Atlas
A trail is a short, ordered route through the atlas. Each stop says why it comes next, so a journey reads as an argument rather than a list. Start one, leave, and come back: your place is kept in this browser, and you do not need an account for that.
This path follows metal from the hearth to the finished thread. It starts with the nozzle that feeds air to the fire, moves through the powered hammer and the shaped tools struck on the anvil, and ends at the bench with...
8 stops
Cloth passes through many hands before it is worn, and each hand holds a different tool. This trail follows the textile tools of the home workshop in the order work reaches them, from the staff that holds unspun fiber...
9 stops
This path follows a piece of wood through the hand shop, from splitting a log along its grain, through shaping, flattening and marking, to boring and cutting the pieces so they fit together. Each stop is a tool whose...
9 stops
This path follows ten tools across three workshops: the hand tools of the woodworker, the smith and the glassblower. It begins with the hammer, one of the oldest tools there is, then moves from the simple blow to the...
10 stops
Eight stops through the long argument between handwork and industry: a wheel older than writing, the exhibition that crowned the machine, the movements that answered it, and the fairground where hand and machine finally...
8 stops
Ordinary domestic life, kept and cultivated at home, has repeatedly organized itself into real movements and institutions: a reaction against Victorian bedding schemes became the cottage garden style, wartime food...
8 stops
A century and a half of hand work answering the machine: the Arts and Crafts revolt against factory production, Japan's parallel mingei philosophy, the studio pottery and studio craft movements it fed, and the...
12 stops
Trails are curated by the atlas. Where you have got to in one is remembered by your own browser and is never sent to us.