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Title: Sticks and Stones: A Study of American Architecture and Civilization

Author: Lewis Mumford

Release date: February 25, 2021 [eBook #64629]

Language: English

Credits: Tim Lindell, Craig Kirkwood, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STICKS AND STONES: A STUDY OF AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE AND CIVILIZATION ***

Transcriber’s Notes:

Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).

Additional Transcriber’s Notes are at the end.

       *       *       *       *       *

STICKS AND STONES

       *       *       *       *       *




STICKS AND STONES


  A STUDY OF AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE
  AND CIVILIZATION

  LEWIS MUMFORD

  [Illustration]

  BONI AND LIVERIGHT
  PUBLISHERS :: :: NEW YORK

       *       *       *       *       *

Copyright, 1924, by Boni and Liveright, Inc.

[Illustration]

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

       *       *       *       *       *

  _Architecture, properly understood, is
  civilization itself._
    --W. R. LETHABY

  _What is civilization? It is the humanization
  of man in society._
    --MATTHEW ARNOLD.




CONTENTS


  CHAPTER                              PAGE

     I. THE MEDIEVAL TRADITION           13

    II. THE HERITAGE OF THE RENAISSANCE  35

   III. THE CLASSICAL MYTH               53

    IV. THE DIASPORA OF THE PIONEER      75

     V. THE DEFEAT OF ROMANTICISM        99

    VI. THE IMPERIAL FAÇADE             123

   VII. THE AGE OF THE MACHINE          155

  VIII. ARCHITECTURE AND CIVILIZATION   193

        ENVOI                           237

        NOTES ON BOOKS                  241




ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


This is an attempt to evaluate architecture in America in terms of our
civilization. I have not sought to criticize particular buildings or
tendencies: I have tried, rather, by approaching our modern problems
from their historic side, to criticize the forces that from one age
to another have conditioned our architecture, and altered its forms.
Lest my purpose be misunderstood, I have left out illustrations; for
a building is not merely a sight; it is an experience: and one who
knows architecture only by photographs does not know it at all. If the
omission of pictures lead the reader occasionally to break away from
the orbit of his daily walks, and examine our development in cities and
buildings for himself, it will be sufficiently justified.

This book would not have been put together but for the persistent
encouragement and kindly interest of Mr. Albert Jay Nock: and it was
in The Freeman that the first five chapters, in somewhat briefer form,
appeared. My hearty thanks are likewise due to Mr. Charles Harris
Whitaker, whose private help and whose admirable public work as editor
of the Journal of the American Institute of Architects have both laid
me under a heavy obligation. My intellectual debt to Messrs. Victor
Branford and Patrick Geddes will be apparent to those who have followed
their work. In the concluding chapters I have been stimulated and
guided in many places by unpublished reports and memoranda written
by Mr. Clarence Stein, Mr. Benton Mackaye, and Mr. Henry Wright.
My friendly thanks are also due to Mr. James Henderson, Mr. Geroid
Tanquary Robinson, and Miss Sophia Wittenberg.

Besides the essays in The Freeman, some of the material in Sticks
and Stones has appeared in the Journal of the American Institute of
Architects (Chapter Six), in The New Republic, and in The American
Mercury. I thank the editors for their permission to draw on these
articles.

LEWIS MUMFORD.




CHAPTER ONE THE MEDIEVAL TRADITION


I

For a hundred years or so after its settlement, there lived and
flourished in America a type of community which was rapidly
disappearing in Europe. This community was embodied in villages and
towns whose mummified remains even today have a rooted dignity that the
most gigantic metropolises do not often possess. If we would understand
the architecture of America in a period when good building was almost
universal, we must understand something of the kind of life that this
community fostered.

The capital example of the medieval tradition lies in the New England
village.

There are two or three things that stand in the way of our seeing
the life of a New England village; and one of them is the myth of
the pioneer, the conception of the first settlers as a free band of
“Americans” throwing off the bedraggled garments of Europe and starting
life afresh in the wilderness. So far from giving birth to a new life,
the settlement of the northern American seaboard prolonged for a
little while the social habits and economic institutions which were
fast crumbling away in Europe, particularly in England. In the villages
of the New World there flickered up the last dying embers of the
medieval order.

Whereas in England the common lands were being confiscated for the
benefit of an aristocracy, and the arable turned into sheep-runs for
the profit of the great proprietors, in New England the common lands
were re-established with the founding of a new settlement. In England
the depauperate peasants and yeomen were driven into the large towns
to become the casual workers, menials, and soldiers; in New England,
on the other hand, it was at first only with threats of punishment and
conscription that the town workers were kept from going out into the
countryside to seek a more independent living from the soil. Just as
the archaic speech of the Elizabethans has lingered in the Kentucky
Mountains, so the Middle Ages at their best lingered along the coast
of Appalachia; and in the organization of our New England villages one
sees a greater resemblance to the medieval Utopia of Sir Thomas More
than to the classic republic in the style of Montesquieu, which was
actually founded in the eighteenth century.

The colonists who sought to establish permanent communities--as
distinct from those who erected only trading posts--were not a
little like those whom the cities of Greece used to plant about the
Mediterranean and the Black Sea littoral. Like the founders of the
“Ancient City,” the Puritans first concerned themselves to erect an
altar, or rather, to lay the foundations for an edifice which denied
the religious value of altars. In the crudest of “smoaky wigwams,” an
early observer notes, the Puritans remember to “sing psalms, pray, and
praise their God”; and although we of today may regard their religion
as harsh and nay-saying, we cannot forget that it was a central point
of their existence and not an afterthought piled as it were on material
prosperity for the sake of a good appearance. Material goods formed the
basis, but not the end, of their life.

The meeting-house determined the character and limits of the community.
As Weeden says in his excellent Economic and Social History of New
England, the settlers “laid out the village in the best order to attain
two objects: first, the tillage and culture of the soil; second,
the maintenance of a ‘civil and religious society.’” Around the
meeting-house the rest of the community crystallized in a definite
pattern, tight and homogeneous.

The early provincial village bears another resemblance to the early
Greek city: it does not continue to grow at such a pace that it either
becomes overcrowded within or spills beyond its limits into dejected
suburbs; still less does it seek what we ironically call greatness by
increasing the number of its inhabitants. When the corporation has a
sufficient number of members, that is to say, when the land is fairly
occupied, and when the addition of more land would unduly increase the
hardship of working it from the town, or would spread out the farmers,
and make it difficult for them to attend to their religious and civil
duties, the original settlement throws out a new shoot. So Charlestown
threw off Woburn; so Dedham colonized Medfield; so Lynn founded Nahant.

The Puritans knew and applied a principle that Plato had long ago
pointed out in The Republic, namely, that an intelligent and socialized
community will continue to grow only as long as it can remain a unit
and keep up its common institutions. Beyond that point growth must
cease, or the community will disintegrate and cease to be an organic
thing. Economically, this method of community-development kept land
values at a properly low level, and prevented the engrossing of land
for the sake of a speculative rise. The advantage of the Puritan method
of settlement comes out plainly when one contrasts it with the trader’s
paradise of Manhattan; for by the middle of the seventeenth century all
the land on Manhattan Island was privately owned, although only a small
part of it was cultivated, and so eagerly had the teeth of monopoly
bitten into this fine morsel that there was already a housing-shortage.

One more point of resemblance: all the inhabitants of an early New
England village were co-partners in a corporation; they admitted
into the community only as many members as they could assimilate.
This co-partnership was based upon a common sense as to the purpose
of the community, and upon a roughly equal division of the land into
individual plots taken in freehold, and a share of the common fields,
of which there might be half a dozen or more.

There are various local differences in the apportionment of the land.
In many cases, the minister and deacons have a larger share than the
rest of the community; but in Charlestown, for example, the poorest
had six or seven acres of meadow and twenty-five or thereabouts of
upland; and this would hold pretty well throughout the settlements. Not
merely is membership in the community guarded: the right of occupying
and transferring the land is also restricted, and again and again, in
the face of the General Assembly, the little villages make provisions
to keep the land from changing hands without the consent of the
corporation; “it being our real intent,” as the burghers of Watertown
put it, to “sitt down there close togither.”

These regulations have a positive side as well; for in some cases the
towns helped the poorer members of the corporation to build houses,
and as a new member was voted into the community, lots were assigned
immediately, without further ado. A friend of mine has called this
system “Yankee communism,” and I cheerfully bring the institution
to the attention of those who do not realize upon what subversive
principles Americanism, historically, rests.

What is true of the seventeenth century in New England holds good for
the eighteenth century in the Moravian settlements of Pennsylvania;
and it is doubtless true for many another obscure colony; for the same
spirit lingered, with a parallel result in architecture and industry,
in the utopian communities of the nineteenth century. It is pretty
plain that this type of pioneering, this definite search for the good
life, was conducted on an altogether different level from the ruthless
exploitation of the individual muckers and scavengers who hit the trail
west of the Alleghanies. Such renewals of the earlier European culture
as the Bach Festival at Bethlehem give us a notion of the cultural
values which the medieval community carried over from the Old World to
the New. There is some of this spirit left even in the architecture of
the Shaker community at Mount Lebanon, New York, which was built as
late as the nineteenth century.

In contrast to the New England village-community was the trading post.
Of this nature were the little towns in the New Netherlands which were
planted there by the Dutch West India Company: the settlers were for
the most part either harassed individuals who were lured to the New
World by the prospects of a good living, or people of established rank
who were tempted to leave the walks of commerce for the dignities and
affluences that were attached to the feudal tenure of the large estates
that lined the Hudson.

The germs of town life came over with these people, and sheer necessity
turned part of their energies to agriculture, but they did not develop
the close village-community we find in New England; and though New
Amsterdam was a replica of the Old World port, with its gabled brick
houses, and its well-banked canals and fine gardens, it left no decided
pattern on the American scene. It is only the country architecture
of the Dutch which survives as either a relic or a memory. These
trading posts like Manhattan and Fort Orange were, as Messrs. Petersen
and Edwards have shown in their study of New York as an Eighteenth
Century Municipality, medieval in their economy: numerous guild and
civic regulations which provided for honest weight and measure and
workmanship continued in force within the town. In their external
dealings, on the other hand, the practice of the traders was sharp,
and every man was for himself. Beginning its life by bargaining in
necessities, the trading post ends by making a necessity of bargaining;
and it was the impetus from its original commercial habits which
determined the characteristics of the abortive city plan that was laid
down for Manhattan Island in 1811. Rich as the Dutch precedent is in
individual farmhouses, it brings us no pattern, such as we find in New
England, for the community as a whole.


II

Since we are accustomed to look upon the village as a quaint primitive
relic of a bygone age, we do not readily see that its form was dictated
by social and economic conditions. Where the village had to defend
itself against Indians, it was necessary to lay it out completely,
so that it might be surrounded by a stockade, and so that the
meeting-house might be such a rallying center as the bell-tower or the
castle was in Europe, or as the high temple site was in classic times.
But in the eighteenth century the Indian figured less in the scheme of
colonial life, and along the seacoast and river--as at Wells Beach in
Maine or Litchfield in Connecticut--the village became a long strip
upon a highroad, and the arable land stretched in narrow plots from the
house to the water, so that the farmer might better protect his crops
and his livestock from the fox, the wolf, the woodchuck, the hawk, the
skunk, and the deer.

I emphasize these points of structure because of the silly notion
superficial observers sometimes carry away from the villages of
Europe or New England; namely, that their irregularity is altogether
capricious and uneconomical, associated only with the vagaries of the
straying cow. It would be more correct to say that the precise reverse
was true. The inequality in size and shape of plots shows always that
attention was paid to the function the land was to perform, rather
than to the mere possession of property. Thus, there was a difference
in size between home lots, which were always seated in the village,
and purely agricultural tracts of land, which were usually on the
outskirts; and in Dedham, for example, married men had home lots of
twelve acres, while bachelors received only eight. Another reason
for the compactness of the village was a decree of the General Court
in Massachusetts, in 1635, that no dwelling should be placed more
than half a mile from the meeting-house in any new plantation. Even
irregularities in the layout and placement of houses, which cannot
be referred to such obvious points as these, very often derive from
an attempt to break the path of the wind, to get a good exposure in
summer, or to profit by a view.

All this was genuine community planning. It did not go by this name,
perhaps, but it achieved the result.


III

We have learned in recent years to appreciate the felicities of
eighteenth-century colonial architecture, and even the earlier
seventeenth-century style is now coming into its own, in the sense that
it is being imitated by architects who have an eye for picturesque
effects; but we lose our perspective altogether if we think that the
charm of an old New England house can be recaptured by designing
overhanging second stories or panelled interiors. The just design,
the careful execution, the fine style that brings all the houses
into harmony no matter how diverse the purposes they served--for the
farmhouse shares its characteristics with the mill, and the mill with
the meeting-house--was the outcome of a common spirit, nourished by
men who had divided the land fairly and who shared adversity and good
fortune together. When the frame of the house is to be raised, a man’s
neighbors will lend him a hand; if the harvest is in danger, every man
goes out into the fields, even if his own crop is not at stake; if a
whale founders on the beach, even the smallest boy bears a hand, and
gets a share of the reward. All these practices were not without their
subtle effect upon craftsmanship.

Schooled in the traditions of his guild, the medieval carpenter pours
his all into the work. Since sale does not enter into the bargain, it
is both to his patron’s advantage to give him the best materials, and
to his own advantage to make the most of them. If at first, in the
haste of settlement, the colonists are content with makeshifts, they
are nevertheless done in the traditional fashion--not the log cabins
of later days, but, more probably, wattle and daub huts like those
of the charcoal burners in the English forests. In some points, the
prevailing English tradition does not fit the raw climate of the north,
and presently the half-timbered houses of some of the earlier settlers
would be covered by clapboards for greater warmth, as in the eighteenth
century their interiors were lined with panelled pine or oak, instead
of the rough plaster. No matter what the material or mode, the
carpenter works not simply for hire, but for dear life’s sake, and as
a baker’s dozen numbers thirteen, so a piece of handicraft contains not
merely the workmanship itself, but a bit of the worker’s soul, for good
measure. The new invention of the gambrel roof, which gave additional
room to the second story without raising the roof-tree, is a product of
this system; and the variation in its length and pitch in New England,
New Jersey, and New York is a witness to the freedom of design that
prevailed throughout the work.

These seventeenth-century houses, built at first with one or two
rooms, and then as luxury increased and family needs multiplied with
as many as four, would doubtless seem unspeakably crude and mean to
the resident of Floral Heights; indeed, if our present requirements
for housing were so simple it would not be quite so difficult to meet
our perpetual shortage. As a matter of fact, however, these early
provincial houses were well up to the standards for a similar homestead
in England; and in some ways were a distinct advance. Just as all the
separate courses on a restaurant menu were a few hundred years ago
cooked in the same pot, so the different subdivisions of the modern
house were originally combined into a single room, which was not
merely kitchen, workroom, and living quarters, but which also, at least
in winter, served as a stable for the more delicate members of the
barnyard. By the time America was settled the division into rooms had
just commenced among the better sort of farmer: the barn had split off
from the rest of the house, and the bedchamber was becoming a separate
apartment. As the seventeenth century lengthened, this division of
functions became more familiar in the provincial house.

Let us take a brief look at one of these seventeenth-century buildings;
let us say, the John Ward house in Salem which still survives as a
relic. As one approaches the village on some November day, when the
leaves are no longer on the trees to obscure the vista, one feels
the dynamic quality of medieval architecture--a quality altogether
different from the prudent regularities of the later Georgian mode.
It is not merely a matter of painted gables, leaded, diamond-paned
windows, overhanging second stories, much as these would perhaps remind
us of a medieval European town. What would attract one is the feeling,
not of formal abstract design, but of growth: the house has developed
as the family within it has prospered, and brought forth children; as
sons and daughters have married, as children have become more numerous,
there have been additions: by a lean-to at one end the kitchen has
achieved a separate existence, for instance; and these unpainted,
weathered oaken masses pile up with a cumulative richness of effect.

Every step that brings one nearer to the house alters the relation of
the planes formed by the gable ends; and so one must have got the same
effect in these old village streets as one gets today when one skirts
around, let us say, Notre Dame in Paris, now overwhelmed by the towers
at the front, and now seeing them reduced to nothing by the tall spire
in the rear. So the building seems in motion, as well as the spectator;
and this quality delights the eye quite as much as formal decoration,
which the architecture of the seventeenth century in America almost
completely lacked.

The Puritan had his failings; and this lack of decoration was perhaps
the most important one in architecture. In his devotion to books and
in his love for music, even psalm-music, the Puritan was not immune to
art; but he was suspicious of the image, and one is tempted to read
into his idol-breaking a positive visual defect, akin to the Daltonism
or color blindness of the Quakers. Whereas medieval architecture
had cherished the sculptor and the painter, even in the commonest
vernacular work, the Puritans looked upon every diversion of the eye
as a diversion from the Lord, and, by forbidding a respectable union
between the artist and the useful arts, they finally turned the artist
out on the streets, to pander to the first fine gentleman who would
give him a kind word or a coin. Whereas Puritan buildings in the
seventeenth century were straightforward and honestly bent to fulfill
their functions, the Puritan did not see that ornament itself may be
functional, too, when it expresses some positive gesture of the spirit.
The bareness of the seventeenth century paved the way for the finicking
graces of the eighteenth.


IV

In essentials, however, both the life and the architecture of the first
provincial period are sound. While agriculture is the mainstay of
life, and the medieval tradition flourishes, the New England village
reaches a pretty fair pitch of worldly perfection; and beneath all the
superficial changes that affected it in the next century and a half,
its sturdy framework held together remarkably well.

Consider the village itself. In the center is a common, a little
to one side will be the meeting-house, perhaps a square barnlike
structure, with a hipped roof and a cupola, like that at Hingham; and
adjacent or across the way will be the grammar school. Along the roads
where the houses are set at regular intervals is a great columnar
arcade of elm trees. All these elements are essential to our early
provincial architecture, and without them it would be a little bare and
forbidding. The trees, above all, are an important part of New England
architecture: in summer they absorb the moisture and cool the air,
besides giving shade; in the winter their huge boles serve as a partial
windbrake; even the humus from their leaves keeps the soil of the lawns
in better order. The apple trees that cling to the warmer side of
the house are not less essential. Would it be an exaggeration to say
that there has never been a more complete and intelligent partnership
between the earth and man than existed, for a little while, in the
old New England village? In what other part of the world has such a
harmonious balance between the natural and the social environment been
preserved?

Nowadays we have begun to talk about garden cities, and we realize that
the essential elements in a garden-city are the common holding of land
by the community, and the coöperative ownership and direction of the
community itself. We refer to all these things as if they represented a
distinct achievement of modern thought; but the fact of the matter is
that the New England village up to the middle of the eighteenth century
was a garden-city in every sense that we now apply to that term, and
happily its gardens and its harmonious framework have frequently
lingered on, even though the economic foundations have long been
overthrown.

This is a medieval tradition in American architecture which should
be of some use to our architects and city planners; for it is a much
more substantial matter than the building of perpendicular churches or
Tudor country-houses in painfully archæological adaptations. If we wish
to tie up with our colonial tradition we must recover more than the
architectural forms: we must recover the interests, the standards, the
institutions that gave to the villages and buildings of early times
their appropriate shapes. To do much less than this is merely to bring
back a fad which might as well be Egyptian as “colonial” for all the
sincerity that it exhibits.




CHAPTER TWO THE HERITAGE OF THE RENAISSANCE


I

The forces that undermined the medieval civilization of Europe sapped
the vitality from the little centers it had deposited in America.
What happened in the course of three or four centuries in Europe took
scarcely a hundred years on this side of the Atlantic.

Economically and culturally, the village community had been pretty well
self-contained; it scraped along on its immediate resources, and if it
could not purchase for itself the “best of everything” it at least made
the most of what it had. In every detail of house construction, from
the setting of fireplaces to the slope of the roof, there were local
peculiarities which distinguished not merely the Dutch settlements
from the English, but which even characterized several settlements in
Rhode Island that were scarcely a day’s tramp apart. The limitation of
materials, and the carpenter’s profound ignorance of “style” made for
freedom and diversity. It remained for the eighteenth century to erect
a single canon of taste.

With the end of the seventeenth century the economic basis of
provincial life shifted from the farm to the sea. This change had the
same effect upon New England, where the village-community proper alone
had flourished, that fur-trading had had upon New York: it broke up
the internal unity of the village by giving separate individuals the
opportunity by what was literally a “lucky haul,” to achieve a position
of financial superiority. Fishermen are the miners of the water.
Instead of the long, watchful care that the farmer must exercise from
planting time to harvest, fishing demands a sharp eye and a quick, hard
stroke of work; and since what the Germans call _Sitzfleisch_ is not
one of the primary qualities of a free lad, it is no wonder that the
sea weaned the young folks of New England away from the drudgeries of
its boulder-strewn farms. With fishing, trading, and building wooden
vessels for sale in foreign ports, riches poured into maritime New
England; and what followed scarcely needs an explanation.

These villages ceased to be communities of farmers, working the land
and standing squarely on their own soil: they became commercial towns
which, instead of trading for a living, simply lived for trade. With
this change, castes arose; first, the division between the poor and the
rich, and then between craftsmen and merchants, between the independent
workers and the menials. The common concerns of all the townsfolk
took second rank: the privileges of the great landlords and merchants
warped the development of the community. Boston, by the middle of
the eighteenth century, was rich in public buildings, including four
schoolhouses, seventeen churches, a Town House, a Province House,
and Faneuil Hall--a pretty large collection for a town whose twenty
thousand inhabitants would scarcely fill a single block of tenements
in the Bronx. But by this time a thousand inhabitants were set down as
poor, and an almshouse and a workhouse had been provided for them.

With the rise of the merchant class, the industrial guild began to
weaken, as it had weakened in Europe during the Renaissance. For about
a hundred years the carpenter-builder continued to remain on the scene,
and work in his forthright and painstaking and honest manner; but in
the middle of the eighteenth century he was joined, for the first
time, by the professional architect, the first one being probably
Peter Harrison, who designed the Redwood Library, which still stands
in Newport. Under competition with architects and amateurs of taste,
the carpenter-builder lost his position as an independent craftsman,
building intelligently for his equals: he was forced to meet the swift,
corrosive influences brought in from foreign lands by men who had
visited the ports of the world; and he must set his sails in order to
catch the new winds of fashion.

What were these winds, and what effect did they have upon the
architecture of the time?

Most of the influences that came by way of trade affected only the
accent of architecture; the language remained a homely vernacular. In
the middle of the eighteenth century China sent over wallpaper; and in
the Metropolitan Museum there is an American lacquered cabinet dated
as early as 1700, decorated with obscure little Chinese figures in
gilded gesso. “China” itself came in to take the place of pewter and
earthenware in the finer houses; while in the gardens of the great
manors, pavilions and pagodas, done more or less in the Chinese manner,
were fashionable. Even Thomas Jefferson, with his impeccably classical
taste, designed such a pavilion for Monticello before the Revolution.

This specific Chinese influence was part of that large, eclectic
Oriental influence of the eighteenth century. The cultural spirit that
produced Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes also led to the translation of
the Chinese and Persian and Sanskrit classics, and by a more direct
route brought home Turkish dressing-gowns, turbans, and slippers to
Boston merchants. In Copley’s painting of Nicholas Boylston, in 1767,
these Turkish ornaments rise comically against the suggestion of a
Corinthian pillar in the background; and this pillar recalls to us the
principal influence of the time--that of classic civilization. This
influence entered America first as a motif in decoration, and passed
out only after it had become a dominating motive in life.


II

The Renaissance was an orientation of the European mind towards the
forms of Roman and Greek civilization, and towards the meaning of
classical culture. On the latter side its impulse was plainly a
liberating one: it delivered the human soul from a cell of torments
in which there were no modulating interests or activities between the
base satisfactions of the temporal life and the beatitudes of heaven.
With the Renaissance the god-beast became, once again, a man. Moreover,
just when the Catholic culture of Christendom was breaking down under
the influence of heresy and skepticism, the classics brought to the
educated men of Europe a common theme which saved them from complete
intellectual vagrancy. The effect of classical civilization, on the
other hand, was not an unmixed good: for it served all too quickly
to stereotype in old forms a spirit which had been freshly reborn,
and it set up a servile principle in the arts which has in part been
responsible for the wreck of both taste and craftsmanship.

