This article is the first of two by Kreisman and Mason based on their recent book from Timber Press, The Arts and Crafts Movement in the Pacific Northwest. This piece surveys Arts and Crafts influences and architecture in the region; the second article, coming in the Fall 2008 issue, focuses on artists and artisans.
During his January 1909 lecture tour to the West Coast, the renowned British designer C. R. Ashbee
presented lectures on the Arts and Crafts in Seattle, Washington and Portland, Oregon. After the crowding, pollution, and degradation he had seen in New York, Pittsburgh, and Chicago, he was fascinated and delighted with the West. Ashbee wrote in his journals that Seattle was “the only American city I have so far seen in which I would care to live. All the gold of Ophir would not tempt me to live in one of those smug eastern cities. . . . Here is a city with a new light in her eyes.” Ashbee’s wife, Janet, remarked on the city’s cosmopolitanism, its “well appointed restaurants decorated with the latest Arts and Crafts distinction of line and coloring.” Her comments reveal that despite its relative youth, the Pacific Northwest was participating actively in the important design and reform movement that had roots in 19th-century Britain but soon was taken to heart by America. |
