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STICKS AND STONES 


A STUDY OF AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE 
AND CIVILIZATION 


LEWIS MUMFORD 


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DON PeAND LIV REG Her 


PUBLISHERS na ae New YorRK 


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First printing, August, 1924 
Second printing, February, 1925 
Third printing, October, 1925 
Fourth printing, October, 1926 


PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 


Architecture, properly understood, is 
cioitlization itself. 


—wW. R. LerHaspy 


What is civilization? It is the humani- 
zation of man in society. 


—Matrurew ARNOLD. 


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CHAPTER 


its 

II. 
III. 
IV. 
Ne 
VI. 
VII. 
VIII. 


CONTENTS 


THE MEDIEVAL TRADITION . 


THE HERITAGE OF THE RENAISSANCE 


THE CLASSICAL MYTH . . . 
THE DIASPORA OF THE PIONEER 
THE DEFEAT OF ROMANTICISM 

THE IMPERIAL FACADE . e e 
THE AGE OF THE MACHINE ° 
ARCHITECTURE AND CIVILIZATION 
ENVOI ° . . . . ° ° 


NOTES ON BOOKS . ° e ° 


PAGE 


13 
35 
53 
WE 
99 
123 
155 
193 
237 


241 


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 


Tus is an attempt to evaluate architecture in America 
in terms of our civilization. I have not sought to criti- 
cize particular buildings or tendencies: I have tried, 
rather, by approaching our modern problems from their 
historic side, to criticize the forces that from one age to 
another have conditioned our architecture, and altered 
its forms Lest my purpose be misunderstood, I have 
left out illustrations; for a building is not merely a sight; 
it is an experience: and one who knows architecture 
only by photographs does not know it at all. If the 
omission of pictures lead the reader occasionally to 
break away from the orbit of his daily walks, and ex- 
amine our development in cities and buildings for him- 
self, it will be sufficiently justified. 

This book would not have been put together but for 
the persistent encouragement and kindly interest of 
Mr. Albert Jay Nock: and it was in The Freeman that 
the first five chapters, in somewhat briefer form, ap- 
peared. My hearty thanks are likewise due to Mr. 
Charles Harris Whitaker, whose private help and whose 
admirable public work as editor of the Journal of the 
American Institute of Architects have both laid me 
under a heavy obligation. My intellectual debt to 
Messrs. Victor Branford and Patrick Geddes will be 
apparent to those who have followed their work. In the 
concluding chapters I have been stimulated and guided 
in many places by unpublished reports and memoranda 
written by Mr. Clarence Stein, Mr. Benton Mackaye, 
and Mr. Henry Wright. My friendly thanks are also 
due to Mr. James Henderson, Mr. Geroid Tanquary 
Robinson, and Miss Sophia Wittenberg. 

Besides the essays in The Freeman, some of the 
material in Sticks and Stones has appeared in the 
Journal of the American Institute of Architects (Chap- 
ter Six), in The New Republic, and in The American 
Mercury. I thank the editors for their permission to 


draw on these articles. 
Lewis Mumrorp. 


CHAPTER ONE 


THE MEDIEVAL TRADITION 


I 


For a hundred years or so after its settlement, 
there lived and flourished in America a type of com- 
munity which was rapidly disappearing in Europe. 
This community was embodied in villages and towns 
_ whose mummified remains even today have a rooted 
dignity that the most gigantic metropolises do not 
often possess. If we would understand the architec- 
ture of America in a period when good building was 
almost universal, we must understand something of 
the kind of life that this community fostered. 

The capital example of the medieval tradition lies 
in the New England village. a 

There are two or three things that stand in the 
way of our seeing the life of a New England village; 
and one of them is the myth of the pioneer, the con- 
ception of the first settlers as a free band of 
“Americans” throwing off the bedraggled garments 
of Europe and starting life afresh in the wilderness. 
So far from giving birth to a new life, the settlement 


[18] 


Sticks and Stones 


of the northern American seaboard prolonged for a 
little while the social habits and economic institutions 
which were fast crumbling away in Europe, particu- 
larly in England. In the villages of the New World 
there flickered up the last dying embers of the medi- 
eval order. 

Whereas in England the common lands were being 
confiscated for the benefit of an aristocracy, and the 
arable turned into sheep-runs for the profit of the 
great proprietors, in New England the common lands 
were re-established with the founding of a new set- 
tlement. In England the depauperate peasants and 
yeomen were driven into the large towns to become 
the casual workers, menials, and soldiers; in New 
England, on the other hand, it was at first only with 
threats of punishment and conscription that the 
town workers were kept from going out into the coun- 
tryside to seek a more independent living from the 
soil. Just as the archaic speech of the Elizabethans 
has lingered in the Kentucky Mountains, so the 
Middle Ages at their best lingered along the coast 
of Appalachia; and in the organization of our New 
England villages one sees a greater resemblance to 
the medieval Utopia of Sir Thomas More than to 
the classic republic in the style of Montesquieu, 


[14] 


The Medieval Tradition 


which was actually founded in the eighteenth cen- 
tury. 

The colonists who sought to establish permanent 
communities—as distinct from those who erected only 
trading posts—were not a little like those whom 
the cities of Greece used to plant about the Mediter- 
ranean and the Black Sea littoral. Like the founders 
of the “Ancient City,” the Puritans first concerned 
themselves to erect an altar, or rather, to lay the 
_ foundations for an edifice which denied the religious 
_ valueofaltars. Inthe crudest of “smoaky wigwams,” 

an early observer notes, the Puritans remember to 
“sing psalms, pray, and praise their God”; and 
although we of today may regard their religion as 
harsh and nay-saying, we cannot forget that it was 
a central point of their existence and not an after- 
thought piled as it were on material prosperity for 
the sake of a good appearance. Material goods 
formed the basis, but not the end, of their life. 

UT he meeting-house determined the character and 
limits of the community. As Weeden says in his 
excellent Economic and Social History of New Eng- 
land, the settlers “laid out the village in the best 
order to attain two objects: first, the tillage and 


culture of the soil; second, the maintenance of a 


[15] 


Sticks and Stones 
‘civil and religious society.’ ” Myotind the meeting- 


house the rest of the community crystallized in a 
definite pattern, tight and homogeneous. 

The early provincial village bears another resem- 
blance to the early Greek city: it does not continue 
to grow at such a pace that it either becomes over- 
crowded within or spills beyond its limits into de- 
jected suburbs; still less does it seek what we iron- 
ically call greatness by increasing the number of its 
inhabitants. When the corporation has a sufficient 
number of members, that is to say, when the land is 
fairly occupied, and when the addition of more land 
would unduly increase the hardship of working it 
from the town, or would spread out the farmers, and 
make it difficult for them to attend to their religious 
and civil duties, ‘the original settlement throws out 
a new shoot. “So Charlestown threw off Woburn; 
so Dedham colonized Medfield; so Lynn founded 
Nahant. 

The Puritans knew and applied a principle that 
Plato had long ago pointed out in The Republic, 
namely, that an intelligent and socialized community 
will continue to grow only as long as it can remain 
a unit and keep up its common institutions. Beyond 
that point growth must cease, or the community will 


[16 ] 


The Medieval Tradition 


disintegrate and cease to be an organic thing. 
Economically, this method of community-develop- 
ment kept land values at a properly low level, and 
prevented the engrossing of land for the sake of a 
speculative rise. The advantage of the Puritan 
method of settlement comes out plainly when one 
contrasts it with the trader’s paradise of Man- 
hattan; for by the middle of the seventeenth century 
all the land on Manhattan Island was privately 
owned, although only a small part of it was culti- 
‘vated, and so eagerly had the teeth of monopoly 
bitten into this fine morsel that there was already a 
housing-shortage. 

/One more point of resemblance: all the inhabitants 
of an early New England village were co-partners 
in a corporation; they admitted into the community 
only as many members as they could assimilate. 
This co-partnership was based upon a common 
sense as to the purpose of the community, and upon 
a roughly equal divison of the land into individual 
plots taken in freehold, and a share of the common 
fields, of which there might be half a dozen or 
more. 

There are various local differences in the appor- 


tionment of the land. In many cases, the minister 


[17] 


Sticks and Stones 


and deacons have a larger share than the rest of the 
community; but in Charlestown, for example, the 
poorest had six or seven acres of meadow and twen- 
ty-five or thereabouts of upland; and this would 
hold pretty well throughout the settlements. Not 
merely is membership in the community guarded: the 
right of occupying and transferring the land is also 
restricted, and again and again, in the face of the 
General Assembly, the little villages make provisions 
to keep the land from changing hands without the 
consent of the corporation; “it being our real in- 
tent,” as the burghers of Watertown put it, to “sitt 
down there close togither.” 

These regulations have a positive side as well; 
for in some cases the towns helped the poorer mem- 
bers of the corporation to build houses, and as 
a new member was voted into the community, lots 
were assigned immediately, without further ado. A 
friend of mine has called this system “Yankee 
communism,” and I cheerfully bring the institution 
to the attention of those who do not realize upon 
what subversive principles Americanism, historically, 
rests. 
<fWhat is true of the seventeenth century in New 


England holds good for the eighteenth century in the 
[18] 


The Medieval Tradition 

Moravian settlements of Pennsylvania; and it 1s 
doubtless true for many another obscure colony; 
for the same spirit lingered, with a parallel result in 
architecture and industry, in the utopian communi- 
ties of the nineteenth century. It is pretty plain 
that this type of pioneering, this definite search for 
the good life, was conducted on an altogether differ- 
ent level from the ruthless exploitation of the indi- 
vidual muckers and scavengers who hit the trail west 
of the Alleghanies. Such renewals of the earlier 
| European culture as the Bach Festival at Bethlehem 
give us a notion of the cultural values which the me- 
dieval community carried over from the Old World 
to the New. There is some of this spirit left even in 
the architecture of the Shaker community at Mount 
Lebanon, New York, which was built as late as the 
nineteenth century. 

JIn contrast to the New England village-commu- 
nity was the trading post. Of this nature were the 
little towns in the New Netherlands which were 
planted there by the Dutch West India Company: 
the settlers were for the most part either harassed 
individuals who were lured to the New World by 
the prospects of a good living, or people of estab- 
lished rank who were tempted to leave the walks of 

[19] 


Sticks and Stones 


commerce for the dignities and affluences that were 
attached to the feudal tenure of the large estates 
that lined the Hudson. 

The germs of town life came over with these 
people, and sheer necessity turned part of their 
energies to agriculture, but they did not develop the 
close village-community we find in New England; 
and though New Amsterdam was a replica of the Old 
World port, with its gabled brick houses, and its well- 
banked canals and fine gardens, it left no decided 
pattern on the American scene. It is only the coun- 
try architecture of the Dutch which survives as 
either a relic or a memory. These trading posts 
like Manhattan and Fort Orange were, as Messrs. 
Petersen and Edwards have shown in their study 
of New York as an Eighteenth Century Municipal- 
ity, medieval in their economy: numerous guild and 
civic regulations which provided for honest weight 
and measure and workmanship continued in force 
within the town. In their external dealings, on the 
other hand, the practice of the traders was sharp, 
and every man was for himself. Beginning its life 
by bargaining in necessities, the trading post ends 
by making a necessity of bargaining; and it was the 
impetus from its original commercial habits which 


[20 ] 


The Medieval Tradition 


determined the characteristics of the abortive city 
plan that was laid down for Manhattan Island in 
1811. Rich as the Dutch precedent is in individual 
farmhouses, it brings us no pattern, such as we 
find in New England, for the community as a 


whole. 


sag 


“Since we are accustomed to look upon the vil- 
_lage as a quaint primitive relic of a bygone age, we 
- do not readily see that its form was dictated by social 
and economic conditions. Where the village had to 
defend itself against Indians, it was necessary to lay 
it out completely, so that it might be surrounded by 
a stockade, and so that the meeting-house might be 
such a rallying center as the bell-tower or the castle 
was in Europe, or as the high temple site was in 
classic times. But in the eighteenth century the 
Indian figured less in the scheme of colonial life, 
and along the seacoast and river—as at Wells Beach 
in Maine or Litchfield in Connecticut—the village 
became a long strip upon a highroad, and the 
arable land stretched in narrow plots from the house 
to the water, so that the farmer might better 


protect his crops and his livestock from the fox, 


[21 ] 


- 


Sticks and Stones 


the wolf, the woodchuck, the hawk, the skunk, and 
the deer. 

I emphasize these points of structure because of 
the silly notion superficial observers sometimes carry 
away from the villages of Europe or New England; 
namely, that their irregularity is altogether capri- 
cious and uneconomical, associated only with the 
vagaries of the straying cow. It would be more 


correct to say that the precise reverse was true. 


~The inequality in size and shape of plots shows al- 


ways that attention was paid to the function the 
land was to perform, rather than to the mere pos- 
session of property. Thus, there was a difference 
in size between home lots, which were always seated 
in the village, and purely agricultural tracts of land, 
which were usually on the outskirts; and in Dedham, 
for example, married men had home lots of twelve 
acres, while bachelors received only eight. Another 
reason for the compactness of the village was a 
decree of the General Court in Massachusetts, in 
1635, that no dwelling should be placed more than 
half a mile from the meeting-house in any new 
plantation. Even irregularities in the layout and 
placement of houses, which cannot be referred to 


such obvious points as these, very often derive 


[22] 


The Medieval Tradition 
from an attempt to break the path of the wind, to 


get a good exposure in summer, or to profit by a 
view. . 

_ All this was genuine community planning. It did 
not go by this name, perhaps, but it achieved the 
result. 


I 


We have learned in recent years to appreciate the 
felicities of eighteenth-century colonial architecture, 
and even the earlier seventeenth-century style is now 
coming into its own, in the sense that it is being 
imitated by architects who have an eye for pictur- 
esque effects; but we lose our perspective altogether 
if we think that the charm of an old New England 
house can be recaptured by designing overhanging 
second stories or panelled interiors. The just de- 
sign, the careful execution, the fine style that brings 
all the houses into harmony no matter how diverse 
the purposes they served—for the farmhouse shares 
its characteristics with the mill, and the mill with 
the meeting-house—was the outcome of a common 
spirit, nourished by men who had divided the land 
fairly and who shared adversity and good fortune 
together. When the frame of the house is to be 

[23] 


Sticks and Stones 


raised, a man’s neighbors will lend him a hand; if the 
harvest is in danger, every man goes out into the 
fields, even if his own crop is not at stake; if a whale 
founders on the beach, even the smallest boy bears 
a hand, and gets a share of the reward. All these 
practices were not without their subtle effect upon 
craftsmanship. 

Schooled in the traditions of his guild, the medieval 
carpenter pours his all into the work. Since sale 
does not enter into the bargain, it is both to his 
patron’s advantage to give him the best materials, 
and to his own advantage to make the most of them. 
\Ef at first, in the haste of settlement, the colonists 
are content with makeshifts, they are nevertheless 
done in the traditional fashion—not the log cabins 
of later days, but, more probably, wattle and daub 
huts like those of the charcoal burners in the English 
forests. In some points, the prevailing English tra- 
dition does not fit the raw climate of the north, and 
presently the half-timbered houses of some of the 
earlier settlers would be covered by clapboards for 
greater warmth, as in the eighteenth century their 
interiors were lined with panelled pine or oak, in- 
stead of the rough plaster. No matter what the 


material or mode, the carpenter works not simply 


[ 24] 


The Medieval Tradition 


for hire, but for dear life’s sake, and as a baker’s 
dozen numbers thirteen, so a piece of handicraft 
contains not merely the workmanship itself, but a 
bit of the worker’s soul, for good measure. The 
new invention of the gambrel roof, which gave ad- 
ditional room to the second story without raising 
the roof-tree, is a product of this system; and 
the variation in its length and pitch in New Eng- 
land, New Jersey, and New York is a witness to 


the freedom of design that prevailed throughout the 


work. \ 

“ae Pee Athen tai houses, built at first 
with one or two rooms, and then as luxury increased 
and family needs multiplied with as many as four, 
would doubtless seem unspeakably crude and mean 
to the resident of Floral Heights; indeed, if our 
present requirements for housing were so simple it 
would not be quite so difficult to meet our perpetual 
shortage. \As a matter of fact, however, these early 
provincial houses were well up to the standards for 
a similar homestead in England; and in some ways 
were a distinct advance. Just as all the separate 
courses on a restaurant menu were a few hundred 
years ago cooked in the same pot, so the different 


subdivisions of the modern house were originally 


[25 ] 


Sticks and Stones 


combined into a single room, which was not merely 
kitchen, workroom, and living quarters, but which 
also, at least in winter, served as a stable for the 
more delicate members of the barnyard.~ By the time 
America was settled the division into rooms had 
just commenced among the better sort of farmer: 
the barn had split off from the rest of the house, 
and the bedchamber was becoming a separate apart- 
ment. As the seventeenth century lengthened, this 
division of functions became more familiar in the 
provincial house. 

Let us take a brief look at one of these seventeenth- 
century buildings; let us say, the John Ward house 
in Salem which still survives as a relic. As one ap- 
proaches the village on some November day, when 
the leaves are no longer on the trees to obscure the 
vista, one feels the dynamic quality of medieval 
architecture—a quality altogether different from 
the prudent regularities of the later Georgian mode. 
It is not merely a matter of painted gables, leaded, 
diamond-paned windows, overhanging second stories, 
much as these would perhaps remind us of a medieval 
European town. ‘What would attract one is the 
feeling, not of formal abstract design, but of growth: 
the house has developed as the family within it has 

[ 26 |] 


The Medieval Tradition 


prospered, and brought forth children; as sons and 
daughters have married, as children have become 
more numerous, there have been additions: by a 
lean-to at one end the kitchen has achieved a separate 
existence, for instance; and these unpainted, weath- 
ered oaken masses pile up with a cumulative rich- 
ness of effect. 

Every step that brings one nearer to the house 
alters the relation of the planes formed by the gable 
ends; and so one must have got the same effect in 
' these old village streets as one gets today when one 
skirts around, let us say, Notre Dame in Paris, now 
overwhelmed by the towers at the front, and now 
seeing them reduced to nothing by the tall spire in 
the rear. So the building seems in motion, as well 
as the spectator; and this quality delights the eye 
quite as much as formal decoration, which the archi- 
tecture of the seventeenth century in America al- 
most completely lacked. 

The Puritan had his failings; and this lack of 
decoration was perhaps the most important one in 
architecture. In his devotion to books and in his 
love for music, even psalm-music, the Puritan was 
not immune to art; but he was suspicious of the 
image, and one is tempted to read into his idol- 


[27] 


Sticks and Stones 


breaking a positive visual defect, akin to the Dal- 
tonism or color blindness of the Quakers. Whereas 
medieval architecture had cherished the sculptor 
and the painter, even in the commonest vernacular 
work, the Puritans looked upon every diversion of 
the eye as a diversion from the Lord, and, by for- 
bidding a respectable union between the artist and 
the useful arts, they finally turned the artist out on 
the streets, to pander to the first fine gentleman 
who would give him a kind word or a coin. Whereas 
Puritan buildings in the seventeenth century were 
straightforward and honestly bent to fulfill their 
functions, the Puritan did not see that ornament 
itself may be functional, too, when it expresses some 
positive gesture of the spirit. “The bareness of the 
seventeenth century paved the way for the finicking 
graces of the eighteenth. 


IV 


In essentials, however, both the life and the archi- 
tecture of the first provincial period are sound. 
While agriculture is the mainstay of life, and 
the medieval tradition flourishes, the New England 
village reaches a pretty fair pitch of worldly 

[28 ] 


The Medieval Tradition 


perfection; and beneath all the superficial changes 
that affected it in the next century and a half, 
its sturdy framework held together remarkably 
well. 

-Consider the village itself. In the center is a 
common, a little to one side will be the meeting- 
house, perhaps a square barnlike structure, with a 
hipped roof and a cupola, like that at Hingham; 
and adjacent or across the way will be the grammar 
_ school. Along the roads where the houses are set 
' at regular intervals is a great columnar arcade of 
elm trees. All these elements are essential to our 
early provincial architecture, and without them it 
would be a little bare and forbidding. cee 
above all, are an important part of New England 
architecture: in summer they absorb the moisture 
and cool the air, besides giving shade; in the winter 
their huge boles serve as a partial windbrake; even 
the humus from their leaves keeps the soil of the 
lawns in better order. The apple trees that cling 
to the warmer side of the house are not less essen- 
tial. Would it be an exaggeration to say that there 
has never been a more complete and intelligent part- 
nership between the earth and man than existed, for 
a little while, in the old New England village? In 

[29 ] 


Sticks and Stones 


what other part of the world has such a harmoni- 
ous balance between the natural and the social en- 
vironment been preserved? 

Nowadays we have begun to talk about garden 
cities, and we realize that the essential elements in 
a garden-city are the common holding of land by 
the community, and the codperative ownership and 
direction of the'community itself. We refer to all 
these things as if they represented a distinct achieve- 
ment of modern thought; but the fact of the matter 
is that the New England village up to the middle 
of the eighteenth century was a garden-city in every 
sense that we now apply to that term, and happily 
its gardens and its harmonious framework have fre- 
quently lingered on, even though the economic foun- 
dations have long been overthrown. 

This is a medieval tradition in American archi- 
tecture which should be of some use to our architects 
and city planners; for it is a much more substantial 
matter than the building of perpendicular churches 
or Tudor country-houses in painfully archeological 
adaptations. If we wish to tie up with our colonial 
tradition we must recover more than the architec- 
tural forms: we must recover the interests, the stand- 
ards, the institutions that gave to the villages and 

[30] 


The Medieval Tradition 


buildings of early times their appropriate shapes. 
To do much less than this is merely to bring back 
a fad which might as well be Egyptian as “colonial” 
for all the sincerity that it exhibits. 


