What Happens If The Remote Work Revolution And The Historical Arts and Crafts Movement Meet On Common Ground?
A paradigm alternative to central management orthodoxy for the development of a rural Maine peninsula.
In Boothbay, Maine, the consortium of interests which I have nicknamed the JECD Party likes to use the word “history” as a talking point, but in the way that they use it, it is devoid of content. What have our political leaders and organizations ever had to say about history, other than to call ordinances protecting the working waterfront “archaic”?
Andersen Design is part of the history of the Peninsula as well as of a worldwide historical movement and philosophy of economic and community development. Founded on Southport Island, Maine in 1952, and moving to East Boothbay in 1958. Andersen Design is one of the first industrial design companies to use production as an art form. I say “one of” because I am assuming others exist in unwritten history. The history of alternative movements is often buried, in our case literally since both of our former locations were bulldozed over once we left, one of many reasons why it matters that the Andersen Design Museum of American Designer Craftsmen manifests in the material world. Now is the right time for a multiplicity of reasons, one being to create an opposing plan for the development of the Boothbay Penisula to that being aggressively advanced by realtors and developers, and politicians seeking to urbanize the Peninsula.
The Boothbay Region Land Trust is advocating for the construction of row houses to house the “workforces” of hypothetical employers who will hire workers en masse. Contrary to that, Andersen Design is an existing entity possessing the assets to make a networked community of ceramic slip-casters, and other types of artist-designers studios viable. Andersen Design’s assets are a large line of original and market-proven designs and the historical provenance of its brand, created, not out of thin air, but in and of a long timeline in history.
When my parents, Weston and Brenda Andersen, arrived in Maine they were award-winning designers in the urban midcentury design movement, traveling on an off-the-beaten-track path, following the footprints of an even earlier design movement, called the Arts and Crafts Movement
The Wikipedia page on mid-century design makes mention of my parents peers, friends, and colleges, including Russell Wright, who invited Dad to apprentice twice, Eva Zeisel, a colleague and friend who asked Dad to introduce her at her perspective at the Brooklyn Museum, even though they had not seen each other in thirty years,George Jensen, which sold Andersen Design in their store, and the Scandanavians wherein AndersenDesign was marketed ina Danish department store, and ceramic companies that are contemporaries of Andersen Design.
It is my understanding that a Wikipedia write-up should be done by a third party and that is why you will find no page for Andersen Design, but today, I decided to contribute a small minor edit to the Midcentury Design page so that it includes Andersen Design in the telling of a movement of which Andersen Design was very much a part as is recognized in the field.
You can see my addition here:
Industrial design
Scandinavian design was very influential at this time, with a style characterized by simplicity, democratic design and natural shapes. Glassware (Iittala – Finland), ceramics (Arabia – Finland), tableware (Georg Jensen – Denmark), lighting (Poul Henningsen – Denmark), and furniture (Danish modern) were some of the genres for the products created. In America, east of the Mississippi, the American-born Russel Wright, designing for Steubenville Pottery, and Hungarian-born Eva Zeisel designing for Red Wing Pottery and later Hall China created free-flowing ceramic designs that were much admired and heralded in the trend of smooth, flowing contours in dinnerware. In New England, Weston and Brenda Andersen started their own production as an art form to create original slip cast designs, making the bodies and original glazes from raw materials to produce an even more organic feel than mass-produced counterparts. The Andersen Design functional forms were simple and elegant American mid-century, later adding a line of wildlife sculptures. On the West Coast of America, the industrial designer and potter Edith Heath (1911–2005) founded Heath Ceramics in 1948. The company was one of the numerous California pottery manufacturers that had their heyday in post-war US, and produced Mid-Century modern ceramic dish-ware. Edith Heath's "Coupe" line remains in demand and has been in constant production since 1948, with only periodic changes to the texture and color of the glazes.[23] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-century_modern
However, my edit was deleted because I did not mention a reliable source, and furthermore because I am family. Below is the explanation about why my edit was deleted:
Hello, I'm Srich32977. I noticed that you added or changed content in an article, Mid-century modern, but you didn't provide a reliable source. It's been removed and archived in the page history for now, but if you'd like to include a citation and re-add it, please do so. You can have a look at the tutorial on citing sources. If you think I made a mistake, you can leave me a message on my talk page. Two additional factors: 1. the edit was not a minor one, so checking the minor edit box was incorrect. 2. Since you are mentioning the family business you have a WP:COI problem. (Thank you for explaining your edit in the edit summary.) – S. Rich (talk) 22:19, 13 May 2021 (UTC)
As you can see the entire section on America is about ceramic companies, and Andersen Design is not there. I left an editing note explaining why Andersen Design belongs and why there is no Andersen Design page on Wikipedia. If I were to write a page I would place Andersen Design, in both the context of design and the context of social-economic philosophers such as was the Arts and Crafts Movement. With the exception of Heath Ceramics, the other designers in the Wikipedia quote designed for external companies, but Dad studied Industrial Design at Pratt Institute, and defined industrial design not only as designing for the industry but also as designing industry itself, in the tradition of Lewis Mumford.
Writing in The Collectors Eye, Christine Churchill places Andersen Design in the midcentury movement: Collectors Eye is a source but I am family- which means I know and understand the history and philosophy from the direct source, but that disqualifies me from contributing a write up about Andersen Design to Wikipedia.
"Responsible for changes good and bad in architecture and design, the industrial Revolution changed the manufacturing process of pottery for good. New factories spat out thousands of pieces of pottery per day – their goal to stock kitchens and dining rooms of middle-class Europe and America quickly and inexpensively.