The first builders of the Renaissance, in Italy, were not primarily
architects; they were rather supreme artists in the minor crafts; and
their chief failing was, perhaps, that they wished to stamp with their
personal imprint all the thousand details of sculpture, painting,
and carving which had hitherto been left to the humble craftsman.
Presently, the technical knowledge of the outward treatment of a
building became a touchstone to success; and a literal understanding
of the products of antiquity took the place in lesser men of personal
inspiration. The result was that architecture became more and more
a thing of paper designs and exact archæological measurements; the
workman was condemned to carry out in a faithful, slavish way the
details which the architect himself had acquired in similar fashion.
So the architect ceased to be a master-builder working among comrades
of wide experience and travel: he became a Renaissance gentleman who
merely gave orders to his servants.

Victor Hugo said in Notre Dame that the printing-press destroyed
architecture, which had hitherto been the stone record of mankind. The
real misdemeanor of the printing-press, however, was not that it took
literary values away from architecture, but that it caused architecture
to derive its value from literature. With the Renaissance the great
modern distinction between the literate and the illiterate extends
even to building; the master mason who knew his stone and his workmen
and his tools and the tradition of his art gave way to the architect
who knew his Palladio and his Vignola and his Vitruvius. Architecture,
instead of striving to leave the imprint of a happy spirit on the
superficies of a building, became a mere matter of grammatical
accuracy and pronunciation; and the seventeenth-century architects who
revolted from this regime and created the baroque were at home only in
the pleasure gardens and theaters of princes. For the common run of
architects, particularly in the northern countries, the Five Orders
became as unchallengeable as the eighty-one rules of Latin syntax. To
build with a pointed arch was barbarous, to build with disregard for
formal symmetry was barbarous, to permit the common workman to carry
out his individual taste in carving was to risk vulgarity and pander to
an obsolete sense of democracy. The classics had, it is true, united
Europe anew in a catholic culture; but alas! it was only the leisured
upper classes who could fully take possession of the new kingdom of
the mind. The Five Orders remained firmly entrenched on one side, the
“lower orders” on the other.

Hereafter, architecture lives by the book. First it is Palladio and
Vignola; then it is Burlington and Chambers; then, after the middle
of the eighteenth century, the brothers Adam and Stuart’s Antiquities
of Athens. Simpler works with detailed prescriptions for building in
the fashionable mode made their way in the late seventeenth century
among the smaller fry of carpenters and builders; and they were widely
used in America, as a guide to taste and technique, right down to the
middle of the nineteenth century. It was by means of the book that
the architecture of the eighteenth century from St. Petersburg to
Philadelphia seemed cast by a single mind. We call the mode Georgian
because vast quantities of such building was done in England, as a
result of the general commercial prosperity of that country; but it
was common wherever European civilization had any fresh architectural
effort to make, and if we call this style “colonial” in America it is
not to mark any particular lapse or lack of distinction.

The Renaissance in architecture had reached England at about the time
of the Great Fire (1666), fully two generations after the Italian
influence had made its way into English literature; and it came to
America, as one might guess, about a generation later. It was left
for Alexander Pope, who himself was a dutiful Augustan, to sum up the
situation with classic precision to Lord Burlington, who had published
Palladio’s Antiquities of Rome:

  “You show us Rome was glorious, not profuse,
   And pompous buildings once were things of use.
   Yet shall, my lord, your just and noble rules
   Fill half the land with imitation fools;
   Who random drawings from your sheets shall take
   And of one beauty many blunders make.”

These lines were a warning and a prophecy. The warning was timely;
and the prophecy came true, except in those districts in which the
carpenter continued to ply his craft without the overlordship of the
architect.


III

The first effect of the Renaissance forms in America was not to
destroy the vernacular but to perfect it; for it provided the
carpenter-builder, whose distance from Europe kept him from profiting
by the spirited work of his forbears, with a series of ornamental
motifs. New England, under the influence of an idol-breaking
Puritanism, had been singularly poor in decoration, as I have already
observed: its modest architectural effects relied solely on mass,
color, and a nice disposition of parts. In its decorative aspects
medievalism had left but a trace in America: the carved grotesque
heads on the face of the Van Cortlandt Mansion in New York, and the
painted decorations in some of the older houses and barns among the
Pennsylvania Dutch pretty well complete the tally.

Classical motifs served to fill the blank in provincial architecture.
As long as the carpenter worked by himself, the classic influence
was confined to little details like the fanlights, the moldings, the
pillars of the portico, and so on. In the rural districts of New
England, from Maine to Connecticut, and in certain parts of New York
and New Jersey and Pennsylvania, the carpenter keeps on building in his
solid, traditional manner down to the time that the jig-saw overwhelms
a mechanically hypnotized age; and even through the jig-saw period
in the older regions, the proportions and the plan remained close to
tradition. The classical did not in fact supplant the vernacular until
the last vestiges of the guild and the village-community had passed
away, and the economic conditions appropriate to the Renaissance
culture had made their appearance.

The dwelling house slowly became more habitable during this period:
the skill in shipbuilding which every sheltered inlet gave evidence of
was carried back into the home, and in the paneling of the walls and
the general tidiness and compactness of the apartments, a shipshape
order comes more and more to prevail. The plastered ceiling makes its
appearance, and the papered wall; above all, white paint is introduced
on the inside and outside of the house.

Besides giving more light, this innovation surely indicates that
chimney flues had become more satisfactory. Paint was no doubt
introduced to keep the torrid summer sun from charring the exposed
clapboards; and white paint was used, despite the expense of white
lead, for the reason that it accorded with the chaste effect which was
inseparable in the eighteenth-century mind from classic precedent.

Indeed, the whiteness of our colonial architecture is an essential
characteristic; it dazzled Dickens on his first visit to America, and
made him think that all the houses had been built only yesterday. The
esthetic reason for delighting in these white colonial farmhouses is
simple: white and white alone fully reflects the surrounding lights;
white and white alone gives a pure blue or lavender shadow against
the sunlight. At dawn, a white house is pale pink and turquoise; at
high noon it is clear yellow and lavender-blue; in a ripe sunset it
is orange and purple; in short, except on a gray day it is anything
but white. These old white houses, if they seem a little sudden and
sharp in the landscape, are at least part of the sky: one finds them
stretched on a slight rise above the highroad like a seagull with
poised wings, or a cloud above the treetops. Were anything needed to
make visible the deterioration of American life which the nineteenth
century brought with it, the habit of painting both wood and brick gray
should perhaps be sufficient.


IV

If the architecture of the early eighteenth century in America is
a little prim and angular, if it never rises far above a sturdy
provincialism, it is not without its own kind of interest; and Faneuil
Hall, for example, is not the worst of Boston’s buildings, though it
is overshadowed by the great utilitarian hulks that line the streets
about it. By studying the classical forms at one remove, the builders
of the eighteenth century in America had the same kind of advantage
that Wren had in England. Wren’s “Renaissance” churches, with their
box-like naves and their series of superimposed orders for steeples,
had no parallel, so far as I am aware, in Italy, and certainly had
no likeness to anything that had been built in classic times: they
were the products of a playful and original fancy, like the mermaid.
Mere knowledge, mere imitation, would never have achieved Renaissance
architecture; it was the very imperfection of the knowledge and
discipleship that made it the appropriate shell of its age. Coming
to America in handbooks and prints, chastely rendered, the models of
antiquity were, down to the Revolution, followed just so far as they
conveniently served. Instead of curbing invention, they gave it a more
definite problem to work upon.

It was a happy accident that made the carpenter-builders and cabinet
makers of America see their China, their Paris, their Rome through a
distance, dimly. What those who admire the eighteenth century style
do not, perhaps, see is that an accident cannot be recovered. However
painstakingly we may cut the waistcoat, the stock, the knee-breeches
of an eighteenth-century costume, it is now only a fancy dress: its
“moment” in history is over. The same principle holds true for Georgian
or colonial architecture, even more than it does for that of the
seventeenth century; for one might, indeed, conceive of a breakdown
in the transportation system or the credit system which would force
a builder to rely for a while upon the products of his own region;
whereas, while our civilization remains intact there are a hundred
handbooks, measured drawings, and photographs which make a naïve
recovery of antiquity impossible.

Once we have genuinely appreciated the influence that created early
colonial architecture, we see that it is irrecoverable: what we call
a revival is really a second burial. All the king’s horses and all
the king’s men have been hauling and tugging vigorously during the
last fifty years to bring back the simple beauties and graces of the
colonial dwelling, and the collectors’ hunt for the products of the
Salem, Newburyport and Philadelphia cabinetmakers is a long and merry
one; but the only beneficent effect of this movement has been the
preservation of a handful of antiquities, which would otherwise have
been impiously torn down. What we have built in the colonial mode is
all very well in its way: unfortunately, it bears the same relation to
the work of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries that
the Woolworth Building bears to the cathedrals of the Middle Age, or
the patriotism of the National Security League to the principles of
Franklin and Jefferson. Photographic accuracy, neatly touched up--this
is its capital virtue, and plainly, it has precious little to do with a
living architecture. Like the ruined chapel in The Pirates of Penzance,
our modern colonial houses are often attached to ancestral estates that
were established--a year ago; and if their occupants are “descendants
by purchase,” what shall we say of their architects?




CHAPTER THREE THE CLASSICAL MYTH


I

The transformation of European society and its material shell that took
place during the period we call the Renaissance is associated with
the break-up of the town economy and its replacement by a mercantile
economy devoted to the advantage of the State. Along with this goes
the destruction of the village community, and the predominance
in social affairs of a landholding oligarchy who have thrown off
feudal responsibilities while they have retained most of the feudal
privileges, and a merchant class, buttressed by riches derived from
war, piracy, and sharp trade.

America reproduced in miniature the changes that were taking place in
Europe. Because of its isolation and the absence of an established
social order, it showed these changes without the blur and confusion
that attended them abroad.

It is sometimes a little difficult to tell whether the classical modes
of building were a result of these changes in society or, among other
things, an incentive to them; whether the classical frame fitted the
needs of the time, or whether men’s activities expanded to occupy the
idolum that had seized their imagination. At any rate, the notion that
the classical taste in architecture developed mainly through technical
interests in design will not hold; for the severely classical shell
arose only in regions where the social conditions had laid a foundation
for the classical myth.

The first development of the grand style in the American renaissance
was in the manors of Virginia and Maryland. It came originally through
an imitation of the country houses of England, and then, after the
Revolutionary War, it led to a direct adaptation of the Roman villa
and the Greek temple. One does not have to go very deep to fetch
up the obvious parallel between the land-monopoly and slavery that
prevailed in the American manors and the conditions that permitted the
Roman villa itself to assume its stately proportions; nor need one
dwell too long upon the natural subordination, in this regime, of the
carpenter-builder to the gentleman-architect. “In the town palaces
and churches,” as Mr. Fiske Kimball justly says, “there was a strong
contradiction between modern conditions and ancient forms, so that it
was only in the country that Palladio’s ideas of domestic architecture
could come to a clear and successful expression. These monuments, since
so much neglected, served in Palladio’s book expressly to represent the
‘Antients’ designs of country-houses....’”

At his death, Robert Carter, who had been Rector of the College,
Speaker of the Burgesses, President of the Council, Acting Governor of
Virginia, and Proprietor of the Northern Neck, was described in the
Gentleman’s Magazine of 1732 as the possessor of an estate of 300,000
acres of land, about 1,000 slaves, and ten thousand pounds. Pliny the
Younger might well have been proud of such an estate. On a substantial
basis like this, a Palladian mansion was possible; and up and down the
land, wherever the means justified the end, Palladian mansions were
built.

The really striking thing about the architecture of Manorial America
with its great dignity and its sometimes striking beauty of detail or
originality of design--as in the staircase at Berry Hill which creates
a flaring pattern like butterfly’s wings--the striking thing is the
fact that the work is not the product of a specialized education; it
is rather the outcome of a warm, loving, and above all intelligent
commerce with the past, in the days before Horseback Hall had become
as aimless and empty as Heartbreak House. Mr. Arthur T. Bolton, the
biographer of the brothers Adam, has exhibited letters from Robert
Adam’s patrons in England which mark their avid and precise interest
in classical forms; and without doubt a little digging would uncover
similar examples in America.

These educated eighteenth-century gentlemen, these contemporaries of
“Junius” and Gibbon, who had read Horace and Livy and Plutarch, had one
foot in their own age, and the other in the grave of Rome. In America,
Thomas Jefferson exemplified this whole culture at its best and gave it
a definite stamp: he combined in almost equal degrees the statesman,
the student, and the artist. Not merely did Jefferson design his own
Monticello; he executed a number of other houses for the surrounding
gentry--Shadwell, Edgehill, Farrington--to say nothing of the Virginia
State Capitol and the church and university at Charlottesville. It
was Jefferson who in America first gave a strict interpretation to
classicism; for he had nothing but contempt for the free, Georgian
vernacular which was making its way among those who regarded the
classical past as little more than a useful embellishment.

The contrast between the classical and the vernacular, between the
architecture of the plantation and the architecture of the village,
between the work of the craftsman, and the work of the gentleman
and the professional architect, became even more marked after the
Revolutionary War. As a result of that re-crystallization of American
society, the conditions of classical culture and classical civilization
were for a short time fused in the activities of the community, even
in the town. One may express the transformation in a crude way by
saying that the carpenter-builder had been content with a classical
finish; the architects of the early republic worked upon a classical
foundation. It was the Revolution itself, I believe, that turned the
classical taste into a myth which had the power to move men and mold
their actions.

The merchant who has spent his hours in the counting house and on the
quay cannot with the most lofty effort convert himself into a classical
hero. It is different with men who have spent long nights and days
wrangling in the State House, men who have ridden on horseback through
a campaign, men who have plotted like Catiline and denounced like
Cicero, men whose daily actions are governed with the fine resolution
of a Roman general or dictator. Unconsciously, such men want a stage
to set off and magnify their actions. King Alfred can perhaps remain a
king, though he stays in a cottage and minds the cakes on the griddle;
but most of us need a little scenery and ritual to confirm these high
convictions. If the tailors had not produced the frock-coat, Daniel
Webster would have had to invent one. The merchant wants his little
comforts and conveniences; at most, he desires the architect to
make his gains conspicuous; but the hero who has drawn his sword or
addressed an assembly wants elbow room for gestures. His parlor must
be big enough for a public meeting, his dining room for a banquet.
So it follows that whereas under pre-Revolutionary conventions even
civic buildings like Independence Hall in Philadelphia are built on
a domestic scale, the early republican architecture is marked by the
practice of building its domestic dwellings on a public scale. The fine
houses of the early republic all have an official appearance; almost
any house might be the White House.

Even when Dickens made his first visit to America, the classical
myth and the classical hero had not altogether disappeared: one has a
painful memory of the “mother of the modern Gracchi,” and one sees how
the republican hero had been vulgarized into a Jacksonian caricature
like General Cyrus Choke. For a whole generation the classical myth
held men in its thrall; the notion of returning to a pagan polity,
quaintly modified by deism, was a weapon of the radical forces in
both America and France. Jean Jacques himself preached the virtues of
Sparta and Rome in Le Contrat Social, as well as the state of nature
which he praised in Emile; and, in general, “radicalism” associated
itself with the worship of rule and reason, as opposed to the caprice,
the irrationality, the brute traditionalism of what the children of
that age then characterized as “Gothic superstition.” Almost within
his lifetime Washington became Divus Cæsar, and if a monument was not
built to him immediately, a city was named after him, as Alexandria had
been named after Alexander. Did not the very war-veterans become the
Society of the Cincinnati; did not the first pioneers on the westward
march sprinkle names like Utica and Ithaca and Syracuse over the Mohawk
trail; and did not a few ex-soldiers go back to their Tory neighbor’s
plow? As Rome and Greece embodied the political interests of the age,
so did classical architecture provide the appropriate shell. Even those
who were not vitally touched by the dominant interests of the period
were not immune to the fashion, once it had been set.


II

In New England, not unnaturally, the influence of the merchant
prevailed in architecture for a longer time, perhaps, than it did
elsewhere. Samuel McIntire, a carver of figureheads for ships and
moldings for cabins, provided an interior setting in the fashion of
Robert Adam, which enabled the merchant of Salem to live like a lord
in Berkeley Square; and Bulfinch, a merchant’s son, began by repairing
his father’s house, went on a grand tour of Europe, and returned to a
lucrative practice which included the first monument on Bunker Hill,
and the first theater opened in Boston. Under McIntire’s assiduous and
scholarly hands, the low-lying traditional farmhouse was converted
into the bulky square house with its hipped roof, its classical
pilasters, its frequently ill-proportioned cupola, its “captain’s
walk,” or “widow’s walk.” The merchant with his eye for magnitude
lords it over the farmer with his homely interest in the wind and the
weather; and so McIntire, the last great figure in a dying line of
craftsmen-artists, is compelled to make up by wealth of ornament a
beauty which the earlier provincial houses had achieved by adaptation
to the site without, and to subtlety of proportion within. The standard
of conspicuous waste, as Mr. Thorstein Veblen would call it, spread
from the manor to the city mansion.

Throughout the rest of the country, the pure classical myth created the
mold of American architecture, and buildings that were not informed by
this myth attempted some sort of mimicry, like the mansion Squire Jones
built for Marmaduke Temple in Cooper’s The Pioneers. There are churches
standing in New Jersey and New York, for example, built as late as
1850, which at a distance have the outlines and proportions of classic
buildings, either in the earlier style of Wren, or in the more severe
and stilted Greek manner favored by a later generation. It is only on
closer inspection that one discovers that the ornament has become an
illiterate reminiscence; that the windows are bare openings; that the
orders have lost their proportions, and that, unlike the wandering
mechanic, who “with a few soiled plates of English architecture” helped
Squire Jones, the builder could no longer pretend to talk learnedly “of
friezes, entablatures, and particularly of the composite order.” Alas
for a bookish architecture when the taste for reading disappears!


III

The dominant designs of the early republican period proceeded directly
or indirectly from such books as Stuart’s Antiquities of Athens, and
from such well-known examples of temple architecture in southern
Europe as the Maison Carrée at Nîmes. In one sense, there was a
certain fitness in adapting the Greek methods of building to America.
Originally, the Greek temple had probably been a wooden building. Its
columns were trees, its cornices exposed beams; and the fact that in
America one could again build mightily in wood may have furnished an
extra incentive to the erection of these colossal buildings. The fact
that the Greek mode in America was well under way before the first
example of it had appeared in Edinburgh, London, or Paris, shows
perhaps that time and place both favored its introduction on this side
of the Atlantic: for the availability of certain materials often, no
doubt, directs the imagination to certain forms.

On the whole, however, the Greek temple precedent was a bad one. For
one thing, since the Greek _cella_ had no source of light except the
doorway, it was necessary to introduce modifications in the elevation,
and to break up the interior; and it was only in the South that the
vast shadowed retreats formed by porches and second-story balconies
proved a happy adaptation to the climate. Again: Greek architecture
was an architecture of exteriors, designed for people who spent the
greater part of the year out of doors. With no temple ritual comparable
to the services of the church or cathedral, the Greeks lavished their
attention upon externals, and as a great admirer of the Greeks, Sir
Reginald Blomfield well says, “may have been more successful with the
outside of their buildings than with the inside.” To fail with the
interior in a northern climate is to fail with the essentials of a
habitation; and these vast rooms, for all their ornament, too often
remained bleak.

Even on the esthetic side, the Greek style of building was not a
full-blown success. With all their strict arrangement of the classic
orders, with all their nice proportions, the muted white exteriors
resembled a genuine Greek temple in the way that a sepia photograph
would represent a sunrise--the warm tones, the colors, the dancing
procession of sculptures were absent; it was a thinned and watered
Greece that they called to mind. Indeed, the disciples of the Age of
Reason and white perukes would have been horrified, I have no doubt,
at the “barbarism” of the original Greek temples, as they would
doubtless also have been at the meanness of the dwellings in which
Pericles or Thucydides must have lived. Once the temple-house ceased
to be a stage upon which the myth of classicism could be enacted, it
ceased also to be a home. For who wishes to live in a temple? That is
a spiritual exercise we do not demand even of a priest. Small wonder
that the temple lingered longest in the South, where, down to the Civil
War, gangs of slaves supported the dignity of the masters and a large
household diminished the chilly sense of solitude.

It was in public architecture that the early republic succeeded best,
and it was here that its influence lingered longest, for down to 1840
well-designed buildings in the classic mode, like the Sub-Treasury
building in New York, were still put up. The work of McComb in New
York, Hoadley in Connecticut, Latrobe in Pennsylvania and Maryland, to
mention only a few of the leading architects, represents the high-water
mark of professional design in America; and the fact that in spite
of the many hands that worked upon it the Capitol at Washington is
still a fairly coherent structure is a witness to the strength of
their tradition. For all its minor felicities, however, we must not
make the mistake of the modern revivalists, like Mr. Fiske Kimball,
who urge the acceptance of the classic tradition in America as a
foundation for a general modern style. Form and function are too far
divorced in the classic mode to permit the growth of an architecture
which will proceed on all fours in houses and public buildings, and
factories and barns; moreover, there are too many new structures
in the modern world which the builders of Rome or the Renaissance
have not even dimly anticipated. In medieval building the town hall
is a different sort of building from the cathedral: using the same
elements, perhaps, it nevertheless contrives an altogether different
effect. In the architecture of the early republic, on the other hand,
the treasury building might be a church, and the church might be a
mansion, for any external differentiation one can observe--in fact, the
only ecclesiastical feeling that goes with the churches of the time
is a cold deism, or an equally cold Protestant faith which has lost
entirely the memories and associations of the intervening centuries.
This sort of architecture achieves order and dignity, not by composing
differences, but by canceling them. Its standards do not inhere in
the building, but are laid on outside of it. When the purpose of the
structure happens to conform to the style, the result may be admirable
in every way. When it does not happen to conform the result is tedious
and banal; and, to tell the truth, a great deal of the architecture of
the early republic is tedious and banal.


IV

One further effect of the classic mode has still to be noted: the
introduction of formal city design, by the French engineer, Major
L’Enfant, in the laying out of Washington. Stirred by the memory of
the grand design of Paris under Louis XIV, with its radiating avenues
that cut through the city in the way that riding lanes cut through the
hunting forest, L’Enfant sought to superimpose a dignified pattern
upon the rectangular plan provided by the commissioners of Washington.
By putting the major public buildings in key positions, by providing
for a proper physical relation between the various departments of the
government, by planning spacious avenues of approach, culminating in
squares, triangles, and round-points, Major L’Enfant gave great dignity
to the new capital city, and even though in the years that followed his
plan was often ignored and overridden, it still maintained a monumental
framework for the administrative buildings of the American State.

Unfortunately, if Washington has the coherence of a formal plan, it
also has its abstractness: contrived to set off and serve the buildings
of the government, it exercised no control over domestic building, over
business, over the manifold economic functions of the developing city.
The framework was excellent, if cities could live by government alone.
By laying too much stress on formal order, the exponents of classic
taste paved the way for the all too formal order of the gridiron plan,
and since the gridiron development was suited to hasty commercial
exploitation, while the mode of Washington was not, it was in this mold
that the architecture of the nineteenth century was cast.

Within a short while after its introduction in New York in 1811 the
effects of the rectangular streets and rectangular lots became evident;
whereas the prints of New York before 1825 show a constant variety in
the elevation and layout of houses, those after this date resemble more
and more standardized boxes. Long monotonous streets that terminated
nowhere, filled by rows of monotonous houses--this was the net
contribution of the formal plan. Classical taste was not responsible
for these enormities--but on the whole it did nothing to check them,
and since the thrifty merchants of New York could not understand
L’Enfant’s plan for Washington, they seized upon that part of it which
was intelligible: its regularity, its appearance of order.