[31] 


CHAPTER TWO 


THE HERITAGE OF THE RENAISSANCE 


I 


Tue forces that undermined the medieval civiliza- 
tion of Europe sapped the vitality from the little 
centers it had deposited in America. What happened 
in the course of three or four centuries in Europe 
took scarcely a hundred years on this side of the 
Atlantic. 

Economically and culturally, the village commu- 
nity had been pretty well self-contained ; it scraped 
along on its immediate resources, and if it could not 
purchase for itself the “best of everything” it at 
least made the most of what it had. In every de- 
tail of house construction, from the setting of fire- 
places to the slope of the roof, there were local pe- 
culiarities which distinguished not merely the Dutch 
settlements from the English, but which even charac- 
terized several settlements in Rhode Island that were 
scarcely a day’s tramp apart. The limitation of 
materials, and the carpenter’s profound ignorance 


of “style” made for freedom and diversity. It re- 


[35 J 


Sticks and Stones 


mained for the eighteenth century to erect a single 
canon of taste. 
With the end of the seventeenth century the eco- 
nomic basis of provincial life shifted from the farm 
Vto the sea. This change had the same effect upon 
New England, where the village-community proper 
alone had flourished, that fur-trading had had upon 
New York: it broke up the internal unity of the 
village by giving separate individuals the oppor- 
tunity by what was literally a “lucky haul,” to 
achieve a position of financial superiority. Fisher- 
men are the miners of the water. Instead of the 
long, watchful care that the farmer must exercise 
from planting time to harvest, fishing demands a 
sharp eye and a quick, hard stroke of work; and 
since what the Germans call Sitzfleisch is not one of 
the primary qualities of a free lad, it is no wonder 
that the sea weaned the young folks of New Eng- 
land away from the drudgeries of its boulder-strewn 
farms. With fishing, trading, and building wooden 
vessels for sale in foreign ports, riches poured into 
maritime New England; and what followed scarcely 
needs an explanation. 
“These villages ceased to be communities of farm- 
ers, working the land and standing squarely on their 


[ 36 ] 


The Heritage of the Renaissance 


own soil: they became commercial towns which, in- 
stead of trading for a living, simply lived for trade. 
With this change, castes arose; first, the division 
between the poor and the rich, and then between 
“craftsmen. and merchants, between the independent 
all the townsfolk took second rank: the privileges 
of the great landlords and merchants warped the 
development of the community. Boston, by the 
middle of the eighteenth century, was rich in public 
_ buildings, including four schoolhouses, seventeen 
churches, a Town House, a Province House, and 
Faneuil Hall—a pretty large collection for a town 
whose twenty thousand inhabitants would scarcely 
fill a single block of tenements in the Bronx. But 
by this time a thousand inhabitants were set down 
as poor, and an almshouse and a workhouse had 
been provided for them. 

With the rise of the merchant class, the indus- 
trial guild began to weaken, as it had weakened in 
Europe during the Renaissance. For about a hun- 
dred years the carpenter-builder continued to re 
main on the scene, and work in his forthright and 
painstaking and honest manner; but in the middle 
of the eighteenth century he was joined, for the 

[37 ] 


Sticks and Stones 


first rst time, by the professional architect, the first one 
being probably ‘Peter Harrison, who designed the 
Redwood Library, which still stands in Newport. 
Under competition with architects and amateurs of 
taste, the carpenter-builder lost his position as an 
independent craftsman, building intelligently for his 
equals: he was forced to meet the swift, corrosive 
influences brought in from foreign lands by men 
who had visited the ports of the world; and he must 
set his sails in order to catch the new winds of 
fashion. 

What were these winds, and what effect did they 
have upon the architecture of the time? 

Most of the influences that came by way of trade 
affected only the accent of architecture; the lan- 
guage remained a homely vernacular. In the middle 
of the eighteenth century China sent over wall- 
paper; and in the Metropolitan Museum there is an 
American lacquered cabinet dated as early as 1700, 
decorated with obscure little Chinese figures in 
gilded gesso. “China” itself came in to take the 
place of pewter and earthenware in the finer 
houses; while in the gardens of the great manors, 
pavilions and pagodas, done more or less in the 


Chinese manner, were fashionable. Even Thomas 


[ 38 ] 


The Heritage of the Renaissance 


Jefferson, with his impeccably classical taste, de- 
signed such a pavilion for Monticello before the 
Revolution. 

“this specific Chinese influence was part of that 
large, eclectic Oriental influence of the eighteenth 
century. The cultural spirit that produced Mon- 
tesquieu’s Lettres Persanes also led to the transla- 
tion of the Chinese and Persian and Sanskrit clas- 
sics, and by a more direct route brought home Turk- 
ish dressing-gowns, turbans, and slippers to Boston 
merchants. “In Copley’s painting of Nicholas Boyl- 
ston, in 1767, fee ariiah ornaments rise comic- 
ally against the ‘suggestion of a Corinthian pillar 
in the background; and this pillar recalls to us the 
principal influence of the time—that of classic civ- 
_ilization. This influence entered America first as a 
motif in decoration, and passed out only after it had 


become a dominating motive in life. 


0 


The Renaissance was an orientation of the Euro- 
pean mind towards the forms of Roman and Greek 
civilization, and towards the meaning of classical 
culture. On the latter side its impulse was plainly 

[ 39] 


Sticks and Stones 


a liberating one: it delivered the human soul from 
a cell of torments in which there were no modulat- 
ing interests or activities between the base satisfac- 
tions of the temporal life and the beatitudes of 
heaven. With the Renaissance the god-beast be- 
came, once again, a man. Moreover, just when the 
Catholic culture of Christendom was breaking down 
under the influence of heresy and skepticism, the 
classics brought to the educated men of Europe a 
common theme which saved them from complete in- 
tellectual vagrancy. The effect of classical civiliza- 
tion, on the other hand, was not an unmixed good: 
for it served all too quickly to stereotype in old 
forms a spirit which had been freshly reborn, and 
it set up a servile principle in the arts which has 
in part been responsible for the wreck of both taste 
and craftsmanship. 

The first builders of the Renaissance, in Italy, were 
not primarily architects; they were rather supreme 
artists in the minor crafts; and their chief failing 
was, perhaps, that they wished to stamp with their 
personal imprint all the thousand details of sculp- 
ture, painting, and carving which had hitherto been 
left to the humble craftsman. Presently, the tech- 
nical knowledge of the outward treatment of a build- 


[40] 


The Heritage of the Renaissance 


ing became a touchstone to success; and a literal 
understanding of the products of antiquity took the 
place in lesser men of personal inspiration. The 
result was that architecture became more and more 
a thing of paper designs and exact archeological 
measurements ; the workman was condemned to carry 
out in a faithful, slavish way the details which the 
architect himself had acquired in similar fashion. 
So the architect ceased to be a master-builder work- 
ing among comrades of wide experience and travel: 
_ he became a Renaissance gentleman who merely gave 
orders to his servants. 

Victor Hugo said in Notre Dame that the print- 
ing-press destroyed architecture, which had hitherto 
been the stone record of mankind. The real mis- 
demeanor of the printing-press, however, was not 
that it took literary values away from architec- 
ture, but that it caused architecture to derive its 
value from literature. With the Renaissance the 
great modern distinction between the literate and 
the illiterate extends even to building; the master 
mason who knew his stone and his workmen and his 
tools and the tradition of his art gave way to the 
architect who knew his Palladio and his Vignola and 


his Vitruvius. Architecture, instead of striving to 


[41 ] 


Sticks and Stones 
leave the imprint of a happy spirit on the super- 


ficies of a building, became a mere matter of gram- 
matical accuracy and pronunciation ; and the seven- 
teenth-century architects who revolted from this 
regime and created the baroque were at home only 
in the pleasure gardens and theaters of princes. For 
the common run of architects, particularly in the 
northern countries, the Five Orders became as un- 
challengeable as the eighty-one rules of Latin syn- 
tax. To build with a pointed arch was barbarous, 
to build with disregard for formal symmetry was 
barbarous, to permit the common workman to carry 
out his individual taste in carving was to risk vul- 
garity and pander to an obsolete sense of democracy. 
The classics had, it is true, united Europe anew in 
a catholic culture; but alas! it was only the leisured 
upper classes who could fully take possession of the 
new kingdom of the mind. The Five Orders re- 
mained firmly entrenched on one side, the “lower 
orders” on the other. 

Hereafter, architecture lives by the book. First 
it is Palladio and Vignola; then it is Burlington and 
Chambers; then, after the middle of the eighteenth 
century, the brothers Adam and Stuart’s Antiqui- 
ties of Athens. Simpler works with detailed pre- 

[ 42 ] 


The Heritage of the Renaissance 


scriptions for building in the fashionable mode made 
their way in the late seventeenth century among the 
smaller fry of carpenters and builders; and they 
were widely used in America, as a guide to taste and 
technique, right down to the middle of the nineteenth 
century. It was by means of the book that the 
architecture of the eighteenth century from St. 
Petersburg to Philadelphia seemed cast by a single 

mind. We call the mode Georgian because vast 
"quantities of such building was done in England, 
as a result of the general commercial prosperity of 
that country ; but it was common wherever European 
civilization had any fresh architectural effort to 
make, and if we call this style “colonial” in America 
it is not to mark any particular lapse or lack of ~ 
distinction. 

The Renaissance in architecture had reached 
England at about the time of the Great Fire (1666), 
fully two generations after the Italian influence had 
made its way into English literature; and it came 
to America, as one might guess, about a generation 
later. It was left for Alexander Pope, himself a 
dutiful Augustan, to sum up the situation with 
classic precision to Lord Burlington, who had pub- 
lished Palladio’s Antiquities of Rome: 

[ 43 |] 


Sticks and Stones 


“You show us Rome was glorious, not profuse, 
And pompous buildings once were things of use. 
Yet shall, my lord, your just and noble rules 
Fill half the land with imitation fools; 

Who random drawings from your sheets shall take 


And of one beauty many blunders make.” 


These lines were a warning and a prophecy. The 
warning was timely; and the prophecy came true, 
except in those districts in which the carpenter con- 
tinued to ply his craft without the overlordship of 
the architect. 


1 


The first effect of the Renaissance forms in Amer- 
ica was not to destroy the vernacular but to perfect 
it; for it provided the carpenter-builder, whose dis- 
tance from Europe kept him from profiting by the 
spirited work of his forbears, with a series of orna- 
mental motifs. New England, under the influence 
of an idol-breaking Puritanism, had been singularly 
poor in decoration, as I have already observed: its 
modest architectural effects relied solely on mass, 
color, and a nice disposition of parts. In its deco- 
rative aspects medievalism had left but a trace in 


[ 44] 


The Heritage of the Renaissance 


America: the carved grotesque heads on the face of 
the Van Cortlandt Mansion in New York, and the 
painted decorations in some of the older houses and 
barns among the Pennsylvania Dutch pretty well 
complete the tally. 

Classical motifs served to fill the blank in provin- 
cial architecture. As long as the carpenter worked 
by himself, the classic influence was confined to little 
details like the fanlights, the moldings, the pillars 
_ of the portico, and so on. In the rural districts of 
_ New England, from Maine to Connecticut, and in 
certain parts of New York and New Jersey and 
Pennsylvania, the carpenter keeps on building in 
his solid, traditional manner down to the time that 
the jig-saw overwhelms a mechanically hypnotized 
age; and even through the jig-saw period in the 
older regions, the proportions and the plan remained 
close to tradition. The classical did not in fact 
supplant the vernacular until the last vestiges of the 
guild and the village-community had passed away, 
and the economic conditions appropriate to the 
Renaissance culture had made their appearance. 

The dwelling house slowly became more habitable 
during this period: the skill in shipbuilding which 
every sheltered inlet gave evidence of was carried 


[45 J 


Sticks and Stones 
back into the home, and in the paneling of the walls 


and the general tidiness and compactness of the 
apartments, a shipshape order comes more and more 
to prevail. The plastered ceiling makes its appear- 
ance, and the papered wall; above all, white paint 
is introduced on the inside and outside of the house. 
Besides giving more light, this innovation surely 
indicates that chimney flues had become more satis- 
factory. Paint was no doubt introduced to keep the 
torrid summer sun from charring the exposed clap- 
boards; and white paint was used, despite the ex- 
pense of white lead, for the reason that it accorded 
with the chaste effect which was inseparable in the 
eighteenth-century mind from classic precedent. 
Indeed, the whiteness of our colonial architecture 
is an essential characteristic; it dazzled Dickens on 
his first visit to America, and made him think that 
all the houses had been built only yesterday. The 
esthetic reason for delighting in these white colonial 
farmhouses is simple: white and white alone fully 
reflects the surrounding lights; white and white 
alone gives a pure blue or lavender shadow against 
the sunlight. At dawn, a white house is pale pink 
and turquoise; at high noon it is clear yellow and 
lavender-blue; in a ripe sunset it is orange and 


[ 46 J 


The Heritage of the Renaissance 
purple; in short, except on a gray day it is anything 
but white. These old white houses, if they seem a 
little sudden and sharp in the landscape, are at least 
part of the sky: one finds them stretched on a slight 
rise above the highroad like a seagull with poised 
wings, or a cloud above the treetops. Were any- 
thing needed to make visible the deterioration of 
. American life which the nineteenth century brought 
with it, the habit of painting both wood and brick 
_ gray should perhaps be sufficient. 


Ii 


If the architecture of the early eighteenth cen- 
tury in America is a little prim and angular, if it 
never rises far above a sturdy provincialism, it is 
not without its own kind of interest; and Faneuil 
Hall, for example, is not the worst of Boston’s build- 
ings, though it is overshadowed by the great utili- 
tarian hulks that line the streets about it. By study- 
ing the classical forms at one remove, the builders 
of the eighteenth century in America had the same 
kind of advantage that Wren had in England. 
Wren’s “Renaissance” churches, with their box-like 


naves and their series of superimposed orders for 


cecal 


Sticks and Stones 


steeples, had no parallel, so far as I am aware, 
in Italy, and certainly had no likeness to anything 
that had been built in classic times: they were the 
products of a playful and original fancy, like the 
mermaid. Mere knowledge, mere imitation, would 
never have achieved Renaissance architecture; it was 
the very imperfection of the knowledge and dis- 
cipleship that made it the appropriate shell of its 
age. Coming to America in handbooks and prints, 
chastely_ rendered, the models of antiquity were, 
down to the Revolution, followed just so far as they_ 
conveniently served. Instead of curbing invention, 
they gave it a more definite problem to work upon. 

It was a happy accident that made the carpenter- 
builders and cabinet makers of America see their 
China, their Paris, their Rome through a distance, 
dimly. What those who admire the eighteenth cen- 
tury style do not, perhaps, see is that an accident 
cannot be recovered. However painstakingly we 
may cut the waistcoat, the stock, the knee-breeches 
of an eighteenth-century costume, it is now only a 
fancy dress: its “moment” in history is over. The 
same principle holds true for Georgian or colonial 
architecture, even more than it does for that of the 


seventeenth century; for one might, indeed, con- 


[48] 


The Heritage of the Renaissance 


ceive of a breakdown in the transportation system 
or the credit system which would force a builder to 
rely for a while upon the products of his own region; 
whereas, while our civilization remains intact there 
are a hundred handbooks, measured drawings, and 
photographs which make a naive recovery of an- 
tiquity impossible. 

Once we have genuinely appreciated the influence 
that created early colonial architecture, we see that 
it is irrecoverable: what we call a revival is really 
a second burial. és All the king’s horses and all the 
king’s men have been hauling and tugging vigorously 
during the last fifty years to bring back the simple 
beauties and graces of the colonial dwelling, and the 
collectors’ hunt for the products of the Salem, New- 
buryport and Philadelphia cabinetmakers is a long 
and merry one; but the only beneficent effect of 
this movement has been the preservation of a hand- 
ful of antiquities, which would otherwise have been 
impiously torn down. What we have built in the 
colonial mode is all very well in its way: unfortu- 
nately, it bears the same relation to the work of the 
late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries that 
the Woolworth Building bears to the guild halls of 
the Middle Age, or the patriotism of the National 

[49] 


Sticks and Stones 


Security League to the principles of Franklin and 
Jefferson. Photographic accuracy, neatly touched 
up—this is its capital virtue, and plainly, it has 
precious little to do with a living architecture. Like 
the ruined chapel in The Pirates of Penzance, our 
modern colonial houses are often attached to an- 
cestral estates that were established—a year ago; 
and if their occupants are “descendants by pur- 


chase,” what shall we say of their architects? 


[ 50] 


CHAPTER THREE 
THE CLASSICAL MYTH 


I 


Tue transformation of European society and its 
material shell that took place during the period we 
call the Renaissance is associated with the break-up 
of the town economy and its replacement by a mer- 
_cantile economy devoted to the advantage of the 
State. Along with this goes the destruction of the 
village community, and the predominance in social 
affairs of a landholding oligarchy who have thrown 
off feudal responsibilities while they have retained 
most of the feudal privileges, and a merchant class, 
buttressed by riches derived from war, piracy, and 
sharp trade. 

America reproduced in miniature the changes that 
were taking place in Europe. Because of its isola- 
tion and the absence of an established social order, 
it showed these changes without the blur and con- 
fusion that attended them abroad. 

It is sometimes a little difficult to tell whether 
the classical modes of building were a result of 
these changes in society or, among other things, an 


[ 53 |] 


Sticks and Stones 


incentive to them; whether the classical frame fitted 
the needs of the time, or whether men’s activities 
expanded to occupy the idolum that had seized their 
imagination. At any rate, the notion that the 
classical taste in architecture developed mainly 
through technical interests in design will not hold; 
for the severely classical shell arose only in regions 
where the social conditions had laid a foundation 
for the classical myth. 

The first development of the grand style in the 
American renaissance was in the manors of Vir- 
ginia and Maryland. It came originally through an 
imitation of the country houses of England, and 
then, after the Revolutionary War, it led to a direct 
adaptation of the Roman villa and the Greek temple. 
One does not have to go very deep to fetch up the 
obvious parallel between the land-monopoly and 
slavery that prevailed in the American manors and 
the conditions that permitted the Roman villa itself 
to assume its stately proportions ; nor need one dwell 
too long upon the natural subordination, in this 
regime, of the carpenter-builder to the gentleman- 


architect. “In the town palaces and churches,” 


as 
Mr. Fiske Kimball justly says, “there was a strong 
contradiction between modern conditions and an- 


[ 54] 


The Classical Myth 


cient forms, so that it was only in the country that 
Palladio’s ideas of domestic architecture ¢ could come — 
‘to a clear and successful expression. These monu- 

ate since so much neglected, served in Palladio’s 
book expressly to represent the ‘Antients’ designs of 
country-houses. .. .’” 

At his death, Robert Carter, who had been Rector 
of the College, Speaker of the Burgesses, President 
of the Council, Acting Governor of Virginia, and 
Proprietor of the Northern Neck, was described in 

the Gentleman’s Magazine of 1732 as the possessor 

of an estate of 300,000 acres of land, about 1,000 
slaves, and ten thousand pounds. Pliny the Younger 
might well have been proud of such an estate. On 
a substantial basis like this, a Palladian mansion 
was possible; and up and down the land, wherever 
the means justified the end, Palladian mansions were 
bul. 

The really striking thing about the architecture of 
Manorial America with its great dignity and its 
sometimes striking beauty of detail or originality of 
design—as in the staircase at Berry Hill which 
creates a flaring pattern like butterfly’s wings—the 
striking thing is the fact that the work is not the 
prodrct of a specialized education; it is rather the 


[ 55 |] 


Sticks and Stones 


outcome of a warm, loving, and above all intelligent 
commerce with the past, in the days before Horse- 
back Hall had become as aimless and empty as 
Heartbreak House. Mr. Arthur T. Bolton, the 
biographer of the brothers Adam, has exhibited 
letters from Robert Adam’s patrons in England 
which mark their avid and precise interest in classi- 
cal forms; and. without doubt a little digging would 
uncover similar examples in America. 

These educated eighteenth-century gentlemen, 
these contemporaries of “Junius” and Gibbon, who 
had read Horace and Livy and Plutarch, had one 
foot in their own age, and the other in the grave of 
Rome. In America, Thomas Jefferson exemplified 
this whole culture at its best and gave it a definite 
stamp: he combined in almost equal degrees the 
statesman, the student, and the artist. Not merely 
did Jefferson design his own Monticello; he executed 
a number of other houses for the surrounding gentry 
—Shadwell, Edgehill, Farrington—to say nothing 
of the Virginia State Capitol and the church and 
university at Charlottesville. It was Jefferson who 
in America first gave a strict interpretation to 
classicism; for he had nothing but contempt -for 
the free, Georgian vernacular which was making its 


[ 561] 


The Classical Myth 


way among those who regarded the classical past as 
little more than a useful embellishment. 

The contrast between the classical and the ver- 
nacular, between the architecture of the plantation 
and the architecture of the village, between the work 
of the craftsman, and the work of the gentleman 
and the professional architect, became even more 
marked after the Revolutionary War. As a result 
of that re-crystallization of American society, the 
conditions of classical culture and classical civiliza- 
tion were for a short time fused in the activities of 
the community, even in the town. One may express 
the transformation in a crude way by saying that 
the carpenter-builder had been content with a classi- 
cal finish; the architects of the early republic worked 
upon a classical foundation. It was the Revolution 
itself, I believe, that turned the classical taste into 
a myth which had the power to move men and 
mold their actions. 

