CHAPTER SEVENTHE AGE OF THE MACHINE
Since 1910 the momentum of the Imperial Age seems to have slackened a little: at any rate, in architecture it has lost much of the original energy which had been given to it by the success of the Chicago Exposition. It may be, as Henry Adams hinted, that the rate of change in the modern world has altered, so that processes which required centuries for their consummation before the coming of the dynamo have been accelerated into decades.
With events and buildings so close to us, it is almost impossible to rate their relative importance; all that I can do in the present chapter is to single out one or two of the more important threads which, it seems to me, are bound to give the predominant color to the fabric of our architecture. It is fairly easy to see, however, why the imperial order has not stamped every aspect of our building: for one thing, eclecticism has not merely persisted, but the new familiarity that the American architect has gained with authentic European and Asiatic workoutside the province of the classic has increased the range of eclecticism. So the baroque architecture of Spain, which flourished so well in Mexico, and the ecclesiastical architecture of Byzantium and Syria, have added a new charm to our motlied wardrobe: from the first came new lessons in ornament and color, applied with great success by Mr. Bertram Goodhue in the Panama-Pacific Exposition, and now budding lustily in southern villas and gardens; and from the second the architect is learning the importance of mass and outline—the essentials in monolithic construction.
Apart from this, however, the imperial regime has been stalled by its own weight. The cost of cutting through new streets, widening grand avenues, and in general putting on a monumental front has put the pure architect at a disadvantage: there is the same disparity between his plans and the actual aims of the commercial community as there is, quite often, between the prospectus and the actual organization of an industry. Within the precincts of the modern city, the engineer, whose utilitarian eye has never blinked at the necessity for profitable enterprise, and whose interest in human beings as loads, weights, stresses, or units pays no attentionto their qualitative demands as human beings—within these precincts, I say, the engineer has recovered his supremacy.
Here, in fact, is the paradox of American architecture. In our suburban houses we have frequently achieved the excellence of Forest Hills and Bronxville; in our public buildings we tend more easily to approach the strength and originality of Mr. Goodhue’s State Capitol for Nebraska; in fact, never before have the individual achievements of American architects been so rich, so varied, and so promising. In that part of architecture which lies outside the purlieus of our commercial system—I mean the prosperous country homes and college buildings and churches and municipal institutions—a tradition of good building and tactful design has been established. At this point, unfortunately, the scope of the architect has become narrowed: the forces that create the great majority of our buildings lie quite outside the cultivated field in which he works. Through the mechanical reorganization of the entire milieu, the place of architecture has become restricted; and even when architecture takes root in some unnoticed crevice, it blooms only to be cut down at the first “business opportunity.”
The processes which are inimical to architecture are, perhaps, seen at their worst in the business district of the metropolis; but more and more they tend to spread throughout the rest of the community. Mr. Charles McKim, for example, was enthusiastic over Mr. Burnham’s design for the Illinois Trust and Savings Bank in Chicago, and predicted that it would long be a monument to his genius. “But unfortunately,” as Mr. Burnham’s biographer says, “unfortunately for Mr. McKim’s reputation as a prophet, he was unappreciative of the rapid growth of Chicago, the consequent appreciation in the value of real estate in the Loop district, and the expansive force of a great bank. This beautiful building is doomed to be replaced by one which will tower into the air to the permissible height of structures in the business section of Chicago.” The alternative to this destruction is an even more ignominious state of preservation; such a state as the Knickerbocker Trust Company building achieved in New York, or the old Customs House in Boston, both of which have been smothered under irrelevant skyscrapers. Even where economic necessity plays no distinct part, the forms of business take precedence over the forms of humanism—as in the Shipping Board’s York Village,where as soon as the direction of the community planner was removed a hideous and illiterate row of shop-fronts was erected, instead of that provided by the architect, in spite of the fact that the difference in cost was negligible.
