I
In the course of this survey we have seen how architecture and
civilization develop hand in hand: the characteristic buildings of
each period are the memorials to their dearest institutions. The
essential structure of the community--the home, meeting-place, the
work-place--remains; but the covering changes and passes, like the
civilization itself, when new materials, new methods of work, new ideas
and habits and ways of feeling, come into their own.
If this interpretation of the rôle of architecture is just, there
is little use in discussing the needs and promises of architecture
without relating the shell itself to the informing changes that may
or may not take place in the life of the community itself. To fancy
that any widespread improvement of architecture lies principally with
the architects is an esthetic delusion: in a barren soil the most
fertile geniuses are cut off from their full growth. We have not
lacked architects of boldness and originality, from Latrobe to Louis
H. Sullivan: nor have we lacked men of great ability, from Thomas
Jefferson 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 organizations to function blindly, as our bed is
made, so must we lie on it; and while we may nevertheless produce
isolated buildings of great esthetic interest, like Messrs. Cram
and Goodhue’s additions to West Point, like The Shelton, like a
hundred country estates, the matrix of our physical community will
not be affected by the existence of separate jewels; and most of our
buildings will not merely be outside the province of the architectural
profession--they will be the product of minds untouched, for the most
part, by humane standards. Occasionally the accidental result will be
good, as has happened sometimes in our skyscrapers and factories and
grain elevators; but an architecture that must depend upon accidental
results is not exactly a triumph of the imagination, still less is it
a triumph of exact technology.
Looking back upon the finished drama, it is convenient to regard our
community and our builders as creatures of their environment: once
their choices are made, they seem inevitable. On this account even the
pomp of the imperial architects can be justified, as the very voice
and gesture of the period they consummated. Looking forward, however,
this convenient fiction of inevitability is no longer serviceable: we
are in the realm of contingency and choice; and at any moment a new
factor may be introduced which will alter profoundly the economic and
social life of the community. The Great War in Europe, the revolution
in Russia, the spread of motor transportation in America, the idea of
non-coöperation in India--I select these at random as matters which
during the last generation have altered profoundly the unceasing “drift
of things.”
The future of our civilization depends upon our ability to select and
control our heritage from the past, to alter our present attitudes
and habits, and to project fresh forms into which our energies may be
freely poured. On our ability to re-introduce old elements, as the
humanists of the late Middle Ages brought back the classic literature
and uncovered the Roman monuments, or to introduce new elements, as the
inventors and engineers of the last century brought in physical science
and the machine-tool technology, our position as creators depends.
During the last century our situation has changed from that of the
creators of machinery to that of creatures of the machine system; and
it is perhaps time that we contrived new elements which will alter once
more the profounder contours of our civilization.
Unfortunately for our comfort and peace of mind, any real change in our
civilization depends upon much more complicated, and much more drastic
measures than the old-fashioned reformer, who sought to work a change
of heart or to alter the distribution of income, ever recognized; and
it will do little good to talk about a “coming renaissance” unless we
have a dim idea of the sort of creature that is to be born again. Our
difficulty, it seems to me, is due to the fact that the human sciences
have lagged behind the physical ones; and up to the present time our
good intentions have been frustrated for the lack of the necessary
instruments of analysis. It may be helpful and amusing, however, to
see what we can do in this department with the instruments that are
already at hand.
In every community, as Frédéric Le Play first pointed out, there are
three elements: the place, the work, and the people; the sociologist’s
equivalent of environment, function, and organism. Out of the
interaction of the folk and their place, through the work, the simple
life of the community develops. At the same time, each of these
elements carries with it its specific spiritual heritage. The people
have their customs and manners and morals and laws; or as we might say
more briefly, their institutions; the work has its technology, its
craft-experience, from the simple lore of peasant and breeder to the
complicated formulæ of the modern chemists and metallurgists; while the
deeper perception of the “place,” through the analysis of the falling
stone, the rising sun, the running water, the decomposing vegetation,
and the living animal gives rise to the tradition of “learning” and
science.
With this simple outline in mind, the process that created our present
mechanical civilization becomes a little more plain; and we can
appreciate, perhaps, the difficulties that stand in the way of any
swift and easy transformation.
Thus our present order was due to a mingled change in every aspect of
the community: morally, it was protestantism; legally, the rise of
representative government; socially, the introduction of “democracy”;
in custom, the general breakdown of the family unit; industrially, it
meant the collapse of the guilds and the growth of the factory-system;
scientifically, the spread of physical science, and the increased
knowledge of the terrestrial globe--and so on.
Each of these facets of the community’s life was the object of separate
attention and effort: but it was their totality which produced the
modern order. Where--among other reasons--the moral preparation for
mechanical civilization was incomplete, as in the Catholic countries,
the industrial revolution was also late and incomplete; where the
craft-tradition remained strong, as in the beech forests of the
Chilterns, the industrial change made fewer inroads into the habits of
the community, than, let us say, in Lancashire, where modern industry
was untempered and unchallenged.
If the circumstances which hedge in our architecture are to be
transformed, it is not sufficient, with Mr. Louis Sullivan, to say
that we must accept and enthrone the virtues of democracy; still
less is there any meaning in the attempt of the Educational Committee
of the American Institute of Architects to educate public taste in
the arts. Nor is there any genuine esthetic salvation in the demand
of the modernists that we embrace in more whole-hearted fashion the
machine. Our architecture has been full of false starts and unfulfilled
promises, precisely because the ground has not been worked enough
beforehand to receive the new seeds.
If we are to have a fine architecture, we must begin at the other end
from that where our sumptuously illustrated magazines on home-building
and architecture begin--not with the building itself, but with the
whole complex out of which architect, builder, and patron spring,
and into which the finished building, whether it be a cottage or
a skyscraper, is set. Once the conditions are ripe for a good
architecture, the plant will flower by itself: it did so in the Middle
Ages, as a hundred little towns and villages between Budapest and
Glastonbury still testify; it did so again within a limited area among
the swells of the Renaissance; and it is springing forth lustily today
in the garden cities of England, the Netherlands, and the Baltic
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 deceits of snobbery. It is only paper flowers that
grow in this fashion.