The merchant who has spent his hours in the 
counting house and on the quay cannot with the most 
lofty effort convert himself into a classical hero. 
It is different with men who have spent long nights 
and days wrangling in the State House, men who 
have ridden on horseback through a campaign, men 


[57 ] 


Sticks and Stones 
who have plotted like Catiline and denounced like 


Cicero, men whose daily actions are governed with 
the fine resolution of a Roman general or dictator. 
Unconsciously, such men want a stage to set off 
and magnify their actions. King Alfred can per- 
haps remain a king, though he stays in a cottage 
and minds the cakes on the griddle; but most of us 
need a little scenery and ritual to confirm these high 
convictions. If the tailors had not produced the 
frock-coat, Daniel Webster would have had to invent 
one. The merchant wants his little comforts and 
conveniences; at most, he desires the architect to 
make his gains conspicuous; but the hero who has 
drawn his sword or addressed an assembly wants 
elbow room for gestures. His parlor must be big 
enough for a public meeting, his dining room for a 
banquet. So it follows that whereas under pre- 
Revolutionary conventions even civic buildings like 
Independence Hall in Philadelphia are built on a 
domestic scale, the early republican architecture is 
marked by the practice of building its domestic 
dwellings on a public scale. The fine houses of the 
early republic all have an official appearance; almost 
any house might be the White House. , 

Even when Dickens made his first visit to America, 


[58] 


The Classical Myth 


the classical myth and the classical hero had not 
altogether disappeared: one has a painful memory 
of the “mother of the modern Gracchi,” and one 
sees how the republican hero had been vulgarized 
into a Jacksonian caricature like General Cyrus 
Choke. For a whole generation the classical myth 
held men in its thrall; the notion of returning to a 
pagan polity, quaintly modified by deism, was a 
weapon of the radical forces in both America and 
| France. Jean Jacques himself preached the virtues 
_ of Sparta and Rome in Le Contrat Social, as well 
as the state of nature which he praised in Emile; 
and, in general, “radicalism” associated itself with 
the worship of rule and reason, as opposed to the 
caprice, the irrationality, the brute traditionalism 
of what the children of that age then characterized 
as “Gothic superstition.” Almost within his life- 
time Washington became Divus Cesar, and if a mon- 
ument was not built to him immediately, a city was 
named after him, as Alexandria had been named 
after Alexander. Did not the very war-veterans be- 
come the Society of the Cincinnati; did not the first 
pioneers on the westward march sprinkle names like 
Utica and Ithaca and Syracuse over the Mohawk 
trail; and did not a few ex-soldiers go back to their 


[ 59 |] 


Sticks and Stones 


Tory neighbor’s plow? As Rome and Greece em- 
bodied the political interests of the age, so did classi- 
els architecture provide the appropriate shell. 
Even those who were not vitally touched by the 
dominant interests of the period were not immune 


to the fashion,-once it had been set. 


II 


In New England, not unnaturally, the influence of 
the merchant prevailed in architecture for a longer 
time, perhaps, than it did elsewhere. Samuel Mc- 
Intire, a carver of figureheads for ships and mold- 
ings for cabins, provided an interior setting in the 
fashion of Robert Adam, which enabled the mer- 
chant of Salem to live like a lord in Berkeley Square; 
and Bulfinch, a merchant’s son, began by repairing 
his father’s house, went on a grand tour of Europe, 
and returned to a lucrative practice which included 
the first monument on Bunker Hill, and the first 
theater opened in Boston. Under McIntire’s assidu- 
ous and scholarly hands, the low-lying traditional 
farmhouse was converted into the bulky square house 
with its hipped roof, its classical pilasters, its fre- 
quently ill-proportioned cupola, its “captain’s 


[ 60 ] 


The Classical Myth 


walk,” or “widow’s walk.” The merchant with his 
eye for magnitude lords it over the farmer with his 
homely interest in the wind and the weather; and so 
McIntire, the last great figure in a dying line of 
craftsmen-artists, is compelled to make up by wealth 
of ornament a beauty which the earlier provincial 
houses had achieved by adaptation to the site with- 
out, and to subtlety of proportion within. The 
standard of conspicuous waste, as Mr. Thorstein 
Veblen would call it, spread from the manor to the 
city mansion. 

Throughout the rest of the country, the pure 
classical myth created the mold of American archi- 
tecture, and buildings that were not informed by 
this myth attempted some sort of mimicry, like the 
mansion Squire Jones built for Marmaduke Temple 
in Cooper’s The Pioneers. There are churches stand- 
ing in New Jersey and New York, for example, built 
as late as 1850, which at a distance have the out- 
lines and proportions of classic buildings, either in 
the earlier style of Wren, or in the more severe and 
stilted Greek manner favored by a later generation. 
It is only on closer inspection that one discovers 
that the ornament has become an illiterate reminis- 
cence; that the windows are bare openings; that 


[61 ] 


Sticks and Stones 
the orders have lost their proportions, and that, 


unlike the wandering mechanic, who “with a 
few soiled plates of English architecture” helped 
Squire Jones, the builder could no longer pretend 
to talk learnedly “of friezes, entablatures, and par- 
ticularly of the composite order.” Alas for a 
bookish architecture when the taste for reading 


disappears ! 


Il 


The dominant designs of the early republican 
period proceeded directly or indirectly from such 
books as Stuart’s Antiquities of Athens, and from 
such well-known examples of temple architecture in 
southern Europe as the Maison Carrée at Nimes. 
In one sense, there was a certain fitness in adapting 
the Greek methods of building to America. Origi- 
nally, the Greek temple had probably been a wooden 
building. Its columns were trees, its cornices ex- 
posed beams; and the architect’s new opportunity to 


fabricate mightily in wood may have furnished an 
extra incentive to the erection of these colossal 


buildings. The fact that the Greek mode in America 
was well under way before the first example of it 


[ 62 ] 


The Classical Myth 


_had appeared in Edinburgh, London, or Paris, shows 
perhaps that time and place both favored its in- 
troduction on this side of the Atlantic: for the 
availability of certain materials often, no doubt, 
directs the imagination to certain forms. 

On the whole, however, the Greek temple precedent 
was a bad one. For one thing, since the Greek cella 
had no source of light except the doorway, it was 
necessary to introduce modifications in the elevation, 
and to break up the interior; and it was only in the 
South that the vast shadowed retreats formed by 
porches and second-story balconies proved a happy 
adaptation to the climate. Again: Greek archi- 
tecture was an architecture of exteriors, designed 
for people who spent the greater part of the year 
out of doors. With no temple ritual comparable 
to the services of the church or cathedral, the 
Greeks lavished their attention upon externals, and 
as a great admirer of the Greeks, Sir Reginald Blom- 
field well says, “may have been more successful with 
the outside of their buildings than with the inside.” 
To fail with the interior in a northern climate is to 
fail with the essentials of a habitation; and these 
vast rooms, for all their ornament, too often re- 


mained bleak. 


[ 63 ] 


Sticks and Stones 
Even on the esthetic side, the Greek style of build- 


ing was not a full-blown success. With all their 
strict arrangement of the classic orders, with all 
their nice proportions, the muted white exteriors 
resembled a genuine Greek temple in the way that a 
sepia photograph would represent a sunrise—the 
warm tones, the colors, the dancing procession of 
sculptures were absent ; it was a thinned and watered 
Greece that they called to mind. Indeed, the dis- 
ciples of the Age of Reason and white perukes would 
have been horrified, I have no doubt, at the “bar- 
barism” of the original Greek temples, as they would 
doubtless also have been at the meanness of the 
dwellings in which Pericles or Thucydides must have 
lived. Once the temple-house ceased to be a stage 
upon which the myth of classicism could be enacted, 
it ceased also to be a home. For who wishes to 
live in a temple? That is a spiritual exercise we 
do not demand even of a priest. Small wonder that 
the temple lingered longest in the South, where, 
down to the Civil War, gangs of slaves supported the 
dignity of the masters and a large household dimin- 
ished the chilly sense of solitude. 

It was in public architecture that the early, 
republic succceded best, and it was here that its 

[ 64 ] 


The Classical Myth 


influence lingered longest, for down to 1840 well- 
designed buildings in the classic mode, like the Sub- 
Treasury building in New York, were still put up. 
The work of McComb in New York, Hoadley in Con- 
necticut, Latrobe in Pennsylvania and Maryland, to 
mention only a few of the leading architects, repre- 
sents the high-water mark of professional design in 
America; and the fact that in spite of the many hands 
that worked upon it the Capitol at Washington is 
still a fairly coherent structure is a witness to the 
strength of their tradition. For all its minor felici- 
ties, however, we must not make the mistake of the 
modern revivalists, like Mr. Fiske Kimball, who urge 
the acceptance of the classic tradition in America as 
a foundation for a general modern style. Form and 
function are too far divorced in the classic mode to 
permit the growth of an architecture which will 
proceed on all fours in houses and public buildings 
and factories and barns; moreover, there are too 
many new structures in the modern world which the 
builders of Rome or the Renaissance have not even 
dimly anticipated. In medieval building the town 
hall is a different sort of building from the cathedral: 
using the same elements, perhaps, it nevertheless 


contrives an altogether different effect. In the 


[65] 


Sticks and Stones 


architecture of the early republic, on the other hand, 
the treasury building might be a church, and the 
church might be a mansion, for any external differ- 
entiation one can observe—in fact, the only ecclesias- 
tical feeling that goes with the churches of the time 
is a cold deism, or an equally cold Protestant faith 
which has lost entirely the memories and associa- 
tions of the intervening centuries. This sort of 
architecture achieves order and dignity, not by com- 
posing differences, but by canceling them. Its 
standards do not inhere in the building, but are laid 
on outside of it. When the purpose of the struc- 
ture happens to conform to the style, the result 
may be admirable in every way. When it does not 
happen to conform the result is tedious and 
banal; and, to tell the truth, a great deal of the 
architecture of the early republic is tedious and 


banal. 


IV 


One further effect of the classic mode_has. still 
to be noted: the introduction of formal city design, 
by the French engineer, Major L’Enfant, in the lay- 

ing out of Washington. Stirred by the memory of 


C66 J 


The Classical Myth 


the grand design of Paris under Louis XIV, with 
its radiating avenues that cut through the city in 
the way that riding lanes cut through the hunt- 
ing forest, L’Enfant sought to superimpose a digni- 
fied pattern. upon the rectangular plan provided 
by the commissioners of Washington. By putting 
the ma jor public buildings in key positions, by pre- 
viding for a proper physical relation between the 
various departments of the government, by plan- 
ning spacious avenues of approach, culminating in 
‘squares, triangles, and round-points, Major L’En- 
fant gave great dignity to the new capital city, and 
even though in the years that followed his plan was 
often ignored and overridden, it still maintained a 
monumental framework for the administrative build- 
ings of the American State. 

Unfortunately, if Washington has the coherence 
of a formal plan, it also has its abstractness: con- 
trived to set off and serve the buildings of the 
government, it exercised no control over domestic 
building, over business, over the manifold economic 
functions of the developing city. The framework was 
excellent, if cities could live by government alone. + 
By laying too much stress on formal order, the 


exponents of classic taste paved the way for the all 


[ 67 J 


Sticks and Stones 


too formal order of the gridiron plan, and since the 
"gridiron development was suited to hasty commer- 
cial exploitation, while the mode of Washington | 
was not, it was in this mold that the architecture of 
the nineteenth century was cast. | ; 

Within a short while after its introduction in New 
York in 1811 the effects of the rectangular streets 
and rectangular lots became evident; whereas the 
prints of New York before 1825 show a constant 
variety in the elevation and layout of houses, those 
after this date resemble more and more standardized 
boxes. Long monotonous streets that terminated 
nowhere, filled by rows of monotonous houses—this. 
was the net contribution of the formal plan. Classi- 
cal taste was not responsible for these enormities— 
but on the whole it did nothing to check them, and 
since the thrifty merchants of New York could not 
understand L’Enfant’s plan for Washington, they 
seized upon that part of it which was intelligible: 
its regularity, its appearance of order. 

With the new forces that were at work on the 
American scene, with the disintegration of classical 
culture under the combined influence of pioneer en- 
terprise, mechanical invention, overseas commerce, 
and the almost religious cult of utilitarianism, all 


[ 68 ] 


The Classical Myth 


this was indeed inevitable. What happened to the 
proud, Roman-patterned republic of 1789 is a 
matter of common knowledge. Benjamin Latrobe, 
the British architect who contributed so much to the 
Capitol at Washington—including a new order of 
corn stalks and tobacco leaves—was a witness to 
the disintegration of the age and the dissolution 
of its world of ideas; and there ig a familiar ring 


to his commentary upon it: 


“I remember [he says in his autobiography] the 
time when I was over head and ears in love with Man 
in a State of Nature. . . . Social Compacts were 
my hobbies; the American Revolution—I ask its par- 
don, for it deserves better company—was a sort of 
dream of the Golden Age; and the French Revolu- 
tion was the Golden Age itself. I should be ashamed 
to confess all this if I had not a thousand compan- 
ions in my kaleidoscopic amusement, and those gen- 
erally men of ardent, benevolent, and well-informed 
minds and excellent hearts. Alas! experience has 
destroyed the illusion, the kaleidoscope is broken, 
and all the tinsel of scenery that glittered so de- 
lightfully is translated and turned to raggedness. 
A dozen years’ residence at the Republican court of 


[69] 


Sticks and Stones 
Washington had affected wonderfully the advance 


of riper years.” 


Major L’Enfant’s plan for Washington was the 
last gasp, it seems to me, of the classical order; 
Jefferson’s University of Virginia was perhaps its 
most perfect consummation, for Jefferson had 
planned for the life of the institution as well as for 
the shell which was to contain it. Before the nine- 
teenth century was long under way men’s minds 
ceased to move freely within the classical idolum; 
| and by 1860 the mood was obliterated and a large 
part of the work had been submerged or destroyed. 
The final ironic commentary upon the dignity and 
austerity of the earlier temples is illustrated in a 
house in Kennebunkport, Maine; for there the se- 
rene, pillared facade is broken up in the rear by a 
later, and alas! a necessary addition: a two-story 
bow-window projected far enough beyond the eaves 
to give a little light to the occupants of the rooms! 

In sum, there was a pathetic incompatibility in 
this architecture between need and achievement, be- 
tween pretensions and matter-of-fact—a rigid oppo- 
sition to common sense that a vernacular, however 
playful, would never countenance. These temples 


[70] 


The Classical Myth 
were built with the marmoreal gesture cf eternity; 
they satisfied the desire and fashion of the moment; 


and today their ghosts parade before us, brave but 
incredible. 


Cv] 


CHAPTER FOUR 


THE DIASPORA OF THE PIONEER 


I 


From the standpoint of architecture, the early 
part of the nineteenth century was a period of dis- 
integration. The gap between sheer utility and art, 
which the Renaissance had emphasized, was widened 
with the coming of machinery. That part of archi- 
tecture which was touched by industrialism became 
crude beyond belief: the new mills and factories were 
usually packing boxes, lacking in light and ventila- 
tion, and the homes of the factory workers, when 
they were not the emptied houses of merchants and 
tradesmen, made to serve a dozen families instead of 
the original one, were little more than covered pens, 
as crowded as a cattle market. At the same time that 
the old forms were undermined by the new methods 
of mechanical production, a sentimental longing to 
retain those forms, just because they were old, seized 
men’s minds; and so industrialism and romanticism 
divided the field of architecture between them. 

It was no accident that caused romanticism and 
industrialism to appear at the same time. They 


[75] 


Sticks and Stones 


were rather the two faces of the new civilization, one 
looking towards the past, and the other towards the 
future; one glorifying the new, the other clinging to 
the old; industrialism intent on increasing the physi- 
«al means of subsistence, romanticism living in a 
sickly fashion on the hollow glamour of the past. 
The age not merely presented these two aspects; it 
sought to enjoy each of them, Where industrialism 
took root, the traditions of architecture were disre- 
garded; where romanticism flourished, on the other _ 
hand, in the mansions, public buildings, and 
churches, architecture became capricious and ab- 
surd, and it returned to a past that had never existed. 
Against the gross callousness which a Bounderby 
exhibited toward beauty and amenity, there was only 
the bland piety of a Pecksniff. 

The dream that is dying and the dream that is 
coming to birth do not stand in sequence, but mingle 
as do the images in a dissolving view; and during the 
very years that the architecture of the Renaissance, 
both in Europe and America, achieved new heights 
of formal design, the first factories were being 
planted in Staffordshire and Yorkshire, the Duke of 
Bridgewater built his famous canal, and Horace 
Walpole designed his “Gothic” mansion on Straw- 

[76] 


The Diaspora of the Pioneer 


berry Hill. The coincidence of industrialism and 
romanticism is just as emphatic in America as in 
England ; and it is not without historic justice that 
the architect who in 1807 designed the chapel of St. 
Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore, after the Gothic 
fashion, successfully introduced a steam pumping 
system in Philadelphia’s waterworks. While the 
industrial buildings of the period represented noth- 
ing but a lapse from the current vernacular, due to 
haste and insufficient resources, romantic architec- 
ture was a positive influence ; and it will perhaps best 
serve our purpose to examine the romantic heritage 
in its pristine form, rather than in the work of dis- 
ciples like Latrobe, whose American practice is dated 
about two generations later. | 

The author of The Castle of Otranto had a per- 
verse and wayward interest in the past; and the 
spirit he exhibited in both his novel and his country 
home was typical of the romantic attitude every- 
where. What attracted Walpole to the Gothic style 
was little more than the phosphorescence of decay: 
he summoned up the ghosts of the Middle Ages but 
not the guilds; and instead of admiring the sound- 
ness of medieval masonry, those who followed directly 
in his path were affected rather by the spectacle of 

[77] 


Sticks and Stones 
its dilapidation, so that the production of authentic 


ruins became one of the chief efforts of the eighteenth- 
century landscape gardener. 

It is not a great step from building a ruin to 
building a mansion that is little better than a ruin. 
While Walpole defended Strawberry Hill by saying 
he did not aim to make his house so Gothic as to 
exclude convenience, it happened again and again 
that the picturesque was the enemy of simple honesty 
and necessity; and just as Walpole himself in his 
refectory used wall paper that imitated stucco, so 
did other owners and builders use plaster and hang- 
ings and wall paper and carpet to cover up defects 
of construction. ‘Towers that no one ever climbed, 
turrets that no one could enter, and battlements 
that no one rose to defend, took the place of the 
classic orders. The drawbridge-and-moat that em- 
bellished Mr. Wemmick’s villa in Great Expectations 
was not a wild conceit of Dickens but a relic of Wal- 
pole and his successors. 

As a disguise for mean or thoughtless workman- 
ship, the application of antique “style” was the 
romantic contribution to architecture; and it served 
very handily during the period of speculative build- 
ing and selling that accompanied the growth of the 

[78 ] 


The Diaspora of the Pioneer 


new industrial towns. Even where style did not con- 
ceal commercial disingenuousness, it covered up a 
poverty of imagination in handling the elements of a 
building. Gothic touches about doors and the ex- 
terior of windows, and a heap of bric-a-brac and 
curios on the inside, softened the gauntness and 
bareness of this architecture, or rather, distracted 
attention from them. Curiosity was the dominant 
mood of the time, acquisitiveness its principal im- 
pulse, and comfort its end. Many good things 
doubtless came out of this situation; but architec- 


ture was not one of them. 


I 


Modern industrialism began to take root in Amer- 
ica after the War of Independence, and its effect 
was twofold: it started up new villages which cen- 
tered about the waterfall or the iron mine and 
had scarcely any other concern than industry; at 
the same time, by cutting canals which tapped the 
interior, it drew life away from the smaller pro- 
vincial ports and concentrated commerce and popu- 
lation in great towns like Boston, Philadelphia, and 
New York. In New England, as in the English 

C79] 


Sticks and Stones 
Cotswolds from Whitney to Chalford, the mechani- 


cal regime was humanized by the presence of an 
older civilization, and the first generation of factory 
hands were farmers’ lads and lasses who neither lost 
nor endangered their independence; but where the 
factory depended upon paupers or immigrants, as 
it did in the big towns and in some of the unsettled 
parts of the country, the community relapsed into 
a barbarism which affected the masters as well as 
the hands. There was more than a difference in 
literary taste between the Corinths and Bethels named 
by an earlier generation and the Mechanicsvilles that 
followed them. 

The chief watchwords of the time were progress 
and expansion. The first belonged to the pioneer 
in industry who opened up new areas for mechanical 
invention and applied science; the second, to the land 
pioneer; and between these two resourceful types 
the old ways, were they good or bad, were scrapped, 
and the new ways, were they good or bad, were 
adopted. Both land pioneering and industrial 
pioneering were essentially subdivisions of one occu- 
pation, mining; and, following the clue opened by 
Messrs. Geddes and Branford, one may say with 
Professor Adshead that the nineteenth century 

[ 80 ] 


The Diaspora of the Pioneer 


witnessed “the great attack of the miner on the 
peasant.” 

Mechanical industry owes its great development 
and progress to the work of the woodman and 
the miner: the first type of worker takes the bent 
sapling and develops the lathe or “bodger” which 
is still to be found in the remote parts of the Chil- 
tern Hills in England, while from the mine itself 
not merely comes the steam engine, first used for 
pumping out water, but likewise the railway. The 
perpetual débris amid which the miner lives forms 
a capital contrast with the ordered culture, the care- 
ful weeding and cutting, of field and orchard: almost 
any sort of habitation is an advance upon the 
squalor of the pithead; and it is not a mere chance 
that the era devoted to mining and all its accessory 
manufactures was throughout the western world 
the dingiest and dirtiest that has yet befouled the 
earth. Choked by his own débris, or stirred by the 
exhaustion of minerals, the miner’s community runs 
down—and he departs. 

