CHAPTER EIGHTARCHITECTURE AND CIVILIZATION
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 Jeffersonto 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 triumphof 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 MiddleAges 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 acceptand 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 Balticcountries. 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.
In order to get our bearings, we shall pull apart, one by one, the principal elements in our heritage of civilization in the United States, and examine them separately. This is a dangerous convenience, however, and I must emphasize that these strands are tightly intertwined and bound up. It is only in thought that one can take them apart. No one has ever encountered man, save on the earth; no one has ever seen the earth, save through the eyes of a man. There is no logical priority in place, work, and people. In discussing the community one either deals with it as a whole, or one’s discussion is incomplete and faulty.
The capital sign of the early settlements beyond the seashore was the clearing; and since the greatmajority of newcomers lived by agriculture, the forest itself appeared merely as an obstacle to be removed. The untouched woods of America were all too lush and generous, and if an occasional Leatherstocking loved them, the new settler saw only land to clear and wood to burn. In the New England village, the tradition of culture was perhaps applied to the land itself, and elsewhere there are occasional elements of good practice, in the ordered neatness of boulder-fences. For the most part, however, the deliberate obliteration of the natural landscape became a great national sport, comparable to the extermination of bison which the casual western traveler devoted himself to at a later date.
The stripping of the Appalachian forest was the first step in our campaign against nature. By 1860 the effect was already grave enough to warn an acute observer, like George Perkins Marsh, of the danger to our civilization, and to prompt him in Earth and Man, to remind his countrymen that other civilizations about the Mediterranean and the Adriatic had lost their top-soil and ruined their agriculture through the wanton destruction of their forests.
In the meanwhile, a new factor had entered. If before the nineteenth century we cleared the forest to make way for the farm, with the entrance of the industrial pioneer we began to clear the farm to parcel out the city. We have called this process the settlement of America, but the name is anomalous, for we formed the habit of using the land, not as a home, a permanent seat of culture, but as a means to something else—principally as a means to the temporary advantages of profitable speculation and exploitation.
James Mackay, a charitable Scotch observer in the middle of the nineteenth century, explained our negligence of the earth by the fact that we pinned our affections to institutions rather than places, and cared not how the landscape was massacred as long as we lived under the same flag and enjoyed the same forms of government. There is no doubt a little truth in this observation; but it was not merely our attachment to republican government that caused this behavior: it was even more, perhaps, our disattachment from the affiliations of a settled life. The pioneer, to put it vulgarly, was on the make and on the move; it did not matter to him how he treated the land, since by the time he could realize its deficiencieshe had already escaped to a new virgin area. “What had posterity done for him?”
The pioneers who turned their backs on a civilized way of life in order to extend the boundaries of civilization, left us with a heavy burden—not merely blasted and disorderly landscapes, but the habit of tolerating and producing blasted and disorderly landscapes. As Cobbett pointed out in his attempt to account for the unkempt condition of the American farm, the farmer in this country lacked the example of the great landed estates, where the woods had become cultivated parks, and the meadowland had become lawns. Without this cultivated example in the country, it is no wonder that our cities have been littered, frayed at the edges, ugly; no wonder that our pavements so quickly obliterate trees and grass; no wonder that so many towns are little more than gashes of metal and stone.
Those who had been bred on the land brought into the city none of that disciplined care which might have preserved some of its amenities. They left the smoke of the clearings, which was a sign of rural “progress”; they welcomed the smoke of the towns, and all that accompanied it.
It is scarcely a paradox to say that the improvementof our cities must proceed inwards from the countryside; for it is largely a matter of reversing the process which converts the farm into incipient blocks of real estate. Once we assimilate the notion that soil and site have uses quite apart from sale, we shall not continue to barbarize and waste them. Consider how the water’s edge of lower Manhattan was developed without the slightest regard for its potential facilities for recreation; how the Acropolis of Pittsburgh, the Hump, was permitted to turn into a noisome slum; how the unique beauty of Casco Bay has been partly secured only by Portland’s inferiority as a shipping center. Indeed, all up and down the country one can pick up a thousand examples of towns misplaced, of recreation areas becoming factory sites, of industries located without intelligent reference to raw materials or power or markets or the human beings who serve them, of agricultural land being turned prematurely into suburban lots, and of small rural communities which need the injection of new industries and enterprises, languishing away whilst a metropolis not fifty miles away continues to absorb more people, who daily pay a heavy premium for their congestion.
I have already drawn attention to the waste of local materials in connection with our manufacture of buildings, our concentration of markets, and our standardization of styles. It is plain that our architects would not have to worry so painfully about the latest fashion-page of architectural tricks, if they had the opportunity to work more consistently with the materials at hand, using brick where clay was plentiful, stone where that was of good quality, and cement where concrete adapted itself to local needs—as it does so well near the seashore, and, for a different reason, in the south. Wood, one of our most important materials for both exterior and interior, has suffered by just the opposite of neglect: so completely have our Appalachian forests been mined, and so expensive are the freight charges for the long haul from the Pacific coast, that good housing in the east depends to no little extent upon our ability to recover continuous local supplies of timber throughout the Appalachian region.
