VI

So far we have considered the regional and industrial bearing of

architecture: it now remains to examine briefly its relation to the

community itself.

In the building of our cities and villages the main _mores_ we have

carried over have been those of the pioneer. We have seen how the

animus of the pioneer, “mine and move,” is antagonistic to the settled

life out of which ordered industries and a great architecture grow.

We have seen also how this animus was deepened in the nineteenth

century by the extraordinary temptation to profit by the increase in

land-increments which followed the growth of population, the result

being, as Mr. Henry George saw when he came back to the cities of

the East from a part of California that was still in the throes of

settlement--progress _and_ poverty.

Now, to increase the population of a town and to raise the nominal

values in ground rents is almost a moral imperative in our American

communities. That is why our zoning laws, which attempt to regulate the

use of land and provide against unfair competition in obtaining the

unearned increment, almost universally leave a loophole through which

the property owners, by mutual consent, may transform the character of

the neighborhood for more intensive uses and higher ground rents. All

our city planning, and more and more our architecture itself, is done

with reference to prospective changes in the value of real estate. It

is nothing to the real estate speculator that the growth of a city

destroys the very purpose for which it may legitimately exist, as the

growth of Atlantic City into a suburb of Broadway and Chestnut Street

ruined its charm as a seaside fishing village. Sufficient unto the day

is the evil he creates.

Most of the important changes that must be effected in relation to

industry and the land cannot be accomplished without departing from

these dominant _mores_--from the customs and laws and uneasy standards

of ethics which we carry over from the days of our continental

conquest. The pioneer inheritance of the miner, coupled with the

imperial inheritance of the hunter-warrior, out for loot, lie at the

bottom of our present-day social structure; and it is useless to expect

any vital changes in the milieu of architecture until the miner and the

hunter are subordinated to relatively more civilized types, concerned

with the culture of life, rather than with its exploitation and

destruction.

I am aware that the statement of the problem in these elementary terms

will seem a little crude and unfamiliar in America where, in the midst

of our buzzing urban environment, we lose sight of the underlying

primitive reality, or--which is worse--speak vaguely of the “cave-man”

unleashed in modern civilization. I do not deny that there are other

elements in our makeup and situation that play an important part; but

it is enough to bring forward here the notion that our concern with

physical utilities and with commercial values is something more than

an abstract defect in our philosophy. On the contrary, it seems to me

to inhere in the dominant occupations of the country, and it is less

to be overcome by moralizing and exhortation, than to be grown out of,

by taking pains to provide for the ascendancy and renewal of the more

humane occupations.

Our communities have grown blindly, and, escaping the natural

limitations which curbed even the Roman engineers, have not been

controlled, on the other hand, by any normative ideal. One step in

the direction of departing from our pioneer customs and habits would

be to consider what the nature of a city is, and what functions it

performs. The dominant, abstract culture of the nineteenth century

was blithely unconcerned with these questions, but, as I have already

pointed out, the Puritans not merely recognized their importance, but

regulated the plan and layout of the city accordingly. The notion that

there is anything arbitrary in imposing a limitation upon the area and

population of a city is absurd: the limits have already been laid down

in the physical conditions of human nature, as Mr. Frederic Harrison

once wisely observed, in the fact that men do not walk comfortably

faster than three miles an hour, nor can they spend on the physical

exertion of locomotion and exercise more than a few hours in every

twenty-four. With respect to the needs of recreation, home-life, and

health, the growth of a city to the point where the outlying citizen

must travel two hours a day in the subway between his office and his

place of work is unintelligent and arbitrary.

A city, properly speaking, does not exist by the accretion of houses,

but by the association of human beings. When the accretion of houses

reaches such a point of congestion or expansion that human association

becomes difficult, the place ceases to be a city. The institutions

that make up the city--schools, clubs, libraries, gymnasia, theaters,

churches, and so forth--can be traced in one form or another back

to the primitive community: they function on the basis of immediate

intercourse, and they can serve through their individual units only a

limited number of people. Should the population of a local community

be doubled, all its civic equipment must be doubled too; otherwise the

life that functions through these institutions and opportunities will

lapse and disappear.

It is not my purpose to discuss in detail the various devices by which

our practice of endless growth and unlimited increment may be limited.

Once the necessary conversion in faith and morals has taken place, the

other things will come easily: for example, the social appropriation of

unearned land-increments, and the exercise of the town-planner’s art to

limit the tendency of a community to straggle beyond its boundaries.

While a great many other ideas and measures are of prime importance for

the good life of the community, that which concerns its architectural

expression is the notion of the community as limited in numbers, and in

area; and as formed, not merely by the agglomeration of people, but by

their relation to definite social and economic institutions. To express

these relations clearly, to embody them in buildings and roads and

gardens in which each individual structure will be subordinated to the

whole--this is the end of community planning.