Unfortunately for architecture, every district of the modern city tends to become a business district, in the sense that its development takes place less in response to direct human needs than to the chances and exigencies of sale. It is not merely business buildings that are affected by the inherent instability of enterprises to which profit and rent have become Ideal Ends: the same thing is happening to the great mass of houses and apartments which are designed for sale. Scarcely any element in our architecture and city planning is free from the encroachment, direct or indirect, of business enterprise. The old Boulevard in New York, for example, which was laid out by the Tweed ring long before the land on either side was used for anything but squatters’ farms, was almost totally disrupted by the building of the first subways, and it has taken twenty years to effect even a partial recovery. The widening of part of Park Avenue by slicing off its central grass plot has just been accomplished, in order to relievetraffic congestion; and it needs only a little time before underground and overground traffic will cause the gradual reduction of our other parkways—even those which now seem secure.
The task of noting the manifold ways in which our economic system has affected architecture would require an essay by itself: it will be more pertinent here, perhaps, to pay attention to the processes through which our economic system has worked; and in particular to gauge the results of introducing mechanical methods of production, and mechanical forms into provinces which were once wholly occupied by handicraft. The chief influence in eliminating the architect from the great bulk of our building is the machine itself: in blotting out the elements of personality and individual choice it has blotted out the architect, who inherited these qualities from the carpenter-builder. Mr. H. G. Wells, in The New Macchiavelli, described Altiora and Oscar Bailey as having the temperament that would cut down trees and put sanitary glass lamp-shades in their stead; and this animus has gone pretty far in both building and city planning, for the reason that lamp-shades may be manufactured quickly for sale, and trees cannot. It is time, perhaps, that we isolatedthe machine and examined its workings. What is the basis of our machine-ritual, and what place has it in relation to the good life?
Before we discuss the influence of machinery upon building, let us consider the building itself as an architectural whole.
Up to the nineteenth century, a house might be a shelter and a work of art. Once it was erected, it had few internal functions to perform: its physiological system, if we may use a crude and inaccurate metaphor, was of the lowest order. An open fire with a chimney, windows that opened and closed—these were its most lively pretensions. Palladio, in his little book on the Five Orders, actually has suggestions for cooling the hot Italian villa by a system of flues conducted into an underground chamber from which cold air would circulate; but this ingenious scheme was on the plane of Leonardo’s flying machine—an imaginative anticipation, I suppose, rather than a project.
With the exception of Wren’s suggestions for ventilating the Houses of Parliament, and SirHumphrey Davy’s actual installation of apparatus for this purpose, it was not until the last quarter of the nineteenth century that engineers turned their minds to this problem, in America. Yankee ingenuity had devised central heating before the Civil War, and one of the first numbers of Harper’s Weekly contained an article deploring the excessive warmth of American interiors; and at one time or another during the century, universal running water, open plumbing, gas, electric lighting, drinking fountains, and high speed electric elevators made their way into the design of modern buildings. In Europe these changes came reluctantly, because of the existence of vast numbers of houses that had been built without a mechanical equipment; so that many a student at the Beaux Arts returned from an attic in the Latin quarter where water was carried in pails up to the seventh story, to design houses in which the labor-saving devices became an essential element in the plan. It is only now, however, during the last two decades, that the full effect of these innovations has been felt.
The economic outcome of all these changes can be expressed mathematically; and it is significant. According to an estimate by Mr. Henry Wright inthe Journal of the American Institute of Architects, the structure of the dwelling house represented over ninety per cent of the cost in 1800. Throughout the century there was a slow, steady increase in the amount necessary for site, fixtures, and appliances, until, in 1900, the curve takes a sharp upward rise; with the result that in 1920 the cost of site and mechanical equipment has risen to almost one-half the total cost of the house. If these estimates apply to the simple dwelling house, they apply, perhaps, with even greater force to the tenement, the office building, the factory, and the loft: here the cost of ventilation, of fireproof construction, of fire-prevention and fire-escaping devices, makes the engineering equipment bulk even more heavily.
Whereas in the first stages of industrial development the factory affected the environment of architecture, in its latest state the factory has become the environment. A modern building is an establishment devoted to the manufacture of light, the circulation of air, the maintenance of a uniform temperature, and the vertical transportation of its occupants. Judged by the standards of the laboratory, the modern building is, alas! an imperfect machine: the engineers of a certain public service corporation, forexample, have discovered that the habit of punching windows in the walls of the building-machine is responsible for great leakages which make difficult the heating and cooling of the plant; and they hold that the maximum efficiency demands the elimination of windows, the provision of “treated” air, and the lighting of the building throughout the day by electricity.