The name pioneer has a romantic color; but in 
America the land pioneer mined the forests and the 
soil, and the industry pioneer almost as ruthlessly 


mined the human resources, and when the pay-dirt 


[81 ] 


Sticks and Stones 
got sallow and thin, they both moved on. Long- 


fellow’s allusion to the “bivouac of life” uncon- 
sciously points to the prevailing temper; for even 
those who remained in the older American centers 
were affected by the pioneer’s malaise and unsettle- 
ment; and they behaved as if at any moment they 
might be called to the colors and sent westward. 
Beside the vivid promises of Mechanical Progress _ 
and Manifest Destiny the realities of an ordered 
society thinned into a pale vapor. In many little 
communities Mechanical Societies were formed for 
the propagation of the utilitarian faith: industrial- 
ism with its ascetic ritual of unsparing work, its 
practice of thrift, its renunciation of the arts, 
gathered to itself the religious zeal of Protestantism. 
The erection of factories, the digging of canals, the 
location of furnaces, the building of roads, the devis- 
ing of inventions, not merely exhausted a great part 
of the available capital; even more, it occupied the 
energy and imagination of the more vigorous spirits. 
Two generations before, Thomas Jefferson could 
lay out and develop the estate of Monticello; now, 
with many of Jefferson’s capacities, Poe could only 
dream about the fantastic Domain of Arnheim. 
The society around Poe had no more use for an 


[ 82 ] 


The Diaspora of the Pioneer 


architectural imagination than the Puritans had for 
decorative images; the smoke of the factory-chimney 
was incense, the scars on the landscape were as the 
lacerations of a saint, and the mere multiplication of 
gaunt sheds and barracks was a sign of progress, 
and therefore an earnest of perfection. 

Did ever so many elements of disintegration come 
together at one time and place before? The ab- 
sence of tradition and example raised enough diffi- 
culties in Birmingham and Manchester and Lyons 
and Essen; but in America it was accentuated by 
the restless march of those pioneers who, in the 
words of a contemporary economist, “leave laws, 
education and the arts, all the essential elements of 
_ civilization, behind them.” What place could archi- 
tecture fill in these squatter communities? It could 
diminish the hardships of living; it could grease the 
channels of gain; and it could demolish or “improve” 
so much of the old as it could not understand, as 
Bulfinch’s Court House in Newburyport was im- 
proved, and as many a fine city residence was swept 
away under the tide of traffic. 

These were the days when the log cabin flourished ; 
the . well-wrought and decorative piece of rustic 


[ 83 |] 


Sticks and Stones 
architecture that the better sort of peasant hut, done. 


_ with the same materials, | became in Russia. A 
genuine architectural development might have led 
from a crude log cabin to a finished one, from a bare 
cabin to an enriched and garnished one, and so, 
perhaps, in the course of a century or so, to a 
fine country architecture and a great native art 
of wood carving comparable to that of the Russian 
sculptors today. In America, however, the pioneer 
jumped baldly from log cabin to White House, or 
its genteel and scroll-sawed equivalent; and the 
arts inherent in good building never had a chance to 
develop. With the animus of the miner in.back of 
everything the pioneer attempted, the pioneer’s 


architecture was all false-work and scantling. 


Ir 


The first contribution to the pioneer’s comfort 
was Franklin’s ingenious stove (1745). -After that 
came a number of material appliances. Central 
heating gave the American house a Roman stand- 
ard of comfort, the astral-oil lamp captivated Edgar 
Poe; and cooking stoves, gas-lighting, permanent 
bathtubs, and water-closets made their way into the 


[ 84] 


The Diaspora of the Pioneer 


better sort of house in the Eastern cities before the 
middle of the nineteenth century. In the develop-_ 
ment of the city itself, the gridiron plan was added _ 
‘to the list of labor-saving devices. Although the 
gridiron plan had the same relation to natural con- 
ditions and fundamental social needs as a paper 
constitution has to the living customs of a people, 
the simplicity of the gridiron plan won the heart of 
the pioneer. Its rectangular blocks formed parcels 
of land which he could sell by the front foot and 
gamble with as easily as if he were playing cards, 
and deeds of transfer could be drawn up hastily 
with the same formula for each plot; moreover, the 
least competent surveyor, without thought or knowl- 
edge, could project the growth of New Eden’s streets 
and avenues into an interminable future. In nine- 
teenth-century city planning the engineer was the 
willing servant of the land monopolist; and he pro- 
vided a frame for the architect—a frame in which 
we still struggle today—where site-value counted for 
everything, and sight-value was not even an after- 
thought. 

In street layout and land subdivision no attention 
was paid to the final use to which the land would be 


put; but the most meticulous efforts were made to 


[85] 


Sticks and Stones 


safeguard its immediate use, namely, land-specula- 
tion. In order to further this use hills were graded, 
swamps and ponds filled, and streets laid out before 
these expenditures could be borne by the people 
who, in the end, were to profit by or suffer from 
them. It was no wonder that the newer towns like 
Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Chicago by the middle 
of the century had forfeited to the gambler in real 
estate, to pay the cost of street improvements, gen- 
erous tracts of land which the original planners had 
set aside as civic centers. Planned by men who still 
retained some of the civic vision of the early re- 
public, the commercial city speedily drifted into the 
hands of people who had no more civic scruples than 
the keeper of a lottery. 

The gridiron plan had one other defect which 
was accounted a virtue by the pioneer, and still is 
shared by those who have not profited by the inter- 
vening century’s experience. With its avenues that 
encompassed swamps and wildernesses, with its 
future growth forecast for at least a hundred years, 
the complete city plan captivated the imagination. 
Scarcely any American town was so mean that it 
did not attempt to grow faster than its neighbor, 
faster perhaps than New York. Only by the accu- 

[ 86 ] 


The Diaspora of the Pioneer 


mulation of more and more people could its colossal 
city plan and its inflated land values be realized. If 
the older cities of the seaboard were limited in their 
attempts to become metropolises by the fact that 
their downtown sections were originally laid out for 
villages, the villages of the middle west labored under 
just the opposite handicap; they had frequently ac- 
quired the framework of a metropolis before they 
had passed out of the physical state of a village. 
The gridiron plan was a sort of hand-me-down which 
the juvenile city was supposed to grow into and fill. 
‘That a city had any other purpose than to attract 
‘trade, to increase land values, and to grow is some- 
thing that, if it uneasily entered the mind of an 
occasional Whitman, never exercised any hold upon 
the minds of the majority of our countrymen. ) For 
them, the place where the great city stands is the 
place of stretched wharves, and markets, and ships 
bringing goods from the ends of the earth; that, 


and nothing else. 


Iv 


With business booming and vanishing, with people 
coming and going, with land continually changing 


[87] 


Sticks and Stones 


hands, what encouragement was there for the stable 
achievements of architecture? In vain does the 
architect antic and grimace to conceal his despair; 
his business is to put on a front. If he is not a 
Pecksniff at heart, he will at any rate have to serve 
Mr. Veneering. A guide book of 1826 refers to a 
Masonic Hall “somewhat in the Gothic style’; and 
we can characterize all the buildings of the period 
by saying that they were “somewhat” like archi- 
tecture—a little more than scenery, a little less than 
solids. 

For a while it seemed as if the Gothic revival 
might give the prevailing cast to nineteenth-century 
_building; for if this mode was adopted at first 
because it was picturesque and historic it was later 
reénforced by the conviction that it was a natural 
and scientific mode of construction, that it stood 
for growth and function, as against the arbitrary 
character of the classic work. The symbols of the 
organic world were rife in the thought of this period, 
for in the sphere of thought biology was supplanting 
physics, and Gothic architecture was supposed pecu- 
liarly to be in the line of growth, while that of the 
Renaissance cut across and, heretically, denied the 
principle of organic development. Unfortunately 

[ 88 ] 


The Diaspora of the Pioneer 


the process of disintegration had gone so far that no 
one current of thought had the power to dominate; 
and the Gothic style proved to be only the first of-a 
_number of discordant influences, derived from in- 
dustry, from history, from archeology. 

Indeed, the chief sign that bears witness to the 
disintegration of architecture during the formative 
days of the pioneer is eclecticism; but there is still 
another—the attempt to justify the industrial 
process by using solely the materials it had created 
in abundance. In discussing the plans for the 
Smithsonian Institution, Robert Dale Owen ob- 
served that “of late years a rival material, from 
the mine, seems encroaching on these [stone, clay, 
wood] and the next generation may see, arising on 
our continent, villages, or it may be cities, of 
iron.” 

What Owen’s generation actually did see, apart 
from sheet-iron facades and zinc cornices, was the 
Crystal Palace, which was built in New York in 
1853 in imitation of London’s exhibition hall of 
1850. Ruskin described the original Crystal Palace, 
with sardonic justice, as a magnified conservatory ; 
and that is about all that can be said for either 
building. As exercises in technique they doubtless 


[89 ] 


Sticks and Stones 


taught many lessons to the iron masters and en- 
gineers; but they had scarcely anything to con- 
tribute to architecture. A later generation built 
the train sheds for their smoky railways on this pat- 
tern; but the precedent lingers today chiefly in 
subway kiosks and window-fronts, and even here it 
has created no fresh forms for itself—unless the 
blank expanse of a plate-glass window framed in 
metallic grilles can be called a fresh form. 

The growth of eclecticism, on the other hand, had 
by the middle of the century given the American city 
the aspect of a museum and the American country- 
side a touch of the picture-book. Washington 
Irving’s Sunnyside and the first Smithsonian build- 
ing were in the predominant Gothic mode; but Poe 
described the mansion of a not altogether imaginary 
Arnheim as semi-Gothic, semi-Saracenic; and the old 
Tombs prison in New York got its name from the 
Egyptian character of its fagade. Who can doubt 
that the design for a Byzantine cottage, shown in 
The American Cottage Builder (1854), was some- 
where carried out? 

Nettled by the criticism that America was not 
Europe, the pioneer determined to bring Europe 


to his doors. Relatively few American architects 


[90] 


The Diaspora of the Pioneer 


during the period, however, had been abroad, and 
still fewer had been there to any purpose; even men 
of culture and imagination like Hawthorne and Emer- 
son were not at home in the physical environment of 
Europe, however intimate they were with its mind. 
The buildings that were erected under the inspiration 
of European tours only accentuated the barbarism 
of the American scene and the poverty of the archi- 
tect’s imagination. 

A good part of our architecture today still ex- 
hibits the parvenu’s uneasiness, and is by turns 
French, Italian, or more or less obsolete English; 
but we do not, perhaps, realize with what a differ- 
ence; for photography and archexological research 
now make it possible to produce buildings which have 
all the virtues of the original except originality, 
whereas the earlier, illiterate development of foreign 
examples, rehearsed in memory, resulted in a con- 
glomerate form which resembled nothing so much, 
perhaps, as P. T. Barnum’s mermaid. 

If the Crystal Palace represents the extreme of in- 
eae art, Colonel Colt’s Armsmear represents the 
opposite—untutored romanticism. Armsmear was 
built near Hartford, between 1855 and 1862. A 
_ writer in the Art Journal for 1876 calls this mansion 


[91 ] 


Sticks and Stones 


a “characteristic type of the unique.” It was a 
“long, grand, impressive, contradictory, beautiful, 
strange thing. ... An Italian villa in stone, massive, 
noble, refined, yet not carrying out any decided prin- 
ciples of architecture, it is like the mind of its origi- 
nator, bold and unusual in its combinations. .. . 
There is no doubt it is a little Turkish among other 
things, on one side it has domes, pinnacles, and light, 
lavish ornamentation, such as Oriental taste delights 
in... . Yet, although the villa is Italian and cos- 
mopolitan, the feeling is English. It is an English 
home in its substantiality, its home-like and com- 
fortable aspects.” 

It is, alas! impossible to illustrate in these pages 
this remarkable specimen of American architecture; 
but in a lecture on the Present and Future Prospects 
of Chicago (1846), I have discovered its exact 
literary equivalent, and it will sum up the crudity 
and cultural wistfulness of the period perhaps better 


than any overt description: 


“T thank you [apologizes the lecturer] for the 
patience you have manifested on this occasion, and 
promise never more to offend in like manner, so long. 


I have now, as Cowper observes— 


[92 ] 


The Diaspora of the Pioneer 


‘Roved for fruit, 

Roved far, and gathered much... .” 

“And can, I think with Scott, surely say that— 

‘To his promise just 

Vich-Alpine has discharged his trust.’ 

“I propose now, gentlemen, to leave you at Carlang- 
_ toghford, 

‘And thou must keep thee with thy sword.’ 
“Let me say to you on this occasion, as Campbell 
does on another: 

‘Wave, Munich! all your banners wave! 

And charge with all your chivalry.’ 

“And should you in the contest fall, remember with 
old Homer— 

‘Such honours Ilion to her hero paid, 

And peaceful slept the mighty Hector’s shade.’ 
‘Allow me now to close in one of Scott’s beautiful 
strains: 

‘Charge, Chester, charge! On, Stanley, on! 


Were the last words of Marmion.’ ” 


That was American architecture between 1820 
mathe Civil War—a collection of tags, thrown at 
“random against a building. Architectural forms 
"were brought together by a mere juxtaposition of 


[93 ] 


Sticks and Stones 


materials, held in place by neither imagination nor 

logic. There are a number of honorable exceptions 

to this rule, for architects like Renwick, who designed _ 
St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and Upjohn, who built Trin- 
ity Church, had a more sincere understanding of the 

conventional task; and by any standard of esthetic 

decency the old Gothic building of New York Uni- 

‘versity, on Washington Square, was a far finer 

structure than the bulky office building that has 

taken its place. Nevertheless, this saving remnant 

does not alter the character of the great mass of 

work, any more than the occasionaily excellent cast- 

iron balconies, brought over from the London of the 

Regency, alter the depressing character of the great 

mass of domestic building. In elevation and in- 

terior treatment, these ante-bellum buildings were _ 
all what-nots. Souvenirs of architecture, their 
forms dimly recall the monuments of the past with- 
out in any sense taking their place. 

To tell the truth, a pall had fallen over the in- 
dustrial city: contemporary writers in the ’forties 
and "fifties speak of the filth and smoke, and without 
doubt the chocolate brownstone front was intro- 
duced as a measure of protective coloration. In 


this dingy environment, men turned to nature as a 


[94] 


The Diaspora of the Pioneer 
refuge against the soiled and bedraggled works of 


man’s creation; and as the creeping factory and 
railroad train removed Nature farther from their 
doors, the park was introduced as a more convenient 
means of escape. The congested capitals of Europe 
had already learnt this lesson; traveled Americans, 
like William Cullen Bryant, brought it home; and 
Central Park, planned in 1853, was the first of the 
great landscape parks to serve as a people’s pleas- 
ance. Conceived in contrast to the deflowered land- 
scape and the muddled city, the park alone re-created 
the traditions of civilization—of man naturalized, 
and therefore at home, of nature humanized, and 
therefore enriched. And even today our parks are 
what our cities should be, and are not. 

By 1860 the halcyon day of American civilization 
was over; the spirit had lingered in letters and 
scholarship, in the work of Parkman and Motley 
and Emerson and Melville and Thoreau, but the sun 
had already sunk below the horizon, and what seemed 
a promise was in reality an afterglow. By the time 
the Civil War came, architecture had recorded faith- 
fully the social transformation; it was sullen, grim, 
gauche, unstable. While in almost every age archi- 


tecture has an independent value to the spirit, so 


[95 | 


Sticks and Stones 


that we can rejoice in Chartres or Winchester even 
though we have abandoned the Roman faith, in the 
early industrial period architecture is reduced to 
a symptom. Romanticism had not restored the past, 
nor had industrialism made the future more welcome. 


66 


Architecture wandered between two worlds, “one 


dead, the other powerless to be born.” 


[96] 


CHAPTER FIVE 


THE DEFEAT OF ROMANTICISM 


I 


BETWEEN 1860 and 1890, some of the forces that 
were latent in industrialism were realized in American 
architecture. Where the first pioneers had fared 
timidly, hampered by insufficient resources, the 
generation that had been stimulated by war indus- 
tries and profiteering, by the discovery of petroleum 
and natural gas, by the spanning of the American 
continent and by cable communication with Europe, 
rioted over its new-found wealth. 

“The Song of the Broad-Ax” still faintly lingered 
on the Pacific slopes; but the land pioneer was 
rapidly giving way to the pioneer in industry; and 
for perhaps the first time during the century, the 
surplus of capital outran the immediate demand for 
new plant and equipment. The Iron Age reached its 
peak of achievement in a series of great bridges, be- 
ginning with the Eads Bridge at St. Louis; and 
romanticism made a last stand. It will pay us, per- 


haps, to take one last look at the romantic effort, 


[99 ] 


Sticks and Stones 


in order to see how impossible and hopeless was the 
task it set out to perform. 

In England, the romantic movement in architec- 
ture had made the return to the Middle Ages a 
definite symbol of social reform: in Ruskin’s mind 
it was associated with the restoration of a medieval 
type of polity, something like a reformed manor, 
while with Morris it meant cutting loose from the 
machine and returning to the meticulous handicraft 
of the town-guilds. In America, the romantic move- 
ment lacked these social and economic implications ; 
and while it is not unfair to say that the literary 
expression of English romanticism was on the whole 
much better than the architecture, in the propor- 
tion that The Stones of Venice was better than the 
Ashmolean Museum or the Albert Memorial, the 
reverse is true on this side of the Atlantic. 

Inarticulate as H. H. Richardson, the chief ex- 
ponent of American romanticism, was, it seemed for 
a while as if he might breast the tide of mechanical 
industry and create for a good part of the scene a 
sense of stability and harmony which it had all too 
plainly lacked. In relation to his age, however, 
Richardson was in the biological sense a “sport’’; 
surrounded by jerry-builders, who had degraded the 

[ 100 7} 


The Defeat of Romanticism 


craft of building, and engineers who ignored it, he 
was perhaps the last of the great medieval line of 
master-masons. 

Richardson began his career in America directly 
after the Civil War. Almost the first of the new 
generation of Americans to be trained by the Ecole 
des Beaux Arts, he brought back to America none 
of those atrocious adaptations of the French 
Renaissance like the New York, Philadelphia, and 
Boston Post Offices. On the contrary, he had come 
under the influence of Viollet-le-Duc; and for about 
ten years he struggled with incongruous forms and 
materials in the anomalous manner known as Free 
Gothic. The end of this period of experiment came 
in 1872, when he received the commission for Trinity 
Church in Boston; and although it was not until 
ten years later that he saw any Romanesque build- 
ings other than in photographs—for he had not 
traveled during his student-years in Paris—it was 
in this sturdy mode that he cast his best work. 
Richardson was not a decorator, but a builder: in 
going back to Romanesque precedent, with its round 
arches and massive stone members, he was following 
out a dictum of Viollet-le-Duc’s: “only primitive 
sources supply the energy for a long career.” 'Turn- 


[101 ] 


Sticks and Stones 


ing away from “applied Gothic,” Richardson started 
to build from the bottom up. So far had the art of 
masonry disappeared that in Trinity Church Rich- 
ardson sometimes introduced struts and girders with- 
out any attempt to assimilate them in the composi- 
tion; but as far as any single man could absorb and 
live with a vanished tradition, Richardson did. 

The proof of Richardson’s genius as a builder lies 
in the difference between the accepted drawings for _ 
Trinity Church and the finished building. His ideas __ 
altered with the progress of the work, and in almost. 
every case the building itself is a vast improvement 
over the paper design. Moreover, in his capacity as 
master-mason, Richardson trained an able corps of 
craftsmen; and so pervasive was his influence that 
one still finds on houses Richardson never saw, the 
touches of delicate, leafy stone-carving he had intro- 
duced. With carving and sculpture, the other arts 
entered, and by his fine designs and exacting stand- 
ards of work, Richardson elevated the position of 
the minor crafts, at the same time that he turned 
over unreservedly to men like John La Farge and 
Augustus St. Gaudens the major elements of decora- 
tion. 

Probably most people who know Richardson’s 

[102 7] 


The Defeat of Romanticism 


name vaguely associate him with ecclesiastical work; 
but Richardson’s brand of romanticism was a gen- 
uine attempt to embrace the age, and in his long 
list of public works there are but five churches. If 
the Pittsburgh Court House and Trinity Church 
stand out as the hugest of his architectural concep- 
tions, it is the smaller buildings that test the skill 
and imagination of the master, and the public 
libraries at North Easton, Malden, and Quincy, 
Mass., and some of the little railway stations in 
Massachusetts stand on an equally high level. Rich- 
ardson pitted his own single powers against the 
barbarism of the Gilded Age; but, unlike his con- 
temporaries in England, he did not turn his back 
upon the excellences of industrialism. ‘The things 
I want most to design,” he said to his biographer, 
“are a grain-elevator and the interior of a great 
river-steamboat.” 

In short, Richardson sought to dominate his age. 
So nearly did he succeed that in a symposium on 
the ten finest buildings in America, conducted by an 
architectural journal in the ’eighties, Richardson 
was given five. This was no easy victory, and, to 
tell the truth, it was only a partial one. The case 
of the State Capitol at Albany, which Richardson 

[ 103 | 


Sticks and Stones 
and Eidlitz took in hand in 1878, after five million 


dollars had been squandered on it in the course of 
ten years’ misconstruction, scarcely caricatures the 
conditions under which the arts struggled to exist. 
Begun in the style of the Roman Renaissance, the 
building under Richardson’s impetuous touch began 
to take on Romanesque proportions, only to be legis- 
lated back into Renaissance by the offended law- 
givers! 

