrs. Richard Morris Hunt; Arthur Astor Carey and Edwin Mead, social reformers; and Will Bradley, graphic designer.

Society of Arts and Crafts

The success of this exhibition led to the incorporation of The Society of Arts and Crafts, on June 28, 1897, with a mandate to “develop and encourage higher standards in the handicrafts.” The 21 founders were interested in more than sales, and focused on the relationship of designers within the commercial world, encouraging artists to produce work with the highest quality of workmanship and design.

This mandate was soon expanded into a credo, possibly written by the SAC’s first president, Charles Elliot Norton, which read:

This Society was incorporated for the purpose of promoting artistic work in all branches of handicraft. It hopes to bring Designers and Workmen into mutually helpful relations, and to encourage workmen to execute designs of their own. It endeavors to stimulate in workmen an appreciation of the dignity and value of good design; to counteract the popular impatience of Law and Form, and the desire for over-ornamentation and specious originality. It will insist upon the necessity of sobriety and restraint, or ordered arrangement, of due regard for the relation between the form of an object and its use, and of harmony and fitness in the decoration put upon it.

Style

The style incorporated locally handcrafted wood, glass, and metal work that is both simple and elegant. A reaction to Victorian opulence and the increasingly common mass-produced housing elements, the style incorporated clean lines, sturdy structure, and natural materials. The name comes from a popular magazine published in the early 1900s by furniture maker Gustav Stickley called The Craftsman, which featured original house and furniture designs by Harvey Ellis, the Greene brothers, and others. The designs, while influenced by the ideals of the British movement, found inspiration in specifically American antecedents such as Shaker furniture and the Mission style. Emphasis on the originality of the artist/craftsman led to the new design concepts of the Art Deco movement of the 1930s.

Architectural developments

Several developments in the American domestic architecture of the period are traceable not only to changes in taste and style but also to the shift from the upper- to middle-class patronage. The American Victorian typically took the form of a two-story square house with a hip roof disguised behind a variety of two-storied bays, with an assortment of gables as well as octagonal or round turrets and wraparound porches presenting a complex facade. Typically, the basic square house was also complemented by a back wing complete with its own entrances, and a stairwell that housed the kitchen, pantries, and scullery on the first floor and the servants' quarters on the second. Fitted with inferior-quality woodwork and hardware, and noticeably smaller bedrooms and lower ceiling heights, the Victorian kitchen-servants wing embodied the aristocratic class distinctions of the Old World.

With the large bays, turrets, and rear wing removed, the front porch simplified, and the ceilings lowered somewhat, it is not difficult to see how the American Foursquare developed from the common American Queen Anne. The middle-class housewife of the era would not have domestic servants (at least not live-in ones) and would be doing much if not all of the housework herself, as well as watching the children. These added roles made it important that the kitchen be integrated into the main house with easy sight lines to the common areas of the main floor (the dining and living rooms) as well as to the back yard. Commonly, the butler's pantry of the Victorian Era was replaced with dining room cabinetry that often consisted of "built-ins", which gave home designers the opportunity to incorporate wood and glass craftsmanship into the public aspects of the home.

Another common design development arising from the class-shift of the time was the built-in "breakfast nook" in the kitchen. The Victorian kitchen of the previous era was separated from the family view and daily routine. It typically had a work table (having the equivalent purpose of the modern countertop) at which the servants would eat after the family meal was served and the kitchen tidied. The Victorian kitchen had no "proper" place for a family member to sit, eat, or do anything else. Again, as the housewife of the Craftsman era was now preparing the family meals, the Victorian kitchen gave way to one designed as the heart of the family's daily life. The breakfast nook often placed under a window or in its own bay provided a place for the family to gather at any time of the day or evening, particularly while food was being prepared.

Renowned architect David Owen Dryden designed and built many Craftsman bungalows in San Diego's North Park area, which is the site of the proposed Dryden Historic District. The Marston House, an Arts and Crafts mansion built in 1905 for George Marston (a prominent San Diegan who was also a founder and first president of the San Diego Historical Society), was designed by San Diego architects William Hebbard and Irving Gill. The Marston House is now a museum located on the border of Balboa Park, and is open to the public.

