CHAPTER THREE - ARCHITECT AND CRAFTSMAN: I: Workmanship in Theory and Practice

Abstract

This chapter discusses workmanship in theory and practice. The 1890s saw Lethaby's emergence as a writer. He had published his first article at the age of 27; but not until he left Shaw's office did Lethaby begin to produce the constant stream of work that showed him as one of the most prolific writers of his time on architecture and the allied arts. Lethaby's increasing impatience with the endless combining and recombining of elements of historic styles that were the mode of expression of contemporary architecture, coupled with the conviction that architectural form had to have significance deeper than the aesthetics of style, led him to examine what other meanings architecture had had in the past. He dug into the myths and legends of sacred buildings, particularly those that regarded the temple as a microcosm, which he put together in his first book Architecture, Mysticism, and Myth. This puzzling, inaccurate but ultimately influential work advanced for the first time the theory that ancient architecture symbolized in a variety of different ways man's conception of the universe.