All this would perhaps seem a little fantastic, were it not for the fact that we have step by step approached the reality. Except for our old-fashioned prejudice in favor of windows, which holds over from a time when one could see a green field or a passing neighbor by sitting at one, the transformation favored by the engineers has already been accomplished. Just because of the ease in installing fans, lights, and radiators in a modern building, a good part of the interiors of our skyscrapers are fed day and night with artificial light and ventilation. The margin of misuse under this method of construction is necessarily great; the province of design, limited. Instead of the architect’s paying attention to exposure, natural circulation, and direct daylight, and making a layout which will achieve these necessary ends, he is forced to center his efforts on the maximumexploitation of land. Where the natural factors are flouted or neglected, the engineer is always ready to provide a mechanical substitute—“just as good as the original” and much more expensive.
By systematically neglecting the simplest elements of city planning, we have provided a large and profitable field for all the palliative devices of engineering: where we eliminate sunlight we introduce electric light; where we congest business, we build skyscrapers; where we overcrowd the thoroughfares with traffic we burrow subways; where we permit the city to become congested with a population whose density would not be tolerated in a well-designed community, we conduct water hundreds of miles by aqueducts to bathe them and slake their thirst; where we rob them of the faintest trace of vegetation or fresh air, we build metalled roads which will take a small portion of them, once a week, out into the countryside. It is all a very profitable business for the companies that supply light and rapid transit and motor cars, and the rest of it; but the underlying population pays for its improvements both ways—that is, it stands the gratuitous loss, and it pays “through the nose” for the remedy.
These mechanical improvements, these labyrinthsof subways, these audacious towers, these endless miles of asphalted streets, do not represent a triumph of human effort: they stand for its comprehensive misapplication. Where an inventive age follows methods which have no relation to an intelligent and humane existence, an imaginative one would not be caught by the necessity. By turning our environment over to the machine we have robbed the machine of the one promise it held out—that of enabling us to humanize more thoroughly the details of our existence.
To return to architecture. A further effect of the machine process on the internal economy of the modern building is that it lends itself to rapid production and quick turnover. This has been very well put by Mr. Bassett Jones, in an article in The American Architect, which is either a hymn of praise to the machine, or a cool parade of its defects, according to the position one may take.
“As the building more and more takes on the character of the machine,” says Mr. Jones, “so does its design, construction, and operation become subject to the same rules that govern ... a locomotive.Our grandfathers built for succeeding generations. The rate of development was slow, and a building which would satisfy the demands made upon it for a century would necessarily be of a substantial nature. But with us in a single generation even the best we can do with all the data and facilities at our command is out of date almost before it shows signs of appreciable wear. So a building erected today is outclassed tomorrow. The writer well remembers the late Douglas Robinson, when outlining the location and property to be improved by the construction of a building some twenty years ago, ending his directions with the proviso that it must be ‘the cheapest thing that will hold together for fifteen years’! When the amortization charges must be based on so short a period as this, and with land taxes constantly increasing, it becomes obvious that construction must be based upon a cubic foot valuation that prohibits the use of any but the cheapest materials and methods.... Even the cost of carrying the required capital inactive during the period of production has its effect in speeding up production to the point where every part of the building that, by any ingenuity of man, can be machine-made must be so made.”
Since the features that govern the construction of modern buildings are conditioned by external canons of mechanism, purpose and adaptation to need play a small part in the design, and the esthetic element itself enters largely by accident. The plan of the modern building is not fundamental to its treatment; it derives automatically from the methods and materials employed. The skyscraper is inevitably a honeycomb of cubes, draped with a fireproof material: as mechanically conceived, it is readily convertible: the floors are of uniform height and the windows of uniform spacing, and with no great difficulty the hotel becomes an office building, the office building a loft; and I confidently look forward to seeing the tower floors become apartments—indeed this conversion has already taken place on a small scale. Where the need of spanning a great space without using pillars exists, as in a theater or an auditorium, structural steel has given the architect great freedom; and in these departments he has learned to use his material well; for here steel can do economically and esthetically what masonry can do only at an unseemly cost, or not at all.