Frank Lloyd Wright, one of the most important architects of the American home and whose career spanned the Victorian to the Craftsman to the Prairie School, which he in large part founded, is credited with much of the conceptual development of the middle-class home design in the first third of the 20th century.

Common architectural design features

Craftsman style house

"Artichoke" wallpaper, by John Henry Dearle for William Morris & Co., circa 1897 (Victoria and Albert Museum).

The Arts and Crafts Movement was a British and American aesthetic movement occurring in the last years of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th century. Inspired by the writings of John Ruskin and a romantic idealization of the craftsman taking pride in his personal handiwork, it was at its height between approximately 1880 and 1910.

It was a reformist movement that influenced British and American architecture, decorative arts, cabinet making, crafts, and even the "cottage" garden designs of William Robinson or Gertrude Jekyll. Its best-known practitioners were William Morris, Charles Robert Ashbee, T. J. Cobden Sanderson, Walter Crane, Nelson Dawson, Phoebe Anna Traquair, Herbert Tudor Buckland, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Christopher Dresser, Edwin Lutyens, Ernest Gimson, William Lethaby, Edward Schroeder Prior, Frank Lloyd Wright, Gustav Stickley, Greene & Greene, Charles Voysey, Christopher Whall and artists in the Pre-Raphaelite movement.

In the United States, the terms American Craftsman, or Craftsman style are often used to denote the style of architecture, interior design, and decorative arts that prevailed between the dominant eras of Art Nouveau and Art Deco, or roughly the period from 1910 to 1925.

Origins and key principles

The Arts and Crafts Movement began primarily as a search for authentic and meaningful styles for the 19th century and as a reaction to the eclectic revival of historic styles of the Victorian era and to "soulless" machine-made production aided by the Industrial Revolution. Considering the machine to be the root cause of all repetitive and mundane evils, some of the protagonists of this movement turned entirely away from the use of machines and towards handcraft, which tended to concentrate their productions in the hands of sensitive but well-heeled patrons.

Yet, while the Arts and Crafts movement was in large part a reaction to industrialization, if looked at on the whole, it was neither anti-industrial nor anti-modern. Some of the European factions believed that machines were in fact necessary, but they should only be used to relieve the tedium of mundane, repetitive tasks. At the same time, some Arts and Crafts leaders felt that objects should also be affordable. The conflict between quality production and 'demo' design, and the attempt to reconcile the two, dominated design debate at the turn of the twentieth century.

The Oregon Public Library is an example of Arts and Crafts in a Carnegie Library.

Those who sought compromise between the efficiency of the machine and the skill of the craftsman thought it a useful endeavour to seek the means through which a true craftsman could master a machine to do his bidding, in opposition to what many believed to be the reality during the Industrial Age, i.e., that humans had become slaves to the industrial machine.

Myers Free Kindergarten building in Auckland, New Zealand.

Glebe Fire Station, Sydney, Australia, in Arts and Crafts style

Cowper Rose, Randwick, Sydney, Australia

St Ellero, Burwood, Sydney, Australia

The need to reverse the human subservience to the unquenchable machine was a point that everyone agreed on. Yet the extent to which the machine was ostracized from the process was a point of contention debated by many different factions within the Arts and Crafts movement throughout Europe.

(This conflict was exemplified in the German Arts and Crafts movement, by the clash between two leading figures of the Deutscher Werkbund (DWB), Hermann Muthesius and Henry Van de Velde. Muthesius, also head of design education for German Government, was a champion of standardization. He believed in mass production, in affordable democratic art. Van de Velde, on the other hand, saw mass production as threat to creativity and individuality.)

Though the spontaneous personality of the designer became more central than the historical "style" of a design, certain tendencies stood out: reformist neo-gothic influences, rustic and "cottagey" surfaces, repeating designs, vertical and elongated forms. In order to express the beauty inherent in craft, some products were deliberately left slightly unfinished, resulting in a certain rustic and robust effect.

