Michael Duffy, History of 19th & 20th Century Design, East Carolina University, 2003.
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The growing repetition and specialization in industry during the last several centuries led to the division of labor and the emergence of the professional designer in the modern era. This development began in the later Middle Ages with the emergence of large urban workshops in large prosperous cities of Europe like Florence, Venice, Nuremberg and Bruges. These workshops produced goods for the sophisticated tastes of ducal and royal courts; churches, and wealthy merchants. The traditional skills and techniques of the labor pool was subjected to more specialization. Craft workers frequently specialized in certain tasks to produce one type or line of products. Yet many of the objects of the same type were made by traditional craft methods. These products additionally displayed much skill and artistry.
Competitive pressures led to the demand for innovation. In the early 1500s pattern books of engravings provided especially for ribbon and cabinet makers a large inventory of shapes and patterns, which now could be repeated in a variety of contexts. These designs did not have to come out of the manufacturing process or the specified use of one product or medium. For example the ornament used by masons could be applied to woodwork or textiles.
In the seventeenth century large nation states shifted power from the Mediterranean region to western and northwestern Europe. Large manufacturing centers were set up and financed by the Crown. For example, in 1667, a school of 60 apprentices and a large operation for hundreds of craftsmen was established at Gobelins, France. Designs for the products came from a staff of artists, decorators and engravers for coaches, tapestries and furniture. The Grand Duke of Saxony established the porcelain factory at Meissen, in Prussia (Germany). Court artists and highly skilled craftspeople moved to Meissen. The King of Spain in the eighteenth century established a comparable factory complex in Santa Barbara along the lines of the Gobelins manufactory.
Commericial and industrial markets expanded rapidly throughout the eighteenth century. This expansion reflected the rising standard of general domestic comfort around 1700 which we see in the consumption of fabrics used in curtains, napkins, tablecloths and bedsheets. Sheets and pillows were previously only used for women giving birth. Now these products were replacing straw and blankets used by most people as their bedding. Even the humblest sectors of society--the working classes--could afford small luxuries such as lace, ribbon, threads and buttons. In the early 17th century we see that the same wages bought more goods. Additionally, there was a substantial increase in imports like tobacco, sugar and textiles from India. The population in Europe rose substantially in the middle 17th century and in the 18th century.
Manufacturing in the middle 18th century became less dependent on local natural resources and local craftwork. Investors and technicians flocked to the cities like London and Paris. Factories became more centralized.
The aristocracy provided a model of taste, as members of this wealthy class commissioned numerous architectural projects, which set a new style. Manufacturers made sure that their new products met with aristocratic approval before they marketed them for a wider middle-class audience. The traditional guild system, established in the eleventh century, found new pressures created by the division of labor and specialization found in the factory centers. As we noted in class, the guild system enforced standards of quality and levels of production for towns and regions of the country. We noted that the guilds were corporations representing master, journeyman and apprentice in different crafts. With the mechanization of factories at the end of the eighteenth century, more semi-skilled and unskilled tasks emerged. There were trades that were becoming freed of guild restrictions.
This growing specialization can be seen in the eighteenth-century furniture industry, where there were professional chairmakers, upholsterers, glassmakers and grinders, and metalworkers. Craftspeople from these different occupations were often organized into teams of interior decorating services, established by firms like that of Thoomas Chippendale who completely outfitted the interiors of the newly fashionable country houses of aristocrats (aristocats) and wealthy merchants. Chippendale published his The Gentleman's and Cabinetmaker's Director (1754) which advertised nationally a wide range of styles including rococo, classical, chinoiserie (Chinese) and Gothic.Engravers, designers and draughtsmen were increasingly brought to the staffs of furniture makers, which created a division between the planning and the making of products.
