It is true that the movement of the last hundred years has been away from handicraft; but a hundred years is a relatively short time, and at least a part of the triumph of machinery has been due to our naïve enjoyment of it as a plaything. There is a wide difference between doing away with hand-labor, as in sawing wood or hoisting a weight, and eliminating handicraft by using machine tools for operations which can be subtly performed only by hand. The first practice is all to the good: the second essentially misunderstands the significance of handicraft and machinery, and I must dwell on this point for a moment, since it is responsible for a good deal of shoddy thinking on the future of art and architecture. V On the human side, the prime distinction overlooked by the mechanists is that machine work is principally toil: handicraft, on the other hand, is a form of living. The operations of the mechanical arts are inherently servile, because the worker is forced to keep the pace set by the machine and to follow the pattern set by the designer, someone other than himself; whereas the handicrafts are relatively free, in that they allow a certain leeway to different types of work and different ways of tackling a job. These distinctions are bound up with a difference in the forms that are used; and it is through these esthetic differences that we may, perhaps, best see how the personal and mechanical may be apportioned in the architecture of the future. The key to handicraft esthetics, it seems to me, is a sort of vital superfluity. The carpenter is not content with his planed surface; nor is the mason satisfied with the smooth stone; nor does the painter impartially cover the bare wall: no, each worker must elaborate the bare utilitarian object until the capital becomes a writhing mass of foliage, until the domed ceiling becomes the gate of heaven, until each object gets the imprint of the fantasies that have ripened in the worker’s head. The craftsman literally possesses his work, in the sense that the Bible says a body is possessed by a familiar spirit.