In fact, the proponents of the Arts and Crafts movement were against the principle of a division of labor, which in some cases could be independent of the presence or absence of machines. They were in favor of the idea of the master craftsman, creating all the parts of an item of furniture, for instance, and also taking a part in its assembly and finishing, with some possible help by apprentices. This was in contrast to work environments such as the French Manufactories, where everything was oriented towards the fastest production possible. (For example, one person or team would handle all the legs of a piece of furniture, another all the panels, another assembled the parts and yet another painted and varnished or handled other finishing work, all according to a plan laid out by a furniture designer who would never actually work on the item during its creation.) The Arts and Crafts movement sought to reunite what had been ripped asunder in the nature of human work, having the designer work with his hands at every step of creation. Some of the most famous apostles of the movement, such as Morris, were more than willing to design products for machine production, when this did not involve the wretched division of labour and loss of craft talent, which they denounced. Morris designed numerous carpets for machine production in series.

History of the movement

Red House in London.

Red House, Bexleyheath, London (1859), by architect Philip Webb for Morris himself, is a work exemplary of this movement in its early stages. There is a deliberate attempt at expressing surface textures of ordinary materials, such as stone and tiles, with an asymmetrical and quaint building composition. Morris later formed the Kelmscott Press and also had a shop where he designed and sold products such as wallpaper, textiles, furniture, etc. Morris's own ideas emerged from the thinking that had informed Pre-Raphaelitism, especially following the publication of Ruskin's book The Stones of Venice and Unto this Last, both of which sought to relate the moral and social health of a nation to the qualities of its architecture and designs. The decline of rural handicrafts, corresponding to the rise of industrialized society, was a cause for concern for many designers and social reformers, who feared the loss of traditional skills and creativity. For Ruskin, a healthy society depended on skilled and creative workers. Morris and other socialist designers such as Crane and Ashbee looked forward to a future society of free craftspeople. The aesthetic movement, which emerged at the same period, fed into these ideas. In 1881 the Home Arts and Industries Association was set up by Eglantyne Louisa Jebb in collaboration with Mary Fraser Tytler (later Mary Watts) and others to promote and protect rural handicrafts. A group of reformist architects, followers of Arthur Mackmurdo, later established the Art Workers Guild to promote their vision of the integration of designing and making. Crane was elected as its president.

In America in the late 1890s, a group of Boston's most influential architects, designers, and educators, determined to bring to America the design reforms begun in Britain by William Morris, met to organize an exhibition of contemporary craft objects. When craftsmen, consumers, and manufacturers realized the aesthetic and technical potential of the applied arts, the process of design reform in Boston started.

The first American Arts and Crafts Exhibition opened on April 5, 1897, at Copley Hall featuring over 1000 objects made by 160 craftsmen, half of whom were women. Some of the supporters for the exhibit were Langford Warren, founder of Harvard's School of Architecture; Mrs. Richard Morris Hunt; Arthur Astor Carey and Edwin Mead, social reformers; and Will Bradley, graphic designer.

The huge success of this exhibition led to the incorporation of The Society of Arts and Crafts with a mandate to "develop and encourage higher standards in the handicrafts." The 21 founders were interested in more than sales, and focused on the relationship of designers within the commercial world, encouraging artists to produce work with the highest quality of workmanship and design.

This mandate was soon expanded into a credo, possibly written by the SAC's first president, Charles Eliot Norton, which read:

"This Society was incorporated for the purpose of promoting artistic work in all branches of handicraft. It hopes to bring Designers and Workmen into mutually helpful relations, and to encourage workmen to execute designs of their own. It endeavors to stimulate in workmen an appreciation of the dignity and value of good design; to counteract the popular impatience of Law and Form, and the desire for over-ornamentation and specious originality. It will insist upon the necessity of sobriety and restraint, or ordered arrangement, of due regard for the relation between the form of an object and its use, and of harmony and fitness in the decoration put upon it."