The Scandinavians were the first to rebel. They began to address the need for “good design for every day use” around 1916. For Swedish artist and alchemist Wilhem Kage, that meant inventing hundreds of new glazes.
The Americans were quick to follow suit, benefiting from the influx of European designers during the 1930’s and 1940’s. The Scheiers were a husband-wife team famous for creating slightly off-center pieces. Also thumbing their noses at machine-made perfection were Weston and Brenda Andersen of East Boothbay Maine (many of their pieces are seen in this spread)"
Eva Zeisel once ran Russian state ceramics. When Dad told her he was moving to Maine to start his own company, she exclaimed: That is such a hard thing to do! and it was, which is another reason why what was created should not be buried but continued to benefit future generations through an engaging work process.
The Arts and Crafts movement was an international trend in the decorative and fine arts that developed earliest and most fully in the British Isles[1] and subsequently spread across the British Empire and to the rest of Europe and America.[2]
Initiated in reaction against the perceived impoverishment of the decorative arts and the conditions in which they were produced,[3] the movement flourished in Europe and North America between about 1880 and 1920.
……….The Arts and Crafts movement emerged from the attempt to reform design and decoration in mid-19th century Britain. It was a reaction against a perceived decline in standards that the reformers associated with machinery and factory production. Wikipedia The Arts and Crafts Movement
Wikipedia doesn’t identify the “perceived decline in standards associated with machinery and factory production” as the Industrial Revolution. Lewis Mumford makes that connection in The Culture of the Cities, as Mumford details every aspect of human living from personal bathing to the order imposed on society by the design of infrastructure, such as very wide streets in baroque cities, a result of military traffic being a determining factor in city planning. Today in Boothbay the determining factor in city planning is money. Thus we have a mini-roundabout obstructing the main flow of traffic at the center of town as a show of economic dominance, rather than military dominance, which has created a great local wealth divide and a paucity of affordable housing for the “workforce”. Why not think in terms of affordable housing for grassroots entrepreneurs, as businesses in a home, rather than thinking in terms of workforces for large corporate developments?
Economic dominance is only about money. Work is about money but it is also how we spend our days on earth.
In orthodox thinking, It is taken as a given the people want what the developers want to build for the reasons that the developers say they are building (housing for the workforce). There are very large and very empty cities in China built on the same premise, including the tax incentives granted to large corporations to get them to move to ghost cities where large forests of tall nondescript housing grids are made for the workforce, surrounding more individualized architectural design for the private executive classes and government buildings.
In Boothbay, there is already talk of “incentives”, which means higher property taxes to drive the cost of owning property higher. An incentive program for individual working studios in or attached to a home would be based on an actual business needing space on a small individualized scale as opposed to large-scale corporations, yet to materialize, to hire large workforces who will live in row house complexes.
A smaller scale and slower rate of growth does not threaten the sustainability of our water supplies as do larger, faster developments. The idea behind the Andersen Design Museum of American Designer Craftsmen- as a fiscal sponsor, is that it would enable artist-designers to apply for non-profit funding to capitalize studios, which does not involve raising property taxes.
The thinking behind the development of rowhouses is generated strictly by money and does not consider the human side of the story. For insight into what people want, Medium is valuable to read because it is where many voices tell their own story. For every story told there is another side to tell, but each story is written by an actual person, bringing a genuine human perspective to issues that are defined only as abstracted monetary concerns in thinking generated and dispersed by central management as one formula for everywhere.
Two popular Medium writers with large followings are Tim Denning and Jessica Wildfire with 172K and 73K followers respectively, serious enough to consider that these content providers resonate with a large audience.
Tim Denning recently published I Am Petrified to Quit My 9-5 Job and Jessica Wildfire published We Don’t Care About Your Precious Office Culture, You Can Keep It,
Denning makes six figures in his full-time job and with 172 000 Medium followers, Denning must be making a large income on his “side hustle”. For a while, Denning has been writing about wanting to break loose from his corporate job but can’t bring himself to do so. He writes of the good, the bad, and the ugly of working a quality job in the corporate world, taking the obvious material benefits out of the equation, both the good and the bad are human relationships.
Jessica Wildfire doesn’t have a lot to say that is good about returning to the office to work. She is riled over central management trying to force remote workers back to the office when she has found she can be much more productive working at home and has a better work-life balance by working from home. It is not about not wanting to work. It is about working better and having control over one’s own life. A large segment of the workforce is finding that they have a better and more productive life when working from home. The workforce is revolting against having their lives controlled by central management, motivated solely by profit.
And so it would be both smart and distinctive for a region like the Boothbay Peninsula to target remote workers rather than large corporations. That will require business in the home-friendly ordinances. The ordinances saying that anyone making an income in the privacy of their own home, even if it does not affect the neighborhood, must get permission from the town selectmen, need to go.
One of the most valuable human assets of corporate life is that it creates a community. Most people need a connection to community and so to become a magnet for a remote working community there needs to be space for gathering together. There is the often spoken of casual meeting in the elevator where stimulating conversations are said to occur, thus the phrase, “elevator pitch”, but casual meetings occur in other places as well. Boothbay has many public gathering places to serve the unexpected, but businesses need spaces of their own where they can have meetings, and so to suppose that a small room with a computer is adequate for a remote worker, or independent contractor, is to limit the growth potential of the remote worker. If teams are an advantage for corporate culture, they can also be formed in remote culture but there need to be spaces in which teams can meet as well as private spaces where individuals can work without distractions.
Andersen Design has the assets to create a community culture in that we have so many designs that it is advantageous to distribute their production among various small studio operations. That creates a community network, and networks can breed other networks joined together through genuine engagement in the work process. It can be cross-cultural, and cross-technologies. We are here in the real world, not a figment in the imagination.