Sticks and Stones: A Study of American Architecture and Civilization

by Lewis Mumford

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.