Influences on later art

Europe

Widely exhibited in Europe, the Arts and Crafts movement's qualities of simplicity and honest use of materials negating historicism inspired designers like Henry van de Velde and movements such as Art Nouveau, the Dutch De Stijl group, Vienna Secession, and eventually the Bauhaus. The movement can be assessed as a prelude to Modernism, where pure forms, stripped of historical associations, would be once again applied to industrial production.

In Russia, Viktor Hartmann, Viktor Vasnetsov and other artists associated with Abramtsevo Colony sought to revive the spirit and quality of medieval Russian decorative arts in the movement quite independent from that flourishing in Great Britain.

The Wiener Werkstätte, founded in 1903 by Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser, played an independent role in the development of Modernism, with its Wiener Werkstätte Style.

The British Utility furniture of World War II was simple in design and based on Arts and Crafts ideas.

In Ireland, the Honan Chapel, located in Cork, Ireland, on the grounds of University College Cork, built in 1916 is internationally recognized as representative of the Irish Arts and Crafts movement.

United States

In the United States, the Arts and Crafts Movement took on a distinctively more bourgeois flavor. While the European movement tried to recreate the virtuous world of craft labor that was being destroyed by industrialization, Americans tried to establish a new source of virtue to replace heroic craft production: the tasteful middle-class home. They thought that the simple but refined aesthetics of Arts and Crafts decorative arts would ennoble the new experience of industrial consumerism, making individuals more rational and society more harmonious. In short, the American Arts and Crafts Movement was the aesthetic counterpart of its contemporary political movement: Progressivism.

In the United States, the Arts and Crafts Movement spawned a wide variety of attempts to reinterpret European Arts and Crafts ideals for Americans. These included the "Craftsman" style architecture, furniture, and other decorative arts such as the designs promoted by Gustav Stickley in his magazine, The Craftsman. A host of imitators of Stickley's furniture (the designs of which are often mislabeled the "Mission Style") included three companies formed by his brothers, the Roycroft community founded by Elbert Hubbard, the "Prairie School" of Frank Lloyd Wright, the Country Day School movement, the bungalow style of houses popularized by Greene and Greene, utopian communities like Byrdcliffe and Rose Valley, and the contemporary studio craft movement. Studio pottery — exemplified by Grueby, Newcomb, Teco, Overbeck and Rookwood pottery, Bernard Leach in Britain, and Mary Chase Perry Stratton's Pewabic Pottery in Detroit — as well as the art tiles by Ernest A. Batchelder in Pasadena, California, and idiosyncratic furniture of Charles Rohlfs also demonstrate the clear influence of Arts and Crafts Movement. Mission, Prairie, and the 'California bungalow' styles of homebuilding remain tremendously popular in the United States today

References

Cathers, David M. Furniture of the American Arts and Crafts Movement. The New American Library, Inc., 1981.
Cumming, Elizabeth. "Hand, Heart and Soul:The Arts and Crafts Movement in Scotland" 2006 Birlinn.
Kaplan, Wendy. "The Art that is Life", The Arts & Crafts Movement in America, 1875–1920. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1987.
Parry, Linda: Textiles of the Arts & Crafts Movement, Thames and Hudson, revised edition 2005,

Frank Lloyd Wright

Frank Lloyd Wright (June 8, 1867 – April 9, 1959) was an American architect, interior designer, writer, and educator who designed more than 1,000 projects, of which more than 500 resulted in completed works.

Wright promoted organic architecture (exemplified by Fallingwater), originated the Prairie School of architecture (exemplified by the Robie House), and developed the concept of the Usonian home (exemplified by the Rosenbaum House). His work includes original and innovative examples of many different building types, including offices, churches, schools, hotels, and museums. Wright also often designed many of the interior elements of his buildings, such as the furniture and stained glass.

Wright authored twenty books and numerous articles and was a popular lecturer in the United States and in Europe. His colorful personal life frequently made headlines, most notably for the failure of his first two marriages and for the 1914 fire and murders at his Taliesin studio.

