"The possibilities of a box": Louise Brigham's Box Furniture and the making of democratic craft and design

Abstract

In 1909, a little-known artist and social reformer named Louise Brigham published Box Furniture: How to Make a Hundred Useful Articles for the Home. An instructional manual for making simple, modular furniture out of repurposed wooden packing crates on the one hand, this text is also a domestic advice book on thrift, home decoration, and the transformative power of craft. Brigham’s unique and interdisciplinary approach to aesthetic, social, domestic, and educational reform was at once of its time and ahead of its time and is itself challenging to fit into a box. ☐ This thesis investigates Box Furniture through the lenses of the Arts and Crafts movement and the Progressive Era. The utopian ideologies of reform that made up each of these movements influenced and shaped Brigham’s vision for box furniture in their own ways, but Brigham’s work also helped to activate the Arts and Crafts movement’s call to democratize design in a manner that was otherwise largely elusive. Ultimately, Brigham’s Box Furniture helps to demonstrate that the aesthetic reform of the Arts and Crafts movement cannot be fully separated from its context within the period’s overarching social and political Progressivism. Additionally, the ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement have remained relevant over time, and while Box Furniture was a product of its time and place, it is also part of a long history of creative reuse, empowerment through craft and handwork, and attempts to democratize design that have run throughout the twentieth century and up to the present day.