With the coherence and stability indicated by this method of planning,

architectural effect would not lie in the virtuosity of the architect

or in the peculiar ornateness and originality of any particular

building: it would tend to be diffused, so that the humblest shop would

share in the triumph with the most conspicuous public building. There

are examples of this order of comprehensive architectural design in

hundreds of little villages and towns in pre-industrial Europe--to say

nothing of a good handful in pre-industrial America--and community

planning would make it once more our daily practice. That it can be

done again the examples of Letchworth and Welwyn in England, and

numerous smaller gardened cities created by municipal authorities

in England and other parts of Europe, bear evidence; and where the

precepts of Mr. Ebenezer Howard have been to any degree followed,

architecture has been quick to benefit.

The difference between community planning and the ordinary method of

city-extension and suburb-building has been very well put in a recent

report to the American Institute of Architects, by the Committee on

Community Planning. “Community planning,” says the report, “does not

ask by what desperate means a city of 600,000 people can add another

400,000 during the next generation, nor how a city of seven millions

may enlarge its effective borders to include 29,000,000. It begins,

rather, at the other end, and it asks with Mr. Ebenezer Howard how

big must a city be to perform all of its social, educational, and

industrial functions. It attempts to establish minima and maxima

for different kinds of communities, depending upon their character

and function. If the established practices of industry, commerce,

and finance tend to produce monstrous agglomerations which do not

contribute to human welfare or happiness, community planning must

question these established practices, since the values they create

have nothing to do with the essential welfare of the community itself,

and since the condition thus created is inimical to the stable,

architectural development of the community.”

The normative idea of the garden-city and the garden-village is

the corrective for the flatulent and inorganic conception of

city-development that we labor with, and under, today. So far from

being a strange importation from Europe, the garden-city is nothing

more or less than a sophisticated recovery of a form that we once

enjoyed on our Atlantic seaboard, and lost through our sudden and

almost uncontrollable access of natural resources and people. Here and

there an enterprising and somewhat benevolent industrial corporation

has attempted to carry out some of the principles of garden-city

development; and the United States Housing Corporation and the Shipping

Board had begun to build many admirable communities, when the war

brought this vast initiative to an end. These precedents are better

than nothing, it goes without saying, but there will have to be a

pretty thorough reorientation in our economic and social life before

the garden-city will be anything more than a slick phrase, without

content or power.

Until our communities are ready to undertake the sort of community

planning that leads to garden-cities, it will be empty eloquence

to talk about the future of American architecture. Sheltered as an

enjoyment for the prosperous minority, or used as a skysign for the

advertisement of business, architecture will still await its full

opportunity for creative achievement.

The signs of promise are plenty, and if I have dealt with the darker

side of the picture and have occasionally overemphasized the weaknesses

and defects of the American tradition, it is only because in our

present appreciation of what the American architect has already given

form to, we are likely to forget the small area these achievements

occupy. So far we have achieved patches of good building; more than

once we have achieved the _mot juste_, but we have not learnt the

more difficult art of consecutive discourse. With respect to the

architecture of the whole community, medieval Boston and medieval

New Amsterdam had more to boast than their magnificently endowed

successors. Just as Mr. Babbitt’s great ancestor, Scadder, transformed

a swamp into a thriving metropolis by the simple method of calling it

New Eden, so do we tend to lighten our burdens by calling them the

“blessings of progress”; but it does not avail. Our mechanical and

metropolitan civilization, with all its genuine advances, has let

certain essential human elements drop out of its scheme; and until we

recover these elements our civilization will be at loose ends, and our

architecture will unerringly express this situation.

Home, meeting-place, and factory; polity, culture, and art have

still to be united and wrought together, and this task is one of the

fundamental tasks of our civilization. Once that union is effected, the

long breach between art and life, which began with the Renaissance,

will be brought to an end. The magnitude of our task might seem a

little disheartening, were it not for the fact that, “against or with

our will,” our civilization is perpetually being modified and altered.

If in less than a hundred years the feudal civilization of Japan could

adopt our modern mechanical gear, there is nothing to prevent our own

civilization from recovering once more its human base--nothing, that

is, except our own desires, aims, habits, and ends. This is an ironic

consolation, perhaps, but the remedy it offers is real.

_ENVOI_

_The aristocracies of the world have never doubted the supremacy of the

home and garden and temple over all the baser mechanisms of existence,

and the folk-civilizations out of which aristocracies have so often

risen have never strayed far from these realities. In the Norse fables,

the dwarfs are regarded as queer monsters, because they are always

“busy people” who have no pride or joy except in the work they perform

and the mischief they cause._

_The great heresy of the modern world is that it ceased to worship the

Lords of Life, who made the rivers flow, caused the animals to mate,

and brought forth the yearly miracle of vegetation: it prostrated

itself, on the contrary, before the dwarfs, with their mechanical

ingenuity, and the giants, with their imbecile power. Today our lives

are perpetually menaced by these “busy people”; we are surrounded

by their machines, and for worship, we turn their prayer wheels of

red-tape._

_It will not always be so; that would be monstrous. Sooner or later

we will learn to pick our way out of the débris that the dwarfs, the

gnomes, and the giants have created; eventually, to use Henry Adams’

figure, the sacred mother will supplant the dynamo. The prospects

for our architecture are bound up with a new orientation towards the

things that are symbolized in the home, the garden and the temple; for

architecture sums up the civilization it enshrines, and the mass of our

buildings can never be better or worse than the institutions that have

shaped them._