Already well-known during his lifetime, Wright was recognized in 1991 by the American Institute of Architects as "the greatest American architect of all time"^[

Fallingwater aka Kaufmann Residence

Fallingwater interior

Robie House dining room

Graycliff Estate

Frank Lloyd Wright desk

Barrel Chair by Frank Lloyd Wright

Wright on the Web: A Virtual Look at the Works of Frank Lloyd Wright

The following site offers a brief overview of Frank Lloyd Wright's prolific 70-year career and a "webliography" -- i.e., a gathering of internet resources that might contribute to the study, appreciation, or sheer enjoyment of works created by the man who has been called America's most creative and innovative architect. Also included is a page that features seventeen buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright which have been designated by the American Institute of Architects (AIA) to be retained as an example of his architectural contribution to American culture. It is hoped that Wright on the Web will inspire the visitor to seek out his nearest building --or make a pilgrimage to a distant one-- and experience "for real" an actual structure or interior space that Frank Lloyd Wright created.

Click on Finding Mr. Wright - A Frank Lloyd Wright Road Trip

Gustav Stickley

Gustav Stickley (March 9, 1858 – April 21, 1942) was a furniture maker and architect as well as the leading spokesperson for the American Craftsman movement, a descendant of the British Arts and Crafts movement.

Biography

In 1901, Stickley founded The Craftsman, a periodical which began by expounding the philosophy of the English Arts & Crafts movement but which matured into the voice of the American movement. He worked with architect Harvey Ellis to design house plans for the magazine, which published 221 such plans over the next fifteen years. He also established the Craftsman Home Builders Club in 1903 to spread his ideas about domestic organic architecture.

These ideas had an enormous influence on Frank Lloyd Wright. Stickley believed that:

A house ought to be constructed in harmony with its landscape, with special attention paid to selecting local materials;
An open floor plan would encourage family interaction and eliminate unnecessary barriers;
Built-in bookcases and benches were practical and ensured that the house would not be completely reliant on furniture from outside;
Artificial light should be kept to a minimum, so large groupings of windows were necessary to bring in light.

Between 1900 and 1916 a style of furniture featuring "...a severely plain and rectilinear style which was visually enriched only be expressed structural features and the warm tones of the wood..." gained popularity in the U.S. This furniture, referred to as "mission oak," was an "...American manifestation of the Arts and Crafts movement..." (Cathers, Furniture of the American Arts and Crafts Movement).

Arts and Crafts Craftsman furniture in a mission

Father Jose Mut's dining room at Mission San Juan Capistrano

Stickley began making furniture in the mission oak style with the founding of the Craftsman Workshops in Eastwood, New York (now a part of Syracuse, New York) in 1904. His furniture was all handmade rather than machine made, crafted to be simple and useful; it was primarily built from native American Oak, joinery was exposed, upholstery was carried out with natural materials (canvas and leather), wood could be varnished but never painted, and there were no unnecessary lines.

He moved his headquarters to New York City in 1905 and planned to establish a boarding school for boys in Morris Plains, New Jersey (what is now Parsippany, New Jersey). Craftsman Farms was designed to be self-sufficient, with vegetable gardens, orchards, dairy cows and chickens. The main house there is constructed from chestnut logs and stone found on the property, and exemplifies Stickley's building philosophy. As he wrote in The Craftsman:

"There are elements of intrinsic beauty in the simplification of a house built on the log cabin idea. First, there is the bare beauty of the logs themselves with their long lines and firm curves. Then there is the open charm felt of the structural features which are not hidden under plaster and ornament, but are clearly revealed, a charm felt in Japanese architecture....The quiet rhythmic monotone of the wall of logs fills one with the rustic peace of a secluded nook in the woods."

Click on Stickley Museum

Gustav Stickley sideboard

Although initially conceived of as a clubhouse for students, financial troubles forced Stickley to live there with his family instead. The planned boarding school never became a reality.