Lewis Mumford

“ 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 ”

“ 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, [151] 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ It was no accident that caused romanticism and industrialism to appear at the same time. They [76] 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [185] 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”