With the new forces that were at work on the American scene, with
the disintegration of classical culture under the combined influence
of pioneer enterprise, mechanical invention, overseas commerce,
and the almost religious cult of utilitarianism, all this was
indeed inevitable. What happened to the proud, Roman-patterned
republic of 1789 is a matter of common knowledge. Benjamin Latrobe,
the British architect who contributed so much to the Capitol at
Washington--including a new order of corn stalks and tobacco
leaves--was a witness to the disintegration of the age and the
dissolution of its world of ideas; and there is a familiar ring to his
commentary upon it:

  “I remember [he says in his autobiography] the time when I was over
  head and ears in love with Man in a State of Nature.... Social
  Compacts were my hobbies; the American Revolution--I ask its pardon,
  for it deserves better company--was a sort of dream of the Golden
  Age; and the French Revolution was the Golden Age itself. I should
  be ashamed to confess all this if I had not a thousand companions
  in my kaleidoscopic amusement, and those generally men of ardent,
  benevolent, and well-informed minds and excellent hearts. Alas!
  experience has destroyed the illusion, the kaleidoscope is broken,
  and all the tinsel of scenery that glittered so delightfully is
  translated and turned to raggedness. A dozen years’ residence at the
  Republican court of Washington had affected wonderfully the advance
  of riper years.”

Major L’Enfant’s plan for Washington was the last gasp, it seems to me,
of the classical order; Jefferson’s University of Virginia was perhaps
its most perfect consummation, for Jefferson had planned for the life
of the institution as well as for the shell which was to contain it.
Before the nineteenth century was long under way men’s minds ceased
to move freely within the classical idolum; and by 1860 the mood
was obliterated and a large part of the work had been submerged or
destroyed. The final ironic commentary upon the dignity and austerity
of the earlier temples is illustrated in a house in Kennebunkport,
Maine; for there the serene, pillared façade is broken up in the rear
by a later, and alas! a necessary addition: a two-story bow-window
projected far enough beyond the eaves to give a little light to the
occupants of the rooms!

In sum, there was a pathetic incompatibility in this architecture
between need and achievement, between pretensions and matter-of-fact--a
rigid opposition to common sense that a vernacular, however playful,
would never countenance. These temples were built with the marmoreal
gesture of eternity; they satisfied the desire and fashion of the
moment; and today their ghosts parade before us, brave but incredible.




CHAPTER FOUR THE DIASPORA OF THE PIONEER


I

From the standpoint of architecture, the early part of the nineteenth
century was a period of disintegration. The gap between sheer utility
and art, which the Renaissance had emphasized, was widened with the
coming of machinery. That part of architecture which was touched by
industrialism became crude beyond belief: the new mills and factories
were usually packing boxes, lacking in light and ventilation, and the
homes of the factory workers, when they were not the emptied houses
of merchants and tradesmen, made to serve a dozen families instead of
the original one, were little more than covered pens, as crowded as
a cattle market. At the same time that the old forms were undermined
by the new methods of mechanical production, a sentimental longing to
retain those forms, just because they were old, seized men’s minds;
and so industrialism and romanticism divided the field of architecture
between them.

It was no accident that caused romanticism and industrialism to
appear at the same time. They were rather the two faces of the new
civilization, one looking towards the past, and the other towards
the future; one glorifying the new, the other clinging to the old;
industrialism intent on increasing the physical means of subsistence,
romanticism living in a sickly fashion on the hollow glamour of the
past. The age not merely presented these two aspects; it sought to
enjoy each of them. Where industrialism took root, the traditions
of architecture were disregarded; where romanticism flourished, on
the other hand, in the mansions, public buildings, and churches,
architecture became capricious and absurd, and it returned to a past
that had never existed. Against the gross callousness which a Bounderby
exhibited toward beauty and amenity, there was only the bland piety of
a Pecksniff.

The dream that is dying and the dream that is coming to birth do not
stand in sequence, but mingle as do the images in a dissolving view;
and during the very years that the architecture of the Renaissance,
both in Europe and America, achieved new heights of formal design, the
first factories were being planted in Staffordshire and Yorkshire,
the Duke of Bridgewater built his famous canal, and Horace Walpole
designed his “Gothic” mansion on Strawberry Hill. The coincidence of
industrialism and romanticism is just as emphatic in America as in
England; and it is not without historic justice that the architect who
in 1807 designed the chapel of St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore, after
the Gothic fashion, successfully introduced a steam pumping system in
Philadelphia’s waterworks. While the industrial buildings of the period
represented nothing but a lapse from the current vernacular, due to
haste and insufficient resources, romantic architecture was a positive
influence; and it will perhaps best serve our purpose to examine the
romantic heritage in its pristine form, rather than in the work of
disciples like Latrobe, whose American practice is dated about two
generations later.

The author of The Castle of Otranto had a perverse and wayward
interest in the past; and the spirit he exhibited in both his novel
and his country home was typical of the romantic attitude everywhere.
What attracted Walpole to the Gothic style was little more than the
phosphorescence of decay: he summoned up the ghosts of the Middle
Ages but not the guilds; and instead of admiring the soundness of
medieval masonry, those who followed directly in his path were
affected rather by the spectacle of its dilapidation, so that the
production of authentic ruins became one of the chief efforts of the
eighteenth-century landscape gardener.

It is not a great step from building a ruin to building a mansion that
is little better than a ruin. While Walpole defended Strawberry Hill
by saying he did not aim to make his house so Gothic as to exclude
convenience, it happened again and again that the picturesque was the
enemy of simple honesty and necessity; and just as Walpole himself
in his refectory used wall paper that imitated stucco, so did other
owners and builders use plaster and hangings and wall paper and carpet
to cover up defects of construction. Towers that no one ever climbed,
turrets that no one could enter, and battlements that no one rose to
defend, took the place of the classic orders. The drawbridge-and-moat
that embellished Mr. Wemmick’s villa in Great Expectations was not a
wild conceit of Dickens but a relic of Walpole and his successors.

As a disguise for mean or thoughtless workmanship, the application of
antique “style” was the romantic contribution to architecture; and
it served very handily during the period of speculative building and
selling that accompanied the growth of the new industrial towns. Even
where style did not conceal commercial disingenuousness, it covered
up a poverty of imagination in handling the elements of a building.
Gothic touches about doors and the exterior of windows, and a heap
of bric-a-brac and curios on the inside, softened the gauntness and
bareness of this architecture, or rather, distracted attention from
them. Curiosity was the dominant mood of the time, acquisitiveness its
principal impulse, and comfort its end. Many good things doubtless came
out of this situation; but architecture was not one of them.


II

Modern industrialism began to take root in America after the War of
Independence, and its effect was twofold: it started up new villages
which centered about the waterfall or the iron mine and had scarcely
any other concern than industry; at the same time, by cutting canals
which tapped the interior, it drew life away from the smaller
provincial ports and concentrated commerce and population in great
towns like Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. In New England, as in
the English Cotswolds from Whitney to Chalford, the mechanical regime
was humanized by the presence of an older civilization, and the first
generation of factory hands were farmers’ lads and lasses who neither
lost nor endangered their independence; but where the factory depended
upon paupers or immigrants, as it did in the big towns and in some
of the unsettled parts of the country, the community relapsed into a
barbarism which affected the masters as well as the hands. There was
more than a difference in literary taste between the Corinths and
Bethels named by an earlier generation and the Mechanicsvilles that
followed them.

The chief watchwords of the time were progress and expansion. The
first belonged to the pioneer in industry who opened up new areas for
mechanical invention and applied science; the second, to the land
pioneer; and between these two resourceful types the old ways, were
they good or bad, were scrapped, and the new ways, were they good or
bad, were adopted. Both land pioneering and industrial pioneering were
essentially subdivisions of one occupation, mining; and, following the
clue opened by Messrs. Geddes and Branford, one may say with Professor
Adshead that the nineteenth century witnessed “the great attack of the
miner on the peasant.”

Mechanical industry owes its great development and progress to the work
of the woodman and the miner: the first type of worker takes the bent
sapling and develops the lathe or “bodger” which is still to be found
in the remote parts of the Chiltern Hills in England, while from the
mine itself not merely comes the steam engine, first used for pumping
out water, but likewise the railway. The perpetual débris amid which
the miner lives forms a capital contrast with the ordered culture, the
careful weeding and cutting, of field and orchard: almost any sort of
habitation is an advance upon the squalor of the pithead; and it is
not a mere chance that the era devoted to mining and all its accessory
manufactures was throughout the western world the dingiest and dirtiest
that has yet befouled the earth. Choked by his own débris, or stirred
by the exhaustion of minerals, the miner’s community runs down--and he
departs.

The name pioneer has a romantic color; but in America the land pioneer
mined the forests and the soil, and the industry pioneer almost as
ruthlessly mined the human resources, and when the pay-dirt got sallow
and thin, they both moved on. Longfellow’s allusion to the “bivouac of
life” unconsciously points to the prevailing temper; for even those who
remained in the older American centers were affected by the pioneer’s
malaise and unsettlement; and they behaved as if at any moment they
might be called to the colors and sent westward.

Beside the vivid promises of Mechanical Progress and Manifest Destiny
the realities of an ordered society thinned into a pale vapor. In many
little communities Mechanical Societies were formed for the propagation
of the utilitarian faith: industrialism with its ascetic ritual of
unsparing work, its practice of thrift, its renunciation of the arts,
gathered to itself the religious zeal of Protestantism. The erection
of factories, the digging of canals, the location of furnaces, the
building of roads, the devising of inventions, not merely exhausted a
great part of the available capital; even more, it occupied the energy
and imagination of the more vigorous spirits. Two generations before,
Thomas Jefferson could lay out and develop the estate of Monticello;
now, with many of Jefferson’s capacities, Poe could only dream about
the fantastic Domain of Arnheim. The society around Poe had no more
use for an architectural imagination than the Puritans had for
decorative images; the smoke of the factory-chimney was incense, the
scars on the landscape were as the lacerations of a saint, and the mere
multiplication of gaunt sheds and barracks was a sign of progress, and
therefore an earnest of perfection.

Did ever so many elements of disintegration come together at one time
and place before? The absence of tradition and example raised enough
difficulties in Birmingham and Manchester and Lyons and Essen; but in
America it was accentuated by the restless march of those pioneers who,
in the words of a contemporary economist, “leave laws, education and
the arts, all the essential elements of civilization, behind them.”
What place could architecture fill in these squatter communities? It
could diminish the hardships of living; it could grease the channels of
gain; and it could demolish or “improve” so much of the old as it could
not understand, as Bulfinch’s Court House in Newburyport was improved,
and as many a fine city residence was swept away under the tide of
traffic.

These were the days when the log cabin flourished; but it did not
remain long enough in place to become the well-wrought and decorative
piece of rustic architecture that the better sort of peasant hut, done
with the same materials, became in Russia. A genuine architectural
development might have led from a crude log cabin to a finished one,
from a bare cabin to an enriched and garnished one, and so, perhaps,
in the course of a century or so, to a fine country architecture and
a great native art of wood carving comparable to that of the Russian
sculptors today. In America, however, the pioneer jumped baldly from
log cabin to White House, or its genteel and scroll-sawed equivalent;
and the arts inherent in good building never had a chance to develop.
With the animus of the miner in back of everything the pioneer
attempted, the pioneer’s architecture was all false-work and scantling.


III

The first contribution to the pioneer’s comfort was Franklin’s
ingenious stove (1745). After that came a number of material
appliances. Central heating gave the American house a Roman standard of
comfort, the astral-oil lamp captivated Edgar Poe; and cooking stoves,
gas-lighting, permanent bathtubs, and water-closets made their way
into the better sort of house in the Eastern cities before the middle
of the nineteenth century. In the development of the city itself, the
gridiron plan was added to the list of labor-saving devices. Although
the gridiron plan had the same relation to natural conditions and
fundamental social needs as a paper constitution has to the living
customs of a people, the simplicity of the gridiron plan won the heart
of the pioneer. Its rectangular blocks formed parcels of land which he
could sell by the front foot and gamble with as easily as if he were
playing cards, and deeds of transfer could be drawn up hastily with the
same formula for each plot; moreover, the least competent surveyor,
without thought or knowledge, could project the growth of New Eden’s
streets and avenues into an interminable future. In nineteenth-century
city planning the engineer was the willing servant of the land
monopolist; and he provided a frame for the architect--a frame in which
we still struggle today--where site-value counted for everything, and
sight-value was not even an afterthought.

In street layout and land subdivision no attention was paid to the
final use to which the land would be put; but the most meticulous
efforts were made to safeguard its immediate use, namely,
land-speculation. In order to further this use hills were graded,
swamps and ponds filled, and streets laid out before these expenditures
could be borne by the people who, in the end, were to profit by
or suffer from them. It was no wonder that the newer towns like
Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Chicago by the middle of the century had
forfeited to the gambler in real estate, to pay the cost of street
improvements, generous tracts of land which the original planners had
set aside as civic centers. Planned by men who still retained some of
the civic vision of the early republic, the commercial city speedily
drifted into the hands of people who had no more civic scruples than
the keeper of a lottery.

The gridiron plan had one other defect which was accounted a virtue by
the pioneer, and still is shared by those who have not profited by the
intervening century’s experience. With its avenues that encompassed
swamps and wildernesses, with its future growth forecast for at least
a hundred years, the complete city plan captivated the imagination.
Scarcely any American town was so mean that it did not attempt to
grow faster than its neighbor, faster perhaps than New York. Only by
the accumulation of more and more people could its colossal city
plan and its inflated land values be realized. If the older cities of
the seaboard were limited in their attempts to become metropolises
by the fact that their downtown sections were originally laid out
for villages, the villages of the middle west labored under just
the opposite handicap; they had frequently acquired the framework
of a metropolis before they had passed out of the physical state of
a village. The gridiron plan was a sort of hand-me-down which the
juvenile city was supposed to grow into and fill. That a city had
any other purpose than to attract trade, to increase land values,
and to grow is something that, if it uneasily entered the mind of an
occasional Whitman, never exercised any hold upon the minds of the
majority of our countrymen. For them, the place where the great city
stands _is_ the place of stretched wharves, and markets, and ships
bringing goods from the ends of the earth; that, and nothing else.


IV

With business booming and vanishing, with people coming and going, with
land continually changing hands, what encouragement was there for the
stable achievements of architecture? In vain does the architect antic
and grimace to conceal his despair; his business is to put on a front.
If he is not a Pecksniff at heart, he will at any rate have to serve
Mr. Veneering. A guide book of 1826 refers to a Masonic Hall “somewhat
in the Gothic style”; and we can characterize all the buildings of the
period by saying that they were “somewhat” like architecture--a little
more than scenery, a little less than solids.

For a while it seemed as if the Gothic revival might give the
prevailing cast to nineteenth-century building; for if this mode was
adopted at first because it was picturesque and historic it was later
reënforced by the conviction that it was a natural and scientific mode
of construction, that it stood for growth and function, as against the
arbitrary character of the classic work. The symbols of the organic
world were rife in the thought of this period, for in the sphere of
thought biology was supplanting physics, and Gothic architecture was
supposed peculiarly to be in the line of growth, while that of the
Renaissance cut across and, heretically, denied the principle of
organic development. Unfortunately the process of disintegration
had gone so far that no one current of thought had the power to
dominate; and the Gothic style proved to be only the first of a number
of discordant influences, derived from industry, from history, from
archæology.

Indeed, the chief sign that bears witness to the disintegration of
architecture during the formative days of the pioneer is eclecticism;
but there is still another--the attempt to justify the industrial
process by using solely the materials it had created in abundance. In
discussing the plans for the Smithsonian Institution, Robert Dale Owen
observed that “of late years a rival material, from the mine, seems
encroaching on these [stone, clay, wood] and the next generation may
see, arising on our continent, villages, or it may be cities, of iron.”

What Owen’s generation actually did see, apart from sheet-iron façades
and zinc cornices, was the Crystal Palace, which was built in New
York in 1853 in imitation of London’s exhibition hall of 1850. Ruskin
described the original Crystal Palace, with sardonic justice, as a
magnified conservatory; and that is about all that can be said for
either building. As exercises in technique they doubtless taught
many lessons to the iron masters and engineers; but they had scarcely
anything to contribute to architecture. A later generation built the
train sheds for their smoky railways on this pattern; but the precedent
lingers today chiefly in subway kiosks and window-fronts, and even here
it has created no fresh forms for itself--unless the blank expanse of
a plate-glass window framed in metallic grilles can be called a fresh
form.

The growth of eclecticism, on the other hand, had by the middle of the
century given the American city the aspect of a museum and the American
countryside a touch of the picture-book. Washington Irving’s Sunnyside
and the first Smithsonian building were in the predominant Gothic mode;
but Poe described the mansion of a not altogether imaginary Arnheim as
semi-Gothic, semi-Saracenic; and the old Tombs prison in New York got
its name from the Egyptian character of its façade. Who can doubt that
the design for a _Byzantine_ cottage, shown in The American Cottage
Builder (1854), was somewhere carried out?

Nettled by the criticism that America was not Europe, the pioneer
determined to bring Europe to his doors. Relatively few American
architects during the period, however, had been abroad, and still
fewer had been there to any purpose; even men of culture and
imagination like Hawthorne and Emerson were not at home in the physical
environment of Europe, however intimate they were with its mind. The
buildings that were erected under the inspiration of European tours
only accentuated the barbarism of the American scene and the poverty of
the architect’s imagination.

A good part of our architecture today still exhibits the parvenu’s
uneasiness, and is by turns French, Italian, or more or less obsolete
English; but we do not, perhaps, realize with what a difference;
for photography and archæological research now make it possible to
produce buildings which have all the virtues of the original except
originality, whereas the earlier, illiterate development of foreign
examples, rehearsed in memory, resulted in a conglomerate form which
resembled nothing so much, perhaps, as P. T. Barnum’s mermaid.

If the Crystal Palace represents the extreme of industrial art, Colonel
Colt’s Armsmear represents the opposite--untutored romanticism.
Armsmear was built near Hartford, between 1855 and 1862. A writer in
the Art Journal for 1876 calls this mansion a “characteristic type
of the unique.” It was a “long, grand, impressive, contradictory,
beautiful, strange thing.... An Italian villa in stone, massive,
noble, refined, yet not carrying out any decided principles of
architecture, it is like the mind of its originator, bold and unusual
in its combinations.... There is no doubt it is a little Turkish among
other things, on one side it has domes, pinnacles, and light, lavish
ornamentation, such as Oriental taste delights in.... Yet, although
the villa is Italian and cosmopolitan, the feeling is English. It is
an English home in its substantiality, its home-like and comfortable
aspects.”

It is, alas! impossible to illustrate in these pages this remarkable
specimen of American architecture; but in a lecture on the Present
and Future Prospects of Chicago (1846), I have discovered its exact
literary equivalent, and it will sum up the crudity and cultural
wistfulness of the period perhaps better than any overt description:

  “I thank you [apologizes the lecturer] for the patience you have
  manifested on this occasion, and promise never more to offend in like
  manner, so long. I have now, as Cowper observes--

    ‘Roved for fruit,
     Roved far, and gathered much....’

  “And can, I think with Scott, surely say that--

    ‘To his promise just
     Vich-Alpine has discharged his trust.’

  “I propose now, gentlemen, to leave you at Carlangtoghford,

    ‘And thou must keep thee with thy sword.’

  “Let me say to you on this occasion, as Campbell does on another:

    ‘Wave, Munich! all your banners wave!
     And charge with all your chivalry.’

  “And should you in the contest fall, remember with old Homer--

    ‘Such honours Ilion to her hero paid,
     And peaceful slept the mighty Hector’s shade.’

  “Allow me now to close in one of Scott’s beautiful strains:

    ‘Charge, Chester, charge! On, Stanley, on!
     Were the last words of Marmion.’”

_That_ was American architecture between 1820 and the Civil War--a
collection of tags, thrown at random against a building. Architectural
forms were brought together by a mere juxtaposition of materials,
held in place by neither imagination nor logic. There are a number
of honorable exceptions to this rule, for architects like Renwick,
who designed St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and Upjohn, who built Trinity
Church, had a more sincere understanding of the conventional task; and
by any standard of esthetic decency the old Gothic building of New
York University, on Washington Square, was a far finer structure than
the bulky office building that has taken its place. Nevertheless, this
saving remnant does not alter the character of the great mass of work,
any more than the occasionally excellent cast-iron balconies, brought
over from the London of the Regency, alter the depressing character
of the great mass of domestic building. In elevation and interior
treatment, these ante-bellum buildings were all what-nots. Souvenirs
of architecture, their forms dimly recall the monuments of the past
without in any sense taking their place.

To tell the truth, a pall had fallen over the industrial city:
contemporary writers in the ’forties and ’fifties speak of the
filth and smoke, and without doubt the chocolate brownstone front
was introduced as a measure of protective coloration. In this dingy
environment, men turned to nature as a refuge against the soiled
and bedraggled works of man’s creation; and as the creeping factory
and railroad train removed Nature farther from their doors, the park
was introduced as a more convenient means of escape. The congested
capitals of Europe had already learnt this lesson; traveled Americans,
like William Cullen Bryant, brought it home; and Central Park, planned
in 1853, was the first of the great landscape parks to serve as a
people’s pleasance. Conceived in contrast to the deflowered landscape
and the muddled city, the park alone re-created the traditions of
civilization--of man naturalized, and therefore at home, of nature
humanized, and therefore enriched. And even today our parks are what
our cities should be, and are not.

By 1860 the halcyon day of American civilization was over; the spirit
had lingered in letters and scholarship, in the work of Parkman and
Motley and Emerson and Melville and Thoreau, but the sun had already
sunk below the horizon, and what seemed a promise was in reality an
afterglow. By the time the Civil War came, architecture had recorded
faithfully the social transformation; it was sullen, grim, gauche,
unstable. While in almost every age architecture has an independent
value to the spirit, so that we can rejoice in Chartres or Winchester
even though we have abandoned the Roman faith, in the early industrial
period architecture is reduced to a symptom. Romanticism had not
restored the past, nor had industrialism made the future more welcome.
Architecture wandered between two worlds, “one dead, the other
powerless to be born.”




CHAPTER FIVE THE DEFEAT OF ROMANTICISM


I

Between 1860 and 1890, some of the forces that were latent in
industrialism were realized in American architecture. Where the first
pioneers had fared timidly, hampered by insufficient resources, the
generation that had been stimulated by war industries and profiteering,
by the discovery of petroleum and natural gas, by the spanning of the
American continent and by cable communication with Europe, rioted over
its new-found wealth.

“The Song of the Broad-Ax” still faintly lingered on the Pacific
slopes; but the land pioneer was rapidly giving way to the pioneer
in industry; and for perhaps the first time during the century, the
surplus of capital outran the immediate demand for new plant and
equipment. The Iron Age reached its peak of achievement in a series
of great bridges, beginning with the Eads Bridge at St. Louis; and
romanticism made a last stand. It will pay us, perhaps, to take one
last look at the romantic effort, in order to see how impossible and
hopeless was the task it set out to perform.

In England, the romantic movement in architecture had made the return
to the Middle Ages a definite symbol of social reform: in Ruskin’s mind
it was associated with the restoration of a medieval type of polity,
something like a reformed manor, while with Morris it meant cutting
loose from the machine and returning to the meticulous handicraft of
the town-guilds. In America, the romantic movement lacked these social
and economic implications; and while it is not unfair to say that the
literary expression of English romanticism was on the whole much better
than the architecture, in the proportion that The Stones of Venice was
better than the Ashmolean Museum or the Albert Memorial, the reverse is
true on this side of the Atlantic.

Inarticulate as H. H. Richardson, the chief exponent of American
romanticism, was, it seemed for a while as if he might breast the
tide of mechanical industry and create for a good part of the scene a
sense of stability and harmony which it had all too plainly lacked. In
relation to his age, however, Richardson was in the biological sense a
“sport”; surrounded by jerry-builders, who had degraded the craft of
building, and engineers who ignored it, he was perhaps the last of the
great medieval line of master-masons.