In the pottery industry there were several innovations from the use of molds by the 1730s which were made of porous clay from alabaster blocks. In 1750 the clay was replaced by Plaster of Paris. New occupations like mold carving, designing and pressing (squeezing clay into molds) emerged. Colored patterns could now be printed on the fired biscuit ware before it was dipped into the glaze vats. Outlines could be printed onto wares already glazed. Transfer printing of paper designs onto hardened clay vessels became popular. Josiah Wedgewood, an independent master potter, moved his existing potteries to Etruria, England, in 1773, where he replaced water power with steam power for his flint and glaze mills. He had a steam engine constructed at his Etruria factory complex in 1784. By this time journeymen were divided into throwers, turners, oven men, flat pressers and dippers. Wedgewood made good pottery for taste-conscious consumers. He set up urban showrooms (as did Chippendale) in London and Stafforshire where he paraded work that was designed by his famous contract artists like the sculptor and engraver John Flaxman or the painters Joseph Wright of Derby and George Stubbs. John Flaxman would submit a drawing and a wax model, which was then translated into a mold or an ornamental pattern by a technical designer, who was a skilled craftsman.
In 1762 Matthew Boulton and a patron, John Fothergill, opened the Soho factory in Birmingham. Steel jewelry, cameo steel frames, buttons and silver-plated products were made there. Sheffield Plate (plating silver to copper base) was used for candelsticks and coffeepots. Ormolu (gold-plated) brass of high purity with a high zinc content was made at Soho. Gilt (fire gilt) brass moldings were made by heating gold and mercury together.
Like Wedgewood, Boulton used pattern books and classical artistic inspiration. After 1776 Boutlon and James Watt supplied steam power to a variety of industries. Early water powered engine In the iron industry, steampower was used for bellows and hammers in order to roll and slit iron. Slightly later, the steam engine was used to blow blast furnaces directly and to work forge hammers.
In English textiles, spinning was first mechanized by Arkwright's water frame of 1769. Hargreave's spinning jenny (named after his wife Jenny) was patented in 1770 while Crompton's mule took effect in the 1780s. The traditional house and workshop production of textiles yielded to centralized factory production. The jenny increased the number of spindles used at any time, reducing the number of spinners. Water and then steampower in the 1790s encouraged centralization.
Weaving was mechanized slightly later. The flying shuttle and later, by mid-19th century, power looms became common. The Jacquard loom, introduced in France in the 1820s, became better known. A card was punched with holes to determine the nature of the pattern to be woven. A worker had to translate designers idea onto a card.
The designer had to know production machinery. The Jacquard loom by mid-century only really impacted low-income and low-quality markets. Calico printing was mechanized around 1830, although roller-printing machines were around since about 1784.
Copper-plate printing of cotton cloth replaced wood-block printing in the manufacturing centers of France in the early 1780s. Printing with power-driven rollers soon followed in 1783 at about the same time that power looms went into production in the 1780s and 1790s in western Europe. In the U.S., cylinder printing with power machinery began in 1803 while the power loom was introduced in 1814 in New England and Pennsylvania.
The industrial revolution reached typographic printing in the early 1800s. The hand press was made stronger to increase its output and the size of its impressions with Lord Stanhope's cast iron prress of 1800. In 1811 Friedrich Koenig put into operation the first successful steam-powered press which nearly doubled the output of the printing press over the iron hand press to 400 sheets per hour. Koenig's stoop-cylinder press enabled even faster output by automating the movement of paper, the inking of type forms, and the horizontal movement of type forms in the type bed.
The automation of setting type followed in the middle of the 19th century and was perfected in Ottmar Mergenthaler's Linotype machine. According to the linotype machine, 90 typewriter keys dispersed small brass matrices with letterform impressions down tubes and then into a typebed where they would line up for a caste impression to be taken. The Linotype was put into production in the 1880s, replacing thousands of skilled hand typesetters and inaugurating the rapid expansion of print media just before the end of the century.
Next:
Session 2 19th Century Tastes and Mechanization
Session 3 Arts and Crafts Movement in Britian
Session 4 Arts and Crafts Movement in America
Session 5 Art Nouveau
Session 6 Art Deco
Session 7 Post-Modern Design
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