"First, there is the bare beauty of the logs themselves with their long lines and firm curves. Then there is the open charm felt of the structural features which are not hidden under plaster and ornament, but are clearly revealed, a charm felt in Japanese architecture"
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Stickley’s eye lingers on the log the way a moralist lingers on a tell: the “long lines and firm curves” aren’t just pleasing, they’re evidence. In this small gush over wood grain and visible joints, he’s selling an ethic of honesty that defined the Arts and Crafts movement at the moment industrial America was learning to fake everything convincingly. Beauty, for Stickley, isn’t applied; it’s extracted from what’s already there, and the extraction method is restraint.
The real move is in what he refuses. “Not hidden under plaster and ornament” is an architectural preference masquerading as a character judgment. Plaster and ornament become shorthand for deception, social pretense, and the anxious performance of status. By contrast, “structural features… clearly revealed” turns construction into confession: a building that shows its bones is imagined as healthier, more modern, more trustworthy.
His invocation of Japanese architecture is equally strategic. Early-20th-century Western designers routinely mined Japan as proof that simplicity could be sophisticated, not impoverished. Stickley uses Japan as a mirror to shame Western excess and to legitimize his own program of exposed joinery and plain materials. The subtext is competitive: industrial production had made ornament cheap and ubiquitous, so the new luxury became intelligible structure and visible craft.
It’s also a quiet argument about who gets to feel at home in modernity. If you can read the building - if the logic is on the surface - you don’t need elite taste to decode it. The charm is “open” because the building, unlike the Gilded Age parlor, isn’t trying to keep you out.
The real move is in what he refuses. “Not hidden under plaster and ornament” is an architectural preference masquerading as a character judgment. Plaster and ornament become shorthand for deception, social pretense, and the anxious performance of status. By contrast, “structural features… clearly revealed” turns construction into confession: a building that shows its bones is imagined as healthier, more modern, more trustworthy.
His invocation of Japanese architecture is equally strategic. Early-20th-century Western designers routinely mined Japan as proof that simplicity could be sophisticated, not impoverished. Stickley uses Japan as a mirror to shame Western excess and to legitimize his own program of exposed joinery and plain materials. The subtext is competitive: industrial production had made ornament cheap and ubiquitous, so the new luxury became intelligible structure and visible craft.
It’s also a quiet argument about who gets to feel at home in modernity. If you can read the building - if the logic is on the surface - you don’t need elite taste to decode it. The charm is “open” because the building, unlike the Gilded Age parlor, isn’t trying to keep you out.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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