Richardson began his career in America directly after the Civil War.
Almost the first of the new generation of Americans to be trained by
the Ecole des Beaux Arts, he brought back to America none of those
atrocious adaptations of the French Renaissance like the New York,
Philadelphia, and Boston Post Offices. On the contrary, he had come
under the influence of Viollet-le-Duc; and for about ten years he
struggled with incongruous forms and materials in the anomalous manner
known as Free Gothic. The end of this period of experiment came in
1872, when he received the commission for Trinity Church in Boston; and
although it was not until ten years later that he saw any Romanesque
buildings other than in photographs--for he had not traveled during
his student-years in Paris--it was in this sturdy mode that he cast
his best work. Richardson was not a decorator, but a builder: in going
back to Romanesque precedent, with its round arches and massive stone
members, he was following out a dictum of Viollet-le-Duc’s: “only
primitive sources supply the energy for a long career.” Turning away
from “applied Gothic,” Richardson started to build from the bottom
up. So far had the art of masonry disappeared that in Trinity Church
Richardson sometimes introduced struts and girders without any attempt
to assimilate them in the composition; but as far as any single man
could absorb and live with a vanished tradition, Richardson did.

The proof of Richardson’s genius as a builder lies in the difference
between the accepted drawings for Trinity Church and the finished
building. His ideas altered with the progress of the work, and in
almost every case the building itself is a vast improvement over the
paper design. Moreover, in his capacity as master-mason, Richardson
trained an able corps of craftsmen; and so pervasive was his influence
that one still finds on houses Richardson never saw, the touches of
delicate, leafy stone-carving he had introduced. With carving and
sculpture, the other arts entered, and by his fine designs and exacting
standards of work, Richardson elevated the position of the minor
crafts, at the same time that he turned over unreservedly to men like
John La Farge and Augustus St. Gaudens the major elements of decoration.

Probably most people who know Richardson’s name vaguely associate
him with ecclesiastical work; but Richardson’s brand of romanticism
was a genuine attempt to embrace the age, and in his long list of
public works there are but five churches. If the Pittsburgh Court
House and Trinity Church stand out as the hugest of his architectural
conceptions, it is the smaller buildings that test the skill and
imagination of the master, and the public libraries at North Easton,
Malden, and Quincy, Mass., and some of the little railway stations
in Massachusetts stand on an equally high level. Richardson pitted
his own single powers against the barbarism of the Gilded Age; but,
unlike his contemporaries in England, he did not turn his back upon
the excellences of industrialism. “The things I want most to design,”
he said to his biographer, “are a grain-elevator and the interior of a
great river-steamboat.”

In short, Richardson sought to dominate his age. So nearly did he
succeed that in a symposium on the ten finest buildings in America,
conducted by an architectural journal in the ’eighties, Richardson
was given five. This was no easy victory, and, to tell the truth,
it was only a partial one. The case of the State Capitol at Albany,
which Richardson and Eidlitz took in hand in 1878, after five
million dollars had been squandered on it in the course of ten years’
misconstruction, scarcely caricatures the conditions under which the
arts struggled to exist. Begun in the style of the Roman Renaissance,
the building under Richardson’s impetuous touch began to take on
Romanesque proportions, only to be legislated back into Renaissance by
the offended lawgivers!

William Morris Hunt, then at the height of his powers, was commissioned
to paint two large mural compositions for the assembly chamber of
this blessed building. So much time had been spent in mismanaging the
structure that Hunt was given only two months to transfer his cartouche
to the panels; but he worked heroically, and, as one of his biographers
says, the work was a great triumph. Great, perhaps--but temporary!
“The building had fallen into the hands of a political ring, and the
poor construction was revealed in the leaking of the massive roof and
the settling of the whole structure. Before ten years had passed,
great portions of Hunt’s paintings flaked off, and what remained was
walled up behind the rebuilding necessary to avert utter ruin.” In a
period like this, Richardson’s comparative success takes on heroic
proportions.


II

With the little eddies of eclecticism, with the rage for the Mansard
roof, or the introduction of German Gothic, and, a little later, the
taste for Queen Anne domesticity, there is scarcely any need to deal;
they represented only the dispersion of taste and the collapse of
judgment which marked the Gilded Age.

Up to the time of the Chicago World’s Fair, Richardson had imitators,
and they were not always mean ones. L. H. Buffington, in Minneapolis,
had to his credit a number of buildings which would not, perhaps,
have dishonored the master himself; but, as so often happens, the
tags in Richardson’s work were easier to imitate than his spirit
and inventiveness; and the chief marks of the style he created are
the all-too-solid courses of rough stone, the round arch, the squat
columns, and the contrasts in color between the light granite and the
dark sandstone or serpentine. Mr. Montgomery Schuyler, an excellent
architectural critic, once said, not without reason, that Richardson’s
houses were not defensible except in a military sense; but one is
tempted to read into these ponderous forms partly the architect’s
unconscious desire to combat the infirmity and jerry-building of his
lower contemporaries, and partly his patron’s anxiety to have a seat of
refuge against the uneasy proletariat. A new feudalism was entrenching
itself behind the stockades of Homestead and the other steel-towns
of the Pittsburgh district. Here was a mode of building, solid,
formidable, at times almost brutal, that served the esthetic needs of
the barons of coal and steel almost as well as the classic met those
heroes who had survived the War of Independence.

I have emphasized what was strong and fine in Richardson’s work in
order to show how free it was from the minor faults of romanticism; and
yet it reckoned without its host, and Richardson, alas! left scarcely
a trace upon the period that followed. Romanticism was welcomed when
it built churches; tolerated when it built libraries; petted when it
built fine houses; but it could not go much farther. Richardson was a
mason, and masonry was being driven out by steel; he was an original
artist, and original art was being thrust into the background by
connoisseurship and collection; he was a builder, and architecture
was committing itself more and more to the paper plan; he insisted
upon building foursquare, and building was doomed more and more to
_façaderie_. The very strength of Richardson’s buildings was a fatal
weakness in the growing centers of commerce and industry. It takes more
than a little audacity to tear down one of Richardson’s monuments,
and so, rather ironically, they have held their own against the
insurrections of traffic and realty speculation; but the difficulty of
getting rid of these Romanesque structures only increased the demand
for a more frail and facile method of construction.

Romanticism met its great defeat in the office-building. By the use
of the passenger elevator, first designed for an exhibition-tower
adjacent to the Crystal Palace in 1853, it had become possible to raise
the height of buildings to seven stories: the desire for ground-rents
presently increased the height to ten. Beyond this, mere masonry could
not go without thickening the supporting piers to such an extent that
on a twenty-foot lot more than a quarter of the width would be lost
on the lower floors. Richardson’s Marshall Field Building in Chicago
was seven stories high; and that was about as far as solid stone or
brick could climb without becoming undignified and futile by its
bulk. The possibilities of masonry and the possibilities of commercial
gain through ground-rents were at loggerheads, and by 1888 masonry was
defeated.

Richardson, fortunately, did not live to see the undermining of the
tradition he had founded and almost established. Within a decade of
his death, however, only the empty forms of architecture remained, for
the steel-cage of the engineer had become the new structural reality.
By 1890 the ground-landlord had discovered, in the language of the
pioneer’s favorite game, that “the roof’s the limit.” If that was so,
why limit the roof? With this canny perception the skyscraper sprang
into being.

During this Gilded Age the standard of the best building had risen
almost as high as it had been in America in any earlier period; but
the mass of good building had relatively decreased; and the domestic
dwellings in both city and country lost those final touches of
craftsmanship that had lingered, here and there, up to the Civil War.
In the awkward country villas that began to fill the still-remote
suburbs of the larger cities, all sense of style and proportion were
lost: the plan was marked by meaningless irregularities; a dingy,
muddy color spread over the wooden façades. There exists a huge and
beautifully printed volume, of which, I believe, there are not more
than a hundred copies, on the villas of Newport in 1876: the compiler
thereof sought to satisfy the vanity of the original owners and the
curiosity of a later generation; yet mid all these examples of the
“novel” and the “unique,” there is not a single mansion that would
satisfy any conceivable line of descendants.

If the level of architecture was low in the country, it touched the
bottom of the abyss in the city. As early as 1835 the multiple-family
tenement had been introduced in New York as a means of producing
congestion, raising the ground-rents, and satisfying in the worst
possible way the need of the new immigrants for housing. The conditions
of life in these tenements were infinitely lower than they had been
in the most primitive farmhouse of the colonial period; their lack of
light, lack of water, lack of sanitary facilities, and lack of privacy,
created an admirable milieu for the propagation of vice and disease,
and their existence in a period which was boasting loudly of the
advance of science and industrialism shows, to say the least, how the
myths which inspired the age stood between the eye and reality, and
obscured the actual state of the modern industrial community.

To the disgrace of the architectural profession in America, the
worst features of tenement-house construction were standardized in
the so-called dumb-bell tenement which won the first prize in the
model tenement-house competition of 1879; and the tenements which
were designed after this pattern in the succeeding years combined a
maximum lack of privacy with a minimum of light and air. The gridiron
street-design, the narrow frontage, the deep lot, all conspired to make
good housing difficult in the larger cities: within this framework
good house-design, indeed, still is difficult. The dumb-bell tenement
of the Gilded Age, however, raised bad housing into an art; and the
acquisition of this art in its later developments is now one of the
stigmata of “progress” in a modern American city. I say this without
irony; the matter is too grave for jest.

During these same ’seventies, the benefits of poor housing were
extended in New York to those with money enough to afford something
better: the Paris flat was introduced. The legitimate excuse for the
small apartment was the difficulty of obtaining household service,
and the futility of keeping up large houses for small families: this,
however, had nothing to do with the actual form that the apartment
took, for, apart from the desire for congestion-rents, it is as easy to
build apartments for two families as for twenty. The flat is a genuine
convenience for the well-to-do visitor to a city; it gives him the
atmosphere of a home without many of its major complications, and those
who got the taste for this life in Paris were not altogether absurd in
desiring to enjoy the same benefits in New York. Unfortunately, what
suits a visitor does not necessarily meet the demands of a permanent
resident: one may tolerate a blank wall for a week or a month without
being depressed, particularly since a good part of a visitor’s time
is spent outside his home; but to live year after year facing a blank
wall or an equally-frowning façade opposite is to be condemned to the
environment of a penitentiary.

The result of building apartments in New York and elsewhere was not
cheaper rents for smaller quarters: it was smaller quarters without
the cheap rents. Those who wanted sunlight and a pleasant view paid a
premium for it; those who did not get either paid more than enough
for what they got. The result of building apartments which would
satisfy only a visitor was to make every family visitors: before the
acute housing shortage, yearly removals to new premises were the only
palliative that made their occupancy tolerable. The amount of wear and
tear and waste, the loss of energy and money and good spirits, produced
by the inability of the architect to design adequately under the
pecuniary standards of the Gilded Age was colossal. The urban nomad in
his own way was as great a spendthrift as the pioneer of the prairie.
Both of them had been unable to create a permanent civilization; and
both of them paid the price for it.


III

During the first period of pioneering, mechanical improvements had
affected the milieu of architecture, but not architecture itself, if
one overlooks such ingenuities as the circular and octagon houses of
the eighteen-thirties. Slowly, the actual methods of construction
changed: the carpenter-builder, who had once performed every
operation, gave way to the joiner, whose work profited by putty and
paint, curtains and carpets--to the plasterer, who covered up the
raw imperfect frame--and to the plumber. Weird ornamental forms for
doors and window-architraves, for moldings and pendants, were supplied
to the builder by the catalogs of the planing and scroll-saw mills.
Invention produced novelties of contortion in wood, unique in ugliness
and imbecile in design. Like the zinc and iron statues that graced
the buildings of the Centennial Exposition, these devices record the
absorption of art in a vain technology.

One need not dwell upon the results of all these miserable efforts,
conceived in haste and aborted for profit: the phenomenon was common
to industrial civilization at this period, and can be observed in
Battersea and Manchester as well as in New York and Pittsburgh. Mr.
Thomas Hardy, who was trained as an architect, wrote the esthetic
apology for industrialism; and in proclaiming the rightness of our
architectural deserts, one cannot help thinking that he transferred to
the Wessex countryside a little of the horrible depression he must have
acquired in London.

“Gay prospects,” exclaimed Mr. Hardy, “wed happily with gay times; but,
alas! if the times be not gay! Men have more often suffered from the
mockery of a place too smiling than from the oppression of surroundings
oversadly tinged.... Indeed, it is a question if the exclusive reign of
orthodox beauty is not approaching its last quarter. The new vale in
Tempe may be a gaunt waste in Thule: human souls may find themselves in
closer harmony with external things wearing a somberness distasteful
to our race when it was young. Shall we say that man has grown so
accustomed to his spiritual Bastille that he no longer looks forward
to, and even shrinks from, a casual emergence into unusual brightness?”

Even the best work of the period is blighted with this sombreness: the
fact that so many of Richardson’s buildings have the heavy air of a
prison shows us that the Gilded Age was not, indeed, gay, and that a
spiritual Black Friday perpetually threatened the calendar of its days.


IV

If the romantic movement in America proved that the architect could
capture only a small part of the field, and go no further than the
interests of privilege allowed, the building of the Brooklyn Bridge
showed how well industrialism could handle its problems when its
purposes were not limited by the necessity for sloppy workmanship
and quick turnover. The story of its building is a tribute to both
science and humanity. When John Roebling, the designer of the bridge,
died in the midst of his job, the business of construction was taken
up by his son, and by his devotion to his task in season and out of
season, Washington Roebling became an invalid. Confined to his house
on Columbia Heights, for ten years the younger Roebling watched the
work through a telescope, and directed it as a general would direct a
battle. So goes the legend: it runs rather higher than the tales of
mean prudence or mechanical skill which glorified Mr. Samuel Smiles’
heroes.

The bridge itself was a testimony to the swift progress of physical
science. The strong lines of the bridge, and the beautiful curve
described by its suspended cables, were derived from an elegant formula
in mathematical physics--the elastic curve. If the architectural
elements of the massive piers have perhaps too much the bare quality of
engineering, if the pointed arches meet esthetic betrayal in the flat
solidity of the cornices, if, in short, the masonry does not sing as
Richardson alone perhaps could have made it sing, the steel work itself
makes up for this, by the architectural beauty of its pattern; so that
beyond any other aspect of New York, I think, the Brooklyn Bridge
has been a source of joy and inspiration to the artist. In the later
bridges the spanning members are sturdier and the supporting piers and
cables are lighter and less essential; and they suffer esthetically by
the very ease of their triumph over the difficulties of engineering.

All that the age had just cause for pride in--its advances in science,
its skill in handling iron, its personal heroism in the face of
dangerous industrial processes, its willingness to attempt the untried
and the impossible--came to a head in the Brooklyn Bridge. What was
grotesque and barbarous in industrialism was sloughed off in the
great bridges. These avenues of communication are, paradoxically, the
only enduring monuments that witness a period of uneasy industrial
transition; and to this day they communicate a feeling of dignity,
stability, and unwavering poise.

The Brooklyn Bridge was opened in 1884; Richardson died, after
finishing the Pittsburgh Court House, in 1886. There was a short period
during which the echoes of Richardson’s style resounded in the work
of the Western architects; and then in New York two of Richardson’s
own pupils, Messrs. McKim and White, who had caught the spirit of the
period that was to follow the passing of the frontier, prepared an
appropriate mold for its activities. By far the finest things in the
late ’eighties are the shingled houses which Richardson and Stanford
White and a few others developed for seaboard estates: they recovered
the spirit of the early vernacular work, and continued the colonial
tradition without even faintly recalling colonial forms. This new note,
however, was scarcely sounded before it died out; and in the twenty
years that followed the conflict between industrialism and romanticism
was swallowed up and finally forgotten in the rise of a new mode.
Richardson had not died too soon. The quality of mind and culture which
shines through his work was opposed to nearly every manifestation of
the period that succeeded him.

From this time on, romanticism retained a place for itself only by
forfeiting its claims to occupy the whole province of architecture. In
churches and college halls where the traditional tie with the Middle
Ages had never perhaps been completely broken, its triumphs have been
genuine; but although Mr. J. G. Rogers’ Harkness Memorial at Yale,
or Messrs. Goodhue and Cram’s St. Thomas’ Church, for example, leave
little to be desired in themselves, they have established no precedent
for the hundred other kinds of building which the modern community
requires; and it is not without significance that in his most recent
efforts Mr. Goodhue, for one, had abandoned the molds of romanticism.
Unlike Richardson, the surviving romanticists now demand a certain
insulation from the modern world; the more intelligent exponents of the
movement believe with Dr. Ralph Adams Cram that there is no hope for
its achievement throughout the community without a return to “Walled
Towns.”

Such a retreat is the equivalent of surrender. To hold to Gothic
precedent in the hope of re-creating the medieval community is to
hope that an ancient bottle will turn potassium permanganate into
claret. The romanticists have never fully faced the social and economic
problems that attend their architectural solutions: the result is that
they have been dependent upon assistance from the very forces and
institutions which, fundamentally, they aim to combat. Isolated on
little islands, secure for the moment, romanticism must view the work
on the mainland with a gesture of irate despair; and the only future it
dares to face lies behind it!




CHAPTER SIX THE IMPERIAL FAÇADE


I

The decade between 1890 and 1900 saw the rise of a new period in
American architecture. This period had, it is true, been dimly
foreshadowed by the grandiose L’Enfant, but if the superficial forms
resembled those of the early republic, and if the precedents of classic
architecture again became a guide, the dawning age was neither a
revival nor a continuation.

In the meanwhile, fresh influences had entered. The generation of
students who had studied in the Ecole des Beaux Arts after the Civil
War was ready, at last, to follow the lone trail which Richard H. Hunt
had blazed. Richardson’s most intimate disciples reacted against the
stamp of his personality and sought a more neutral mode of expression,
consecrated by established canons of good taste. On top of this, the
introduction of steel-cage construction removed the necessity for solid
masonry, and placed a premium upon the mask. The stage was set for a
new act of the drama.

All these influences shaped the style of our architecture when it
arose; but the condition that gave it a substantial base was the rise
of a new order in America’s economic life. Up to this time, the chief
industrial problem had been to improve the processes of mechanical
production and to stake out new areas for exploitation. One may compare
these economic advances to the separate sorties of an army operating on
a wide front: any lone adventurer might take his courage in his hands
and exploit an invention, or sink an oil well, if he could find it.
By 1890 the frontier had closed; the major resources of the country
were under the control of the monopolist; it became more important
to consolidate gains than freshly to achieve them. Separate lines of
railroads were welded into systems; separate steel plants and oil
plants were wrought into trusts; and where monopoly did not rest upon a
foundation of natural advantage, the “gentleman’s agreement” began its
service as a useful substitute. The popular movements which sought to
challenge the forces of this new regime--the labor movement, socialism,
populism--had neither analyzed the situation with sufficient care nor
attracted the adherence of the majority. The defeat of Henry George as
a local political candidate was symbolic: by 1888 a humane thinker
like Edward Bellamy had already accepted the defeat, had embraced the
idea of the trust, and had conceived a comprehensive utopia on the
basis of letting the process of monopoly go the limit, so that finally,
by a mere yank of the levers, the vast economic organizations of the
country would become the “property” of the people.

The drift to the open lands came to a full pause. The land-empire had
been conquered, and its overlords were waxing in power and riches: the
name “millionaire” became the patent of America’s new nobility. With
the shift from industry to finance went a shift from the producing
towns to the spending towns: architecture came to dwell in the stock
exchanges, the banks, the shops, and the clubs of the metropolis; if it
sought the countryside at all, it established itself in the villas that
were newly laid out on hill and shore in the neighborhood of the great
cities. The keys to this period are opulence and magnitude: “money to
burn.”

These years witnessed what the Roman historian, Ferrero, has called
a “_véritable recommencement d’histoire_.” In the new centers of
privilege there arose a scale of living and a mode of architecture
which, with all its attendant miseries, depletions, and exploitations,
recalled the Rome of the first and second centuries after Christ. It is
needless to say that vast acres of buildings, factories, shops, homes,
were erected which had no relation at all to the imperial regime; for
not everyone participated in either the benefits or the depressions
that attended the growth of monopoly; but the accent of this period,
the dominant note, was an imperial one. While the commonplace building
of the time cannot be ignored, it remains, so to say, out of the
picture.


II

Hardly had the process of concentration and consolidation begun before
the proper form manifested itself. The occasion for its appearance
was the World’s Columbian Exposition, opened in 1893. In creating
this fair, the enterprise and capacity for organization which the
architects of Chicago had applied to the construction of the skyscraper
transformed the unkempt wilderness of Jackson Park into the Great
White City in the space of two short years. Here the architects of
the country, particularly of New York and Chicago, appeared for the
first time as a united profession, or, to speak more accurately, as
a college. Led by the New Yorkers, who had come more decisively under
European influence, they brought to this exposition the combination
of skill and taste in all the departments of the work that had, two
centuries earlier, created the magnificent formalities of Versailles.
There was unity of plan in the grouping of the main buildings about
the lagoon; there was unity of tone and color in the gleaming white
façades; there was unity of effect in the use of classic orders and
classic forms of decoration. Lacking any genuine unity of ideas and
purposes--for Root had initially conceived of a variegated oriental
setting--the architects of the exposition had achieved the effects of
unity by subordinating their work to an established precedent. They
chanted a Roman litany above the Babel of individual styles. It was a
capital triumph of the academic imagination. If these main buildings
were architecture, America had never seen so much of it at one time
before. Even that belated Greco-Puritan, Mr. Charles Eliot Norton, was
warm in praise.

It would be foolish to quarrel with the style that was chosen for these
exposition buildings, or to deny its propriety. Messrs. McKim, White,
Hunt, and Burnham divined that they were fated to serve Renaissance
despots and emperors with more than Roman power, and unerringly they
chose the proper form for their activities. Whereas Rome had cast its
spell over the architects of the early Renaissance because they wished
once more to enter into its life, the life of its sages and poets and
artists, it attracted the architects of the White City because of its
external features--because of its stereotyped canons and rules--because
of the relatively small number of choices it offered for a lapse in
taste--because of its skill in conspicuous waste, and because of that
very noncommittal quality in its massive forms which permitted the
basilica to become a church, or the temple to become a modern bank.

Of all the Renaissance architects, their impulses and interests were
nearest, perhaps, to Robert Adam, whose church at West Wycombe could
be turned into a ballroom by the simple act of removing the pews, and
permitting the gay walls and decorations to speak for themselves.
Behind the white staff façade of the World’s Fair buildings was
the steel and glass structure of the engineer: the building spoke
one language and the “architecture” another. If the coming of
the skyscraper had turned masonry into veneer, here was a mode of
architecture which was little but veneer.

In their place, at the Fair, these classic buildings were all that
could be demanded: Mr. Geoffrey Scott’s defense of the Baroque, in
The Architecture of Humanism, applies particularly to its essential
manifestations in the Garden and the Theater--and why not in the Fair?
Form and function, ornament and design, have no inherent relation,
one with the other, when the mood of the architect is merely playful:
there is no use in discussing the anatomy of architecture when its
only aim is fancy dress. As a mask, as a caprice, the classic orders
are as justifiable as the icing on a birthday cake: they divert the
eye without damaging the structure that they conceal. Unfortunately,
the architecture of the Renaissance has a tendency to imitate the
haughty queen who advised the commons to eat cake. Logically, it
demands that a Wall Street clerk shall live like a Lombardy prince,
that a factory should be subordinated to esthetic contemplation; and
since these things are impossible, it permits “mere building” to
become illiterate and vulgar below the standards of the most debased
vernacular. Correct in proportion, elegant in detail, courteous in
relation to each other, the buildings of the World’s Fair were,
nevertheless, only the simulacra of a living architecture: they were
the concentrated expression of an age which sought to produce “values”
rather than goods. In comparison with this new style, the romanticism
of the Victorian Age, with its avid respect for the medieval building
traditions, was honesty and dignity itself.

