Sticks and Stones: A Study of American Architecture and Civilization

by Lewis Mumford

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.