Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Elements Of A Creative Environment: Was The Roycroft Campus Of 1900 - 1915 A Hothouse?, Katherine Somerville

The Exposition

Ancient Athens, Renaissance-era Florence, and Germany’s Bauhaus community that practiced between the two World Wars are all examples of what Barton Kunstler refers to as a hothouse. He defines a hothouse as an area where creativity flourishes wildly and magnificently, producing results that neither nature nor the usual round of human activity could ever anticipate. Out of each of Kunstler’s notable hothouse communities came extraordinary achievements and he theorizes that a hothouse is created out of a relatively rare confluence of forces – 36 factors within four dimensions, to be exact. In this essay I will show how the creative …