Repositioning Craft Education and Training to Re-connect Artisans to Designers

Historic architecture, whether strictly formal or vernacular in style, can be viewed as building expressed as art, the result of collective skills and knowledge of designers and various crafts engaged in its construction. Education and training in taste and judgment of a designer, combined with enlightened craftsman’s skills, contributes to the functional success and aesthetic appeal of a building. When there is an absence of quality design and craftsmanship, a building fails as a work of art. Contemporary art is largely dominated by image over substance, where specialized knowledge and skill are dismissed as being marginalized, mechanical, and hindering creative thought and fail to recognize the disciplined learning that provided the essential foundation for the apparently spontaneous creativity of the leading historic craftsmen and artists, such as Fillipio Brunnelleschi (1377-1446) and Michelangelo Buonaroti (1475-1564). Andrea Palladio (1508-1580), the leading Renaissance architect and author of I Quattro Libri dell’architettura (The Four Books of Architecture) published in Venice in 1570, actually spent several years working as a stonemason in the Pedemuro workshop in Vicenza, Italy. His combination of pragmatic appreciation of materials, construction process, and