William Morris Hunt, then at the height of 
his powers, was commissioned to paint two large 
mural compositions for the assembly chamber of 
this blessed building. So much time had been spent 
in mismanaging the structure that Hunt was given 
only two months to transfer his cartouche to the 
panels; but he worked heroically, and, as one of his 
biographers says, the work was a great triumph. 
Great, perhaps—but temporary! ‘The building 
had fallen into the hands of a political ring, and 
the poor construction was revealed in the leaking 
of the massive roof and the settling of the whole 
structure. Before ten years had passed, great por- 
tions of Hunt’s paintings flaked off, and what re- 
mained was walled up behind the rebuilding neces- 


sary to avert utter ruin.” In a period like this, 


[ 104 ] 


The Defeat of Romanticism 


Richardson’s comparative success takes on heroic 


proportions, 


I 


With the little eddies of eclecticism, with the rage 
for the Mansard roof, or the introduction of German 
Gothic, and, a little later, the taste for Queen Anne 
domesticity, there is scarcely any need to deal; they 
represented only the dispersion of taste and the col- 
lapse of judgment which marked the Gilded Age. 

_ Up to the time of the Chicago World’s Fair, 
Richardson had imitators, and they were not always 
mean ones. L. H. Buffington, in Minneapolis, had to 
his credit a number of buildings which would not, 
perhaps, have dishonored the master himself; but, 
as so often happens, the tags in Richardson’s work 
were easier to imitate than his spirit and inventive- 
ness; and the chief marks of the style he created are 
the all-too-solid courses of rough stone, the round 
lanel the squat columns, and the contrasts in color 
between the light granite and the dark sandstone or 
serpentine. Mr. Montgomery Schuyler, an excellent 
architectural critic, once said, not without reason, 
that Richardson’s houses were not defensible ex- 
cept in a military sense; but one is tempted to read 


[105 ] 


Sticks and Stones 


into these ponderous forms partly the architect’s 
unconscious desire to combat the infirmity and jerry- 
building of his lower contemporaries, and partly his 
patron’s anxiety to have a seat of refuge against the 
uneasy proletariat. A new feudalism was entrench- 
ing itself behind the stockades of Homestead and 
the other steel-towns of the Pittsburgh district. 
Here was a mode of building, solid, formidable, at 
times almost brutal, that served the esthetic needs. 
of the barons of coal and steel almost as well as 
the classic met those heroes who had survived the 
War of Independence. 

I have emphasized what was strong and fine in 
Richardson’s work in order to show how free it was 
from the minor faults of romanticism; and yet it 
reckoned without its host, and Richardson, alas! 
left scarcely a trace upon the period that followed. 
Romanticism was welcomed when it built churches; 
tolerated when it built libraries; petted when it built 
fine houses; but it could not go much farther. 
Richardson was a mason, and masonry was being 
driven out by steel; he was an original artist, and 
original art was being thrust into the background by 
connoisseurship and collection; he was a builder, and 


architecture was committing itself more and more 


[ 106 J 


The Defeat of Romanticism 
to the paper plan; he insisted upon building four- 


square, and building was doomed more and more to 
fagaderie. The very strength of Richardson’s build- - 
ings was a fatal weakness in the growing centers of 
commerce and industry. It takes more than a little 
audacity to tear down one of Richardson’s monu- 
ments, and so, rather ironically, they have held their 
own against the insurrections of traffic and realty 
speculation; but the difficulty of getting rid of these 
Romanesque structures only increased the demand 
for a more frail and facile method of construc- 
tion. 

Romanticism met its great defeat in the office- 
building. By the use of the passenger elevator, first 
designed for an exhibition-tower adjacent to the 
Crystal Palace in 1853, it had become possible to 
raise the height of buildings to seven stories: the 
desire for ground-rents presently increased the 
height to ten. Beyond this, mere masonry could 
not go without thickening the supporting piers to 
such an extent that on a twenty-foot lot more than 
a quarter of the width would be lost on the lower 
floors. Richardson’s Marshall Field Building in 
Chicago was seven stories high; and that was about 


as far as solid stone or brick could climb without 


[ 107 ] 


Sticks and Stones 
becoming undignified and futile by its bulk. The 


possibilities of masonry and the possibilities of com- 
mercial gain through ground-rents were at logger- 
heads, and by 1888 masonry was defeated. 

Richardson, fortunately, did not live to see the 
undermining of the tradition he had founded and 
almost established. Within a decade of his death, 
however, only the empty forms of architecture re- 
mained, for the steel-cage of the engineer had be- 
come the new structural reality. By 1890 the 
ground-landlord had discovered, in the language of 
the pioneer’s favorite game, that “the roof’s the 
limit.” If that was so, why limit the roof? With 
this canny perception the skyscraper sprang into 
being. 

During this Gilded Age the standard of the best 
building had risen almost as high as it had been in 
America in any earlier period; but the mass of good 
building had relatively decreased; and the domestic 
dwellings in both city and country lost those final 
touches of craftsmanship that had lingered, here 
and there, up to the Civil War. In the awkward 
country villas that began to fill the still-remote 
suburbs of the larger cities, all sense of style and 


proportion were lost: the plan was marked by mean- 


[ 108] 


The Defeat of Romanticism 


ingless irregularities; a dingy, muddy color spread 
over the wooden facades. There exists a huge and 
beautifully printed volume, of which, I believe, there 
are not more than a hundred copies, on the villas 
of Newport in 1876: the compiler thereof sought 
to satisfy the vanity of the original owners and 
the curiosity of a later generation; yet mid all these 
examples of the “novel” and the “unique,” there is 
not a single mansion that would satisfy any conceiv- 
able line of descendants. 

If the level of architecture was low in the coun- 
try, it touched the bottom of the abyss in the city. 
As early as 1835 the multiple-family tenement had 
been introduced in New York as a means of pro- 
ducing congestion, raising the ground-rents, and 
satisfying in the worst possible way the need of the 
new immigrants for housing. The conditions of life 
in these tenements were infinitely lower than they 
had been in the most primitive farmhouse of the 
colonial period; their lack of light, lack of water, 
lack of sanitary facilities, and lack of privacy, 
created an admirable milieu for the propagation 
of vice and disease, and their existence in a period 
which was boasting loudly of the advance of science 


and industrialism shows, to say the least, how the 


{ 109] 


Sticks and Stones 
myths which inspired the age stood between the eye 


and reality, and obscured the actual state of the 
modern industrial community. 

To the disgrace of the architectural profession 
in America, the worst features of tenement-house 
construction were standardized in the so-called 
dumb-bell tenement which won the first prize in the 
model tenement-house competition of 1879; and the 
tenements which were designed after this pattern 
in the succeeding years combined a maximum lack 
of privacy with a minimum of light and air. The 
gridiron street-design, the narrow frontage, the deep 
lot, all conspired to make good housing difficult in 
the larger cities: within this framework good house- 
design, indeed, still is difficult. The dumb-bell tene- 
ment of the Gilded Age, however, raised bad hous- 
ing into an art; and the acquisition of this art 
in its later developments is now one of the stig- 
mata of “progress” in a modern American city. I 
say this without irony; the matter is too grave for 
jest. 

During these same ’seventies, the benefits of poor 
housing were extended in New York to those with 
money enough to afford something better: the Paris 
flat was introduced. The legitimate excuse for the 


[110] 


The Defeat of Romanticism 


small apartment was the difficulty of obtaining 
household service, and the futility of keeping up 
large houses for small families: this, however, had 
nothing to do with the actual form that the apart- 
ment took, for, apart from the desire for congestion- 
rents, it is as easy to build apartments for two 
families as for twenty. The flat is a genuine con- 
venience for the well-to-do visitor to a city; it gives 
him, the atmosphere of a home without many of its 
major complications, and those who got the taste for 
this life in Paris were not altogether absurd in de- 
siring to enjoy the same benefits in New York. Un- 
fortunately, what suits a visitor does not necessarily 
meet the demands of a permanent resident: one may 
tolerate a blank wall for a week or a month without 
being depressed, particularly since a good part of 
a visitor’s time is spent outside his home; but to live 
year after year facing a blank wall or an equally- 
frowning facade opposite is to be condemned to the 
environment of a penitentiary. 

The result of building apartments in New York 
and elsewhere was not cheaper rents for smaller 
quarters: it was smaller quarters without the cheap 
rents. Those who wanted sunlight and a pleasant 


view paid a premium for it; those who did not get 


Pitt] 


~ 


Sticks and Stones 


either paid more than enough for what they got. 
The result of building apartments which would 
satisfy only a visitor was to make every family 
visitors: before the acute housing shortage, yearly 
removals to new premises were the only palliative 
that made their occupancy tolerable. The amount 
of wear and tear and waste, the loss of energy and 
money and good spirits, produced by the inability 
of the architect to design adequately under the 
pecuniary standards of the Gilded Age was colossal. 


_-YThe urban nomad in his own way was as great a 


spendthrift as the pioneer of the prairie. Both of 
them had been unable to create a permanent civiliza- 


tion; and both of them paid the price for it. 


Tit 


During the first period of pioneering, mechanical 
improvements had affected the milieu of architecture, 
but not architecture itself, if one overlooks such in- 
genuities as the circular and octagon houses of the 
eighteen-thirties. Slowly, the actual methods of 
construction changed: the carpenter-builder, who had 
once performed every operation, gave way to the 
joiner, whose work profited by putty and paint. 

[ 112 ] 


The Defeat of Romanticism 


curtains and carpets—to the plasterer, who covered 
up the raw imperfect frame—and to the plumber. 
Weird ornamental forms for doors and window- 
architraves, for moldings and pendants, were sup- 
plied to the builder by the catalogs of the planing 
and scroll-saw mills. Invention produced novelties 
of contortion in wood, unique in ugliness and im- 
becile in design. Like the zinc and iron statues that 
graced the buildings of the Centennial Exposition, 
these devices record the absorption of art in a vain 
technology. 

One need not dwell upon the results of all these 
miserable efforts, conceived in haste and aborted for 
profit: the phenomenon was common to industrial 
civilization at this period, and can be observed in 
Battersea and Manchester as well as in New York and 
Pittsburgh. Mr. Thomas Hardy, who was trained 
as an architect, wrote the esthetic apology for in- 
dustrialism; and in proclaiming the rightness of our 
architectural deserts, one cannot help thinking that 
he transferred to the Wessex countryside a little of 
the horrible depression he must have acquired in 
Londen. 


“wed 


“Gay prospects,” exclaimed Mr. Hardy, 
happily with gay times; but, alas! if the times be 


[113] 


Sticks and Stones 


not gay! Men have more often suffered from the 
mockery of a place too smiling than from the op- 
pression of surroundings oversadly tinged... . 
Indeed, it is a question if the exclusive reign of ortho- 
dox beauty is not approaching its last quarter. The 
new vale in Tempe may be a gaunt waste in Thule: 
human souls may find themselves in closer harmony 
with external things wearing a somberness distaste- 
ful to our race when it was young. Shall we say 
that man has grown so accustomed to his spiritual 
Bastille that he no longer looks forward to, and 
even shrinks from, a casual emergence into unusual 
brightness ?” 

Even the best work of the period is blighted with 
this sombreness: the fact that so many of Richard- 
son’s buildings have the heavy air of a prison shows 
us that the Gilded Age was not, indeed, gay, and 
that a spiritual Black Friday perpetually threatened 
the calendar of its days. 


IV 


If the romantic movement in America proved that 
the architect could capture only a small part of the 
field, and go no further than the interests of priv- 


C114] 


The Defeat of Romanticism 
ilege allowed, the building of the Brooklyn Bridge 


showed how well industrialism could handle its prob- 
lems when its purposes were not limited by the neces- 
sity for sloppy workmanship and quick turnover. 
The story of its building is a tribute to both science 
and humanity. When John Roebling, the designer 
of the bridge, died in the midst of his job, the busi- 
ness of construction was taken up by his son, and 
by his devotion to his task in season and out of 
season, Washington Roebling became an invalid. 
Confined to his house on Columbia Heights, for ten 
years the younger Roebling watched the work 
through a telescope, and directed it as a general 
would direct a battle. So goes the legend: it runs 
rather higher than the tales of mean prudence or 
mechanical skill which glorified Mr. Samuel Smiles’ 
heroes. 

The bridge itself was a testimony to the swift 
progress of physical science. The strong lines of 
the bridge, and the beautiful curve described by its 
suspended cables, were derived from an elegant for- 
mula in mathematical physics—the catenary curve. 
If the architectural elements of the massive piers 
have perhaps too much the bare quality of engineer- 


ing, if the pointed arches meet esthetic betrayal in 


[1157] 


Sticks and Stones 
the flat solidity of the cornices, if, in short, the 


masonry does not sing as Richardson alone perhaps 
could have made it sing, the steel work itself makes 
up for this, by the architectural beauty of its pat- 
tern; so that beyond any other aspect of New York, 
I think, the Brooklyn Bridge has been a source of 
joy and inspiration to the artist. In the later 
bridges the spanning members are sturdier and the 
supporting piers and cables are lighter and less 
essential; and they suffer esthetically by the very 
ease of their triumph over the difficulties of en- 
gineering. 

All that the age had just cause for pride in—its 
advances in science, its skill in handling iron, its 
personal heroism in the face of dangerous industrial 
processes, its willingness to attempt the untried and 
the impossible—came to a head in the Brooklyn 
Bridge. What was grotesque and barbarous in in- 
dustrialism was sloughed off in the great bridges. 
These avenues of communication are, paradoxically, 
the only enduring monuments that witness a period 
of uneasy industrial transition; and to this day they 
communicate a feeling of dignity, stability, and 
unwavering poise. 

The Brooklyn Bridge was opened in 1884; Rich- 

[116] 


The Defeat of Romanticism 


ardson died, after finishing the Pittsburgh Court 
House, in 1886. There was a short period during 
_which the echoes of Richardson’s style resounded in 
the work of the Western architects; and then in 
New York two of Richardson’s own pupils, Messrs. 
McKim and White, who had caught the spirit of the 
period that was to follow the passing of the frontier, 
prepared an appropriate mold for its activities. By 
far the finest things in the late eighties are the 
shingled houses which Richardson and Stanford 
White and a few others developed for seaboard es- 
tates: they recovered the spirit of the early vernacu- 
lar work, and continued the colonial tradition with- 
out even faintly recalling colonial forms. This 
new note, however, was scarcely sounded before it 
died out; and in the twenty years that followed the 
conflict between industrialism and romanticism was 
swallowed up and finally forgotten in the rise of a 
new mode. Richardson had not died too soon. The 
quality of mind and culture which shines through his 
work was opposed to nearly every manifestation of 
the period that succeeded him. 

From this time on, romanticism retained a place 
for itself only by forfeiting its claims to occupy the 


whole province of architecture. In churches and 


Pa 7s] 


Sticks and Stones 
college halls where the traditional tie with the Middle 


Ages had never been completely broken, its archaic 
triumphs have been genuine; but although Mr. J. G. 
Rogers’ Harkness Memorial at Yale, and Messrs. 
Goodhue and Cram’s St. Thomas’ Church, for ex- 
ample, leave little to be desired in themselves, they 
have established no precedent for the hundred other 
kinds of building which the modern community re- 
quires; and it is not without significance that in his 
most recent efforts Mr. Goodhue, for one, had aban- 
doned the molds of romanticism. Unlike Richardson, 
the surviving romanticists now demand a certain 
insulation from the modern world; the more intelli- 
gent exponents of the movement believe with Dr. 
Ralph Adams Cram that there is no hope for its 
achievement throughout the community without a 
return to “Walled Towns.” 

Such a retreat is the equivalent of surrender. To 
kold to Gothic precedent in the hope of re-creating 
the medieval community is to hope that an ancient 
bottle will turn potassium permanganate into claret. 
The romanticists have never fully faced the social 
and economic problems that attend their architec- 
tural solutions: the result is that they have been 


dependent upon assistance from the very forces and 


[1187] 


The Defeat of Romanticism 


institutions which, fundamentally, they aim to com- 
bat. Isolated on little islands, secure for the moment, 
romanticism must view the work on the mainland 
with a gesture of irate despair; and the only future 
it dares to face lies behind it! 


[119] 


CHAPTER SIX 


THE IMPERIAL FACADE 


Tue decade between 1890 and 1900 saw the rise 
of a new period in American architecture. This 
period had, it is true, been dimly foreshadowed by 
the grandiose L’Enfant, but if the superficial forms 
resembled those of the early republic, and if the 
precedents of classic architecture again became a 
_ guide, the dawning age was neither a revival nor a 
continuation. 

In the meanwhile, fresh influences had entered. 
The generation of students who had studied in 
the Ecole des Beaux Arts after the Civil War was 
ready, at last, to follow the lone trail which Richard 
H. Hunt had blazed. Richardson’s most intimate 
disciples reacted against the stamp of his person- 
ality and sought a more neutral mode of expression, 
consecrated by established canons of good taste. On 
top of this, the introduction of steel-cage construc- 
tion removed the necessity for solid masonry, and 
placed a premium upon the mask. The stage was 


set for a new act of the drama. 


[123] 


Sticks and Stones 
All these influences shaped the style of our archi- 


tecture when it arose; but the condition that gave 
it a substantial base was the rise of a new order in 
America’s economic life. Up to this time, the chief 
industrial problem had been to improve the processes 
of mechanical production and to stake out new areas 
for exploitation. One may compare these economic 
advances to the separate sorties of an army operat- 
ing on a wide front: any lone adventurer might take 
his courage in his hands and exploit an invention, or 
sink an oil well, if he could find it. By 1890 the 
frontier had closed; the major resources of the 
country were under the control of the monopolist ; it 
became more important to consolidate gains than 
freshly to achieve them. Separate lines of rail- 
roads were welded into systems; separate steel plants 
and oil plants were wrought into trusts; and where 
monopoly did not rest upon a foundation of natural 
advantage, the “gentleman’s agreement” began its 
service as a useful substitute. The popular move- 
ments which sought to challenge the forces of this 
new regime—the labor movement, socialism, popu- 
lism—had neither analyzed the situation with suffi- 
cient care nor attracted the adherence of the ma- 
jority. The defeat of Henry George as a local 
[124] 


The Imperial Facade 


political candidate was symbolic: by 1888 a humane 
thinker like Edward Bellamy had already accepted 
the defeat, had embraced the idea of the trust, and 
had conceived a comprehensive utopia on the basis of 
letting the process of monopoly go the limit, so that 
finally, by a mere yank of the levers, the vast eco- 
nomic organizations of the country would become 
the “property” of the people. 

The drift to the open lands came to a full pause. 
The land-empire had been conquered, and its over- 
lords were waxing in power and riches: the name 
“millionaire” became the patent of America’s new 
nobility. With the shift from industry to finance \ 
went a shift from the producing towns to the spend- 
ing towns: architecture: came to dwell in the stock 
exchanges, the banks, the shops, and the clubs of the 
metropolis; if it sought the countryside at all, it 
established itself in the villas that were newly laid 
out on hill and shore in the neighborhood of the 
great cities. The keys to this period are opulence 
and magnitude: “money to burn.” 

These years witnessed what the Roman historian, 
Ferrero, has called a “véritable recommencement 
d’histoire.” In the new centers of privilege there — 


arose a scale of living and a mode of architecture 


[125] 


Sticks and Stones 
which, with all its attendant miseries, depletions, and 
‘exploitations, recalled the Rome of the first and 
second centuries after Christ. It is needless to say 
that vast acres of buildings, factories, shops, homes, 
were erected which had no relation at all to the im- 
perial regime; for not everyone participated in 
either the benefits or the depressions that attended 
the growth of monopoly ; but the accent of this 
period, the dominant note, was an imperial one. 
While the commonplace building of the time can- 
not be ignored, it remains, so to say, out of the pic- 


ture. 
01 


Hardly had the process of concentration and con- 
solidation begun before the proper form manifested 
itself. The occasion for its appearance was the 
World’s Columbian Exposition, opened in 1893. In 
creating this fair, the enterprise and capacity for 
organization which the architects of Chicago had 
applied to the construction of the skyscraper trans- 
formed the unkempt wilderness of Jackson Park into 
the Great White City in the space of two short years, 
Here the architects of the country, particularly of 
New York and Chicago, appeared for the first time 

[126] 


The Imperial Facade 


as a united profession, or, to speak more accurately, 
as a college. Led by the New Yorkers, who had 
come more decisively under European influence, they 
brought to this exposition the combination of skill 
and taste in all the departments of the work that 
had, two centuries earlier, created the magnificent 
formalities of Versailles. There was unity of plan 
in the grouping of the main buildings about the 
lagoon; there was unity of tone and color in the 
gleaming white facades; there was unity of effect 
in the use of classic orders and classic forms of 
decoration. Lacking any genuine unity of ideas 
and purposes—for Root had initially conceived of 
a variegated oriental setting—the architects of the 
exposition had achieved the effects of unity by 
subordinating their work to an established prec- 
edent. They chanted a Roman litany above the 
Babel of individual styles. It was a capital triumph 
of the academic imagination. If these main build- 
ings were architecture, America had never seen so 
much of it at one time before. Even that belated 
Greco-Puritan, Mr. Charles Eliot Norton, was warm 
in praise. 

