Centenary Lecture Series
June 29, 2009 at 5pm
On Craftsmanship
Professor Richard Sennett
New York University and London School of Economics
The Craftsman names a basic human impulse: the desire to do a job well for its own sake. Although the word may suggest a way of life that waned with the advent of industrial society, Sennett argues (in his book of this name) that the craftsman’s realm is far broader than skilled manual labour; the computer programmer, the doctor, the parent, and the citizen need to learn the values of good craftsmanship today.
In his lecture Richard Sennett will lead the audience across time and space, from ancient Roman brickmakers to Renaissance goldsmiths to the printing presses of Enlightenment Paris and the factories of industrial London.
History has drawn fault lines dividing practice and theory, technique and expression, craftsman and artist, maker and user; modern society suffers from the historical inheritance. But the past life of craft and craftsmen also suggests ways of using tools, organizing work, and thinking about materials that remain alternative, viable proposals about how to conduct life with skill.
About Professor Sennett
Richard Sennett was born in Chicago in 1943. He grew up in the Cabrini Green Housing Project, one of the first racially-mixed public housing projects in the United States. At the age of six he began to study the piano and the cello, eventually working with Frank Miller of the Chicago Symphony and Claus Adam of the Julliard Quartet. Mr. Sennett was one of the last students of the conductor Pierre Monteux. In 1963 a hand injury put a sudden end to his musical career; for better or worse he then embarked on academic study.
Mr. Sennett trained at the University of Chicago and at Harvard University, receiving his Ph.D. in 1969. He then moved to New York where, in the 1970s he founded, with Susan Sontag and Joseph Brodsky, The New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University. In the 1980s he served as an advisor to UNESCO and as president of the American Council on Work; he also taught occasionally at Harvard. In the mid 1990s Mr. Sennett began to divide his time between New York University and the London School of Economics . In addition to these academic homes, he maintains informal connections to MIT and to Trinity College, Cambridge University.
Mr.Sennett is married to the sociologist Saskia Sassen. He continues to play chamber music for pleasure, and is a passionate cook.