Vase (Shape #85),

early 20th century

<p> The company Teco (a portmanteau of terracotta) developed from the American Terra Cotta Tile and Ceramic Company, established near Chicago by William Day Gates to produce architectural terracotta. In 1899, Gates founded Teco as a means of entering the burgeoning market for art pottery. The result was an impressively wide array of ceramics in a modernist idiom, designed by Gates himself as well as by architectural luminaries such as Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. Teco’s mode of production departed from prevailing Arts and Crafts precepts in being factory-made, with mold casting, sprayed glaze, and large-scale firings. Rather than assert the superiority of handicraft, Gates sought to humanize factory work, and, through mass production, “to put in each and every home a vase of my make” and “so feel that I have . . . contributed to the . . . happiness of my generation.” </p>