It would be foolish to quarrel with the style that 
was chosen for these exposition buildings, or to 


F12%] 


Sticks and Stones 


deny its propriety. Messrs. McKim, White, Hunt, 
and Burnham divined that they were fated to serve 
Renaissance despots and emperors with more than 
Roman power, and unerringly they chose the proper 
form for their activities. Whereas Rome had cast 
its spell over the architects of the early Renaissance 
because they wished once more to enter into its life, 
the life of its sages and poets and artists, it at- 
tracted the architects of the White City because of 
its external features—because of its stereotyped 
canons and rules—because of the relatively small 
number of choices it offered for a lapse in taste— 
because of its skill in conspicuous waste, and be- 
cause of that very noncommittal quality in its 
massive forms which permitted the basilica to be- 
come a church, or the temple to become a modern 
bank. 

Of all the Renaissance architects, their impulses 
and interests were nearest, perhaps, to Robert Adam, 
whose church at West Wycombe could be turned into 
a ballroom by the simple act of removing the pews, 
and permitting the gay walls and decorations to 
speak for themselves. Behind the white staff facade 
of the World’s Fair buildings was the steel and glass 


structure of the engineer: the building spoke one 


[128] 


The Imperial Facade 
language and the “architecture” another. If the 


coming of the skyscraper had turned masonry into 
veneer, here was a mode of architecture which was 
little but veneer. 

In their place, at the Fair, these classic buildings 
were all that could be demanded: Mr. Geoffrey 
Scott’s defense of the Baroque, in The Architecture 
of Humanism, applies particularly to its essential 
manifestations in the Garden and the Theater—and 
why not in the Fair? Form and function, ornament 
and design, have no inherent relation, one with the 
other, when the mood of the architect is merely 
playful: there is no use in discussing the anatomy of 
architecture when its only aim is fancy dress. As a 
mask, as a caprice, the classic orders are as justi- 
fiable as the icing on a birthday cake: they divert 
the eye without damaging the structure that they 
conceal. Unfortunately, the architecture of the 
Renaissance has a tendency to imitate the haughty 
queen who advised the commons to eat cake. Logic- 
ally, it demands that a Wall Street clerk shall live 
like a Lombardy prince, that a factory should be 
subordinated to esthetic contemplation; and since 
these things are impossible, it permits “mere build- 
ing” to become illiterate and vulgar below the stand- 


[129] 


Sticks and Stones 


ards of the most debased vernacular. Correct in 
proportion, elegant in detail, courteous in relation 
“to each other, the buildings of the World’s Fair were, 
nevertheless, only the simulacra of a living architec- 
ture: they were the concentrated expression of an 
age which sought to produce “values” rather than 
goods. In comparison with this new style, the roman- 
ticism of the Victorian Age, with its avid respect for 
the medieval building traditions, was honesty and 
dignity itself. 

The Roman precedent, modified by the work of 
Louis XIV and Napoleon III, by Le Notre and 
Haussmann, formed the basis not merely for the 
World’s Fair, but for the host of city plans that 
were produced in the two decades that followed. It 
seemed for a while as if the architect might take the 
place of the engineer as city planner, and that the 
mangled regularity of the engineer’s gridiron plan, 
laid down without respect to topographic advantage 
or to use, might be definitely supplanted in the re- 
modeled central districts and in the new extensions 
and suburbs of the American city. The evil of the 
World’s Fair triumph was that it suggested to the 
civic enthusiast that every city might become a fair: 
it introduced the notion of the City Beautiful as a 

[ 130] 


The Imperial Facade 


_sort of municipal cosmetic, and reduced the work 
of the architect to that of putting a pleasing front 
upon the scrappy building, upon the monotonous 
streets and the mean houses, that characterized vast 
areas in the newer and larger cities. 

If the engineer who had devoted himself to sewers 
and street-plans alone had been superficial, the archi- 
tectural city planner who centered attention upon 
parkways alone, grand avenues alone, and squares 
like the Place de |’Etoile alone, was equally superfi- 
cial. The civic center and the parkway represented 
the better and more constructive side of this effort: 
in Cleveland, in Pittsburgh, in Springfield, Mass., 
harmonious groups of white buildings raised their 
heads above the tangle of commercial traffic, and in 
the restoration of L’Enfant’s plan for Washington, 
the realities of the imperial regime at length caught 
up with the dreamer born out of his due time. A 
good many of these plans, however, were patheti- 
cally immature. One of the reports for Manhat- 
tan, for example, devoted pages and pages to 
showing the improvement that would follow the 
demolition of the wall around Central Park—and 
the importance of clipped trees in the design of 


grand avenues! 


[131] 


Sticks and Stones 
Plainly, the architect did not face with sufficient 


realism the colossal task with which he was con- 
fronted in the renovation of the city. He accepted 
his improvements too much at the value placed 
upon them by the leaders of Big Business—as a cre- 
ator of land-values, as an element in increasing the 
commercial attractiveness of the city. Did not Mr. 
Daniel Bireaiiare Heel! point to the improvements 
in Periclean Athens, not as the embodiment of 
Athenian citizenship and religion at its highest 
point, but as a measure for increasing the attrac- 
tiveness of the city to visitors from abroad? Cut 
off from his true function to serve and beautify the 
community, made an accessory of business itself, like 
the merest salesman or advertising agent, it is no 
wonder that the architect speedily lost his leader- 
ship; and that the initiative went once again into 
the hands of the engineer. 

The main merit of all these efforts to perpetuate 
the World’s Fair is that they sought to achieve 
some of the dignity and decisiveness of the formal 
plan. Their weakness was that they neglected new 
elements, like the billboard, the skysign, the subway, 
the tall building, which undermined the effects of 
the plan even when it was achieved. In their efforts 


[132] 


The Imperial Facade 


to escape from the welter of misguided commercial 
enterprise, the advocates of the city beautiful placed 
too great reliance upon spots of outward order and 
decency ; they took refuge in the paper symmetry of 
axial avenues and round-points, as one finds them 
in Haussmann’s Paris, and neglected the deeper 
and more genuine beauties of, let us say, the 
High Street in Oxford or Chipping Camden, or 
of many another European town that had achieved 
completion in its essentials before the nineteenth 
century. 

In short, the advocates of the city beautiful 
sought a remedy on paper which could be purchased 
only by a thorough reorganization of the commu- 
nity’s life. If all this applies to the better side of the 
World’s Fair, it touches even more emphatically 
‘the worse. 

The twenty years between 1890 and 1910 saw the 
complete rehabilitation of the Roman mode, as the 
very cloak and costume of imperial enterprise. The 
main effort of architecture was to give an effect of 
dignity and permanence to the fagades of the princi- 
pal thoroughfares: the public buildings must domi- 
nate the compositions, numerous boulevards and 


avenues must concentrate the traffic at certain points 


[1337 


Sticks and Stones 


Nand guide the stranger to the markets and amuse- 

ments: where possible, as in the Chicago plan, 
“by Messrs. Burnham and Bennett, avenues must 
be cut through the gridiron pattern of blocks in 
~ order to achieve these effects. If this imperial 
street system is somewhat arbitrary, and if the nec- 
essary work of grading, filling, demolishing, and 
purchasing existing property rights is extremely 
costly, the end, nevertheless, justifies the means— 
the architecture impresses and awes a populace 
that shares vicariously in it glories. Should the 
effect prove a little too austere and formidable, the 
monuments will be offset with circuses and hippo- 
dromes. 

In all this, the World’s Fair was a precise and 
classic example, for it reproduced in miniature the 
imperial order. When the panic of 1893 kept people 
away from the exhibitions of art, industry, and cul- 
ture, sideshows were promptly introduced by the 
astute organizers. Beyond the serene classic facades, 
which recalled the elevation of a Marcus Aurelius, 
sprawled the barkers, the freaks, and the tricksters, 
whose gaudy booths might have reminded the specta- 
tor of the other side of the imperial shield—the 
gaminism of Petronius Arbiter. The transforma- 


[ 134 ] 


The Imperial Facade 
tion of these white facades into the Gay White Ways 


came during the next decade; whilst the sideshows 
achieved a separate existence as “Coney Island.” On 
top of this came the development of the mildly glad- 
iatorial spectacles of football and baseball: at first 
invented for playful exercise, they became a standard 
means of exhibition by more or less professional per- 
formers. The erection of numerous amphitheaters 
and arenas, such as the Yale Bowl, the Harvard 
Stadium, the Lewisohn Stadium, and their counter- 
parts in the West, rounded out the imperial spec- 
tacle. 

By a happy congruence of forces, the large-scale 
manufacture of Portland cement, and the reintro- 
duction of the Roman method of concrete construc- 
tion, came during the same period. Can anyone 
contemplate this scene and still fancy that imperial- 
ism was nothing more than a move for foreign 
markets and territories of exploitation? On the 
contrary, it was a tendency that expressed itself in 
every department of Western civilization, and if it 
appears most naked, perhaps, in America, that is 
only because, as in the earlier periods, there was so 
little here to stand in its way. Mr. Louis Sullivan 
might well complain, in The Autobiography of an 

[135] 


Sticks and Stones 


Idea, that imperialism stifled the more creative modes 
of architecture which might have derived from our 
fine achievements in science, from our tentative ex- 
periments in democracy. It seems inevitable, how- 
ever, that the dominant fact in our civilization should 
stamp the most important monuments and build- 
ings with its image. In justice to the great pro- 
fessors of the classic style, Messrs. McKim and 
Burnham and Carrere and Hastings, one must admit 
that the age shaped them and chose them and used 
them for its ends. Their mode of building was 
almost unescapably determined by the milieu in 
which they worked. 

The change in the social scene which favored an 
imperial setting was not without its effects upon 
the industries that supplied the materials for archi- 
tecture, and upon the processes of building itself. 
Financial concentration in the stone quarries, for 
example, was abetted by the creation of a national 
system of rail transportation, and partly, perhaps, 
by the elaboration of the mechanical equipment for 
cutting and trimming stone beyond a point where a 
small plant could work economically. The result was 
that during this period numerous small local quar- 
ries, which had been called into existence by Richard- 

[136 | 


The Imperial Facade 


son’s fine eye for color contrasts, were allowed to 
lapse. Vermont marble and Indiana limestone served 
better the traditions that had been created in the 
White City. 

The carrying of coals to Newcastle is always a 
pathetic practice; it remained for the imperial age 
to make it a subject: for boasting. Just as many 
Connecticut towns, whose nearby fields are full of 
excellent granite boulders, boast a bank or a library 
of remote marble, so New York City, which has a 
solid foundation of schist, gneiss, and limestone, 
can point to only a handful of buildings, notably 
the College of the City of New York and Mr. Good- 
hue’s Church of the Intercession, in which these ex- 
cellent local materials were used. The curious result 
of being able by means of railway transportation to 
draw upon’ the ends of the earth for materials has 
been, not variety, but monotony. Under the im- 
perial order the architect was forced to design 
structures that were identical in style, treatment, 
and material, though they were placed thousands of 
miles apart and differed in every important func- 
tion. This ignorance of regional resources is not 
incompatible with grand effects, or even on occasion 
with decently good architecture. But it does not 

[137 |] 


Sticks and Stones 
profit by that fine adaptation to site, that just- 


ness of proportion in the size of window and slope 
of roof, which is an earnest of the architect’s mastery 
of the local situation. Substitute Manila for the 
military colony of Timgad, or Los Angeles for 
Alexandria, and it is plain that we have here another 
aspect of Ferrero’s generalization. Even architects 
whose place of work was nearer to the site of their 
buildings were, nevertheless, compelled to copy the 
style of the more successful practitioners in New 
York and Chicago. 

In government, in industry, in architecture, the im- 
perial age was one. The underlying policy of im- 
perialism is to exploit the life and resources of 
separate regions for the benefit of the holders of 
privilege in the capital city. Under this rule, all 
roads lead literally to Rome. While, as the Ger- 
man historian, W. H. Riehl, points out, the provin- 
cial highroads served to bring the city out into the 
countryside, the railroads served to bring the major 
cities together and to drain the products of rural 
regions into the metropolis. It was no accident that 
the great triumphs of American architecture during 
the imperial period were the railroad stations; par- 
ticularly the Pennsylvania and the Grand Central 

[ 138 ] 


The Imperial Facade 


in New York, and the Union Station in Washington. 
Nor i is it by mere chance that the Washington and 
the Pennsylvania stations are the monuments to 
two architects, McKim and Burnham, who wor- 
shiped most whole-heartedly at the imperial shrine. 
With capital insight, these men established the 
American Academy at Rome: they recognized their 
home. 

Esthetically considered, it is true, perhaps, that 
the finest element in the Pennsylvania station is the 
train hall, where the architect has dealt sincerely 
with his steel elements and has not permitted himself 
to cast a fond, retrospective eye upon the Roman 
baths. When all allowances are made, however, there 
remains less for criticism in the railway stations and 
the stadiums—those genuinely Roman bequests— 
than in any of the other imperial monuments. In- 
deed, so well does Roman architecture lend itself to 
the railroad station that one of the prime virtues of 
such a building, namely ease of circulation, was even 
communicated to the New York Public Library, 
where it is nothing but a nuisance, since it both in- 
creases the amount of noise and diminishes the 
amount of space for reading rooms that are already 


overcrowded, 


[139] 


Sticks and Stones 
Here, indeed, is the capital defect of an estab- 


lished and formalized mode: it tends to make the 
architect think of a new problem in terms of an old 
solution for a different problem. Mr. Charles 
McKim, for example, found himself hampered in 
competition over the New York Public Library be- 
cause the demands of the librarian for a convenient 
and expeditious administration of his business inter- 
fered with the full-blown conception which Mr. McKim 
had in mind. All this happened after years of dem- 
onstration in the Boston Library of Messrs. McKim 
and White’s failure to meet that problem squarely; 
and it apparently was not affected by Mr. McKim’s 
experience with the great Columbia Library, which 
has ample space for everything except books. In 
short, the classic style served well enough only when 
the building to be erected had some direct relation 
to the needs and interests of the Roman world— 
the concourse of idlers in the baths or the tiers of 
spectators in the circuses and hippodromes. When 
it came face to face with our own day, it had: but» 
little to say, and it said that badly, as anyone who 
will patiently examine the superimposed orders on 
the American Telegraph Building in New York will 


discover for himself. 


[ 1407] 


The Imperial Facade 


Tir 


With the transition from republican to imperial 
Rome, numerous monuments were erected to the 
Divine Cesar. Within a much shorter time than 
marked the growth of the imperial tradition in 
America, a similar edification of patriotic memories 
took place. 

In the restoration of the original plan of Wash- 
ington, which began in 1901, the axis of the plan 
was so altered as to make it pass through the Wash- 
ington Monument; and at the same time the place 
of the Lincoln Memorial, designed by the late Mr. 
Henry Bacon, a pupil of Mr. McKim’s, was assigned. 
This was the first of a whole series of temples de- 
voted to the national deities. In the Lincoln Me- 
morial, in the McKinley Memorial at Niles, Ohio, in 
the Hall of Fame at New York University, and in 
their prototype, Grant’s Tomb, one feels not the liv- 
ing beauty of our American past, but the mortuary 
air of archeology. The America that Lincoln was 
bred in, the homespun and humane and humorous 
America that he wished to preserve, has nothing in 
common with the sedulously classic monument that 
was erected to his memory. Who lives in that shrine, 


[141 ] 


Sticks and Stones 


I wonder—Lincoln, or the men who conceived it: the 
leader who beheld the mournful victory of the Civil 
War, or the gencration that took pleasure in the 
mean triumph of the Spanish-American exploit, and 
placed the imperial standard in the Philippines and 
the Caribbean? 

On the plane of private citizenship, a similar move- 
ment took place: while before 1890 one can count 
the tombs in our cemeteries that boast loudly of the 
owner’s earthly possessions and power, from that 
time onward the miniature temple-mausoleum becomes 
more and more frequent. In fact, an entire history 
of architecture could be deduced from our cemeteries ; 
all that has so far been described could be marked 
in the progress from the simple slab, carved in 
almost Attic purity with a weeping willow or a 
cubistic cherub, that characterized the eighteenth 
century, to the bad lettering and the more awkward 
headstones of the early nineteenth century; and from 
this to the introduction of polished granite and iron 
ornament in the post-Civil War cemetery, down to 
the mechanically perfect mausoleum, where the 
corpses are packed like the occupants of a subway 
train, that some of our more effusively progressive 


communities boast of today. As we live, so we die: 


[ 142 ] 


The Imperial Facade 


no wonder Shelley described Hell as a place much 
‘like London. 

The Roman development of New York, Chicago, 
Washington, and the lesser metropolises, had an im- | 
portant effect upon the homes of the people. ‘His- 
torically, the imperial monument and the slum-tene- 
ment go hand in hand. The same process that 
creates an unearned increment for the landlords 
who possess favored sites, contributes a generous 
quota—which might be called the unearned excre- 
ment—of depression, overcrowding, and bad living, 
in the dormitory districts of the city. This had 
happened in imperial Rome; it had happened again 
in Paris under Napoleon III, where Haussmann’s 
sweeping reconstructions created new slums in the 
districts behind the grand avenues, quite as bad, 
if far less obvious, as those that had been cleared 
away; and it happened once again in our American 
cities. Whereas in Rome a certain limit, however, 
was placed upon the expansion of the city because of 
the low development of vehicular traffic, the rise of 
mechanical transportation placed no bounds at all 
on the American city. If Rome was forced to create 
huge engineering projects like aqueducts and sewers 
in order to cleanse the inhabitants and remove the 


[ 143] 


Sticks and Stones 


offal of its congested districts, the American city 
followed the example of the modern Romes like Lon- 
don and Paris by devising man-sewers, in which the 
mass of plebeians could be daily drained back and 
forth between their dormitories and their facto- 
ries. 

So far from relieving congestion, these colossal 
pieces of engineering only made more of it possible: 
by pouring more feeder lines into the central district 
of New York, Boston, Chicago, or where you will, 
rapid transit increased the housing congestion at 
one end and the business-congestion at the other. As 
for the primary sewer system devised for the imperial 
metropolis, it could scarcely even claim, with rapid 
transit, that it was a valuable commercial investment. 
The water outlets of New York are so thoroughly 
polluted that not merely have the shad and the 
oyster beds vanished from the Hudson River, where 
both once flourished, but it is a serious question 
whether the tides can continue to transport their 
vast load of sewage without a preliminary reduction 
of its content. Like the extension of the water con- 
duits into the Adirondacks, all these necessary little 
improvements add to the per capita cost of living in 
an imperial metropolis, without providing a single 


[144] 


The Imperial Facade 


benefit that a smaller city with no need for such 
improvements does not enjoy. In the matter of pub- 
lic parks, for example, the Committee on Congestion 
in New York, in 1911, calculated that the park 
space needed for the East Side alone, on the scale 
provided by the city of Hartford, would be greater 
than the entire area of Manhattan Island. In short, 
even for its bare utilitarian requirements, the mass- 
city, as the Germans call it, costs more and gives 
less than communities which have not had imperial 
greatness inflicted upon them. 

As to the more positive improvements under the 
imperial regime, history leaves no doubt as to their 
dubious character, and current observation only re- 
inforces history’s lesson. In discussing the growth 
of the tenement in Rome after the Great Fire, Fried- 
lander says: 

“The motives for piling up storeys were as strong 
as ever: the site for Cesar’s Forum had cost over 
£875,000 compensation to tenants and ground land- 
lords. Rome had loftier houses than modern cap- 
ital. A disproportionately large part of the area 
available for building was monopolized by the few, 
in consequence of the waste of space in the plethoric 
architecture of the day, and a very considerable 


[ 145] 


Sticks and Stones 


portion was swallowed up by the public places, such 
as the imperial forums, which took up six hectares, 
as well as by the traffic regulations and extensions 
of the streets. The transformation and decoration 
of Rome by the Caesars enhanced the scarcity of 
housing, as did Napoleon III’s improvements in 
Paris. A further adjutory cause of the increase 
in the price of dwellings was the habit of speculation 
in house property (which Crassus had practiced in 
great style) and the monopoly of the proprietors, 
in consequence of which houses were let and sub- 
let.” 

