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When Did Craft Become a Dirty Word?
It may be disappearing from institutional marquees, but these days craft is the star of the design world.

By Kristi Cameron and Paul Makovsky
Additional reporting by Laurie Manfra
October 2003

Last fall the American Craft Museum changed its name to the Museum of Arts and Design. Likewise the California College of Arts and Crafts has recently dropped the C-word from its name, and is now the California College of the Arts (CCA). Both claim they aren't dissing craft so much as acknowledging its immersion with higher arts. "The artificial boundaries between art, design, and craft that were so important to the nineteenth-century academies no longer exist," says Simon Blattner, chair of the museum's board of trustees.

It's true that the distinction between craft and design--the handmade versus the mass-produced--doesn't mean what it used to. But there's more to the name changes than that: the museum's curatorial direction has also turned away from craft in favor of design (see Perspective, page 78). Ironically craft is disappearing from these institutions' vocabularies at exactly a time when it is newly informing both the aesthetics and the production of designed objects and spaces. In the past few years we've noticed designers reacting to the limitations of mass production by manufacturing unique pieces, engaging machines to do what previously only individuals could. (See "Custom-Made Miracles," March 2002; "The Smart Hands of Hella Jongerius," July 2002; and "Magic Touch," February 2003.) These designers don't view craft nostalgically but in a forward-looking manner, revisiting the conventions of skillful workman-ship, sensitivity to materials. and limited productions. (See "KomKom Combination," December 2001; "Rapid Prototyping," August/September 2002; "The New Organics," October 2002; and "Fluid Forms," December 2002.)

This resurgence can also be seen in a new attention to visual intricacy and ornamentation, the incorporation of handcrafted elements into manufactured products, and labor-intensive uses of technology. All of these were evident at this year's International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF), where we found seven of the objects featured on these pages. Along with numerous other new projects, they prove that craft is not a dirty word but one that designers are actively redefining for the twenty-first century.
* denotes projects seen at ICFF