The Roman precedent, modified by the work of Louis XIV and Napoleon
III, by Le Nôtre and Haussmann, formed the basis not merely for the
World’s Fair, but for the host of city plans that were produced in the
two decades that followed. It seemed for a while as if the architect
might take the place of the engineer as city planner, and that the
mangled regularity of the engineer’s gridiron plan, laid down without
respect to topographic advantage or to use, might be definitely
supplanted in the remodeled central districts and in the new extensions
and suburbs of the American city. The evil of the World’s Fair triumph
was that it suggested to the civic enthusiast that every city might
become a fair: it introduced the notion of the City Beautiful as a
sort of municipal cosmetic, and reduced the work of the architect to
that of putting a pleasing front upon the scrappy building, upon the
monotonous streets and the mean houses, that characterized vast areas
in the newer and larger cities.

If the engineer who had devoted himself to sewers and street-plans
alone had been superficial, the architectural city planner who centered
attention upon parkways alone, grand avenues alone, and squares like
the Place de l’Etoile alone, was equally superficial. The civic center
and the parkway represented the better and more constructive side
of this effort: in Cleveland, in Pittsburgh, in Springfield, Mass.,
harmonious groups of white buildings raised their heads above the
tangle of commercial traffic, and in the restoration of L’Enfant’s
plan for Washington, the realities of the imperial regime at length
caught up with the dreamer born out of his due time. A good many of
these plans, however, were pathetically immature. One of the reports
for Manhattan, for example, devoted pages and pages to showing the
improvement that would follow the demolition of the wall around Central
Park--and the importance of clipped trees in the design of grand
avenues!

Plainly, the architect did not face with sufficient realism the
colossal task with which he was confronted in the renovation of the
city. He accepted his improvements too much at the value placed upon
them by the leaders of Big Business--as a creator of land-values, as an
element in increasing the commercial attractiveness of the city. Did
not Mr. Daniel Burnham himself point to the improvements in Periclean
Athens, not as the embodiment of Athenian citizenship and religion at
its highest point, but as a measure for increasing the attractiveness
of the city to visitors from abroad? Cut off from his true function to
serve and beautify the community, made an accessory of business itself,
like the merest salesman or advertising agent, it is no wonder that the
architect speedily lost his leadership; and that the initiative went
once again into the hands of the engineer.

The main merit of all these efforts to perpetuate the World’s Fair is
that they sought to achieve some of the dignity and decisiveness of
the formal plan. Their weakness was that they neglected new elements,
like the billboard, the skysign, the subway, the tall building,
which undermined the effects of the plan even when it was achieved.
In their efforts to escape from the welter of misguided commercial
enterprise, the advocates of the city beautiful placed too great
reliance upon spots of outward order and decency; they took refuge in
the paper symmetry of axial avenues and round-points, as one finds
them in Haussmann’s Paris, and neglected the deeper and more genuine
beauties of, let us say, the High Street in Oxford or Chipping Camden,
or of many another European town that had achieved completion in its
essentials before the nineteenth century.

In short, the advocates of the city beautiful sought a remedy on paper
which could be purchased only by a thorough reorganization of the
community’s life. If all this applies to the better side of the World’s
Fair, it touches even more emphatically the worse.

The twenty years between 1890 and 1910 saw the complete rehabilitation
of the Roman mode, as the very cloak and costume of imperial
enterprise. The main effort of architecture was to give an effect of
dignity and permanence to the façades of the principal thoroughfares:
the public buildings must dominate the compositions, numerous
boulevards and avenues must concentrate the traffic at certain points
and guide the stranger to the markets and amusements: where possible,
as in the Chicago plan, by Messrs. Burnham and Bennett, avenues must be
cut through the gridiron pattern of blocks in order to achieve these
effects. If this imperial street system is somewhat arbitrary, and if
the necessary work of grading, filling, demolishing, and purchasing
existing property rights is extremely costly, the end, nevertheless,
justifies the means--the architecture impresses and awes a populace
that shares vicariously in it glories. Should the effect prove a little
too austere and formidable, the monuments will be offset with circuses
and hippodromes.

In all this, the World’s Fair was a precise and classic example, for
it reproduced in miniature the imperial order. When the panic of 1893
kept people away from the exhibitions of art, industry, and culture,
sideshows were promptly introduced by the astute organizers. Beyond
the serene classic façades, which recalled the elevation of a Marcus
Aurelius, sprawled the barkers, the freaks, and the tricksters, whose
gaudy booths might have reminded the spectator of the other side of the
imperial shield--the gaminism of Petronius Arbiter. The transformation
of these white façades into the Gay White Ways came during the next
decade; whilst the sideshows achieved a separate existence as “Coney
Island.” On top of this came the development of the mildly gladiatorial
spectacles of football and baseball: at first invented for playful
exercise, they became a standard means of exhibition by more or less
professional performers. The erection of numerous amphitheaters and
arenas, such as the Yale Bowl, the Harvard Stadium, the Lewisohn
Stadium, and their counterparts in the West, rounded out the imperial
spectacle.

By a happy congruence of forces, the large-scale manufacture of
Portland cement, and the reintroduction of the Roman method of concrete
construction, came during the same period. Can anyone contemplate
this scene and still fancy that imperialism was nothing more than
a move for foreign markets and territories of exploitation? On the
contrary, it was a tendency that expressed itself in every department
of Western civilization, and if it appears most naked, perhaps, in
America, that is only because, as in the earlier periods, there was
so little here to stand in its way. Mr. Louis Sullivan might well
complain, in The Autobiography of an Idea, that imperialism stifled
the more creative modes of architecture which might have derived from
our fine achievements in science, from our tentative experiments in
democracy. It seems inevitable, however, that the dominant fact in our
civilization should stamp the most important monuments and buildings
with its image. In justice to the great professors of the classic
style, Messrs. McKim and Burnham and Carrere and Hastings, one must
admit that the age shaped them and chose them and used them for its
ends. Their mode of building was almost unescapably determined by the
milieu in which they worked.

The change in the social scene which favored an imperial setting was
not without its effects upon the industries that supplied the materials
for architecture, and upon the processes of building itself. Financial
concentration in the stone quarries, for example, was abetted by the
creation of a national system of rail transportation, and partly,
perhaps, by the elaboration of the mechanical equipment for cutting
and trimming stone beyond a point where a small plant could work
economically. The result was that during this period numerous small
local quarries, which had been called into existence by Richardson’s
fine eye for color contrasts, were allowed to lapse. Vermont marble and
Indiana limestone served better the traditions that had been created in
the White City.

The carrying of coals to Newcastle is always a pathetic practice; it
remained for the imperial age to make it a subject for boasting. Just
as many Connecticut towns whose nearby fields are full of excellent
granite boulders, boast a bank or a library of remote marble, so
New York City, which has a solid foundation of schist, gneiss, and
limestone, can point to only a handful of buildings, notably the
College of the City of New York and Mr. Goodhue’s Church of the
Intercession, in which these excellent local materials were used. The
curious result of being able by means of railway transportation to draw
upon the ends of the earth for materials has been, not variety, but
monotony. Under the imperial order the architect was forced to design
structures that were identical in style, treatment, and material,
though they were placed thousands of miles apart and differed in
every important function. This ignorance of regional resources is not
incompatible with grand effects, or even on occasion with decently good
architecture. But it does not profit by that fine adaptation to site,
that justness of proportion in the size of window and slope of roof,
which is an earnest of the architect’s mastery of the local situation.
Substitute Manila for the military colony of Timgad, or Los Angeles
for Alexandria, and it is plain that we have here another aspect of
Ferrero’s generalization. Even architects whose place of work was
nearer to the site of their buildings were, nevertheless, compelled to
copy the style of the more successful practitioners in New York and
Chicago.

In government, in industry, in architecture, the imperial age was
one. The underlying policy of imperialism is to exploit the life
and resources of separate regions for the benefit of the holders
of privilege in the capital city. Under this rule, all roads lead
literally to Rome. While, as the German historian, W. H. Riehl, points
out, the provincial highroads served to bring the city out into the
countryside, the railroads served to bring the major cities together
and to drain the products of rural regions into the metropolis. It was
no accident that the great triumphs of American architecture during
the imperial period were the railroad stations; particularly the
Pennsylvania and the Grand Central in New York, and the Union Station
in Washington. Nor is it by mere chance that the Washington and the
Pennsylvania stations are the monuments to two architects, McKim and
Burnham, who worshiped most whole-heartedly at the imperial shrine.
With capital insight, these men established the American Academy at
Rome: they recognized their home.

Esthetically considered, it is true, perhaps, that the finest element
in the Pennsylvania station is the train hall, where the architect has
dealt sincerely with his steel elements and has not permitted himself
to cast a fond, retrospective eye upon the Roman baths. When all
allowances are made, however, there remains less for criticism in the
railway stations and the stadiums--those genuinely Roman bequests--than
in any of the other imperial monuments. Indeed, so well does Roman
architecture lend itself to the railroad station that one of the prime
virtues of such a building, namely ease of circulation, was even
communicated to the New York Public Library, where it is nothing but a
nuisance, since it both increases the amount of noise and diminishes
the amount of space for reading rooms that are already overcrowded.

Here, indeed, is the capital defect of an established and formalized
mode: it tends to make the architect think of a new problem in terms
of an old solution for a different problem. Mr. Charles McKim, for
example, indignantly withdrew from the competition over the New York
Public Library because the demands of the librarian for a convenient
and expeditious administration of his business interfered with the
full-blown conception which Mr. McKim had in mind. All this happened
after years of demonstration in the Boston Library of Messrs. McKim and
White’s failure to meet that problem squarely; and it apparently was
not affected by Mr. McKim’s experience with the great Columbia Library,
which has ample space for everything except books. In short, the
classic style served well enough only when the building to be erected
had some direct relation to the needs and interests of the Roman
world--the concourse of idlers in the baths or the tiers of spectators
in the circuses and hippodromes. When it came face to face with our
own day, it had but little to say, and it said that badly, as anyone
who will patiently examine the superimposed orders on the American
Telegraph Building in New York will discover for himself.


III

With the transition from republican to imperial Rome, numerous
monuments were erected to the Divine Cæsar. Within a much shorter time
than marked the growth of the imperial tradition in America, a similar
edification of patriotic memories took place.

In the restoration of the original plan of Washington, which began in
1901, the axis of the plan was so altered as to make it pass through
the Washington Monument; and at the same time the place of the Lincoln
Memorial, designed by the late Mr. Henry Bacon, a pupil of Mr. McKim’s,
was assigned. This was the first of a whole series of temples devoted
to the national deities. In the Lincoln Memorial, in the McKinley
Memorial at Niles, Ohio, in the Hall of Fame at New York University,
and in their prototype, Grant’s Tomb, one feels not the living beauty
of our American past, but the mortuary air of archæology. The America
that Lincoln was bred in, the homespun and humane and humorous America
that he wished to preserve, has nothing in common with the sedulously
classic monument that was erected to his memory. Who lives in that
shrine, I wonder--Lincoln, or the men who conceived it: the leader who
beheld the mournful victory of the Civil War, or the generation that
took pleasure in the mean triumph of the Spanish-American exploit, and
placed the imperial standard in the Philippines and the Caribbean?

On the plane of private citizenship, a similar movement took place:
while before 1890 one can count the tombs in our cemeteries that boast
loudly of the owner’s earthly possessions and power, from that time
onward the miniature temple-mausoleum becomes more and more frequent.
In fact, an entire history of architecture could be deduced from our
cemeteries; all that has so far been described could be marked in the
progress from the simple slab, carved in almost Attic purity with a
weeping willow or a cubistic cherub, that characterized the eighteenth
century, to the bad lettering and the more awkward headstones of the
early nineteenth century; and from this to the introduction of polished
granite and iron ornament in the post-Civil War cemetery, down to the
mechanically perfect mausoleum, where the corpses are packed like
the occupants of a subway train, that some of our more effusively
progressive communities boast of today. As we live, so we die: no
wonder Shelley described Hell as a place much like London.

The Roman development of New York, Chicago, Washington, and the
lesser metropolises, had an important effect upon the homes of the
people. Historically, the imperial monument and the slum-tenement go
hand in hand. The same process that creates an unearned increment
for the landlords who possess favored sites, contributes a generous
quota--which might be called the unearned excrement--of depression,
overcrowding, and bad living, in the dormitory districts of the city.
This had happened in imperial Rome; it had happened again in Paris
under Napoleon III, where Haussmann’s sweeping reconstructions created
new slums in the districts behind the grand avenues, quite as bad,
if far less obvious, as those that had been cleared away; and it
happened once again in our American cities. Whereas in Rome a certain
limit, however, was placed upon the expansion of the city because
of the low development of vehicular traffic, the rise of mechanical
transportation placed no bounds at all on the American city. If Rome
was forced to create huge engineering projects like aqueducts and
sewers in order to cleanse the inhabitants and remove the offal of
its congested districts, the American city followed the example of the
modern Romes like London and Paris by devising man-sewers, in which the
mass of plebeians could be daily drained back and forth between their
dormitories and their factories.

So far from relieving congestion, these colossal pieces of engineering
only made more of it possible: by pouring more feeder lines into the
central district of New York, Boston, Chicago, or where you will,
rapid transit increased the housing congestion at one end and the
business-congestion at the other. As for the primary sewer system
devised for the imperial metropolis, it could scarcely even claim, with
rapid transit, that it was a valuable commercial investment. The water
outlets of New York are so thoroughly polluted that not merely have the
shad and the oyster beds vanished from the Hudson River, where both
once flourished, but it is a serious question whether the tides can
continue to transport their vast load of sewage without a preliminary
reduction of its content. Like the extension of the water conduits into
the Adirondacks, all these necessary little improvements add to the per
capita cost of living in an imperial metropolis, without providing a
single benefit that a smaller city with no need for such improvements
does not enjoy. In the matter of public parks, for example, the
Committee on Congestion in New York, in 1911, calculated that the park
space needed for the East Side alone, on the scale provided by the city
of Hartford, would be greater than the entire area of Manhattan Island.
In short, even for its bare utilitarian requirements, the mass-city, as
the Germans call it, costs more and gives less than communities which
have not had imperial greatness inflicted upon them.

As to the more positive improvements under the imperial regime, history
leaves no doubt as to their dubious character, and current observation
only reinforces history’s lesson. In discussing the growth of the
tenement in Rome after the Great Fire, Friedlander says:

“The motives for piling up storeys were as strong as ever: the site
for Cæsar’s Forum had cost over £875,000 compensation to tenants and
ground landlords. Rome had loftier houses than modern capital. A
disproportionately large part of the area available for building was
monopolized by the few, in consequence of the waste of space in the
plethoric architecture of the day, and a very considerable portion
was swallowed up by the public places, such as the imperial forums,
which took up six hectares, as well as by the traffic regulations and
extensions of the streets. The transformation and decoration of Rome
by the Cæsars enhanced the scarcity of housing, as did Napoleon III’s
improvements in Paris. A further adjutory cause of the increase in
the price of dwellings was the habit of speculation in house property
(which Crassus had practiced in great style) and the monopoly of the
proprietors, in consequence of which houses were let and sublet.”

It would be tedious to draw out the parallel: given similar social
conditions in America we have not been able to escape the same social
results, even down to the fact that the palliatives of private
philanthropy flourish here again as they had not flourished anywhere on
the same scale since the Roman Empire. So much for imperial greatness.
When an architect like Mr. Edward Bennett can say, as he did in The
Significance of the Fine Arts: “House the people densely, if necessary,
but conserve great areas for recreation,” we need not be in doubt as to
who will profit by the density and who will profit, at the other end,
by the recreation. It is not merely that the park must be produced
to remedy the congestion: it is even more that the congestion must
be produced in order to provide for the park. To profit by both the
disease and the remedy is one of the master-strokes of imperialist
enterprise. Mr. Daniel Burnham said of the World’s Fair, according to
Mr. Bennett and Mr. Charles Moore, “that it is what the Romans would
have wished to create in permanent form.” One may say of our imperial
cities that they are what the Romans did create--but whether the form
will be permanent or not is a matter we may leave to the sardonic
attentions of history.

For my own part, I think we have at last acquired a criterion which
will enable us to sum up the architecture of the imperial age, and
deal justly with these railroad stations and stadiums, these sewers
and circuses, these aqueducts and parkways and grand avenues. Our
imperial architecture is an architecture of compensation: it provides
grandiloquent stones for people who have been deprived of bread
and sunlight and all that keeps man from becoming vile. Behind the
monumental façades of our metropolises trudges a landless proletariat,
doomed to the servile routine of the factory system; and beyond the
great cities lies a countryside whose goods are drained away, whose
children are uprooted from the soil on the prospect of easy gain and
endless amusements, and whose remaining cultivators are steadily
drifting into the ranks of an abject tenantry. This is not a casual
observation: it is the translation of the last three census reports
into plain English. Can one take the pretensions of this architecture
seriously; can one worry about its esthetics or take full delight
in such finer forms as Mr. Pope’s Temple of the Scottish Rite in
Washington, or Mr. Bacon’s Lincoln Memorial? Yes, perhaps--if one
refuses to look beyond the mask.

Even in some of its proudest buildings, the imperial show wears thin;
and one need not peer into the slums beyond in order to realize its
defects. The rear of the Metropolitan Museum or the Brooklyn Museum,
for example, might be the rear of a row of Bronx tenements or Long
Island City factories, so gaunt and barren and hideous is their
aspect. If the imperial age was foreshadowed in the World’s Fair, it
has received its apotheosis in the museum. In contrast to the local
museums one still finds occasionally in Europe, which are little more
than extensions of the local curio cabinet, the imperial museum is
essentially a loot-heap, a comprehensive repository for plunder. The
sage Viollet-le-Duc once patly said that he preferred to see his apples
hanging on a tree, rather than arranged in rows in the fruit shop: but
the animus of the museum is to value the plucked fruit more than the
tree that bore it.

Into the museum come the disjecta membra of other lands, other
cultures, other civilizations. All that had once been a living faith
and practice is here reduced to a separate specimen, pattern, or form.
For the museum, the world of art has already been created: the future
is restricted to a duplication of the perfected past. This animus is
identic with that which made the Romans so skillful in copying Greek
statues and so dull in carving their own; a desirable habit of humility
were it not for the fact that the works of art in the past could not
have been created had our ancestors been so punctual in respect to
finished designs. The one thing the museum cannot attempt to do is to
supply a soil for living art: all that it can present is a pattern
for reproduction. To the extent that an insincere or imitative art is
better than no art at all, the Imperial Age marked an advance: to the
extent, however, that a living art is a fresh gesture of the spirit,
the museum confessed all too plainly that the age had no fresh gestures
to make; on that score, it was a failure, and the copying of period
furniture and the design of period architecture were the livid proofs
of that failure.

The museum is a manifestation of our curiosity, our acquisitiveness,
our essentially predatory culture; and these qualities were copiously
exhibited in the architecture of imperialism. It would be foolish to
reproach the great run of architects for exploiting the characteristics
of their age; for even those who in belief and design have remained
outside the age--such resolute advocates of a medieval polity as Dr.
Ralph Adams Cram--have not been able to divert its currents. In so
far as we have learned to care more for empire than for a community
of freemen, living the good life, more for dominion over palm and
pine than for the humane discipline of ourselves, the architect has
but enshrined our desires. The opulence, the waste of resources
and energies, the perversion of human effort represented in this
architecture are but the outcome of our general scheme of working and
living. Architecture, like government, is about as good as a community
deserves. The shell that we create for ourselves marks our spiritual
development as plainly as that of a snail denotes its species. If
sometimes architecture becomes frozen music, we have ourselves to thank
when it is a pompous blare of meaningless sounds.




CHAPTER SEVEN THE AGE OF THE MACHINE


I

Since 1910 the momentum of the Imperial Age seems to have slackened a
little: at any rate, in architecture it has lost much of the original
energy which had been given to it by the success of the Chicago
Exposition. It may be, as Henry Adams hinted, that the rate of change
in the modern world has altered, so that processes which required
centuries for their consummation before the coming of the dynamo have
been accelerated into decades.

With events and buildings so close to us, it is almost impossible
to rate their relative importance; all that I can do in the present
chapter is to single out one or two of the more important threads
which, it seems to me, are bound to give the predominant color to the
fabric of our architecture. It is fairly easy to see, however, why the
imperial order has not stamped every aspect of our building: for one
thing, eclecticism has not merely persisted, but the new familiarity
that the American architect has gained with authentic European and
Asiatic work outside the province of the classic has increased the
range of eclecticism. So the baroque architecture of Spain, which
flourished so well in Mexico, and the ecclesiastical architecture of
Byzantium and Syria, have added a new charm to our motlied wardrobe:
from the first came new lessons in ornament and color, applied with
great success by Mr. Bertram Goodhue in the Panama-Pacific Exposition,
and now budding lustily in southern villas and gardens; and from
the second the architect is learning the importance of mass and
outline--the essentials in monolithic construction.

Apart from this, however, the imperial regime has been stalled by its
own weight. The cost of cutting through new streets, widening grand
avenues, and in general putting on a monumental front has put the pure
architect at a disadvantage: there is the same disparity between his
plans and the actual aims of the commercial community as there is,
quite often, between the prospectus and the actual organization of an
industry. Within the precincts of the modern city, the engineer, whose
utilitarian eye has never blinked at the necessity for profitable
enterprise, and whose interest in human beings as loads, weights,
stresses, or units pays no attention to their qualitative demands as
human beings--within these precincts, I say, the engineer has recovered
his supremacy.

Here, in fact, is the paradox of American architecture. In our suburban
houses we have frequently achieved the excellence of Forest Hills and
Bronxville; in our public buildings we tend more easily to approach the
strength and originality of Mr. Goodhue’s State Capitol for Nebraska;
in fact, never before have the individual achievements of American
architects been so rich, so varied, and so promising. In that part
of architecture which lies outside the purlieus of our commercial
system--I mean the prosperous country homes and college buildings and
churches and municipal institutions--a tradition of good building and
tactful design has been established. At this point, unfortunately, the
scope of the architect has become narrowed: the forces that create the
great majority of our buildings lie quite outside the cultivated field
in which he works. Through the mechanical reorganization of the entire
milieu, the place of architecture has become restricted; and even when
architecture takes root in some unnoticed crevice, it blooms only to be
cut down at the first “business opportunity.”

The processes which are inimical to architecture are, perhaps, seen
at their worst in the business district of the metropolis; but more
and more they tend to spread throughout the rest of the community. Mr.
Charles McKim, for example, was enthusiastic over Mr. Burnham’s design
for the Illinois Trust and Savings Bank in Chicago, and predicted that
it would long be a monument to his genius. “But unfortunately,” as Mr.
Burnham’s biographer says, “unfortunately for Mr. McKim’s reputation
as a prophet, he was unappreciative of the rapid growth of Chicago,
the consequent appreciation in the value of real estate in the Loop
district, and the expansive force of a great bank. This beautiful
building is doomed to be replaced by one which will tower into the
air to the permissible height of structures in the business section
of Chicago.” The alternative to this destruction is an even more
ignominious state of preservation; such a state as the Knickerbocker
Trust Company building achieved in New York, or the old Customs
House in Boston, both of which have been smothered under irrelevant
skyscrapers. Even where economic necessity plays no distinct part,
the forms of business take precedence over the forms of humanism--as
in the Shipping Board’s York Village, where as soon as the direction
of the community planner was removed a hideous and illiterate row of
shop-fronts was erected, instead of that provided by the architect, in
spite of the fact that the difference in cost was negligible.

Unfortunately for architecture, every district of the modern city
tends to become a business district, in the sense that its development
takes place less in response to direct human needs than to the chances
and exigencies of sale. It is not merely business buildings that are
affected by the inherent instability of enterprises to which profit
and rent have become Ideal Ends: the same thing is happening to the
great mass of houses and apartments which are designed for sale.
Scarcely any element in our architecture and city planning is free
from the encroachment, direct or indirect, of business enterprise.
The old Boulevard in New York, for example, which was laid out by the
Tweed ring long before the land on either side was used for anything
but squatters’ farms, was almost totally disrupted by the building
of the first subways, and it has taken twenty years to effect even a
partial recovery. The widening of part of Park Avenue by slicing off
its central grass plot has just been accomplished, in order to relieve
traffic congestion; and it needs only a little time before underground
and overground traffic will cause the gradual reduction of our other
parkways--even those which now seem secure.