It would be tedious to draw out the parallel: given 
similar social conditions in America we have not been 
able to escape the same social results, even down 
to the fact that the palliatives of private philan- 
thropy flourish here again as they had not flourished 
anywhere on the same scale since the Roman Em- 
pire. So much for imperial greatness. When an 
architect like Mr. Edward Bennett can say, as he 
did in The Significance of the Fine Arts: “House the 
people densely, if necessary, but conserve great areas 
for recreation,” we need not be in doubt as to who 
will profit by the density and who will profit, at the 
other end, by the recreation. It is not merely that 

f146 7 


The Imperial Facade 
the park must be produced to remedy the congestion: 


it is even more that the congestion must be produced 
in order to provide for the park. To profit by both 
the disease and the remedy is one of the master- 
strokes of imperialist enterprise. Mr. Daniel Burn- 
ham said of the World’s Fair, according to Mr. 
Bennett and Mr. Charles Moore, “that it is what the 
Romans would have wished to create in permanent 
form.” One may say of our imperial cities that 
they are what the Romans did create—but whether 
the form will be permanent or not is a matter 
we may leave to the sardonic attentions of his- 
tory 

For my own part, I think we have at last acquired 
a criterion which will enable us to sum up the archi- 
tecture of the imperial age, and deal justly with 
these railroad stations and stadiums, these sewers 
and circuses, these aqueducts and parkways and 
grand avenues. Our imperial architecture is an 
architecture of compensation: it provides grandilo- 
quent stones for people who have been deprived of 
bread and sunlight and all that keeps man from 
becoming vile. Behind the monumental facades of 
our metropolises trudges a landless proletariat, 
doomed to the servile routine of the factory system; 


[ 147 ] 


Sticks and Stones 


and beyond the great cities lies a countryside whose 
goods are drained away, whose children are uprooted 
from the soil on the prospect of easy gain and end- 
less amusements, and whose remaining cultivators 
are steadily drifting into the ranks of an abject 
tenantry. This is not a casual observation: it is 
the translation of the last three census reports into 
plain English. Can one take the pretensions of this 
architecture seriously; can one worry about its 
esthetics or take full delight in such finer forms 
as Mr. Pope’s Temple of the Scottish Rite in 
Washington, or Mr. Bacon’s Lincoln Memorial? 
Yes, perhaps—if one refuses to look beyond the 
mask, 

Even in some of its proudest buildings, the im- 
perial show wears thin; and one need not peer into 
the slums beyond in order to realize its defects. The 
rear of the Metropolitan Museum or the Brooklyn 
Museum, for example, might be the rear of a row 
of Bronx tenements or Long Island City factories, so 
gaunt and barren and hideous is their aspect. If 
the imperial age was foreshadowed in the World’s 
Fair, it has received its apotheosis in the museum. 
In contrast to the local museums one still finds oc- 


casionally in Europe, which are little more than ex- 


[ 148 J 


The Imperial Facade 


tensions of the local curio cabinet, the imperial mu-_ 


seum is essentially a loot-heap, a comprehensive 


_repository for plunder. The sage Viollet-le-Duc once 
patly said that he preferred to see his apples hang- 
ing on a tree, rather than arranged in rows in the 
fruit shop: but the animus of the museum is to value 
‘the plucked fruit more than the tree that bore 
it. 

Into the museum come the disjecta membra of other 
lands, other cultures, other civilizations. All that 
had once been a living faith and practice is here re- 
duced to a separate specimen, pattern, or form, For 
the museum, the world of art has already been cre- 
ated: the future is restricted to a duplication of the 
perfected past. This animus is identic with that 
which made the Romans so skillful in copying Greek 
statues and so dull in carving their own; a desirable 
habit of humility were it not for the fact that the 
works of art in the past could not have been created 
had our ancestors been so punctual in respect to 
finished designs. The one thing the museum cannot 
attempt to do is to supply a soil for living art: all 
that it can present is a pattern for reproduction. 
To the extent that an insincere or imitative art is 
better than no art at all, the Imperial Age marked 

[ 149 ] 


Sticks and Stones 


an advance: to the extent, however, that a living 
art is a fresh gesture of the spirit, the museum con- 
fessed all too plainly that the age had no fresh 
gestures to make; on that score, it was a failure, 
and the copying of period furniture and the design 
of period architecture were the livid proofs of that 
failure P 

The museum is a manifestation of our curiosity, 
our acquisitiveness, our essentially predatory cul- 
ture; and these qualities were copiously exhibited in 
the architecture of imperialism. It would be foolish 
to reproach the great run of architects for exploit- 
ing the characteristics of their age; for even those 
who in belief and design have remained outside the 
age—such resolute advocates of a medieval polity as 
Dr. Ralph Adams Cram—have not been able to divert 
its currents. In so far as we have learned to care 
more for empire than for a community of freemen, 
living the good life, more for dominion over palm 
and pine than for the humane discipline of ourselves, 
the architect has but enshrined our desires. The 
opulence, the waste of resources and energies, the 
perversion of human effort represented in this archi- 
tecture are but the outcome of our general scheme 


of working and living. Architecture, like govern- 


[ 150] 


The Imperial Facade 


ment, is about as good as a community deserves. 
“The shell that we create for ourselves marks our 
spiritual development as plainly as that of a snail 
denotes its species. If sometimes architecture be- 
comes frozen music, we have ourselves to thank when 


it is a pompous blare of meaningless sounds. 


[1517] 


CHAPTER SEVEN 


THE AGE OF THE MACHINE 


I 


Since 1910 the momentum of the Imperial Age 
seems to have slackened a little: at any rate, in archi- 
tecture 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 work 


[ 155 ] 


Sticks and Stones 


outside 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 im- 
portance 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 or- 
ganization 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 attention 


[156] 


The Age of the Machine 


to 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 archi- 
tecture. In our suburban houses we have frequently 
achieved the excellence of Forest Hills and Bronx- 
ville; in our public buildings we tend more easily to 
approach the strength and originality of Mr. Good- 
hue’s State Capitol for Nebraska; in fact, never be- 
fore 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 archi- 
tect 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.” 


[157] 


Sticks and Stones 


The processes which are inimical to architecture 
are, perhaps, seen at their worst in the business dis- 
trict 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 un- 
fortunately,” 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 Vil- 

[ 158 ] 


The Age of the Machine 


lage, where as soon as the direction of the com- 
munity planner was removed a hideous and illiterate 
row of shop-fronts was erected, instead of that pro- 
vided 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 relieve 


[ 159 ] 


Sticks and Stones 


traffic congestion; and it needs only a little time be- 
fore 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 isolated 


[ 160] 


The Age of the Machine 


the machine and examined its workings. What is the 
basis of our machine-ritual, and what place has it 


in relation to the good life? 


bug 


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 physio- 
logical 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 sug- 
gestions for cooling the hot Italian villa by a system 
of flues conducted into an underground chamber 
from which cold air would circulate; but this in- 
genious 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 Sir 


[161 ] 


Sticks and Stones 


Humphrey 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 con- 
tained an article deploring the excessive warmth of 
American interiors; and at one time or another dur- 
ing 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 ex- 
istence 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, dur- 
ing 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 in 


[1627] 


The Age of the Machine 
the 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-preven- 
tion and fire-escaping devices, makes the engineering 
equipment bulk even more heavily. 

Whereas in the first stages of industrial develop- 
ment the factory affected the environment of archi- 
tecture, 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, for 


[ 163 ] 


Sticks and Stones 
example, have discovered that the habit of punching 


windows in the walls of the building-machine is re- 
sponsible 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 ap- 
proached 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 fa- 
vored 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 mar- 
gin of misuse under this method of construction is 
necessarily great; the province of design, limited. 
Instead of the architect’s paying attention to ex- 
posure, natural circulation, and direct daylight, and 
making a layout which will achieve these necessary 
ends, he is forced to center his efforts on the maxi- 


[ 164] 


The Age of the Machine 


mum exploitation of land. Where the natural fac- 
tors 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 engi- 
neering: where we eliminate sunlight we introduce 
electric light ; where we congest business, we build sky- 
scrapers ; 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 por- 
tion 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 labyrinths 


[ 165 ] 


Sticks and Stones 


of subways, these audacious towers, these endless 
miles of asphalted streets, do not represent a tri- 
umph of human effort: they stand for its compre- 
hensive misapplication. Where an inventive age fol- 
lows methods which have no relation to an intelligent 
and humane existence, an imaginative one would not 
be caught by thenecessity. By turning our environ- 
ment over to the machine we have robbed the ma- 
chine of the one promise it held out—that of enab- 
ling us to humanize more thoroughly the details of 


our existence. 
Im 


To return to architecture. A further effect of the 
machine process on the internal economy of the mod- 
ern building is that it lends itself to rapid produc- 
tion and quick turnover. This has been very well 
put by Mr. Bassett Jones, in an article in The Amer- 
ican Architect, which is either a hymn of praise to 
the machine, or a cool parade of its defects, accord- 
ing to the position one may take. 

‘As the building more and more takes on the char- 


acter of the machine,” 


says Mr. Jones, “so does its 
design, construction, and operation become subject 


to the same rules that govern . .. a locomotive. 


[ 166 7 


The Age of the Machine 


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 na- 
ture. 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 re- 
members 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 valua- 
tion that prohibits the use of any but the cheapest 
materials and methods. . . . Even the cost of carry- 
ing the required capital inactive during the period 
of production has its effect in speeding up produc- 
tion to the point where every part of the building 
that, by any ingenuity of man, can be machine-made 


must be so made.” 


[167 ] 


Sticks and Stones 


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 meth- 
ods and materials employed. The skyscraper is in- 
evitably a honeycomb of cubes, draped with a fire- 
proof 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 for- 
ward 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, is 


[168] 


The Age of the Machine 


not 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 modu- 
lation 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 architec- 
tural forms: Burnham and Root’s Monadnock Build- 
ing, 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 elabo- 
rate modeling of surface, like that of the old Flat- 
iron Building. Then the skyscraper was treated as 
a tower, and its vertical lines were accented by piers 
which simulated the acrobatic leap of stone con- 
struction: 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 satis- 


factory examples of the skyscraper. 


[ 1697] 


Sticks and Stones 


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 orna- 
ments 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 buiiding 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 per- 
haps at his best against the simple planes of the 
modern building: but a different order of imagina- 
tion, an imagination like that of the Norman build- 
ers, is powerless in the face of this problem—or it 
becomes brutal. If modern building has become en- 
gineering, 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, wait- 


[1707] 


The Age of the Machine 


ing for 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 news- 
paper 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 ar- 
chitect himself is largely paralyzed by his problem, 
what shall we say of the artisans, and of the sur- 
viving 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 exer- 
cise 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 no 

iz 


Sticks and Stones 


wonder that they behave like the poor drudge in 
the Chicago Exposition who left bare or half-orna- 
mented 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’? 
IV 


The chief justification for our achievements in me- 
chanical 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 reasons 


172") 


The Age of the Machine 


for 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 facade, has now been re- 
duced 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, rep- 
resenting 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, how- 
ever, 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 in- 


[173 J 


Sticks and Stones 


stance, from the Staten Island Ferry or the Brook- 
lyn 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, and 

[174] 


The Age of the Machine 
not 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 ap- 
preciated 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 restric- 
tion, 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 Archi- 
tects. 

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 sem- 
blance of dignity as human beings; it is perhaps 
inevitable that one of the greatest mechanical 
achievements in a thoroughly dehumanized civiliza- 
tion should, no doubt unconsciously, achieve this 
very 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 the 


[175 | 


Sticks and Stones 
noble 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 brumma- 
gem gothic of the Smithsonian Institution was a 
return to organic architecture. Consider what pain- 
ful efforts of interior decoration are necessary be- 
fore 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 pe- 
riod 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 attempted 


[176] 


The Age of the Machine 


feverishly 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 civiliza- 
tion, 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. 


Vv 


The provinces in which mechanical architecture 
has been genuinely successful are those in which 
there have been no conventional precedents, and in 


which the structure has achieved a sense of absolute 


[er77e| 


Sticks and Stones 
form by following sympathetically the limitations 


of material and function. Just as the bridge summed 
up what was best in early industrialism, so the mod- 
ern 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 achieve- 
ments. In the Aristotelian sense, every purpose con- 
tains an inherent form; and it is only natural that 
a factory or lunchroom or grain elevator, intelli- 
gently 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 per- 
fection 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 unerr- 


[178] 


The Age of the Machine 
ing logic and skill. Put alongside buildings in which 


the architect has glorified his own idiosyncrasy or 
pandered to the ritual of conspicuous waste, our 
industrial plants at least have honesty and sincerity 
and an inner harmony of form and function. There 
is nothing peculiar to machine-technology in these 
virtues, however, for the modern factory shares them 
with the old New England mill, the modern grain 
elevator with the Pennsylvania barn, the steamship 
with the clipper, and the airplane hangar with the 
castle. 

The error with regard to these new forms of 
building is the attempt to universalize the mere 
process or form, instead of attempting to univer- 
salize the scientific spirit in which they have been 
conceived. The design for a dwelling-house which 
ignores everything but the physical necessities of 
the occupants is the product of a limited conception 
of science which stops short at physics and mechanics, 
and neglects biology, psychology, and sociology. If 
it was bad esthetics to design steel frames decorated 
with iron cornucopias and flowers, it is equally bad 
esthetics to design homes as if babies were hatched 
from incubators, and as if wheels, rather than love 
and hunger, made the world go round. During the 

[179 ] 


- Sticks and Stones 


first movement of industrialism it was the pathetic 
fallacy that crippled and warped the new achieve- 
ments 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 conven- 
tional 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 
offiee 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 pos- 
sibility more dubious. The weakness of our con- 
ventional styles of architecture was that they 
stopped short at a province called building—which 
meant the province where the ordinary rules of es- 
thetic decency and politeness were completely aban- 
doned, for lack of a precedent. 

The modernist is correct in saying that the mass 
of building ought to speak the same language; it is 

[180] 


The Age of the Machine 
well for him to attempt to follow Mr. Louis Sullivan, 


in his search for a “rule so broad as to admit of no 
exceptions.” Where the modernist becomes con- 
fused, however, is in regarding the dictionary of 
modern forms, whose crude elements are exhibited 
in our factories and skyscrapers and grain eleva- 
tors, as in any sense equivalent for their creative 
expression. So far our mechanical architecture is 
a sort of structural Esperanto: it has a vocabulary 
without a literature, and when it steps beyond the 
elements of its grammar it can only translate badly 
into its own tongue the noble poems and epics that 
the Romans and Greeks and medieval builders left 
behind them. 

The leaders of modernism do not, indeed, make 
the mistake that some of their admirers have made: 
Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright’s pleasure pavilions and 
hotels do not resemble either factories or garages or 
grain elevators: they represent the same tendencies, 
perhaps, but they do so with respect to an entirely 
different set of human purposes. In one important 
characteristic, Mr. Wright’s style has turned its 
back upon the whole world of engineering: whereas 
the steel cage lends itself to the vertical skyscraper, 
Mr. Wright’s designs are the very products of the 

sie] 


Sticks and Stones 
prairie, in their low-lying, horizontal lines, in their 
flat roofs, while at the same time they defy the neu- 
tral gray or black or red of the engineering struc- 
ture 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, un- 
able to control and mold the products of the ma- 
chine, 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 Auto- 
biography of an Idea, the growth of imperialism 
burked the development of a consonant modern 
style. In Europe, particularly in Finland, Ger- 
many, and the Netherlands, the best American work 
has been appreciated and followed up, and as so 
often happens, exaggerated; so that the esthetic 
appreciation of the machine has been carried across 
the Atlantic and back again, very much in the way 
that Emerson’s individualism was transformed by 
Nietzsche and became the mystic doctrine of the 


Superman. Some of the results of this movement 


[1827] 


The Age of the Machine 
are interesting and valid: the work of the Dutch 


architects, for example, in the garden suburbs around 
Amsterdam: but what pleases one in these new com- 
positions 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 prece- 
dents, 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 me- 
chanical 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 archi- 
tect, the owner, or the working contractor, works 
within a tradition whose bearing lies beyond him. 
Outside this mechanical tradition we have had many 
examples of good individual work, like the stone 

‘houses that have been erected around Philadelphia, 
and the more or less native cement and adobe houses 
in New Mexico and California: but the great mass 
of modern houses are no longer framed for some 


definite site and some definite occupants: they are 


[183] 


Sticks and Stones 


manufactured for a blind market. The boards are 
cut to length in the sawmill, the roofing is fabricated 
in a roofing plant, the window frames are cut in 
standard sizes and put together in the framing fac- 
tory, the balustrade is done in a turning mill, the 
very internal fittings like china closets and chests 
are made in asdistant 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 ex- 
pensive grades of work, the architect is all but 
eliminated. The charming designs that the Euro- 
pean modernists make testify to the strength of 
their long architectural tradition even in the face 
of machinery; the truth is that they fit our modern 
methods of house-production scarcely much better 
than the thatched cottage of clay and wattle. The 
nemesis of mechanism is that it inexorably eliminates 
the architect—even the architect who worships its 
achievements ! 

So much of the detail of a building is established 
by factory standards and patterns that even the 
patron himself has precious little scope for giving 
vent to his impulses in the design or execution of 


the work; for every divergence from a standardized 


[ 184] 


The Age of the Machine 


design represents an additional expense. In fact, 
the only opportunity for expressing his taste and 
personality is in choosing the mode in which the 
house is to be built: he must find his requirements 
in Italy, Colonial America, France, Tudor England, 
or Spain—woe to him if he wants to find them in 
twentieth-century America! Thus the machine proc- 
ess 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 fix- 
tures will be pseudo-candlesticks in silvered metal. 
If one builds a stucco house, one is doomed by simi- 
lar 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 for- 
eign to the conception of the machine mode that only 
the very poor, and the very rich, can afford it. Need 
I add that Colonial or Italian, when it falls from the 
mouth of the “realtor” has nothing to do with 
authentic Colonial or Italian work? 

Commercial concentration and the national market 


[185] 


Sticks and Stones 


waste resources by neglect, as in the case of the 
Appalachian forests they squandered them by pil- 
lage. 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 ac- 
cepting it, those vast acres of nondescript monotony 
that, call them West Philadelphia or Long Island 
City or what you will, are but the anonymous dis- 
tricts of Coketown. The chief thing needful for 
the full enjoyment of this architecture is a stand- 
ardized people. Here our various educational in- 
stitutions, from the advertising columns of the five- 
cent magazine to the higher centers of learning, 
from the movie to the radio, have not perhaps alto- 
gether 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 descrip- 
tion; 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, 


[186] 


The Age of the Machine 


sewers, and so forth—to house-costs, the house it- 
self 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 bath- 
room, its elegant furnace, its dainty garbage-dis- 
posal system, has become more and more a thing to 
get away from. The real excuse for the omnipres- 
ent garage is that in a mechanized environment of 
subways and house-machines some avenue of escape 
and compensation must be left open. Distressing as 


a Sunday automobile ride may be on the crowded 


[187] 


Sticks and Stones 
highways that lead out of the great city, it is one 


degree better than remaining in a neighborhood 
unsuited to permanent human habitation. So intense 
is the demand for some saving grace, among all these 
frigid commercial perfections, that handicraft is 
being patronized once more, in a manner that would 
have astonished Ruskin, and the more audacious sort 
of interior decorator is fast restoring the sentimen- 
talities 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 some- 
times been the brutal emblem of the warrior, like 
that of the Assyrians: it has remained for the ar- 
chitecture 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 architec- 
ture 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 de- 


scription are either aristocratic relics of the age 


[1887] 


The Age of the Machine 


of handicraft, enjoyed only by the rich, or they are 
fugitive attempts to imitate cheaply the ways and 
gestures of handicraft. 

We have attempted to live off machinery, and the 
host has devoured us. It is time that we ceased to 
play the parasite: time that we looked about us, to 
see what meaté 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, 


[189] 


CHAPTER EIGHT 


ARCHITECTURE AND CIVILIZATION 


r 


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 essen- 
tial 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 rdle 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 archi- 
tecture 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 Jefferson 


[193] 


Sticks and Stones 


to 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 or 
ganizations 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 inter= 
est, like Messrs, Cram and Goodhue’s additions to 
West Point, like The Shelton, like a hundred coun 
try estates, the matrix of our physical community 
will not be affected by the existence of separate jows 
els; and most of our buildings will net merely be out= 
side 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 de= 
pend upon accidental results is not exactly a tri- 


[194°] 


Architecture and Civilization 
umph of the imagination, still less is it a triumph 
of exact technology. 

Looking back upon the finished drama, it is con- 
venient 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 ser- 
viceable: 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- 
coéperation in India—I select these at random as 
matters which during the last generation have al- 
tered 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 Middle 


[195 J 


Sticks and Stones 
Ages brought back the classic literature and un- 


covered the Roman monuments, or to introduce new 
elements, as the inventors and engineers of the last 
century brought in physical science and the ma- 
chine-tool technology, our position as creators de- 
pends. 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 frus- 
trated for the lack of the necessary instruments of 


analysis. It may be helpful and amusing, however, 


[ 196] 


Architecture and Civilization 


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 formule 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. 


[197] 


Sticks and Stones 


Thus our present order was due to a mingled 
change in every aspect of the community: morally, 
it was protestantism; legally, the rise of represen- 
tative 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 or- 
der. Where—among other reasons—the moral 
preparation for mechanical civilization was incom- 
plete, as in the Catholic countries, the industrial 
revolution was also late and incomplete; where the 
craft-tradition remained strong, as in the beech for- 
ests 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 archi- 
tecture are to be transformed, it is not sufficient, 
with Mr. Louis Sullivan, to say that we must ac- 


[ 198 ] 


Architecture and Civilization 


cept and enthrone the virtues of democracy; still 
less is there any meaning in the attempt of the Edu- 
cational 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 be- 
gin at the other end from that where our sumptu- 
ously 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 Baltic 

[ 199] 


Sticks and Stones 


countries. 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 conceits 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 in- 


complete and faulty. 
III 


The capital sign of the early settlements beyond 


the seashore was the clearing; and since the great 


[ 200 7 


Architecture and Civilization 


majority 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 Leather- 
stocking 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 ap- 
plied 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, com- 
parable 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. 


[201 J 


Sticks and Stones 


vIn 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 thé 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 de- 


[ 202 J 


Architecture and Civilization 


ficiencies he 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 Ameri- 
can farm, the farmer in this country lacked the ex- 
ample 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 improve- 


f 203 7 


Sticks and Stones 


ment of our cities must proceed inwards from the 
countryside; for it is largely a matter of revers- 
ing the process which converts the farm into incipi- 
ent 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 Man- 
hattan 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 Port- 
land’s inferiority as a shipping center. Indeed, all 
up and down the country one can pick up a thou- 
sand 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 en- 
terprises, languishing away whilst a metropolis not 
fifty miles away continues to absorb more people, 
who daily pay a heavy premium for their conges- 


tion. 


[ 204 J 


Architecture and Civilization 


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 consist- 
ently with the materials at hand, using brick where 
clay was plentiful, stone where that was of good qual- 
ity, 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 ex- 
terior 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 re- 
gion. 