What is weak in some of our buildings, however, isnot the employment of certain materials, but the application of a single formula to every problem. In the bare mechanical shell of the modern skyscraper there is precious little place for architectural modulation and detail; the development of the skyscraper has been towards the pure mechanical form. Our first tall buildings were designed for the most part by men who thought in terms of established architectural forms: Burnham and Root’s Monadnock Building, in Chicago, which has exerted such a powerful influence over the new school of German architects, was an almost isolated exception; and, significantly enough, it did not employ the steel skeleton! The academic architects compared the skyscraper to a column, with a base, a shaft, and a capital; and they sought to relieve its empty face with an elaborate modeling of surface, like that of the old Flatiron Building. Then the skyscraper was treated as a tower, and its vertical lines were accented by piers which simulated the acrobatic leap of stone construction: the Woolworth Tower and the Bush Tower were both designed in this fashion, and, in spite of numerous defects in detail, they remain with the new Shelton Hotel in New York among the most satisfactory examples of the skyscraper.
Neither column nor buttress has anything to do with the internal construction of the skyscraper; both forms are “false” or “applied.” Under the veracious lead of the late Mr. Louis Sullivan, the buildings of the machine period have accepted the logic of the draped cube, and the only gestures of traditional architecture that remain are the ornaments that cling to the very highest and the very lowest stories. Those buildings which do not follow this logic for the most part accentuate the clumsy unimaginativeness of the designer: the new Standard Oil building in New York, with its vestigial orders, shows an interesting profile across the harbor almost in spite of itself, but at a closer range will not bear criticism.
An ornamentalist, like Mr. Louis Sullivan, is perhaps at his best against the simple planes of the modern building: but a different order of imagination, an imagination like that of the Norman builders, is powerless in the face of this problem—or it becomes brutal. If modern building has become engineering, modern architecture retains a precarious foothold as ornament, or to put it more frankly, as scene painting. Indeed, what is the bare interior of a modern office or apartment house but a stage, waitingfor the scenery to be shifted, and a new play to be put on. It is due to this similarity, I believe, that modern interior decoration has so boldly accepted the standards and effects of stage-design. A newspaper critic referred to Mr. Norman-Bel Geddes as having lined the interior of the Century Theater with a cathedral: well, in the same way, the interior of a modern skyscraper is lined with a factory, an office, or a home.
It is not for nothing that almost every detail of the mechanized building follows a standard pattern and preserves a studious anonymity. Except for the short run of the entrance, the original architect has no part in its interior development. If the architect himself is largely paralyzed by his problem, what shall we say of the artisans, and of the surviving handicraft workers who still contribute their quota of effort to the laying of bricks and stones, to the joining of pipes, to the plastering of ceilings? Gone are most of their opportunities for the exercise of skilled intelligence, to say nothing of art: they might as well make paper-boxes or pans for all the personal stamp they can give to their work. Bound to follow the architect’s design, as the printer is supposed to follow the author’s words, it is nowonder that they behave like the poor drudge in the Chicago Exposition who left bare or half-ornamented the columns which the architect had not bothered to duplicate in full in the haste of finishing his drawing. Is it any wonder, too, that the last vestige of guild standards is gone: that the politics of industry, the bargaining for better wages and fewer hours, concerns them more than their control over their job and the honor and veracity of their workmanship? What kind of work can a man put into “the cheapest building that will last fifteen years”?
The chief justification for our achievements in mechanical architecture has been brought forth by those who believe it has provided the basis for a new style. Unfortunately, the enthusiasts who have put the esthetic achievements of mechanical architecture in a niche by themselves, and who have serenely disregarded all its lapses and failures and inefficiencies, have centered their attention mainly upon its weakest feature—the skyscraper. I cannot help thinking that they have looked in the wrong place. The economic and social reasonsfor regarding the skyscraper as undesirable have been briefly alluded to; if they needed any further confirmation, a week’s experience of the miseries of rapid transit would perhaps be sufficient. It remains to point out that the esthetic reasons are just as sound.