The task of noting the manifold ways in which our economic system has
affected architecture would require an essay by itself: it will be more
pertinent here, perhaps, to pay attention to the processes through
which our economic system has worked; and in particular to gauge the
results of introducing mechanical methods of production, and mechanical
forms into provinces which were once wholly occupied by handicraft.
The chief influence in eliminating the architect from the great bulk
of our building is the machine itself: in blotting out the elements of
personality and individual choice it has blotted out the architect,
who inherited these qualities from the carpenter-builder. Mr. H. G.
Wells, in The New Macchiavelli, described Altiora and Oscar Bailey as
having the temperament that would cut down trees and put sanitary glass
lamp-shades in their stead; and this animus has gone pretty far in both
building and city planning, for the reason that lamp-shades may be
manufactured quickly for sale, and trees cannot. It is time, perhaps,
that we isolated the machine and examined its workings. What is the
basis of our machine-ritual, and what place has it in relation to the
good life?


II

Before we discuss the influence of machinery upon building, let us
consider the building itself as an architectural whole.

Up to the nineteenth century, a house might be a shelter and a work of
art. Once it was erected, it had few internal functions to perform: its
physiological system, if we may use a crude and inaccurate metaphor,
was of the lowest order. An open fire with a chimney, windows that
opened and closed--these were its most lively pretensions. Palladio,
in his little book on the Five Orders, actually has suggestions for
cooling the hot Italian villa by a system of flues conducted into an
underground chamber from which cold air would circulate; but this
ingenious scheme was on the plane of Leonardo’s flying machine--an
imaginative anticipation, I suppose, rather than a project.

With the exception of Wren’s suggestions for ventilating the Houses of
Parliament, and Sir Humphrey Davy’s actual installation of apparatus
for this purpose, it was not until the last quarter of the nineteenth
century that engineers turned their minds to this problem, in America.
Yankee ingenuity had devised central heating before the Civil War,
and one of the first numbers of Harper’s Weekly contained an article
deploring the excessive warmth of American interiors; and at one time
or another during the century, universal running water, open plumbing,
gas, electric lighting, drinking fountains, and high speed electric
elevators made their way into the design of modern buildings. In Europe
these changes came reluctantly, because of the existence of vast
numbers of houses that had been built without a mechanical equipment;
so that many a student at the Beaux Arts returned from an attic in the
Latin quarter where water was carried in pails up to the seventh story,
to design houses in which the labor-saving devices became an essential
element in the plan. It is only now, however, during the last two
decades, that the full effect of these innovations has been felt.

The economic outcome of all these changes can be expressed
mathematically; and it is significant. According to an estimate by Mr.
Henry Wright in the Journal of the American Institute of Architects,
the structure of the dwelling house represented over ninety per cent
of the cost in 1800. Throughout the century there was a slow, steady
increase in the amount necessary for site, fixtures, and appliances,
until, in 1900, the curve takes a sharp upward rise; with the result
that in 1920 the cost of site and mechanical equipment has risen
to almost one-half the total cost of the house. If these estimates
apply to the simple dwelling house, they apply, perhaps, with even
greater force to the tenement, the office building, the factory, and
the loft: here the cost of ventilation, of fireproof construction,
of fire-prevention and fire-escaping devices, makes the engineering
equipment bulk even more heavily.

Whereas in the first stages of industrial development the factory
affected the environment of architecture, in its latest state
the factory has become the environment. A modern building is an
establishment devoted to the manufacture of light, the circulation
of air, the maintenance of a uniform temperature, and the vertical
transportation of its occupants. Judged by the standards of the
laboratory, the modern building is, alas! an imperfect machine: the
engineers of a certain public service corporation, for example,
have discovered that the habit of punching windows in the walls of
the building-machine is responsible for great leakages which make
difficult the heating and cooling of the plant; and they hold that the
maximum efficiency demands the elimination of windows, the provision of
“treated” air, and the lighting of the building throughout the day by
electricity.

All this would perhaps seem a little fantastic, were it not for the
fact that we have step by step approached the reality. Except for our
old-fashioned prejudice in favor of windows, which holds over from a
time when one could see a green field or a passing neighbor by sitting
at one, the transformation favored by the engineers has already been
accomplished. Just because of the ease in installing fans, lights,
and radiators in a modern building, a good part of the interiors
of our skyscrapers are fed day and night with artificial light and
ventilation. The margin of misuse under this method of construction
is necessarily great; the province of design, limited. Instead of the
architect’s paying attention to exposure, natural circulation, and
direct daylight, and making a layout which will achieve these necessary
ends, he is forced to center his efforts on the maximum exploitation
of land. Where the natural factors are flouted or neglected, the
engineer is always ready to provide a mechanical substitute--“just as
good as the original” and much more expensive.

By systematically neglecting the simplest elements of city planning,
we have provided a large and profitable field for all the palliative
devices of engineering: where we eliminate sunlight we introduce
electric light; where we congest business, we build skyscrapers; where
we overcrowd the thoroughfares with traffic we burrow subways; where
we permit the city to become congested with a population whose density
would not be tolerated in a well-designed community, we conduct water
hundreds of miles by aqueducts to bathe them and slake their thirst;
where we rob them of the faintest trace of vegetation or fresh air, we
build metalled roads which will take a small portion of them, once a
week, out into the countryside. It is all a very profitable business
for the companies that supply light and rapid transit and motor
cars, and the rest of it; but the underlying population pays for its
improvements both ways--that is, it stands the gratuitous loss, and it
pays “through the nose” for the remedy.

These mechanical improvements, these labyrinths of subways, these
audacious towers, these endless miles of asphalted streets, do not
represent a triumph of human effort: they stand for its comprehensive
misapplication. Where an inventive age follows methods which have no
relation to an intelligent and humane existence, an imaginative one
would not be caught by the necessity. By turning our environment over
to the machine we have robbed the machine of the one promise it held
out--that of enabling us to humanize more thoroughly the details of our
existence.


III

To return to architecture. A further effect of the machine process on
the internal economy of the modern building is that it lends itself to
rapid production and quick turnover. This has been very well put by Mr.
Bassett Jones, in an article in The American Architect, which is either
a hymn of praise to the machine, or a cool parade of its defects,
according to the position one may take.

“As the building more and more takes on the character of the machine,”
says Mr. Jones, “so does its design, construction, and operation
become subject to the same rules that govern ... a locomotive. Our
grandfathers built for succeeding generations. The rate of development
was slow, and a building which would satisfy the demands made upon it
for a century would necessarily be of a substantial nature. But with
us in a single generation even the best we can do with all the data
and facilities at our command is out of date almost before it shows
signs of appreciable wear. So a building erected today is outclassed
tomorrow. The writer well remembers the late Douglas Robinson, when
outlining the location and property to be improved by the construction
of a building some twenty years ago, ending his directions with the
proviso that it must be ‘the cheapest thing that will hold together
for fifteen years’! When the amortization charges must be based on so
short a period as this, and with land taxes constantly increasing,
it becomes obvious that construction must be based upon a cubic foot
valuation that prohibits the use of any but the cheapest materials
and methods.... Even the cost of carrying the required capital
inactive during the period of production has its effect in speeding up
production to the point where every part of the building that, by any
ingenuity of man, can be machine-made must be so made.”

Since the features that govern the construction of modern buildings are
conditioned by external canons of mechanism, purpose and adaptation
to need play a small part in the design, and the esthetic element
itself enters largely by accident. The plan of the modern building
is not fundamental to its treatment; it derives automatically from
the methods and materials employed. The skyscraper is inevitably a
honeycomb of cubes, draped with a fireproof material: as mechanically
conceived, it is readily convertible: the floors are of uniform height
and the windows of uniform spacing, and with no great difficulty
the hotel becomes an office building, the office building a loft;
and I confidently look forward to seeing the tower floors become
apartments--indeed this conversion has already taken place on a small
scale. Where the need of spanning a great space without using pillars
exists, as in a theater or an auditorium, structural steel has given
the architect great freedom; and in these departments he has learned
to use his material well; for here steel can do economically and
esthetically what masonry can do only at an unseemly cost, or not at
all.

What is weak in some of our buildings, however, is not the employment
of certain materials, but the application of a single formula to every
problem. In the bare mechanical shell of the modern skyscraper there
is precious little place for architectural modulation and detail; the
development of the skyscraper has been towards the pure mechanical
form. Our first tall buildings were designed for the most part by
men who thought in terms of established architectural forms: Burnham
and Root’s Monadnock Building, in Chicago, which has exerted such a
powerful influence over the new school of German architects, was an
almost isolated exception; and, significantly enough, it did not employ
the steel skeleton! The academic architects compared the skyscraper
to a column, with a base, a shaft, and a capital; and they sought to
relieve its empty face with an elaborate modeling of surface, like
that of the old Flatiron Building. Then the skyscraper was treated as
a tower, and its vertical lines were accented by piers which simulated
the acrobatic leap of stone construction: the Woolworth Tower and
the Bush Tower were both designed in this fashion, and, in spite of
numerous defects in detail, they remain with the new Shelton Hotel in
New York among the most satisfactory examples of the skyscraper.

Neither column nor buttress has anything to do with the internal
construction of the skyscraper; both forms are “false” or “applied.”
Under the veracious lead of the late Mr. Louis Sullivan, the buildings
of the machine period have accepted the logic of the draped cube,
and the only gestures of traditional architecture that remain are
the ornaments that cling to the very highest and the very lowest
stories. Those buildings which do not follow this logic for the most
part accentuate the clumsy unimaginativeness of the designer: the new
Standard Oil building in New York, with its vestigial orders, shows an
interesting profile across the harbor almost in spite of itself, but at
a closer range will not bear criticism.

An ornamentalist, like Mr. Louis Sullivan, is perhaps at his best
against the simple planes of the modern building: but a different
order of imagination, an imagination like that of the Norman builders,
is powerless in the face of this problem--or it becomes brutal. If
modern building has become engineering, modern architecture retains a
precarious foothold as ornament, or to put it more frankly, as scene
painting. Indeed, what is the bare interior of a modern office or
apartment house but a stage, waiting for the scenery to be shifted,
and a new play to be put on. It is due to this similarity, I believe,
that modern interior decoration has so boldly accepted the standards
and effects of stage-design. A newspaper critic referred to Mr.
Norman-Bel Geddes as having lined the interior of the Century Theater
with a cathedral: well, in the same way, the interior of a modern
skyscraper is lined with a factory, an office, or a home.

It is not for nothing that almost every detail of the mechanized
building follows a standard pattern and preserves a studious anonymity.
Except for the short run of the entrance, the original architect has no
part in its interior development. If the architect himself is largely
paralyzed by his problem, what shall we say of the artisans, and of the
surviving handicraft workers who still contribute their quota of effort
to the laying of bricks and stones, to the joining of pipes, to the
plastering of ceilings? Gone are most of their opportunities for the
exercise of skilled intelligence, to say nothing of art: they might as
well make paper-boxes or pans for all the personal stamp they can give
to their work. Bound to follow the architect’s design, as the printer
is supposed to follow the author’s words, it is no wonder that they
behave like the poor drudge in the Chicago Exposition who left bare
or half-ornamented the columns which the architect had not bothered
to duplicate in full in the haste of finishing his drawing. Is it any
wonder, too, that the last vestige of guild standards is gone: that the
politics of industry, the bargaining for better wages and fewer hours,
concerns them more than their control over their job and the honor and
veracity of their workmanship? What kind of work can a man put into
“the cheapest building that will last fifteen years”?


IV

The chief justification for our achievements in mechanical architecture
has been brought forth by those who believe it has provided the
basis for a new style. Unfortunately, the enthusiasts who have put
the esthetic achievements of mechanical architecture in a niche by
themselves, and who have serenely disregarded all its lapses and
failures and inefficiencies, have centered their attention mainly upon
its weakest feature--the skyscraper. I cannot help thinking that they
have looked in the wrong place. The economic and social reasons for
regarding the skyscraper as undesirable have been briefly alluded to;
if they needed any further confirmation, a week’s experience of the
miseries of rapid transit would perhaps be sufficient. It remains to
point out that the esthetic reasons are just as sound.

All the current praise of the skyscraper boils down to the fact that
the more recent buildings have ceased to be as bad as their prototypes.
Granted. The uneasy hemming and hawing of ornament, which once agitated
the whole façade, has now been reduced to a concentrated gesture; and
the zoning ordinances that have been established in many large American
cities have transformed the older, top-heavy building into a tower or
a pyramid. That this is something of an advance is beyond dispute; in
New York one need only compare the Fisk Tire Building with the United
States Tire Building, representing respectively the later and the
earlier work of the same architects, to see what a virtue can be made
of legal necessity. A great architecture, however, is something to be
seen and felt and lived in. By this criterion most of our pretentious
buildings are rather pathetic.

When one approaches Manhattan Island, for instance, from the Staten
Island Ferry or the Brooklyn Bridge, the great towers on the tip of
the island sometimes look like the fairy stalagmites of an opened
grotto; and from an occasional vantage point on the twentieth floor of
an office building one may now and again recapture this impression.
But need I point out that one can count on one’s fingers the number
of buildings in New York or Chicago that one can approach from the
street in similar fashion? For the millions who fill the pavements and
shuttle back and forth in tubes, the skyscraper as a tall, cloudward
building does not exist. Its esthetic features are the entrance, the
elevator, and the window-pocked wall; and if there has been any unique
efflorescence of a fresh style at these points, I have been unable to
discover it.

What our critics have learned to admire in our great buildings is their
photographs--and that is another story. In an article chiefly devoted
to praise of the skyscraper, in a number of The Arts, the majority of
the illustrations were taken from a point that the man in the street
never reaches. In short, it is an architecture, not for men, but for
angels and aviators!

If buildings are to be experienced directly, and not through the
vicarious agency of the photograph, the skyscraper defeats its own
ends; for a city built so that tall buildings could be approached and
appreciated would have avenues ten times the width of the present ones;
and a city so generously planned would have no need for the sort of
building whose sole economic purpose is to make the most of monopoly
and congestion. In order to accommodate the office-dwellers in the
Chicago Loop, for example, if a minimum of twenty stories were the
restriction, the streets would have to be 241 feet wide, according to
a calculation of Mr. Raymond Unwin, in the Journal of the American
Institute of Architects.

One need not dwell upon the way in which these obdurate, overwhelming
masses take away from the little people who walk in their shadows any
semblance of dignity as human beings; it is perhaps inevitable that one
of the greatest mechanical achievements in a thoroughly dehumanized
civilization should, no doubt unconsciously, achieve this wry purpose.
It is enough to point out that the virtues of the skyscraper are mainly
exercises in technique. They have precious little to do with the human
arts of seeing, feeling, and living, or with the noble architectural
end of making buildings which stimulate and enhance these arts.

A building that one cannot readily see, a building that reduces
the passerby to a mere mote, whirled and buffeted by the winds of
traffic, a building that has no accommodating grace or perfection in
its interior furnishing, beyond its excellent lavatories--in what
sense is such a building a great work of architecture, or how can
the mere manner of its construction create a great style? One might
as well say, with Robert Dale Owen, that the brummagem gothic of the
Smithsonian Institution was a return to organic architecture. Consider
what painful efforts of interior decoration are necessary before the
skyscraper-apartment can recapture the faded perfume of the home.
Indeed, it takes no very discerning eye to see that in a short time
we shall be back again in interiors belonging to the period of the
ottoman and the whatnot, in order to restore a homely sense of comfort
and esthetic ease to the eviscerated structure of the modern fireproof
apartment. What chiefly distinguishes our modern American work in this
department from that of the disreputable ’eighties is that the earlier
architects were conscious of their emptiness, and attempted feverishly
to hide it: whereas our moderns do not regard emptiness as a serious
lapse, and are inclined to boast about it.

There is a sense, of course, in which these modern colossi express our
civilization. It is a romantic notion, however, to believe that this
is an important or beautiful fact. Our slums express our civilization,
too, and our rubbish heaps tell sermons that our stones conceal. The
only expression that really matters in architecture is that which
contributes in a direct and positive way to the good life: that is
why there is so much beauty to the square foot in an old New England
village, and so little, beyond mere picturesqueness, in the modern
metropolis. A building stands or falls, even as a pure work of art, by
its just relation to the city around it. Without a sense of scale--and
the skyscraper has destroyed our sense of scale--the effect of any
single building is nullified.


V

The provinces in which mechanical architecture has been genuinely
successful are those in which there have been no conventional
precedents, and in which the structure has achieved a sense of
absolute form by following sympathetically the limitations of
material and function. Just as the bridge summed up what was best in
early industrialism, so the modern subway station, the modern lunch
room, the modern factory, and its educational counterpart, the modern
school, have often been cast in molds which would make them conspicuous
esthetic achievements. In the Aristotelian sense, every purpose
contains an inherent form; and it is only natural that a factory or
lunchroom or grain elevator, intelligently conceived, should become a
structure quite different in every aspect from the precedents that are
upheld in the schools.

It would be a piece of brash esthetic bigotry to deny the esthetic
values that derive from machinery: the clean surfaces, the hard lines,
the calibrated perfection that the machine has made possible carry
with them a beauty quite different from that of handicraft--but often
it is a beauty. Our new sensitiveness to the forms of useful objects
and purely utilitarian structures is an excellent sign; and it is not
surprising that this sensitiveness has arisen first among artists.
Many of our power-plants are majestic; many of our modern factories
are clean and lithe and smart, designed with unerring logic and
skill. Put alongside buildings in which the architect has glorified
his own idiosyncrasy or pandered to the ritual of conspicuous waste,
our industrial plants at least have honesty and sincerity and an
inner harmony of form and function. There is nothing peculiar to
machine-technology in these virtues, however, for the modern factory
shares them with the old New England mill, the modern grain elevator
with the Pennsylvania barn, the steamship with the clipper, and the
airplane hangar with the castle.

The error with regard to these new forms of building is the attempt
to universalize the mere process or form, instead of attempting to
universalize the scientific spirit in which they have been conceived.
The design for a dwelling-house which ignores everything but the
physical necessities of the occupants is the product of a limited
conception of science which stops short at physics and mechanics, and
neglects biology, psychology, and sociology. If it was bad esthetics
to design steel frames decorated with iron cornucopias and flowers,
it is equally bad esthetics to design homes as if babies were hatched
from incubators, and as if wheels, rather than love and hunger, made
the world go round. During the first movement of industrialism it was
the pathetic fallacy that crippled and warped the new achievements of
technology; today we are beset by the plutonic fallacy, which turns all
living things it touches into metal.

In strict justice to our better sort of mechanical architecture, I
must point out that the error of the mechanolators is precisely the
opposite error to that of the academies. The weakness of conventional
architecture in the schools of the nineteenth century was the fact
that it applied only to a limited province: we knew what an orthodox
palace or post office would be like, and we had even seen their guilty
simulacra in tenement-houses and shopfronts; but no one had ever dared
to imagine what a Beaux Arts factory would be like; and such approaches
to it as the pottery works in Lambeth only made the possibility more
dubious. The weakness of our conventional styles of architecture was
that they stopped short at a province called building--which meant the
province where the ordinary rules of esthetic decency and politeness
were completely abandoned, for lack of a precedent.

The modernist is correct in saying that the mass of building ought
to speak the same language; it is well for him to attempt to follow
Mr. Louis Sullivan, in his search for a “rule so broad as to admit
of no exceptions.” Where the modernist becomes confused, however, is
in regarding the _dictionary_ of modern forms, whose crude elements
are exhibited in our factories and skyscrapers and grain elevators,
as in any sense equivalent for their creative expression. So far our
mechanical architecture is a sort of structural Esperanto: it has a
vocabulary without a literature, and when it steps beyond the elements
of its grammar it can only translate badly into its own tongue the
noble poems and epics that the Romans and Greeks and medieval builders
left behind them.

The leaders of modernism do not, indeed, make the mistake that some of
their admirers have made: Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright’s pleasure pavilions
and hotels do not resemble either factories or garages or grain
elevators: they represent the same tendencies, perhaps, but they do so
with respect to an entirely different set of human purposes. In one
important characteristic, Mr. Wright’s style has turned its back upon
the whole world of engineering: whereas the steel cage lends itself to
the vertical skyscraper, Mr. Wright’s designs are the very products
of the prairie, in their low-lying, horizontal lines, in their flat
roofs, while at the same time they defy the neutral gray or black or
red of the engineering structure by their colors and ornament.

In sum, the best modern work does not merely respect the machine:
it respects the people who use it. It is the lesser artists and
architects who, unable to control and mold the products of the machine,
have glorified it in its nakedness, much as the producer of musical
comedies, in a similar mood of helpless adulation, has “glorified” the
American girl--as if either the machine or the girl needed it.

It has been a genuine misfortune in America that, as Mr. Sullivan
bitterly pointed out in The Autobiography of an Idea, the growth of
imperialism burked the development of a consonant modern style. In
Europe, particularly in Finland, Germany, and the Netherlands, the best
American work has been appreciated and followed up, and as so often
happens, exaggerated; so that the esthetic appreciation of the machine
has been carried across the Atlantic and back again, very much in the
way that Emerson’s individualism was transformed by Nietzsche and
became the mystic doctrine of the Superman. Some of the results of this
movement are interesting and valid: the work of the Dutch architects,
for example, in the garden suburbs around Amsterdam: but what pleases
one in these new compositions is not the mechanical rigor of form but
the playfulness of spirit--they are good architecture precisely because
they are something more than mere engineering. Except for a handful of
good precedents, our mechanical work in America does not express this
vitality. The machine has stamped us; and we have not reacted.

Moreover, in the building of separate houses in the city and its
suburbs, where the demands of mechanical efficiency are not so drastic
as they are in the office building, the effect of the machine process
has been to narrow the scope of individual taste and personality.
The designer, whether he is the architect, the owner, or the working
contractor, works within a tradition whose bearing lies beyond him.
Outside this mechanical tradition we have had many examples of good
individual work, like the stone houses that have been erected around
Philadelphia, and the more or less native cement and adobe houses in
New Mexico and California: but the great mass of modern houses are no
longer framed for some definite site and some definite occupants: they
are manufactured for a blind market. The boards are cut to length in
the sawmill, the roofing is fabricated in a roofing plant, the window
frames are cut in standard sizes and put together in the framing
factory, the balustrade is done in a turning mill, the very internal
fittings like china closets and chests are made in a distant plant,
after one of a dozen patterns fixed and exemplified in the catalog.
The business of the building worker is reduced to a mere assemblage
of parts; and except for the more expensive grades of work, the
architect is all but eliminated. The charming designs that the European
modernists make testify to the strength of their long architectural
tradition even in the face of machinery; the truth is that they fit
our modern methods of house-production scarcely much better than the
thatched cottage of clay and wattle. The nemesis of mechanism is that
it inexorably eliminates the architect--even the architect who worships
its achievements!

So much of the detail of a building is established by factory standards
and patterns that even the patron himself has precious little scope
for giving vent to his impulses in the design or execution of the
work; for every divergence from a standardized design represents an
additional expense. In fact, the only opportunity for expressing his
taste and personality is in choosing the mode in which the house is to
be built: he must find his requirements in Italy, Colonial America,
France, Tudor England, or Spain--woe to him if he wants to find them
in twentieth-century America! Thus the machine process has created a
standardized conception of style: of itself it can no more invent a new
style than a mummy can beget children. If one wishes a house of red
brick it will be Georgian or Colonial; that is to say, the trimming
will be white, the woodwork will have classic moldings, and the
electric-light fixtures will be pseudo-candlesticks in silvered metal.
If one builds a stucco house, one is doomed by similar mechanical
canons to rather heavy furniture in the early Renaissance forms,
properly duplicated by the furniture makers of Grand Rapids--and so on.
The notion of an American stucco house is so foreign to the conception
of the machine mode that only the very poor, and the very rich, can
afford it. Need I add that Colonial or Italian, when it falls from the
mouth of the “realtor” has nothing to do with authentic Colonial or
Italian work?