(It is characteristic of our mechanical and met- 
ropolitan civilization that one of the great sources 
of timber waste is the metropolitan newspaper: and 
one of the remoter blessings of a sounder regional 


[ 205 ] 


Sticks and Stones 


development 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 pleas- 
ant ramifications of this notion.) 
v 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 even- 
tually 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 vested 


[206] 


Architecture and Civilization 


land-values and property rights and privileges; in- 
deed, 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 ex- 
ploitation, is precisely the reason for urging the 
first course. Our land has suffered from zeal in 
exploitation; and it would be much better, for ex- 
ample, that our water power resources should re- 
main 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 bene- 
fited the rural communities, and given them an in- 


dependent lease on life. In the United States, Mr. 
[207 J 


Sticks and Stones 
Benton Mackaye has sketched out a bold and fun- 


damental plan for associating the development of a 
spinal recreational trail with an electric power de- 
velopment 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 over- 
crowded, 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 institu- 
tion 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 pro- 
jects 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 con- 
servation movement during the last century; and if 


the art itself has neither a corpus of experience nor 


[208 |] 


Architecture and Civilization 


an 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 gath- 
ered up and intelligently used. When regional plan- 
ning 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 refresh- 


ened countryside that we will perhaps find it. 


IV 


Let us now turn to industry. The medieval order 
was disrupted in America before it could fully take 
root. As a result we have no craft-tradition that 
is properly native, with the exception of the ship- 
builders and furniture-makers of New England, 
whose art has been on the wane since the second 


[ 209 |] 


Sticks and Stones 


quarter of the nineteenth century. We have covered 
up this deficiency by importing from generation to 
generation foreign workmen, principally Germans 
and Italians, in whose birthplaces the art of using 
wood and stone has not been entirely lost; but we 
are still far from having created an independent 
craft-tradition of our own. If art is the fine efflor- 
escence of a settled life, invention is the necessity of 
the roving pioneer who every day faces new difficul- 
ties and new hazards; and accordingly we have de- 
voted our energies to the machine, and to the prod- 
ucts 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 every- 
day life. 

Our skill in working according to exact formule 
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 per- 
haps give the pervasive finish of a style to struc- 
tures whose parts are now oddly at sixes and sevens. 
Unfortunately for us and for the world in general 
the machine did not come simply as a technological 
contribution: it appeared when the guild had broken 
down and when the joint stock company had gotten 

[ 210] 


Architecture and Civilization 


its piratical start as a Company of Gentleman-Ad- 
venturers. 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 be- 
come 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 pa- 
tron 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 dif- 
ference; 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 pro- 
duction of buildings is bound to be too low, while 


[211] 


Sticks and Stones 


their cost is bound, by the same process, to be dis- 
proportionately high. 

The remedy seized by the engineer, as I have 
pointed out, is to introduce the process of stand- 
ardization 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 build- 
ings, and so tend to make the art of building ap- 
proach 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 ma- 
chine is inherently wasteful and fraudulent, but be- 
cause our social order has not been adapted to its 


use. Our gains have been canceled, for the reason 


[ 212 ] 


Architecture and Civilization 


that the vast expansion of our productive powers 
has necessitated an equally vast expansion in our 
consumptive processes. Hence in many departments 
of building, the advantage of machinery has been 
almost nullified; and if handicraft has been driven 
out, it is less because it is inefficient than because 
the pace of production and consumption under 
handicraft is so much retarded. 

When Ruskin began to agitate for the revival of 
handicraft it looked as if our industrial system were 
bound to triumph everywhere, and as if Ruskin’s 
protest were the last weak chirp of romanticism. At 
the present time, however, the issue is not so simple 
as it seemed to the builders of the Crystal Palace; 
nor are the choices so narrow. What seemed a fugi- 
tive philosophy when applied to the machine by itself 
has turned out to be a rigorous and intelligent criti- 
cism, when applied to the machine-system. The use 
of the machine in provinces where it has no essen- 
tial concern, the network of relationships that have 
followed the financial exploitation of machinery— 
these things have led to a revolt, in which the engi- 
neers themselves have participated. It is not ma- 
chinery alone that causes standardization, we begin 
to see, but the national market ; it is not the machine 


[213] 


Sticks and Stones 


that makes our cheaper houses blank and anonymous, 
but the absence of any mediating relation between 
the user and the designer—except through the per- 
sonality 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 re- 
stored the center of gravity to the small factory, 
set in the countryside, and to the individual crafts- 
man or group, working in the small shop. Pro- 
fessor Patrick Geddes has characterized the tran- 
sition 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 speak- 
ing, 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 there- 
fore not unreasonable to look forward to a continu- 
ation of this development, which will enable groups 
of building workers to serve their immediate region 
quite as economically as would a multitude of na- 


[2147] 


Architecture and Civilization 


tional factories, producing goods blindly for a blind 
national market. With direct sale and service, from 
local sawmills and local furniture-making shops, the 
older handicrafts themselves might reénter 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; unfor- 
tunately, five families cannot combine for such a 
purpose in the state I am speaking of without a 
power-franchise; and so the only source of electric 
light is a distant commercial power plant using coal. 
Here is an obvious case where commercial monopoly 
runs contrary to economy and where the benefits of 
modern technology are forfeited in the working of 


[215] 


Sticks and Stones 


our financial system. Once we understand that 
modern industry does not necessarily bring with it 
financial and physical concentration, the growth of 
smaller centers andea 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 hun- 
dred years is a relatively short time, and at least a 
part of the triumph of machinery has been due to 
our naive 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. 
Vv 


On the human side, the prime distinction over- 
looked by the mechanists is that machine work is 
[ 216 | 


Architecture and Civilization 


principally 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 lit- 
erally possesses his work, in the sense that the Bible 


says a body is possessed by a familiar spirit. 


E2r7] 


Sticks and Stones 


Occasionally, this elaboration passes the point at 
which it would give the highest esthetic delight to 
the beholder ; nevertheless, the craftsman keeps pour- 
ing 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 en- 
joyment of the portals of a medieval cathedral or 
the fagade 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 be- 
come plain. The conditions that make possible good 
machine-work are, first of all, a complete calculation 


of consequences, embodied in a working drawing or 


[ 218 ] 


Architecture and Civilization 


design: to deviate by a hair’s breadth from this cal- 
culation is to risk failure. The qualities exemplified 
in good machine-work follow naturally from the 
implements: they are precision, economy, finish, geo- 
metric 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 so- 
ciety; 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: any- 
one 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 spent 


[ 219 ] 


Sticks and Stones 


in 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 understand- 
ing this distinction. Just as in art we multiply in- 
adequate chromalithographs 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 Im- 
perial Rome, to copy the original productions of 
other artists and craftsmen. Between handicraft 
that is devoted to mechanical reproduction and ma- 
chinery that is set to reproduce endless simulacra of 
handicraft, our esthetic opportunities in art and 
architecture are muffed again and again. An occa- 
sional man of talent, like Mr. Samuel Yellin, the 
iron-worker, will survive; but the great run of crafts- 
men do not. 

Now, with due respect to the slickness and perfec- 
tion of the best machine-work, we enjoy it because of 


[ 220 ] 


Architecture and Civilization 


the 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 amphore 
of the Greek potters, the fragile crane-necked bot- 
tles 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 them 


[ 221 J 


Sticks and Stones 
from being quickly and callously replaced. Wren’s 


churches are preserved beyond their period of desue- 
tude 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 
me escape the vicious circle of economic activity. Ac- 
cording 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 in- 
come 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 community 

[ 222 ] 


Architecture and Civilization 


with 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 expendi- 
tures. 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 been 
[228] 


Sticks and Stones 


able, 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 build- 
ing will be ready to receive the imprint of the archi- 
tect, 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 ex- 
hibits 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 coherent 
[224] 


Architecture and Civilization 


pattern. 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 discus- 
sion 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. 


VI 


So far we have considered the regional and 
industrial bearing of architecture: it now remains 
to examine briefly its relation to the community 
itself. 

In the building of our cities and villages the main 
mores we have carried over have been those of the 
pioneer. We have seen how the animus of the pio- 
neer, “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 in- 
crease in land-increments which followed the growth 


[225] 


Sticks and Stones 
of population, the result being, as Mr. Henry George 


saw when he came back to the cities of the East from 
a part of California that was still in the throes of 
settlement—progress and poverty. 

Now, to increase the population of a town and 
to raise the nominal values in ground rents is almost 
a moral imperative in our American communities. 
That is why our zoning laws, which attempt to regu- 
late the use of land and provide against unfair com- 
petition in obtaining the unearned increment, almost 
universally leave a loophole through which the prop- 
erty 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 spec- 
ulator 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 ef- 
fected in relation to industry and the land cannot 


[ 226] 


Architecture and Civilization 


be accomplished without departing from these domi- 
nant mores—from the customs and laws and uneasy 
standards of ethics which we carry over from the 
days of our continental conquest. The pioneer in- 
heritance 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 mod- , 
ern 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 domi- 


[ 227] 


Sticks and Stones 


nant occupations of the country, and it is less to 
be overcome by moralizing and exhortation, than to 
be grown out of, by taking pains to provide for the 
ascendancy and renewal of the more humane occu- 
pations. \ 

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 direc- 
tion 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 domi- 
nant, abstract culture of the nineteenth century 
was blithely unconcerned with these questions, but, 
as I have already pointed out, the Puritans not 
merely recognized their importance, but regulated 
the plan and layout of the city accordingly. The 
notion that there is anything arbitrary in imposing 
a limitation upon the area and population of a city 
is absurd: the limits have already been laid down 
in the physical conditions of human nature, as Mr. 
Frederic Harrison once wisely observed, in the fact 
that men do not walk comfortably faster than three 
miles an hour, nor can they spend on the physical 
exertion of locomotion and exercise more than a 

[228] 


Architecture and Civilization 


few hours in every twenty-four. With respect to 
the needs of recreation, home-life, and health, the 
growth of a city to the point where the outlying 
citizen must travel two hours a day in the subway 
between his office and his place of work is unintelli- 
gent 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 as~ 
sociation 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 com- 
munity 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 va- 
rious devices by which our practice of endless growth 
and unlimited increment may be limited. Once the 


[ 229] 


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necessary conversion in faith and morals has taken 
place, the other things will come easily: for ex- 
ample, 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 com- 
munity, that which concerns its architectural ex- 
pression 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 rela- 
tion 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 build- 
ing: it would tend to be diffused, so that the hum- 
blest shop would share in the triumph with the most 
conspicuous public building. There are examples 
of this order of comprehensive architectural design 


[ 2307] 


Architecture and Civilization 


in hundreds of little villages and towns in pre-indus- 
trial 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 gar- 


dened 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 Com- 
mittee on Community Planning. “Community plan- 
ning,” says the report, “does not ask by what des- 
perate 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 bor- 
ders to include 29,000,000. It begins, rather, at the 
other end, and it asks with Mr. Ebenezer Howard 
how big must a city be to perform all of its social, 
educational, and industrial functions. It attempts 
to establish minima and maxima for different kinds 


[ 231 ] 


Sticks and Stones 


of communities, depending upon their character and 
function. If the established practices of industry, 
commerce, and finance tend to produce monstrous 
agglomerations which do not contribute to human 
welfare or happiness, community planning must ques- 
tion 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 de- 
velopment 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 peo- 
ple. Here and there an enterprising and somewhat 
benevolent industrial corporation has attempted. to 
carry out some of the principles of garden-city de- 
velopment ; and the United States Housing Corpora- 
tion and the Shipping Board had begun to build 


many admirable communities, when the end of the 


[232] 


Architecture and Civilization 


war brought this vast initiative to a close. 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, architec- 
ture 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 oc- 
casionally overemphasized the weaknesses and defects 
of the American tradition, it is only because in our 
present appreciation of what the American architect 
has already given form to, we are likely to forget the 
small area these achievements occupy. So far we 
have achieved patches of good building; more than 
once we have achieved the mot juste, but we have 
not learnt the more difficult art of consecutive dis- 
course. With respect to the architecture of the 

[ 233 J 


Sticks and Stones 


whole community, medieval Boston and medieval New 
Amsterdam had more to boast than their magnifi- 
cently endowed successors. Just as Mr. Babbitt’s 
great ancestor, Scadder, transformed a swamp into 
a thriving metropolis by the simple method of call- 
ing it New Eden, so do we tend to lighten our bur- 
dens by calling them the “blessings of progress” ; 
but it does not avail. Our mechanical and metro- 
politan 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 archi- 
tecture 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 magni- 
tude 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 mod- 


ern mechanical gear, there is nothing to prevent our 


[234] 


Architecture and Civilization 


own Civilization from recovering once more its human 
base—nothing, that is, except our own desires, aims, 
habits, and ends. This is an ironic consolation, per- 


haps, but the remedy it offers is real. 


[235] 


ENVOI 


The aristocracies of the world have never doubted 
the supremacy of the home and garden and temple 
over all the baser mechanisms of existence, and the 
folk-civilizations out of which aristocracies have 
so often risen have never strayed far from these 
realities. In the Norse fables, the dwarfs are re- 
garded as queer monsters, because they are always 
“busy people” who have no pride or joy except in 
the work they perform and the mischief they cause. 

The great heresy of the modern world is that it 
ceased to worship the Lords of Life, who made the 
rivers flow, caused the animals to mate, and brought 
forth the yearly miracle of vegetation: it prostrated 
itself, on the contrary, before the dwarfs, with their 
mechanical ingenuity, and the giants, with their tm 
becile power. Today our lives are perpetually men- 
aced by these “busy people”; we are surrounded by 
their machines, and for worship, we turn their prayer 
wheels of red-tape. 

It will not always be so; that would be monstrous. 


[ 237 ] 


Sticks and Stones 


Sooner or later we will learn to pick our way out of 
the débris that the dwarfs, the gnomes, and the giants 
have created; eventually, to use Henry Adams’ 
figure, the sacred mother will supplant the dynamo. 
The prospects for our architecture are bound up 
with a new orientation towards the things that are 
symbolized in the home, the garden and the temple; 
for architecture sums up the civilization it enshrines, 
and the mass of our buildings can never be better 


or worse than the institutions that have shaped them. 


[2387 


NOTES ON BOOKS 


Zz 
Historicat Backcrounp 


The best introductions to the historic setting of 
our architecture and civilization are the local guide- 
books and histories. See, for example, Stokes’s ex- 
cellent and exhaustive Iconography of Manhattan, 
and the Memorial History of Boston, edited by Justin 
Winsor. Both are profusely illustrated. In the 
wave of civic enthusiasm that swept over the coun- 
try in the ’nineties, many local descriptions and 
histories were written. For the most part, they are 
loose, rambling, credulous, and devoid of sociologi- 
cal insight: but occasionally there is a nugget in the 
matrix. Powell’s Historic Towns series covers broad 
ground. As regional histories, Weeden’s Economic 
and Social History of New England, and Mr. Sam- 
uel Eliot: Morison’s Maritime History of Massa- 
chusetts, stand in a class by themselves: in them we 
have the beginnings of what W. H. Riehl called a 
“natural history” of the human community. 


[241 J 


Sticks and Stones 


II 
ARCHITECTURAL History 


Ever since colonial architecture was reappreciated 
after the Civil War, a large amount of material has 
appeared on the early architecture of the colonies. 
Before 1900 the greater part of this was uncritical. 
Isham and Brown’s work on the early architecture of 
Connecticut and Rhode Island made a new departure, 
which Messrs. Cousins and Riley’s studies of the 
architecture of Salem and Philadelphia have carried 
on. Mr. Fiske Kimball’s compendious study of the 
Domestic Architecture of the Colonies and the Early 
Republic brings together a large amount of authenti- 
cated data. Articles and illustrations dealing with 
particular aspects of our pre-industrial architecture, 
or with particular regions—like the Lebanon Val- 
ley in Pennsylvania—are scattered through the 
architectural periodicals. Beyond the early repub- 
lican period, our architectural histories come to an 
end. Works like John Bullock’s The American Cot- 
tage Builder, New York: 1854, occur in almost every 
old library and are full of interesting data. To fill 
the gap in later years we must have recourse to a 


comprehensive German treatise, Das Amerikanische 


[242 7 


Biographical Studies 


Haus, by F. R. Vogel, Berlin: 1910. This may be 
supplemented by Homes in City and Country, by 
Russell Sturgis, J. W. Root and others, New York: 
1893. 


III 
BiocRaPHICAL STuDIES 


Where formal description leaves off, the biog- 
raphies of our principal architects enter. The fol- 
lowing books traverse in order the entire period from 
the Revolution to the present generation. 

Samuel McIntire: His Life and Work. F. Cousins 
and P. M. Riley, Boston: 1916. 

The Life and Letters of Charles Bulfinch. Ellen 
Susan Bulfinch, New York: 1896. 

The Journal of Latrobe. Benjamin Henry La- 
trobe, New York: 1905. 

Henry Hobson Richardson. Mrs. Schuyler Van 
Rensselaer, Boston: 1888. 

Charles Follen McKim. A. H. Granger, Boston: 
1913. 

Daniel H. Burnham. Charles Moore, New York: 
1921. 

The Autobiography of an Idea. Louis H. Sul- 
livan, New York: 1924. 

[ 243 ] 


Sticks and Stones 


Iv 
ConTEMPORARY Work 


Portfolios of work by contemporary architects 
are so numerous that to single out any would be 
invidious. The files of the Architectural Record, 
the American Architect, House and Garden, and 
Arts and Decorations—to mention only the more 
available periodicals—should be consulted particu- 


larly for illustrations. 


Vv 
EstTuHeEtTIcs 


As an introduction to architecture in general the 
formal textbooks are occasionally useful. Let me 
commend particularly, however, Viollet-le-Duc’s The 
Habitations of Man in all Ages. The archeology 
and ethnology of this work are, it goes without say- 
ing, outmoded: but for all that it has a permanent 
interest, and it is high time that someone took up 
Viollet-le-Duc’s theme and redeveloped it in the 
light of contemporary research. While I am re- 
storing a classic, let me add another: Ruskin’s 
The Seven Lamps of Architecture. Ruskin is dis- 

[ 244 J 


Esthetics 


regarded nowadays, as he was in his own genera- 
tion, by people who have not yet caught up with 
him. His insight and unflinching intelligence are 
both needed, however, and it is no longer necessary 
to warn the student against his quirks and solecisms. 
Ruskin wrote the apology for modernism in art when 
he said: “There would be hope if we could change 
_ palsy for puerility,’ and he anticipated modern 
decoration when he said: “I believe the only manner 
of rich ornament that is open to us is geometrical 
color mosaic, and that much might result from 
strenuously taking up that mode of design.” For 
that matter, Ruskin even predicted the architectural 
use of steel frames. The Seven Lamps of Architec- 
ture closes on a prophetic word which means far more 
to us today than to Ruskin’s contemporaries. “TI 
could smile,” he said, “when I hear the hopeful ex- 
ultation of many, at the new reach of worldly science 
and vigor of worldly effort; as if we were again at 
the beginning of new days. There is thunder on the 
horizon, as well as dawn.” We who have seen the 
lightning strike may well reread these words. . 
As for modern books on architecture and esthetics, 
Iet me recommend a handful. Among them note 
W. R. Lethaby’s Form in Civilization. In sharp 
[245] 


Sticks and Stones 


contrast to Professor Lethaby is Geoffrey Scott’s 
The Architecture of Humanism, Boston: 1914. I 
do not accept Mr. Scott’s main position; but there 
is something to be said for it, and he says it well. 
Both points of view are embraced in the distinction 
Mr. Claude Bragdon makes between the Organic and 
the Arranged, in one of Six Lectures on Archi- 
tecture. From a limited field, Rhys Carpenter’s 
Esthetic Basis of Greek Art reaches conclusions 
which illuminate almost every province of esthetics. 
There is an able exposition of the absolutist, me- 
chanical point of view in Vers Une Architecture, by 
the architect whose pen-name is “Le Corbusier- 
Saugnier.” In Speculations, Mr. T. E. Hulme pre- 
sents an interesting philosophic apology for mechan- 
ism. 


VI 
SocioLocy 


For the civic and sociological background of this 
study, consult Professor Patrick Geddes’s Gikics 
in Evolution, London: 1915, likewise his Principles 
of Sociology in Relation to Economics. The latter 
can be obtained through Le Play House, 65 Belgrave 
Road, London, S.W.1. The chapter on West- 

[246 7 


Sociology 


minster, by Mr. Victor Branford, in Our Social In- 
heritance, London: 1919, is a unique introduction to 
the direct study of social institutions and their 
architectural forms. The other volumes in The Mak- 
ing of the Future series, edited by Messrs. Geddes 
and Branford, should also have an important place 
on the student’s shelf. 

Light on our more immediate problems will be 
found in the files of the Journal of the American 
Institute of Architects. Note particularly Mr. F. 
L. Ackermann’s article on Craftsmen—Machines— 
Speed—Credit, June, 1923, and Mr. Benton Mac- 
kaye’s article on the proposed Appalachian Trail. 
See, also, the Power number of the Survey Graphic. 
The Regional Planning number of the Survey 
Graphic, May, 1925, deals in detail with some of 
the problems and possibilities treated in Chapter 
Eight. The Report of the Committee on Commu- 
nity Planning of the American Institute of Archi- 
tects (1924) should be read in connection with the 
last chapter: it treats in detail the difficulties that 
the architect confronts under our present economic 
and social order. See, likewise, Mr. Ebenezer 


Howard’s classic Garden Cities of Tomorrow. 


Finis 


[ 247 J 


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