(It is characteristic of our mechanical and metropolitan civilization that one of the great sources of timber waste is the metropolitan newspaper: and one of the remoter blessings of a sounder regionaldevelopment is that it would, perhaps, remove the hourly itch for the advertising sheet, and by the same token would provide large quantities of wood for housing, without calling for the destruction of ten acres of spruce for the Sunday edition alone! I give the reader the privilege of tracing the pleasant ramifications of this notion.)
To see the interdependence of city and country, to realize that the growth and concentration of one is associated with the depletion and impoverishment of the other, to appreciate that there is a just and harmonious balance between the two—this capacity we have lacked. Before we can build well on any scale we shall, it seems to me, have to develop an art of regional planning, an art which will relate city and countryside in a new pattern from that which was the blind creation of the industrial and the territorial pioneer. Instead of regarding the countryside as so much grist doomed to go eventually into the metropolitan mill, we must plan to preserve and develop all our natural resources to the limit.
It goes without saying that any genuine attempt to provide for the social and economic renewal of a region cannot be constrained to preserve vestedland-values and property rights and privileges; indeed, if the land is to be fully loved and cared for again we must recover it in something more than name only. The main objection to keeping our natural resources in the hands of the community, namely, that private capital is more zealous at exploitation, is precisely the reason for urging the first course. Our land has suffered from zeal in exploitation; and it would be much better, for example, that our water power resources should remain temporarily undeveloped, than that they should be incontinently used by private corporations to concentrate population in the centers where a high tariff can be charged. The number of things that are waiting to be done—the planting of town forests, the communal restoration of river banks and beaches, the transformation of bare roads into parkways—will of course differ in each region and locality; and my aim here is only to point to a general objective.
The beginnings of genuine regional planning have already been made in Ontario, Canada, where the social utilization of water-power has directly benefited the rural communities, and given them an independent lease on life. In the United States, Mr.Benton Mackaye has sketched out a bold and fundamental plan for associating the development of a spinal recreational trail with an electric power development for the whole Appalachian region, along the ridgeway; both trail and power being used as a basis for the re-afforestation and the re-peopling of the whole upland area, with a corresponding decentralization and depopulation of the overcrowded, spotty coastal region. Such a scheme would call for a pretty thorough dislocation of metropolitan values; and if it is slow in making headway, that is only because its gradual institution would mean that a new epoch had begun in American civilization. At the present time it is hard to discover how tangible these new hopes and projects may be: it is significant, however, that the Housing and Regional Planning Commission of the State of New York was called into existence by the necessity for finding a way out of our metropolitan tangle; and it is possible that a new orientation in power and culture is at hand.
In a loose, inconsecutive way, the objectives of regional planning have been dealt with by the conservation movement during the last century; and if the art itself has neither a corpus of experience noran established body of practitioners, this is only to say that it has, as it were, broken through the surface in a number of places and that it remains to be gathered up and intelligently used. When regional planning starts its active career, it will concern itself to provide a new framework for our communities which will redistribute population and industry, and recultivate the environment—substituting forestry for timber-mining, stable agriculture for soil-mining, and in general the habit of dressing and keeping the earth for our traditional American practice of stripping and deflowering it. Architecture begins historically when the “Bauer” who plants becomes the “Bauer” who builds; and if our architecture is to have a substantial foundation, it is in a refreshened countryside that we will perhaps find it.
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 secondquarter 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 gottenits 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, whiletheir 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 reasonthat 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 machinethat 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 nationalfactories, 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 ofour 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.
On the human side, the prime distinction overlooked by the mechanists is that machine work isprincipally toil: handicraft, on the other hand, is a form of living. The operations of the mechanical arts are inherently servile, because the worker is forced to keep the pace set by the machine and to follow the pattern set by the designer, someone other than himself; whereas the handicrafts are relatively free, in that they allow a certain leeway to different types of work and different ways of tackling a job. These distinctions are bound up with a difference in the forms that are used; and it is through these esthetic differences that we may, perhaps, best see how the personal and mechanical may be apportioned in the architecture of the future.
The key to handicraft esthetics, it seems to me, is a sort of vital superfluity. 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.
Occasionally, this elaboration passes the point at which it would give the highest esthetic delight to the beholder; nevertheless, the craftsman keeps pouring himself into his job: he must fill up every blank space, and will not be denied, for carving wood or hacking stone, when it is done with a free spirit, is a dignified and enjoyable way of living. Those of us who have become acclimated to industrialism sometimes find the effulgence and profusion of craftsmanship a little bewildering: but if our enjoyment of the portals of a medieval cathedral or the façade of an East Indian house is dulled by the myopic intricacy of the pattern, our appreciation of the craftsman’s fun and interest should be heightened. Granting that art is an end in itself, is it not an end to the worker as well as the spectator? A great part of craftsmanship needs no other justification than that it bears the mark of a joyous spirit.
