From Craftsmanship to Draftsmanship

Naval Architecture and the Three Traditions of Early Modern Design

Datos Bibliográficos

ID4021110
AutoresDavid Mcgee (0000-0002-7329-3428, autor de correspondencia)
Año1999
Volumen40
Número2
Páginas209-236
Fecha de publicación1999-04-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaTechnology and Culture (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0040-165X • E-ISSN: 1097-3729
EditorialProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/tech.1999.0103
OpenAlexW2041200578
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas11
Referencias citadas15

From Craftsmanship to Draftsmanship: Naval Architecture and the Three Traditions of Early Modern Design David Mcgee (bio) Almost every historian of technology has used the word “craft” at one time or another. It is a term we apply to techniques in which artifacts are made by hand and eye and rule of thumb, where skills and knowledge are thought to be literally embodied in the craftsman. We use it to refer to techniques that proceed by trial and error, making no use of quantitative physical theory, so that they are consequently not “scientific.” On the grounds that they are not scientific, we use “craft” as a historical category that includes all the technologies of the past. This category has, in turn, often been used as the foundation for a narrative in which a modern shift from supposedly conservative, tradition-bound craft techniques to “rational” scientific technologies marks a radical break in human history, a technological dividing line between past and present. 1 [End Page 209] The story of a craft/science divide is certainly a dramatic one. We are entitled to ask, however, whether its foundations are secure. That is, we are entitled to ask whether it is either useful or accurate, even loosely speaking, to regard all premodern technologies as crafts. In fact, the category creates a historiographical problem. We know there is a difference between making a horseshoe, constructing a siege engine, and building a palace at Versailles. But when we ask what the difference is the question turns out to be difficult to answer, because lumping all the technologies of the past into the single category “craft” leaves us without the criteria we need to distinguish among them. With such a blunt conceptual tool we can neither hope to explain the lack of science we perceive in the technologies of the past nor properly understand the conditions under which a scientific approach to technology can develop. 2 Accordingly, the goal of this article is to set out formal criteria for distinguishing among the technical activities of the past. In general, I approach the issue in terms of design. In particular, I argue that using criteria of graphic representation it is possible to distinguish three broad approaches to design prior to 1800. These I designate the craft (properly speaking), the mechanical, and the architectural traditions. Identifying these traditions, I suggest, provides a more fruitful conceptualization of premodern technology than is provided by the general notion of craft. More important, classification on the basis of definite criteria allows comparison. Comparison leads to a recognition of the significance of the architectural approach, in which the use of measured plan drawings allowed the application of mathematical, physical theory in design long before the modern era. It is by investigating the link between design, drawing, and science in the architectural tradition, I hope to show, that we can begin to explain both the promise and the problems of science in premodern technology. To keep the discussion within limits I consider only the early modern period, taking 1800 as a rough cutoff date. I also focus on British naval architecture. This is partly because naval architecture was the first early modern technology to make use of measured plans after architecture itself, and partly because the use of measured plans in shipbuilding originated in Britain around 1586. Thereafter, the British naval dockyards became the single largest industrial organization in the world, and remained the largest industrial organization in Britain during the industrial revolution, so that the design techniques employed there are of interest in their own right. 3 At [End Page 210] the same time, there was a sustained attempt to apply quantitative physical theory to ship design, an effort that largely failed. 4 Early naval architecture thus offers an excellent opportunity to study the conditions that made it possible even to consider the application of science in design, as well as to study the difficulties that stood in the way of a scientific approach to technology in the early modern period. Thinking about Design Any discussion of design in the history of technology should start with what remains the dominant view, namely, the visual- or nonverbal-thinking account put forward by Edwin Layton

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Craft · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Historiography · Literature · Narrative · Siege · Sociology · Style (visual arts) · Visual arts · Architecture · History · Maritime and Coastal Archaeology · Philosophy