Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Workmanship as a personal statement, September 7, 2004
Pye knows that understanding comes in two steps. The second presents the new knowledge, but the first step clears out old fallacies to make way for the new facts. To do that, he starts this book by thoroughly confusing the question of what is hand work, and what is done by machine. Once that is shown irrelevant, he starts on the points that truly matter.
First, the terms "craft" and "craftsmanship" have been co-opted and corrupted by so many authors that, with regret, he abandons them. Instead, he defines new terms. The first opposed pairs are the workmanship of risk and the workmanship of certainty. Certainty is knowledge that a piece of work will surely complete in the way intended, as is typical in mass manufacture. Risk is the chance that any workpiece could be damaged or destroyed at any step in its handling - a chisel could clip, a hammer could damage the surface, a saw cut might be placed wrong. It doesn't matter whether the tool is a simple hammer or a complex milling machine: either a reliable process or a fallible workman defines the result.
Pye's second distinction is "regulated" versus "free" or "rough" fabrication. Regulated work meets fine tolerances, has precise geometries and surfaces. Free work allows the workman to vary the workpiece somewhat. Free workmanship allows expressive notes, perhaps tool textures or subtle changes of shape. Rough workmanship goes farther. A wood fence, for example, may be straight and strong enough, with coarse shapes, knots in the wood, and even some checking.
None of that distinguishes good workmanship from bad. Good workmanship carries out the practical and esthetic intent of a design, or improves on them. Bad workmanship detracts from the design's usefulness or beauty. In something like a rural stone wall, excessively regulated work might even be considered bad, if it's the one exact geometry in a generally relaxed environment. A rough-hewn bench may be just as good, in its way, as an inlaid Victorian table.
Pye ends this wise book by reviewing what Ruskin and Morris had to say about craft. I won't repeat his arguments, but he points out the reams of nonsense they interleaved between pages of meaningful thought. As with everything he analyzes, he carefully highlights the worthwhile, and elegantly tears up the romantic silliness.
Pye is truly dedicated to workmanship and to dedicated workmen (and, implicitly, women). I recommend this book to anyone who creates anything, whether professionally or for the personal reward in the act of making.
//wiredweird
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15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A great book that lives up to expectations, December 18, 2000
In this book David Pye accurately and concisely differentiates between hand craftsmanship and modern machine done work. He writes his philosophical yet practical, personal ideas on craftsmanship. It is a great discussion for anyone interested in fine workmanship. It attempts to answer questions (or at least provide an entry point into discussion) of why hand workmanship is important, why it appeals to us, and want makes it fundamentally different from machine build crafts. It does not focus on any specific craft (thought Professor Pye is a woodworker himself), but is meaningful and accessable to anyone interested in crafts and hand workmanship. This is a great book.
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18 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
well-meaning, but boring and pointlessly abstruse, June 13, 2003
I got this book basically because I wanted to learn something about how to tell a good piece of woodworking (furniture mostly) from a lousy piece of woodworking. But that's only touched on in a small fraction of the book, and, while I agree and sympathize with the author's views in many ways, mainly I found this book a boring read. In part it's because Pye's writing style is rather long-winded and archaic. He might have been more at home as an amateur philosopher in the 18th century, or soapbox orator in the 19th, than an essayist in the 20th. Just picking a couple of sentences at random: "Nor am I saying that free workmanship is better than regulated, nor that regulated workmanship is the ruin of our civilization. On the contrary, I say that on the contrast and tension between regulation and diversity depends half the art of workmanship." As for Pye's ideas, well, he goes to a lot of trouble to analyze and explore his concepts of "workmanship of risk" (simply put, workmanship where you can screw it really bad) versus "workmanship of certainty" (e.g. machine-punching), and "free" (open to variation) work, and the allied concept of diversity in the product, versus "regulated" (uniform, predictable--most machine production) work. Pye observations sound like this: "In our society at present the sensitivity of people to the quality of diversity in workmanship seems very uneven." "There is . . . a total incongruity and a sense of outrage about a piece of material with a highly polished surface and a raw, rough edge." "In the art of workmanship, then, we seek to diversify the scale of those formal elements which begin to be distinguishable at close and also--in season--to diversify the forms themselves by allowing slight improvisations, divagations and irregularities so that we are continually presented with fresh and unexpected incidents of form." "The traditional association between high regulation and durability, whether true aor false, has no force any longer. The highly regulated ball-point pen with which I am writing will be thrown away next week." "The extreme paucity of names for surface qualities has quite probably had the effect of prefenting any general understanding that they exist as a complete domain of aesthetic experience . . . standing independently of form and color." Well, Pye puts some new names to things, and makes some fresh observations here and there. (There are also some interesting pictures, though too few I'd say in a book that after all is about craftsmanship.) Yet it's hard to see a lot of this stuff as really insightful, or meriting the kind of laborious, involved disquisition that Pye gives it. A page of his comments about about regulated work could be conveyed to anyone's intuition by a single Paul Strand photo of machinery. Also, many of his observations feel, ultimately, a bit like juggling of the names he has given things--but if you step back it's not all that earth-shaking an observation. There's a part where Pye takes Ruskin to task for, in Pye's view, a number of inaccurate statements about art and craftsmanship. Pye may be correct, but his discussion on these points suffers from his style as usual (as well as an oddly peevish tone). It also doesn't benefit from comparison with Ruskin, since, when I read a bit of the Ruskin quoted by Pye here, I'm reminded of how I miss succinct, pithy writing as I ready Pye's own contributions. Ruskin: "But, accurately speaking, no good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a misunderstanding of the ends of art. . . . In all things that live there are certain irregularities and deficiencies which are not only signs of life, but sources of beauty." Even if this is wrong in some respects (as Pye likes to explain at length), Ruskin here is such a refreshing change of pace. Better wrong and interesting than correct and dull. A few of the Ruskin quotes were the only things I marked in the whole book. Well, maybe it's just me, but I found this book tedious and rather a disappointment.
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