Commercial concentration and the national market waste resources by
neglect, as in the case of the Appalachian forests they squandered
them by pillage. Standardized materials and patterns and plans and
elevations--here are the ingredients of the architecture of the machine
age: by escaping it we get our superficially vivacious suburbs; by
accepting it, those vast acres of nondescript monotony that, call
them West Philadelphia or Long Island City or what you will, are but
the anonymous districts of Coketown. The chief thing needful for the
full enjoyment of this architecture is a standardized people. Here our
various educational institutions, from the advertising columns of the
five-cent magazine to the higher centers of learning, from the movie to
the radio, have not perhaps altogether failed the architect.

The manufactured house is set in the midst of a manufactured
environment. The quality of this environment calls for satire rather
than description; and yet a mere catalog of its details, such as Mr.
Sinclair Lewis gave in Babbitt, is almost satire in itself. In this
environment the home tends more and more to take last place: Mr. Henry
Wright has in fact humorously suggested that at the present increasing
ratio of site-costs--roads, sewers, and so forth--to house-costs, the
house itself will disappear in favor of the first item by 1970. The
prophetic symbol of this event is the tendency of the motor-car and
the temple-garage to take precedence over the house. Already these
incubi have begun to occupy the last remaining patch of space about the
suburban house, where up to a generation ago there was a bit of garden,
a swing for the children, a sandpile, and perhaps a few fruit trees.

The end of a civilization that considers buildings as mere machines is
that it considers human beings as mere machine-tenders: it therefore
frustrates or diverts the more vital impulses which would lead to the
culture of the earth or the intelligent care of the young. Blindly
rebellious, men take revenge upon themselves for their own mistakes:
hence the modern mechanized house, with its luminous bathroom, its
elegant furnace, its dainty garbage-disposal system, has become
more and more a thing to get away from. The real excuse for the
omnipresent garage is that in a mechanized environment of subways and
house-machines some avenue of escape and compensation must be left
open. Distressing as a Sunday automobile ride may be on the crowded
highways that lead out of the great city, it is one degree better than
remaining in a neighborhood unsuited to permanent human habitation. So
intense is the demand for some saving grace, among all these frigid
commercial perfections, that handicraft is being patronized once more,
in a manner that would have astonished Ruskin, and the more audacious
sort of interior decorator is fast restoring the sentimentalities in
glass and wax flowers that marked the Victorian Age. This is a pretty
comment upon the grand achievements of modern industry and science; but
it is better, perhaps, that men should be foolish than that they should
be completely dehumanized.

The architecture of other civilizations has sometimes been the brutal
emblem of the warrior, like that of the Assyrians: it has remained for
the architecture of our own day in America to be fixed and stereotyped
and blank, like the mind of a Robot. The age of the machine has
produced an architecture fit only for lathes and dynamos to dwell
in: incomplete and partial in our applications of science, we have
forgotten that there is a science of humanity, as well as a science
of material things. Buildings which do not answer to this general
description are either aristocratic relics of the age of handicraft,
enjoyed only by the rich, or they are fugitive attempts to imitate
cheaply the ways and gestures of handicraft.

We have attempted to live off machinery, and the host has devoured us.
It is time that we ceased to play the parasite: time that we looked
about us, to see what means we have for once more becoming men. The
prospects of architecture are not divorced from the prospects of the
community. If man is created, as the legends say, in the image of
the gods, his buildings are done in the image of his own mind and
institutions.




CHAPTER EIGHT ARCHITECTURE AND CIVILIZATION


I

In the course of this survey we have seen how architecture and
civilization develop hand in hand: the characteristic buildings of
each period are the memorials to their dearest institutions. The
essential structure of the community--the home, meeting-place, the
work-place--remains; but the covering changes and passes, like the
civilization itself, when new materials, new methods of work, new ideas
and habits and ways of feeling, come into their own.

If this interpretation of the rôle of architecture is just, there
is little use in discussing the needs and promises of architecture
without relating the shell itself to the informing changes that may
or may not take place in the life of the community itself. To fancy
that any widespread improvement of architecture lies principally with
the architects is an esthetic delusion: in a barren soil the most
fertile geniuses are cut off from their full growth. We have not
lacked architects of boldness and originality, from Latrobe to Louis
H. Sullivan: nor have we lacked men of great ability, from Thomas
Jefferson to Bertram Goodhue; nor yet have we lacked men who stood
outside the currents of their time and kept their own position, from
Richardson to Dr. Cram. With all these capacities at our disposal,
our finest efforts in building remain chaotic and undisciplined and
dispersed--the reflection of our accumulated civilization.

Our architectural development is bound up with the course of our
civilization: this is a truism. To the extent that we permit our
institutions and organizations to function blindly, as our bed is
made, so must we lie on it; and while we may nevertheless produce
isolated buildings of great esthetic interest, like Messrs. Cram
and Goodhue’s additions to West Point, like The Shelton, like a
hundred country estates, the matrix of our physical community will
not be affected by the existence of separate jewels; and most of our
buildings will not merely be outside the province of the architectural
profession--they will be the product of minds untouched, for the most
part, by humane standards. Occasionally the accidental result will be
good, as has happened sometimes in our skyscrapers and factories and
grain elevators; but an architecture that must depend upon accidental
results is not exactly a triumph of the imagination, still less is it
a triumph of exact technology.

Looking back upon the finished drama, it is convenient to regard our
community and our builders as creatures of their environment: once
their choices are made, they seem inevitable. On this account even the
pomp of the imperial architects can be justified, as the very voice
and gesture of the period they consummated. Looking forward, however,
this convenient fiction of inevitability is no longer serviceable: we
are in the realm of contingency and choice; and at any moment a new
factor may be introduced which will alter profoundly the economic and
social life of the community. The Great War in Europe, the revolution
in Russia, the spread of motor transportation in America, the idea of
non-coöperation in India--I select these at random as matters which
during the last generation have altered profoundly the unceasing “drift
of things.”

The future of our civilization depends upon our ability to select and
control our heritage from the past, to alter our present attitudes
and habits, and to project fresh forms into which our energies may be
freely poured. On our ability to re-introduce old elements, as the
humanists of the late Middle Ages brought back the classic literature
and uncovered the Roman monuments, or to introduce new elements, as the
inventors and engineers of the last century brought in physical science
and the machine-tool technology, our position as creators depends.
During the last century our situation has changed from that of the
creators of machinery to that of creatures of the machine system; and
it is perhaps time that we contrived new elements which will alter once
more the profounder contours of our civilization.

Unfortunately for our comfort and peace of mind, any real change in our
civilization depends upon much more complicated, and much more drastic
measures than the old-fashioned reformer, who sought to work a change
of heart or to alter the distribution of income, ever recognized; and
it will do little good to talk about a “coming renaissance” unless we
have a dim idea of the sort of creature that is to be born again. Our
difficulty, it seems to me, is due to the fact that the human sciences
have lagged behind the physical ones; and up to the present time our
good intentions have been frustrated for the lack of the necessary
instruments of analysis. It may be helpful and amusing, however, to
see what we can do in this department with the instruments that are
already at hand.

In every community, as Frédéric Le Play first pointed out, there are
three elements: the place, the work, and the people; the sociologist’s
equivalent of environment, function, and organism. Out of the
interaction of the folk and their place, through the work, the simple
life of the community develops. At the same time, each of these
elements carries with it its specific spiritual heritage. The people
have their customs and manners and morals and laws; or as we might say
more briefly, their institutions; the work has its technology, its
craft-experience, from the simple lore of peasant and breeder to the
complicated formulæ of the modern chemists and metallurgists; while the
deeper perception of the “place,” through the analysis of the falling
stone, the rising sun, the running water, the decomposing vegetation,
and the living animal gives rise to the tradition of “learning” and
science.

With this simple outline in mind, the process that created our present
mechanical civilization becomes a little more plain; and we can
appreciate, perhaps, the difficulties that stand in the way of any
swift and easy transformation.

Thus our present order was due to a mingled change in every aspect of
the community: morally, it was protestantism; legally, the rise of
representative government; socially, the introduction of “democracy”;
in custom, the general breakdown of the family unit; industrially, it
meant the collapse of the guilds and the growth of the factory-system;
scientifically, the spread of physical science, and the increased
knowledge of the terrestrial globe--and so on.

Each of these facets of the community’s life was the object of separate
attention and effort: but it was their totality which produced the
modern order. Where--among other reasons--the moral preparation for
mechanical civilization was incomplete, as in the Catholic countries,
the industrial revolution was also late and incomplete; where the
craft-tradition remained strong, as in the beech forests of the
Chilterns, the industrial change made fewer inroads into the habits of
the community, than, let us say, in Lancashire, where modern industry
was untempered and unchallenged.

If the circumstances which hedge in our architecture are to be
transformed, it is not sufficient, with Mr. Louis Sullivan, to say
that we must accept and enthrone the virtues of democracy; still
less is there any meaning in the attempt of the Educational Committee
of the American Institute of Architects to educate public taste in
the arts. Nor is there any genuine esthetic salvation in the demand
of the modernists that we embrace in more whole-hearted fashion the
machine. Our architecture has been full of false starts and unfulfilled
promises, precisely because the ground has not been worked enough
beforehand to receive the new seeds.

If we are to have a fine architecture, we must begin at the other end
from that where our sumptuously illustrated magazines on home-building
and architecture begin--not with the building itself, but with the
whole complex out of which architect, builder, and patron spring,
and into which the finished building, whether it be a cottage or
a skyscraper, is set. Once the conditions are ripe for a good
architecture, the plant will flower by itself: it did so in the Middle
Ages, as a hundred little towns and villages between Budapest and
Glastonbury still testify; it did so again within a limited area among
the swells of the Renaissance; and it is springing forth lustily today
in the garden cities of England, the Netherlands, and the Baltic
countries. The notion that our architecture will be improved by courses
of appreciation in our museums and colleges is, to put it quite mildly,
one of the decadent deceits of snobbery. It is only paper flowers that
grow in this fashion.


II

In order to get our bearings, we shall pull apart, one by one, the
principal elements in our heritage of civilization in the United
States, and examine them separately. This is a dangerous convenience,
however, and I must emphasize that these strands are tightly
intertwined and bound up. It is only in thought that one can take
them apart. No one has ever encountered man, save on the earth; no
one has ever seen the earth, save through the eyes of a man. There
is no logical priority in place, work, and people. In discussing the
community one either deals with it as a whole, or one’s discussion is
incomplete and faulty.


III

The capital sign of the early settlements beyond the seashore was
the clearing; and since the great majority of newcomers lived by
agriculture, the forest itself appeared merely as an obstacle to
be removed. The untouched woods of America were all too lush and
generous, and if an occasional Leatherstocking loved them, the new
settler saw only land to clear and wood to burn. In the New England
village, the tradition of culture was perhaps applied to the land
itself, and elsewhere there are occasional elements of good practice,
in the ordered neatness of boulder-fences. For the most part, however,
the deliberate obliteration of the natural landscape became a great
national sport, comparable to the extermination of bison which the
casual western traveler devoted himself to at a later date.

The stripping of the Appalachian forest was the first step in our
campaign against nature. By 1860 the effect was already grave enough
to warn an acute observer, like George Perkins Marsh, of the danger to
our civilization, and to prompt him in Earth and Man, to remind his
countrymen that other civilizations about the Mediterranean and the
Adriatic had lost their top-soil and ruined their agriculture through
the wanton destruction of their forests.

In the meanwhile, a new factor had entered. If before the nineteenth
century we cleared the forest to make way for the farm, with the
entrance of the industrial pioneer we began to clear the farm to parcel
out the city. We have called this process the settlement of America,
but the name is anomalous, for we formed the habit of using the land,
not as a home, a permanent seat of culture, but as a means to something
else--principally as a means to the temporary advantages of profitable
speculation and exploitation.

James Mackay, a charitable Scotch observer in the middle of the
nineteenth century, explained our negligence of the earth by the fact
that we pinned our affections to institutions rather than places, and
cared not how the landscape was massacred as long as we lived under the
same flag and enjoyed the same forms of government. There is no doubt a
little truth in this observation; but it was not merely our attachment
to republican government that caused this behavior: it was even more,
perhaps, our disattachment from the affiliations of a settled life. The
pioneer, to put it vulgarly, was on the make and on the move; it did
not matter to him how he treated the land, since by the time he could
realize its deficiencies he had already escaped to a new virgin area.
“What had posterity done for him?”

The pioneers who turned their backs on a civilized way of life in
order to extend the boundaries of civilization, left us with a heavy
burden--not merely blasted and disorderly landscapes, but the habit of
tolerating and producing blasted and disorderly landscapes. As Cobbett
pointed out in his attempt to account for the unkempt condition of the
American farm, the farmer in this country lacked the example of the
great landed estates, where the woods had become cultivated parks, and
the meadowland had become lawns. Without this cultivated example in the
country, it is no wonder that our cities have been littered, frayed at
the edges, ugly; no wonder that our pavements so quickly obliterate
trees and grass; no wonder that so many towns are little more than
gashes of metal and stone.

Those who had been bred on the land brought into the city none of that
disciplined care which might have preserved some of its amenities. They
left the smoke of the clearings, which was a sign of rural “progress”;
they welcomed the smoke of the towns, and all that accompanied it.

It is scarcely a paradox to say that the improvement of our cities
must proceed inwards from the countryside; for it is largely a matter
of reversing the process which converts the farm into incipient blocks
of real estate. Once we assimilate the notion that soil and site
have uses quite apart from sale, we shall not continue to barbarize
and waste them. Consider how the water’s edge of lower Manhattan was
developed without the slightest regard for its potential facilities for
recreation; how the Acropolis of Pittsburgh, the Hump, was permitted to
turn into a noisome slum; how the unique beauty of Casco Bay has been
partly secured only by Portland’s inferiority as a shipping center.
Indeed, all up and down the country one can pick up a thousand examples
of towns misplaced, of recreation areas becoming factory sites, of
industries located without intelligent reference to raw materials or
power or markets or the human beings who serve them, of agricultural
land being turned prematurely into suburban lots, and of small rural
communities which need the injection of new industries and enterprises,
languishing away whilst a metropolis not fifty miles away continues to
absorb more people, who daily pay a heavy premium for their congestion.

I have already drawn attention to the waste of local materials in
connection with our manufacture of buildings, our concentration of
markets, and our standardization of styles. It is plain that our
architects would not have to worry so painfully about the latest
fashion-page of architectural tricks, if they had the opportunity to
work more consistently with the materials at hand, using brick where
clay was plentiful, stone where that was of good quality, and cement
where concrete adapted itself to local needs--as it does so well
near the seashore, and, for a different reason, in the south. Wood,
one of our most important materials for both exterior and interior,
has suffered by just the opposite of neglect: so completely have our
Appalachian forests been mined, and so expensive are the freight
charges for the long haul from the Pacific coast, that good housing
in the east depends to no little extent upon our ability to recover
continuous local supplies of timber throughout the Appalachian region.

(It is characteristic of our mechanical and metropolitan civilization
that one of the great sources of timber waste is the metropolitan
newspaper: and one of the remoter blessings of a sounder regional
development is that it would, perhaps, remove the hourly itch for the
advertising sheet, and by the same token would provide large quantities
of wood for housing, without calling for the destruction of ten acres
of spruce for the Sunday edition alone! I give the reader the privilege
of tracing the pleasant ramifications of this notion.)

To see the interdependence of city and country, to realize that the
growth and concentration of one is associated with the depletion and
impoverishment of the other, to appreciate that there is a just and
harmonious balance between the two--this capacity we have lacked.
Before we can build well on any scale we shall, it seems to me, have
to develop an art of regional planning, an art which will relate city
and countryside in a new pattern from that which was the blind creation
of the industrial and the territorial pioneer. Instead of regarding
the countryside as so much grist doomed to go eventually into the
metropolitan mill, we must plan to preserve and develop all our natural
resources to the limit.

It goes without saying that any genuine attempt to provide for the
social and economic renewal of a region cannot be constrained to
preserve vested land-values and property rights and privileges;
indeed, if the land is to be fully loved and cared for again we must
recover it in something more than name only. The main objection to
keeping our natural resources in the hands of the community, namely,
that private capital is more zealous at exploitation, is precisely the
reason for urging the first course. Our land has suffered from zeal in
exploitation; and it would be much better, for example, that our water
power resources should remain temporarily undeveloped, than that they
should be incontinently used by private corporations to concentrate
population in the centers where a high tariff can be charged. The
number of things that are waiting to be done--the planting of town
forests, the communal restoration of river banks and beaches, the
transformation of bare roads into parkways--will of course differ in
each region and locality; and my aim here is only to point to a general
objective.

The beginnings of genuine regional planning have already been made
in Ontario, Canada, where the social utilization of water-power has
directly benefited the rural communities, and given them an independent
lease on life. In the United States, Mr. Benton Mackaye has sketched
out a bold and fundamental plan for associating the development of a
spinal recreational trail with an electric power development for the
whole Appalachian region, along the ridgeway; both trail and power
being used as a basis for the re-afforestation and the re-peopling
of the whole upland area, with a corresponding decentralization
and depopulation of the overcrowded, spotty coastal region. Such a
scheme would call for a pretty thorough dislocation of metropolitan
values; and if it is slow in making headway, that is only because its
gradual institution would mean that a new epoch had begun in American
civilization. At the present time it is hard to discover how tangible
these new hopes and projects may be: it is significant, however, that
the Housing and Regional Planning Commission of the State of New York
was called into existence by the necessity for finding a way out of our
metropolitan tangle; and it is possible that a new orientation in power
and culture is at hand.

In a loose, inconsecutive way, the objectives of regional planning
have been dealt with by the conservation movement during the last
century; and if the art itself has neither a corpus of experience
nor an established body of practitioners, this is only to say that
it has, as it were, broken through the surface in a number of places
and that it remains to be gathered up and intelligently used. When
regional planning starts its active career, it will concern itself to
provide a new framework for our communities which will redistribute
population and industry, and recultivate the environment--substituting
forestry for timber-mining, stable agriculture for soil-mining, and in
general the habit of dressing and keeping the earth for our traditional
American practice of stripping and deflowering it. Architecture begins
historically when the “Bauer” who plants becomes the “Bauer” who
builds; and if our architecture is to have a substantial foundation, it
is in a refreshened countryside that we will perhaps find it.


IV

Let us now turn to industry. The medieval order was disrupted in
America before it could fully take root. As a result we have no
craft-tradition that is properly native, with the exception of the
shipbuilders and furniture-makers of New England, whose art has been on
the wane since the second quarter of the nineteenth century. We have
covered up this deficiency by importing from generation to generation
foreign workmen, principally Germans and Italians, in whose birthplaces
the art of using wood and stone has not been entirely lost; but we
are still far from having created an independent craft-tradition
of our own. If art is the fine efflorescence of a settled life,
invention is the necessity of the roving pioneer who every day faces
new difficulties and new hazards; and accordingly we have devoted our
energies to the machine, and to the products of the machine. All that
we cannot do in this medium we regard as “mere” art, and put it apart
from the direct aims and practices of everyday life.

Our skill in working according to exact formulæ with machines and
instruments of precision is not to be belittled: socially directed it
would put an end to a hundred vapid drudgeries, and it would perhaps
give the pervasive finish of a style to structures whose parts are
now oddly at sixes and sevens. Unfortunately for us and for the
world in general the machine did not come simply as a technological
contribution: it appeared when the guild had broken down and when
the joint stock company had gotten its piratical start as a Company
of Gentleman-Adventurers. As a result, our mechanical age was given
an unsocial twist; and inventions which should have worked for the
welfare of the community were used for the financial aggrandizement
of investors and monopolizers. In architecture, all the skill of the
technologist and all the taste of the artist have become subservient
to the desire of the financier for a quick turnover of capital, and
the ground landlord for the maximum exploitation of the land. The
sole chances for good workmanship occur when, by a happy accident of
personality or situation, the patron asks of the architect and engineer
only the best that they can give.

It is this side of exaggeration to say that today a building is one
kind of manufactured product on a counter of manufactured products;
but with a difference; for the internal processes of construction
are still, in spite of all our advances, handicrafts. An interesting
result, as Mr. F. L. Ackermann has pointed out, follows from this
fact: namely, that the pace of building tends to lag behind the pace
at which other goods are produced under the machine-system; and if
this is the case, the quantitative production of buildings is bound
to be too low, while their cost is bound, by the same process, to be
disproportionately high.

The remedy seized by the engineer, as I have pointed out, is to
introduce the process of standardization and mechanization wherever
possible. This heightens the pace of building, and by and large it
quickens the rate of deterioration in the thing built: both processes
increase the turnover of buildings, and so tend to make the art of
building approach the rhythm established by our price-system for the
other mechanical arts; since, under the price-system, the manufacturer
must create a continued demand for his products or risk flooding the
market. The two ways of creating a demand are to widen the area of sale
or to increase the rate of consumption. Shoddy materials and shoddy
workmanship are the most obvious means of accomplishing the second end;
but fashion plays a serious part, and maladaptation to use, though less
frequently noted, cannot be ignored.

All these little anomalies and inconveniences have come with
machinery, not of course because the machine is inherently wasteful
and fraudulent, but because our social order has not been adapted to
its use. Our gains have been canceled, for the reason that the vast
expansion of our productive powers has necessitated an equally vast
expansion in our consumptive processes. Hence in many departments of
building, the advantage of machinery has been almost nullified; and if
handicraft has been driven out, it is less because it is inefficient
than because the pace of production and consumption under handicraft is
so much retarded.

When Ruskin began to agitate for the revival of handicraft it looked
as if our industrial system were bound to triumph everywhere, and as
if Ruskin’s protest were the last weak chirp of romanticism. At the
present time, however, the issue is not so simple as it seemed to the
builders of the Crystal Palace; nor are the choices so narrow. What
seemed a fugitive philosophy when applied to the machine by itself has
turned out to be a rigorous and intelligent criticism, when applied to
the machine-system. The use of the machine in provinces where it has
no essential concern, the network of relationships that have followed
the financial exploitation of machinery--these things have led to a
revolt, in which the engineers themselves have participated. It is not
machinery alone that causes standardization, we begin to see, but the
national market; it is not the machine that makes our cheaper houses
blank and anonymous, but the absence of any mediating relation between
the user and the designer--except through the personality of the
builder, who builds for sale.

Apart from this, in certain industries like wood-turning and
furniture-making the introduction of the gasoline engine and the
electric motor has restored the center of gravity to the small factory,
set in the countryside, and to the individual craftsman or group,
working in the small shop. Professor Patrick Geddes has characterized
the transition from steam to electricity as one from the paleotechnic
to the neotechnic order; and intuitive technological geniuses, like
Mr. Henry Ford, have been quick to see the possibilities of little
factories set in the midst of the countryside. Mechanically speaking,
the electric motor has in certain industries and operations placed
the individual worker on a par with the multiple-machine factory,
even as motor transportation is reducing the advantages of the big
city over the small town or village. It is therefore not unreasonable
to look forward to a continuation of this development, which will
enable groups of building workers to serve their immediate region
quite as economically as would a multitude of national factories,
producing goods blindly for a blind national market. With direct sale
and service, from local sawmills and local furniture-making shops,
the older handicrafts themselves might reënter once more through the
back door--as indeed they have already begun to do in response to the
demands of the wealthy.

I am not suggesting here that handicraft is likely to replace
machinery: what I am suggesting is the immediate and tangible
possibility that machinery itself may lend itself in its modern
forms to a more purposive system of production, like that fostered
by handicraft; and under this condition the antagonism and disparity
between the two forms of production need not be so great as they are at
present. In a little valley I happen to be acquainted with, there is
enough running water to supply five families with electric light from
a single power plant; unfortunately, five families cannot combine for
such a purpose in the state I am speaking of without a power-franchise;
and so the only source of electric light is a distant commercial
power plant using coal. Here is an obvious case where commercial
monopoly runs contrary to economy and where the benefits of modern
technology are forfeited in the working of our financial system. Once
we understand that modern industry does not necessarily bring with it
financial and physical concentration, the growth of smaller centers and
a more widespread distribution of the genuine benefits of technology
will, I think, take place.