When we compare an ideal product of handicraft, like a Florentine table of the sixteenth century, with an ideal product of mechanical art—say a modern bathroom—the contrasting virtues and defects become plain. The conditions that make possible good machine-work are, first of all, a complete calculation of consequences, embodied in a working drawing ordesign: to deviate by a hair’s breadth from this calculation is to risk failure. The qualities exemplified in good machine-work follow naturally from the implements: they are precision, economy, finish, geometric perfection. 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; namely, to produce a necessary quantity of useful goods with a minimum of human effort.
Craftsmanship, to put the distinction roughly, emphasizes the worker’s delight in production: anyone who proposed to reduce the amount of time and effort spent by the carver in wood or stone would be in effect attempting to shorten the worker’s life. Machine-work, on the other hand, tends at its best to diminish the inescapable drudgeries of production: any dodge or decoration that increases the time spentin service to the machine adds to the physical burden of existence. One is a sufficient end; the other is, legitimately, only a means to an end.
Our modern communities are far from understanding this distinction. 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. Between handicraft that is devoted to mechanical reproduction and machinery that is set to reproduce endless simulacra of handicraft, our esthetic opportunities in art and architecture are muffed again and again. An occasional man of talent, like Mr. Samuel Yellin, the iron-worker, will survive; but the great run of craftsmen do not.
Now, with due respect to the slickness and perfection of the best machine-work, we enjoy it because ofthe use that it fulfills: it may incidentally achieve significant form, but no one retains a pickle bottle, beautifully shaped though Messrs. Heinz and Co.’s are, for this reason: it was meant for pickles and it vanishes with the pickles. 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. The very rage of iconoclasm which the Mohammedans and Puritans and eighteenth-century liberals exhibited betrayed a deep respect for the power of art; for we destroy the things that threaten our existence. Art, in a certain sense, is the spiritual varnish that we lay on material things, to insure their preservation: on its lowest terms, beauty is justified because it has “survival value.” The fact that houses which bear the living imprint of the mind are irreplaceable is what prevents themfrom being quickly and callously replaced. Wren’s churches are preserved beyond their period of desuetude by Wren’s personality. This process is just the opposite to that fostered by the machine-system, and it explains why, in the long run, machine-work may be unsatisfactory and uneconomical—too quickly degraded.
Art, in fact, is one of the main ways in which we escape the vicious circle of economic activity. According to the conventional economist, our economic life has but three phases: production, distribution, and consumption. We work to eat so that we may eat to work. This is a fairly accurate portrait of life in an early industrial town; but it does not apply to the economic processes of a civilized community. Everywhere, even in regions of difficulty, something more comes out of production than the current income and the current saving of capital: sometimes it is leisure and play, sometimes it is religion, philosophy, and science, and sometimes it is art. In the creation of any permanent work of art the processes of dissipation and consumption are stayed: hence the only civilized criterion of a community’s economic life is not the amount of things produced, but the durability of things created. A communitywith a low rate of production and a high standard of creation will in the long run be physically richer than a modern city in which the gains of industry are frittered away in evanescent, uncreative expenditures. What matters is the ratio of production to creation.
Here lies the justification of the modern architect. Cut off though he is from the actual processes of building, he nevertheless remains the sole surviving craftsman who maintains the relation towards the whole structure that the old handicraft workers used to enjoy in connection with their particular job. The architect can still leave his imprint, and even in the severely utilitarian factory he can take the simple forms of the engineer and turn them into a superb structure like Messrs. Helmle and Corbett’s Fletcher Building in New York. 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. Up to the present he has beenable, for the most part, to exercise this freedom only on traditional buildings, like churches and libraries and auditoriums, which are outside the reaches of the present commercial regime and have therefore some prospect of durability.
But before the whole mass of contemporary building will be ready to receive the imprint of the architect, and before the handicrafts re-enter the modern building to give the luster of permanence to its decorations and fixtures, there will have to be a pretty thoroughgoing reorientation in our economic life. Whilst buildings are erected to increase site values, whilst houses are produced in block to be sold to the first wretch who must put a roof over his family’s head, it is useless to dwell upon the ministrations of art; and, unfortunately, too much of our building today rests upon this basis and exhibits all the infirmities of our present economic structure.
From the aspect of our well-to-do suburbs and our newly-planned industrial towns, from the beginnings of a sound functional architecture in some of our schools and factories, it is easy to see what the architecture of our various regions might be if it had the opportunity to work itself out in a coherentpattern. For the present, however, it is impossible to say with any certainty whether our architects are doomed to be extruded by mechanism, or whether they will have the opportunity to restore to our machine-system some of the freedom of an earlier regime; and I have no desire to burden this discussion with predictions and exhortations. But if the conclusions we have reached are sound, it is only the second possibility that holds out any promise to the good life.
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 mainmoreswe 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 growthof 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—progressandpoverty.
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 cannotbe accomplished without departing from these dominantmores—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 dominantoccupations 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 afew 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 thenecessary 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 designin 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 kindsof 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 broughtthis 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 themot juste, but we have not learnt the more difficult art of consecutive discourse. With respect to the architecture of thewhole 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 ourown 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.