Arts and Crafts Architecture

Arts and Crafts architecture is the building expression of the wider Arts and Crafts movement that emerged in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century, inspired by the ideas of the historian Thomas Carlyle, the critic John Ruskin and the designer William Morris, who lived from 1834 to 1896. The movement was as much a project of social reform as of design reform, driven by the belief that the connection between a maker and the work produced by hand was essential both to human fulfillment and to producing genuinely useful, beautiful objects and buildings, in conscious opposition to the rise of factory production. In architecture this philosophy favored honest use of local, natural materials, visible craftsmanship, and forms drawn from vernacular building traditions rather than academic classical or revival precedent. William Morris's own house, the Red House, built to his ethos of craftsmanship and artisan skill, is regarded as an early landmark of what came to be recognized as the Arts and Crafts architectural style.