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.

Occasionally, this elaboration passes the point at which it would
give the highest esthetic delight to the beholder; nevertheless, the
craftsman keeps pouring himself into his job: he must fill up every
blank space, and will not be denied, for carving wood or hacking stone,
when it is done with a free spirit, is a dignified and enjoyable way
of living. Those of us who have become acclimated to industrialism
sometimes find the effulgence and profusion of craftsmanship a little
bewildering: but if our enjoyment of the portals of a medieval
cathedral or the façade of an East Indian house is dulled by the myopic
intricacy of the pattern, our appreciation of the craftsman’s fun and
interest should be heightened. Granting that art is an end in itself,
is it not an end to the worker as well as the spectator? A great part
of craftsmanship needs no other justification than that it bears the
mark of a joyous spirit.

When we compare an ideal product of handicraft, like a Florentine table
of the sixteenth century, with an ideal product of mechanical art--say
a modern bathroom--the contrasting virtues and defects become plain.
The conditions that make possible good machine-work are, first of all,
a complete calculation of consequences, embodied in a working drawing
or design: to deviate by a hair’s breadth from this calculation is to
risk failure. The qualities exemplified in good machine-work follow
naturally from the implements: they are precision, economy, finish,
geometric perfection. When the workman’s personality intervenes in the
process, it is carelessness. If he leave his imprint, it is a flaw.

A good pattern in terms of the machine is one that fulfills the bare
essentials of an object: the chairishness of a chair, the washiness of
a basin, the enclosedness of a house, and any superfluity that may be
added by way of ornament is a miscarriage of the machine-process, for
by adding dull work to work that is already dull it defeats the end for
which machinery may legitimately exist in a humane society; namely, to
produce a necessary quantity of useful goods with a minimum of human
effort.

Craftsmanship, to put the distinction roughly, emphasizes the worker’s
delight in production: anyone who proposed to reduce the amount of time
and effort spent by the carver in wood or stone would be in effect
attempting to shorten the worker’s life. Machine-work, on the other
hand, tends at its best to diminish the inescapable drudgeries of
production: any dodge or decoration that increases the time spent in
service to the machine adds to the physical burden of existence. One is
a sufficient end; the other is, legitimately, only a means to an end.

Our modern communities are far from understanding this distinction.
Just as in art we multiply inadequate chromolithographs and starve
the modern artist, so in architecture a good part of machine-work is
devoted to the production of fake handicraft, like the molded stone
ornamentation used in huge Renaissance fireplaces, designed frequently
for small modern apartments that are superheated by steam. In turn,
the surviving worker who now practices handicraft has been debased
into a servile drudge, using his skill and love, like his predecessors
in Imperial Rome, to copy the original productions of other artists
and craftsmen. Between handicraft that is devoted to mechanical
reproduction and machinery that is set to reproduce endless simulacra
of handicraft, our esthetic opportunities in art and architecture are
muffed again and again. An occasional man of talent, like Mr. Samuel
Yellin, the iron-worker, will survive; but the great run of craftsmen
do not.

Now, with due respect to the slickness and perfection of the best
machine-work, we enjoy it because of the use that it fulfills: it may
incidentally achieve significant form, but no one retains a pickle
bottle, beautifully shaped though Messrs. Heinz and Co.’s are, for this
reason: it was meant for pickles and it vanishes with the pickles.
This is not merely true of today: it is true of all ages: the common
utensils of life return to the dust, whereas those things that hold
the imprint of man’s imagination--the amphoræ of the Greek potters,
the fragile crane-necked bottles of the Persians, the seals of the
Egyptians--are preserved from the rubbish heap, no matter how frail
they may be or how small their intrinsic value.

There is something in man that compels him to respect the human imprint
of art: he lives more nobly surrounded by his own reflections, as a
god might live. The very rage of iconoclasm which the Mohammedans and
Puritans and eighteenth-century liberals exhibited betrayed a deep
respect for the power of art; for we destroy the things that threaten
our existence. Art, in a certain sense, is the spiritual varnish
that we lay on material things, to insure their preservation: on its
lowest terms, beauty is justified because it has “survival value.”
The fact that houses which bear the living imprint of the mind are
irreplaceable is what prevents them from being quickly and callously
replaced. Wren’s churches are preserved beyond their period of
desuetude by Wren’s personality. This process is just the opposite to
that fostered by the machine-system, and it explains why, in the long
run, machine-work may be unsatisfactory and uneconomical--too quickly
degraded.

Art, in fact, is one of the main ways in which we escape the vicious
circle of economic activity. According to the conventional economist,
our economic life has but three phases: production, distribution,
and consumption. We work to eat so that we may eat to work. This is
a fairly accurate portrait of life in an early industrial town; but
it does not apply to the economic processes of a civilized community.
Everywhere, even in regions of difficulty, something more comes out of
production than the current income and the current saving of capital:
sometimes it is leisure and play, sometimes it is religion, philosophy,
and science, and sometimes it is art. In the creation of any permanent
work of art the processes of dissipation and consumption are stayed:
hence the only civilized criterion of a community’s economic life
is not the amount of things produced, but the durability of things
created. A community with a low rate of production and a high standard
of creation will in the long run be physically richer than a modern
city in which the gains of industry are frittered away in evanescent,
uncreative expenditures. What matters is the ratio of production to
creation.

Here lies the justification of the modern architect. Cut off though
he is from the actual processes of building, he nevertheless remains
the sole surviving craftsman who maintains the relation towards the
whole structure that the old handicraft workers used to enjoy in
connection with their particular job. The architect can still leave
his imprint, and even in the severely utilitarian factory he can take
the simple forms of the engineer and turn them into a superb structure
like Messrs. Helmle and Corbett’s Fletcher Building in New York. To
the extent that honest engineering is better than fake architecture,
genuine architecture is better than engineering: for it strikes the
same esthetic and humane chord that painting and sculpture appeal to
by themselves. The freedom to depart from arbitrary and mechanical
precedent, the freedom to project new forms which will more adequately
meet his problem are essential to the architect. Up to the present he
has been able, for the most part, to exercise this freedom only on
traditional buildings, like churches and libraries and auditoriums,
which are outside the reaches of the present commercial regime and have
therefore some prospect of durability.

But before the whole mass of contemporary building will be ready to
receive the imprint of the architect, and before the handicrafts
re-enter the modern building to give the luster of permanence to its
decorations and fixtures, there will have to be a pretty thoroughgoing
reorientation in our economic life. Whilst buildings are erected to
increase site values, whilst houses are produced in block to be sold
to the first wretch who must put a roof over his family’s head, it is
useless to dwell upon the ministrations of art; and, unfortunately, too
much of our building today rests upon this basis and exhibits all the
infirmities of our present economic structure.

From the aspect of our well-to-do suburbs and our newly-planned
industrial towns, from the beginnings of a sound functional
architecture in some of our schools and factories, it is easy to
see what the architecture of our various regions might be if it had
the opportunity to work itself out in a coherent pattern. For the
present, however, it is impossible to say with any certainty whether
our architects are doomed to be extruded by mechanism, or whether they
will have the opportunity to restore to our machine-system some of
the freedom of an earlier regime; and I have no desire to burden this
discussion with predictions and exhortations. But if the conclusions we
have reached are sound, it is only the second possibility that holds
out any promise to the good life.


VI

So far we have considered the regional and industrial bearing of
architecture: it now remains to examine briefly its relation to the
community itself.

In the building of our cities and villages the main _mores_ we have
carried over have been those of the pioneer. We have seen how the
animus of the pioneer, “mine and move,” is antagonistic to the settled
life out of which ordered industries and a great architecture grow.
We have seen also how this animus was deepened in the nineteenth
century by the extraordinary temptation to profit by the increase in
land-increments which followed the growth of population, the result
being, as Mr. Henry George saw when he came back to the cities of
the East from a part of California that was still in the throes of
settlement--progress _and_ poverty.

Now, to increase the population of a town and to raise the nominal
values in ground rents is almost a moral imperative in our American
communities. That is why our zoning laws, which attempt to regulate the
use of land and provide against unfair competition in obtaining the
unearned increment, almost universally leave a loophole through which
the property owners, by mutual consent, may transform the character of
the neighborhood for more intensive uses and higher ground rents. All
our city planning, and more and more our architecture itself, is done
with reference to prospective changes in the value of real estate. It
is nothing to the real estate speculator that the growth of a city
destroys the very purpose for which it may legitimately exist, as the
growth of Atlantic City into a suburb of Broadway and Chestnut Street
ruined its charm as a seaside fishing village. Sufficient unto the day
is the evil he creates.

Most of the important changes that must be effected in relation to
industry and the land cannot be accomplished without departing from
these dominant _mores_--from the customs and laws and uneasy standards
of ethics which we carry over from the days of our continental
conquest. The pioneer inheritance of the miner, coupled with the
imperial inheritance of the hunter-warrior, out for loot, lie at the
bottom of our present-day social structure; and it is useless to expect
any vital changes in the milieu of architecture until the miner and the
hunter are subordinated to relatively more civilized types, concerned
with the culture of life, rather than with its exploitation and
destruction.

I am aware that the statement of the problem in these elementary terms
will seem a little crude and unfamiliar in America where, in the midst
of our buzzing urban environment, we lose sight of the underlying
primitive reality, or--which is worse--speak vaguely of the “cave-man”
unleashed in modern civilization. I do not deny that there are other
elements in our makeup and situation that play an important part; but
it is enough to bring forward here the notion that our concern with
physical utilities and with commercial values is something more than
an abstract defect in our philosophy. On the contrary, it seems to me
to inhere in the dominant occupations of the country, and it is less
to be overcome by moralizing and exhortation, than to be grown out of,
by taking pains to provide for the ascendancy and renewal of the more
humane occupations.

Our communities have grown blindly, and, escaping the natural
limitations which curbed even the Roman engineers, have not been
controlled, on the other hand, by any normative ideal. One step in
the direction of departing from our pioneer customs and habits would
be to consider what the nature of a city is, and what functions it
performs. The dominant, abstract culture of the nineteenth century
was blithely unconcerned with these questions, but, as I have already
pointed out, the Puritans not merely recognized their importance, but
regulated the plan and layout of the city accordingly. The notion that
there is anything arbitrary in imposing a limitation upon the area and
population of a city is absurd: the limits have already been laid down
in the physical conditions of human nature, as Mr. Frederic Harrison
once wisely observed, in the fact that men do not walk comfortably
faster than three miles an hour, nor can they spend on the physical
exertion of locomotion and exercise more than a few hours in every
twenty-four. With respect to the needs of recreation, home-life, and
health, the growth of a city to the point where the outlying citizen
must travel two hours a day in the subway between his office and his
place of work is unintelligent and arbitrary.

A city, properly speaking, does not exist by the accretion of houses,
but by the association of human beings. When the accretion of houses
reaches such a point of congestion or expansion that human association
becomes difficult, the place ceases to be a city. The institutions
that make up the city--schools, clubs, libraries, gymnasia, theaters,
churches, and so forth--can be traced in one form or another back
to the primitive community: they function on the basis of immediate
intercourse, and they can serve through their individual units only a
limited number of people. Should the population of a local community
be doubled, all its civic equipment must be doubled too; otherwise the
life that functions through these institutions and opportunities will
lapse and disappear.

It is not my purpose to discuss in detail the various devices by which
our practice of endless growth and unlimited increment may be limited.
Once the necessary conversion in faith and morals has taken place, the
other things will come easily: for example, the social appropriation of
unearned land-increments, and the exercise of the town-planner’s art to
limit the tendency of a community to straggle beyond its boundaries.

While a great many other ideas and measures are of prime importance for
the good life of the community, that which concerns its architectural
expression is the notion of the community as limited in numbers, and in
area; and as formed, not merely by the agglomeration of people, but by
their relation to definite social and economic institutions. To express
these relations clearly, to embody them in buildings and roads and
gardens in which each individual structure will be subordinated to the
whole--this is the end of community planning.

With the coherence and stability indicated by this method of planning,
architectural effect would not lie in the virtuosity of the architect
or in the peculiar ornateness and originality of any particular
building: it would tend to be diffused, so that the humblest shop would
share in the triumph with the most conspicuous public building. There
are examples of this order of comprehensive architectural design in
hundreds of little villages and towns in pre-industrial Europe--to say
nothing of a good handful in pre-industrial America--and community
planning would make it once more our daily practice. That it can be
done again the examples of Letchworth and Welwyn in England, and
numerous smaller gardened cities created by municipal authorities
in England and other parts of Europe, bear evidence; and where the
precepts of Mr. Ebenezer Howard have been to any degree followed,
architecture has been quick to benefit.

The difference between community planning and the ordinary method of
city-extension and suburb-building has been very well put in a recent
report to the American Institute of Architects, by the Committee on
Community Planning. “Community planning,” says the report, “does not
ask by what desperate means a city of 600,000 people can add another
400,000 during the next generation, nor how a city of seven millions
may enlarge its effective borders to include 29,000,000. It begins,
rather, at the other end, and it asks with Mr. Ebenezer Howard how
big must a city be to perform all of its social, educational, and
industrial functions. It attempts to establish minima and maxima
for different kinds of communities, depending upon their character
and function. If the established practices of industry, commerce,
and finance tend to produce monstrous agglomerations which do not
contribute to human welfare or happiness, community planning must
question these established practices, since the values they create
have nothing to do with the essential welfare of the community itself,
and since the condition thus created is inimical to the stable,
architectural development of the community.”

The normative idea of the garden-city and the garden-village is
the corrective for the flatulent and inorganic conception of
city-development that we labor with, and under, today. So far from
being a strange importation from Europe, the garden-city is nothing
more or less than a sophisticated recovery of a form that we once
enjoyed on our Atlantic seaboard, and lost through our sudden and
almost uncontrollable access of natural resources and people. Here and
there an enterprising and somewhat benevolent industrial corporation
has attempted to carry out some of the principles of garden-city
development; and the United States Housing Corporation and the Shipping
Board had begun to build many admirable communities, when the war
brought this vast initiative to an end. These precedents are better
than nothing, it goes without saying, but there will have to be a
pretty thorough reorientation in our economic and social life before
the garden-city will be anything more than a slick phrase, without
content or power.

Until our communities are ready to undertake the sort of community
planning that leads to garden-cities, it will be empty eloquence
to talk about the future of American architecture. Sheltered as an
enjoyment for the prosperous minority, or used as a skysign for the
advertisement of business, architecture will still await its full
opportunity for creative achievement.

The signs of promise are plenty, and if I have dealt with the darker
side of the picture and have occasionally overemphasized the weaknesses
and defects of the American tradition, it is only because in our
present appreciation of what the American architect has already given
form to, we are likely to forget the small area these achievements
occupy. So far we have achieved patches of good building; more than
once we have achieved the _mot juste_, but we have not learnt the
more difficult art of consecutive discourse. With respect to the
architecture of the whole community, medieval Boston and medieval
New Amsterdam had more to boast than their magnificently endowed
successors. Just as Mr. Babbitt’s great ancestor, Scadder, transformed
a swamp into a thriving metropolis by the simple method of calling it
New Eden, so do we tend to lighten our burdens by calling them the
“blessings of progress”; but it does not avail. Our mechanical and
metropolitan civilization, with all its genuine advances, has let
certain essential human elements drop out of its scheme; and until we
recover these elements our civilization will be at loose ends, and our
architecture will unerringly express this situation.

Home, meeting-place, and factory; polity, culture, and art have
still to be united and wrought together, and this task is one of the
fundamental tasks of our civilization. Once that union is effected, the
long breach between art and life, which began with the Renaissance,
will be brought to an end. The magnitude of our task might seem a
little disheartening, were it not for the fact that, “against or with
our will,” our civilization is perpetually being modified and altered.
If in less than a hundred years the feudal civilization of Japan could
adopt our modern mechanical gear, there is nothing to prevent our own
civilization from recovering once more its human base--nothing, that
is, except our own desires, aims, habits, and ends. This is an ironic
consolation, perhaps, but the remedy it offers is real.




_ENVOI_


_The aristocracies of the world have never doubted the supremacy of the
home and garden and temple over all the baser mechanisms of existence,
and the folk-civilizations out of which aristocracies have so often
risen have never strayed far from these realities. In the Norse fables,
the dwarfs are regarded as queer monsters, because they are always
“busy people” who have no pride or joy except in the work they perform
and the mischief they cause._

_The great heresy of the modern world is that it ceased to worship the
Lords of Life, who made the rivers flow, caused the animals to mate,
and brought forth the yearly miracle of vegetation: it prostrated
itself, on the contrary, before the dwarfs, with their mechanical
ingenuity, and the giants, with their imbecile power. Today our lives
are perpetually menaced by these “busy people”; we are surrounded
by their machines, and for worship, we turn their prayer wheels of
red-tape._

_It will not always be so; that would be monstrous. Sooner or later
we will learn to pick our way out of the débris that the dwarfs, the
gnomes, and the giants have created; eventually, to use Henry Adams’
figure, the sacred mother will supplant the dynamo. The prospects
for our architecture are bound up with a new orientation towards the
things that are symbolized in the home, the garden and the temple; for
architecture sums up the civilization it enshrines, and the mass of our
buildings can never be better or worse than the institutions that have
shaped them._




NOTES ON BOOKS


I HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

The best introductions to the historic setting of our architecture
and civilization are the local guide-books and histories. See, for
example, Stokes’s excellent and exhaustive Iconography of Manhattan,
and the Memorial History of Boston, edited by Justin Winsor. Both
are profusely illustrated. In the wave of civic enthusiasm that
swept over the country in the ’nineties, many local descriptions and
histories were written. For the most part, they are loose, rambling,
credulous, and devoid of sociological insight: but occasionally there
is a nugget in the matrix. Powell’s Historic Towns series covers broad
ground. As regional histories, Weeden’s Economic and Social History
of New England, and Mr. Samuel Eliot Morison’s Maritime History of
Massachusetts, stand in a class by themselves: in them we have the
beginnings of what W. H. Riehl called a “natural history” of the human
community.


II ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY

Ever since colonial architecture was reappreciated after the Civil
War, a large amount of material has appeared on the early architecture
of the colonies. Before 1900 the greater part of this was uncritical.
Isham and Brown’s work on the early architecture of Connecticut and
Rhode Island made a new departure, which Messrs. Cousins and Riley’s
studies of the architecture of Salem and Philadelphia have carried on.
Mr. Fiske Kimball’s compendious study of the Domestic Architecture of
the Colonies and the Early Republic brings together a large amount of
authenticated data. Articles and illustrations dealing with particular
aspects of our pre-industrial architecture, or with particular
regions--like the Lebanon Valley in Pennsylvania--are scattered through
the architectural periodicals. Beyond the early republican period,
our architectural histories come to an end. Works like John Bullock’s
The American Cottage Builder, New York: 1854, occur in almost every
old library and are full of interesting data. To fill the gap in
later years we must have recourse to a comprehensive German treatise,
Das Amerikanische Haus, by F. R. Vogel, Berlin: 1910. This may be
supplemented by Homes in City and Country, by Russell Sturgis, J. W.
Root and others, New York: 1893.


III BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES

Where formal description leaves off, the biographies of our principal
architects enter. The following books traverse in order the entire
period from the Revolution to the present generation.

Samuel McIntire: His Life and Work. F. Cousins and P. M. Riley, Boston:
1916.

The Life and Letters of Charles Bulfinch. Ellen Susan Bulfinch, New
York: 1896.

The Journal of Latrobe. Benjamin Henry Latrobe, New York: 1905.

Henry Hobson Richardson. Mrs. Schuyler Van Rensselaer, Boston: 1888.

Charles Follen McKim. A. H. Granger, Boston: 1913.

Daniel H. Burnham. Charles Moore, New York: 1921.

The Autobiography of an Idea. Louis H. Sullivan, New York: 1924.


IV CONTEMPORARY WORK

Portfolios of work by contemporary architects are so numerous that
to single out any would be invidious. The files of the Architectural
Record, the American Architect, House and Garden, and Arts and
Decorations--to mention only the more available periodicals--should be
consulted particularly for illustrations.


V ESTHETICS

As an introduction to architecture in general the formal textbooks
are occasionally useful. Let me commend particularly, however,
Viollet-le-Duc’s The Habitations of Man in all Ages. The archæology
and ethnology of this work are, it goes without saying, outmoded:
but for all that it has a permanent interest, and it is high time
that someone took up Viollet-le-Duc’s theme and redeveloped it in
the light of contemporary research. While I am restoring a classic,
let me add another: Ruskin’s The Seven Lamps of Architecture. Ruskin
is disregarded nowadays, as he was in his own generation, by people
who have not yet caught up with him. His insight and unflinching
intelligence are both needed, however, and it is no longer necessary
to warn the student against his quirks and solecisms. Ruskin wrote
the apology for modernism in art when he said: “There would be hope
if we could change palsy for puerility,” and he anticipated modern
decoration when he said: “I believe the only manner of rich ornament
that is open to us is geometrical color mosaic, and that much might
result from strenuously taking up that mode of design.” For that
matter, Ruskin even predicted the architectural use of steel frames.
The Seven Lamps of Architecture closes on a prophetic word which means
far more to us today than to Ruskin’s contemporaries. “I could smile,”
he said, “when I hear the hopeful exultation of many, at the new reach
of worldly science and vigor of worldly effort; as if we were again at
the beginning of new days. There is thunder on the horizon, as well
as dawn.” We who have seen the lightning strike may well reread these
words....

As for modern books on architecture and esthetics, let me recommend
a handful. Among them note W. R. Lethaby’s Form in Civilization.
In sharp contrast to Professor Lethaby is Geoffrey Scott’s The
Architecture of Humanism, Boston: 1914. I do not accept Mr. Scott’s
main position; but there is something to be said for it, and he says
it well. Both points of view are embraced in the distinction Mr.
Claude Bragdon makes between the Organic and the Arranged, in one of
Six Lectures on Architecture. From a limited field, Rhys Carpenter’s
Esthetic Basis of Greek Art reaches conclusions which illuminate
almost every province of esthetics. There is an able exposition of the
absolutist, mechanical point of view in Vers Une Architecture, by the
architect whose pen-name is “Le Corbusier-Saugnier.” In Speculations,
Mr. T. E. Hulme presents an interesting philosophic apology for
mechanism.


VI SOCIOLOGY

For the civic and sociological background of this study, consult
Professor Patrick Geddes’s Cities in Evolution, London: 1915, likewise
his Principles of Sociology in Relation to Economics. The latter can
be obtained through Le Play House, 65 Belgrave Road, London, S. W. 1.
The chapter on Westminster, by Mr. Victor Branford, in Our Social
Inheritance, London: 1919, is a unique introduction to the direct study
of social institutions and their architectural forms. The other volumes
in The Making of the Future series, edited by Messrs. Geddes and
Branford, should also have an important place on the student’s shelf.

Light on our more immediate problems will be found in the files of the
Journal of the American Institute of Architects. Note particularly Mr.
F. L. Ackermann’s article on Craftsmen--Machines--Speed--Credit, June,
1923, and Mr. Benton Mackaye’s article on the proposed Appalachian
Trail. See, also, the Power number of the Survey Graphic. The report
of the Committee on Community Planning of the American Institute of
Architects (1924) should be read in connection with the last chapter:
it treats in detail the difficulties that the architect confronts under
our present economic and social order. See, likewise, Mr. Ebenezer
Howard’s classic Garden Cities of Tomorrow.

FINIS

       *       *       *       *       *

Transcriber’s Notes:

Punctuation has been made consistent.

Variations in spelling and hyphenation were retained as they appear in
the original publication, except that obvious typographical errors have
been corrected.



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