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.