All the current praise of the skyscraper boils down to the fact that the more recent buildings have ceased to be as bad as their prototypes. Granted. The uneasy hemming and hawing of ornament, which once agitated the whole façade, has now been reduced to a concentrated gesture; and the zoning ordinances that have been established in many large American cities have transformed the older, top-heavy building into a tower or a pyramid. That this is something of an advance is beyond dispute; in New York one need only compare the Fisk Tire Building with the United States Tire Building, representing respectively the later and the earlier work of the same architects, to see what a virtue can be made of legal necessity. A great architecture, however, is something to be seen and felt and lived in. By this criterion most of our pretentious buildings are rather pathetic.
When one approaches Manhattan Island, for instance,from the Staten Island Ferry or the Brooklyn Bridge, the great towers on the tip of the island sometimes look like the fairy stalagmites of an opened grotto; and from an occasional vantage point on the twentieth floor of an office building one may now and again recapture this impression. But need I point out that one can count on one’s fingers the number of buildings in New York or Chicago that one can approach from the street in similar fashion? For the millions who fill the pavements and shuttle back and forth in tubes, the skyscraper as a tall, cloudward building does not exist. Its esthetic features are the entrance, the elevator, and the window-pocked wall; and if there has been any unique efflorescence of a fresh style at these points, I have been unable to discover it.
What our critics have learned to admire in our great buildings is their photographs—and that is another story. In an article chiefly devoted to praise of the skyscraper, in a number of The Arts, the majority of the illustrations were taken from a point that the man in the street never reaches. In short, it is an architecture, not for men, but for angels and aviators!
If buildings are to be experienced directly, andnot through the vicarious agency of the photograph, the skyscraper defeats its own ends; for a city built so that tall buildings could be approached and appreciated would have avenues ten times the width of the present ones; and a city so generously planned would have no need for the sort of building whose sole economic purpose is to make the most of monopoly and congestion. In order to accommodate the office-dwellers in the Chicago Loop, for example, if a minimum of twenty stories were the restriction, the streets would have to be 241 feet wide, according to a calculation of Mr. Raymond Unwin, in the Journal of the American Institute of Architects.
One need not dwell upon the way in which these obdurate, overwhelming masses take away from the little people who walk in their shadows any semblance of dignity as human beings; it is perhaps inevitable that one of the greatest mechanical achievements in a thoroughly dehumanized civilization should, no doubt unconsciously, achieve this wry purpose. It is enough to point out that the virtues of the skyscraper are mainly exercises in technique. They have precious little to do with the human arts of seeing, feeling, and living, or with thenoble architectural end of making buildings which stimulate and enhance these arts.
A building that one cannot readily see, a building that reduces the passerby to a mere mote, whirled and buffeted by the winds of traffic, a building that has no accommodating grace or perfection in its interior furnishing, beyond its excellent lavatories—in what sense is such a building a great work of architecture, or how can the mere manner of its construction create a great style? One might as well say, with Robert Dale Owen, that the brummagem gothic of the Smithsonian Institution was a return to organic architecture. Consider what painful efforts of interior decoration are necessary before the skyscraper-apartment can recapture the faded perfume of the home. Indeed, it takes no very discerning eye to see that in a short time we shall be back again in interiors belonging to the period of the ottoman and the whatnot, in order to restore a homely sense of comfort and esthetic ease to the eviscerated structure of the modern fireproof apartment. What chiefly distinguishes our modern American work in this department from that of the disreputable ’eighties is that the earlier architects were conscious of their emptiness, and attemptedfeverishly to hide it: whereas our moderns do not regard emptiness as a serious lapse, and are inclined to boast about it.
There is a sense, of course, in which these modern colossi express our civilization. It is a romantic notion, however, to believe that this is an important or beautiful fact. Our slums express our civilization, too, and our rubbish heaps tell sermons that our stones conceal. The only expression that really matters in architecture is that which contributes in a direct and positive way to the good life: that is why there is so much beauty to the square foot in an old New England village, and so little, beyond mere picturesqueness, in the modern metropolis. A building stands or falls, even as a pure work of art, by its just relation to the city around it. Without a sense of scale—and the skyscraper has destroyed our sense of scale—the effect of any single building is nullified.
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 absoluteform 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 unerringlogic 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 thefirst 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 iswell 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 thedictionaryof 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 theprairie, 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 movementare 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 aremanufactured 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 standardizeddesign 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 marketwaste 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 crowdedhighways 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 ageof 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.