CRITICAL WRITTEN REFLECTION #1 & #2

#1

The trouble Craftsman | Richard Sennett

Craftsman is a person who is devoted to his/her work and aims to have the best quality of the practice; in another words, is a person who becomes engaged with what he/she is doing. Craftsmanship has been introduced from the archaic time, when tools were invented and used by people. The term craftsman refers to men, since women were supposed to lack the “masculine mind” to evolve skills. Skills were handed down from generation to generation. The progress in evolving the skills took a really long time up to now that the ability of communication has made communal thinking more feasible, resulting in faster speed in evolution.

- Two recipes for arousing the desire to work hard and well.

- Working for the sake of the community.

- Competition – stimulates the desire to perform well. Doesn’t serve the Craftsmen’s aspiration for quality.

For the craftsman the skill is important, even in modern times. But what is skill? The generic answer to this is a trained practice, and with the practice of skill comes contrast “coup de foudre” that means the sudden inspiration. Hours after hours with training, you will reach the point where you will create a workflow with all this trained skill in the back of your head. If you meet a fixed target and no further progress, skill will open up your rhythm and solve your problems. Craftsmanship is not about succeeding but rather becoming a part of your life.

#2

What are the architect’s positions in “The Craftsman” by Richard Sennett?

The hand is the window to the mind. Raw talent cannot take the place of training, the idea that 10,000 hours of practice – roughly three hours a day for 10 years – are needed to become expert. Experience and human relationships themselves are raw material that we can craft and cultivate with care.

Architecture affects people, and it is much about motivation:

(p.29) ”Poor craftsmanship was a barometer of other forms of material indifference. The housing we saw was meant for relatively privileged citizens, the Soviet scientific class. These families were allotted indi- vidual apartments rather than forced to live in communal space. Yet the negligence of construction was mirrored in the inhabitants’ neglect of their surroundings: window boxes and balconies were bare of plants; walls had crusted over with crayon graffiti or spray-painted obscenities that nobody had bothered to clean up. When I asked about the dilapi- dated state of these buildings, our tour guides gave us a sweeping explanation. ‘‘People’’—in general—don’t care; they are demoralized. ”

(p.31) “ ‘‘collective craftsmanship,’’ he meant that the glue binding an institution is created by sharp mutual exchanges as much as by shared commitment. ”

(p.37) “From the social point of view, in sum, demoralization has many sides. It can occur when a collective goal for good work becomes hollow and empty; equally, sheer competition can disable good work and depress workers. Neither corporatism nor capitalism as crude labels get at the institutional issue. “

(p.30-31) ”The moral imperative is not, though, inherently empty. In the same decades that Russia was rotting, Japan was prospering under a command economy suffused with its own cultural imperatives to work well for the common good. Still, in the past half-century the Japanese manifested a practical creativity that brought the country back to life after the Second World War. In the 1950s the Japanese mass-produced cheap, simple goods; by the early 1970s they produced cheap, high-quality automobiles, radios, and stereos, as well as superb steel and aluminum for special applications. Working precisely to high standards provided the Japanese during these years a sense of mutual and self-respect. In part they needed the

collective goal because workers, particularly those in the middle ranks of organizations, spent long hours together laboring, seldom seeing their wives or children, in order to make ends meet. But the moral imperative worked because of how it was organized.”

The approach of governments towards architecture and craftsmanship influenced people in motivation. As they neglected good quality, people started to care less and less and craftsmanship went through a down steep. On opposite, as they motivated the society, it flourished and hardworking craftsmen arouse.