1. Gothic, Wim Delvoye, 2003
Delvoye's summer installations for the Public Art Fund in Manhattan's Madison Square Park and Central Park playfully use medieval iconography to replicate a Caterpillar excavator and other industrial tools. The Belgian artist created the Cor-Ten steel sculptures--amalgamations of Gothic forms, such as the Notre Dame's circular rose window--using AutoCAD and laser cutting.
2. Flora Vases, KleinReid, 2003 *
At ICFF ceramic designers James Klein and David Reid exhibited their Flora collection: handcrafted porcelain vases and lamps decorated in relief with intricate flowers. The line, available in frost and sepia tones, is a departure from the clean monochromatic surfaces the designers are known for.
3. CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts Entry Facade, Beige Design, 2003
This metal facade is meant to draw visitors into the gallery. From the sidewalk the sculptural orange swell dominates, but on approach the piece appears to flatten and individual sections become more visible, an effect architect Thom Faulders describes as a functional transition from sign to threshold. The facade was designed and fabricated with computers, but the assembly of its 122 aluminum pieces--55 of which are unique--was unusually labor-intensive, done by hand over the course of six weeks.
4. Layer Rug, Research/Design, 2002
Sebastiaan Straatsma's semitransparent rug is the high-tech equivalent of a hooked rug. Interlocking mats in different patterns and colors are layered one on top of another to create different overall surface patterns. Each mat is individually cast by pouring polyurethane rubber into a mold.
5. Jarrett Tables, Venini, 2003 *
For more than 80 years Venini has been producing some of the best handblown glassware in the world. Architect Rodolfo Dordoni's new furniture collection for the company (winner of the ICFF Editors Award for Craftsmanship) incorporates handblown glass stems into the legs of manufactured tables.
6. Bobbin Lace Lamp, Niels van Eijk, 2003
There's no bulb required in this lamp made of fiber-optic glass. Van Eijk hand weaves the high-tech material in a traditional bobbin-lace technique that causes breakage where the fibers join, releasing light.
7. Rubber Band Bowls, Elodie Blanchard, 2003 *
The Butter Vending Machine at ICFF was filled with products ranging from the mass-produced to the handmade and the functional to the conceptual. All were available in limited quantities and came in packaging that contained information about the designer and the product. Items for sale included the Rubber Band Bowl, a lacy structure handmade from heavy-duty elastics.
8. Stella McCartney Manhattan Store, Stella McCartney, 2002
McCartney individualized the three changing rooms in her new flagship store in Manhattan with crafty touches. One includes walls made with intricate marquetry panels of fine wood and shell. Another, shown here, includes objects such as fans, buttons, dried flowers, and stickers that are applied to a textile screen-printed with cheeky monkeys.
9. Metamorphosis Series Lamps, Collura and Ryan, 2003 *
Each element of this lamp collection by designers Denis Collura and Dez Ryan--which debuted at ICFF--is handcrafted, fabricated, and assembled in the New York area. An artisan hand blows the glass, and a shade maker builds the fabric shades according to the designers' specifications. All of the smaller sculptural details are first carved by Collura in wood and then cast in bronze like pieces of jewelry. The lamps are then carefully finished with sterling-silver, gold, nickel, or copper plating.
10. 3-D Printable Textiles, Freedom of Creation, 2003
This white nylon mesh, designed by Janne Kyttanen, is made using selective laser sintering, a process that creates three-dimensional objects by rapidly stacking tiny layers of matter as specified in CAD files. The textile can be produced in any seamless shape (in other words, it doesn't need to be cut and sewn) on demand. Freedom of Creation has also developed a version of the textile made from bronze, which looks even more like the handworked chain metal of yore.
11. Tongxian Art Complex Wall, Office DA, 2003
This brick wall separates the entry court from the sculpture court at the site of a new arts complex 30 miles from Beijing. Alleyways with curved walls connect courtyards and form the sculptural undersides of stairwells, which means these exterior spaces are carved from interior ones. The gray bricks, a staple of Chinese construction, are uniform in size and shape. Designed in AutoCAD, the pattern was hand laid by Chinese masons.
12. Night Blossom, Tord Boontje for Swarovski, 2002 *
Crystal-maker Swarovski's ICFF booth (which won this year's Editors Award for Best Booth) featured Tord Boontje's chandelier, a twig in bloom formed from Swarovski crystals, varnished metal, and LEDs. Part of the company's Crystal Palace Project, the fixture reinvents the notion of the artisan-crafted chandelier.
13. Parsons Benefit and Fashion Show for Aid to Artisans, 2003
Students in the fashion department of the Parsons School of Design collaborated with Aid to Artisans (ATA), a nonprofit organization that works with developing countries to retool native crafts for modern use. They worked with Macedonian artisans to adapt traditional embroidery and surface treatments for use in contemporary accessories and clothing designs. The products were sent to New York and made into clothing and accessories for a Parsons benefit fashion show this past May. The patterns on the embroidery panels of the lingerie are loosely based on ones found in folk costumes and everyday textiles.
14. Viktor & Rolf Invitation Cards, Mevis and van Deursen, 2002/2003
Armand Mevis and Linda van Deursen collaborated with illustrators and designers in Amsterdam and Zurich to create 700 handmade invitations for fashion designers Viktor & Rolf's 2002 and 2003 seasonal collections. Each was stamped in black wax with a Viktor & Rolf logo seal and personalized with stitching, ink, colored pencils, and markers.
15. Tile/Terrazzo Installation, Julie Eizenberg, 2003
Architect Julie Eizenberg's terrazzo tile installation at the National Building Museum alternates between highly polished and rugged textures. Installed by a team of master craftsmen led by Michael Menegazzi, the piece is part of the museum's Masonry Variations exhibition, which celebrates innovative contemporary uses of masonry by four young architects--Carlos Jiménez, Jeanne Gang, Winka Dubbeldam, and Eizenberg--all of whom collaborate with craftspeople.
16. Mosaic Planter, Alessandro Mendini for Bisazza, 2002 *
Mendini realized the design on this giant planter at the Fondation Cartier, in Paris, using Bisazza's glass mosaic tiles, which were laid according to a pattern generated in Architectural Imagery, the company's own computer technology. As demonstrated by an enormous mosaic in its ICFF booth, Bisazza's software pixelates any image and produces a color map for the tiles, which are then placed by hand.
17. Pyrex Pistilli, Monica Castiglioni, 2003 *
Jewelry designer Monica Castiglioni, daughter of the late Achille Castiglioni, is now designing small decorative objects in Pyrex, among other things. The little pistons (pistilli) of her glass sculptures are pulled out and formed by the glassmaker one arm at a time, so each is unique. After seeing them in Milan, furniture designer Paola Lenti requested that they be shown alongside her own work in a Karkula exhibition during ICFF.
1 courtesy Public Art Fund; 13 courtesy Parsons School of Design; 15 courtesy the National Building Museum; all others courtesy the designers and manufacturers
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