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.