Sticks and Stones

Sticks and Stokes

By Lewis Mumford.

Table of Contents

1. Titlepage
2. Imprint
3. Epigraph
4. Acknowledgments
5. Sticks and Stones
   1. I: The Medieval Tradition
      1. I
      2. II
      3. III
      4. IV
   2. II: The Heritage of the Renaissance
      1. I
      2. II
      3. III
      4. IV
   3. III: The Classical Myth
      1. I
      2. II
      3. III
      4. IV
   4. IV: The Diaspora of the Pioneer
      1. I
      2. II
      3. III
      4. IV
   5. V: The Defeat of Romanticism
      1. I
      2. II
      3. III
      4. IV
   6. VI: The Imperial Façade
      1. I
      2. II
      3. III
   7. VII: The Age of the Machine
      1. I
      2. II
      3. III
      4. IV
      5. V
   8. VIII: Architecture and Civilization
      1. I
      2. II
      3. III
      4. IV
      5. V
      6. VI
   9. Envoi
6. Notes on Books
   1. I: Historical Background
   2. II: Architectural History
   3. III: Biographical Studies
   4. IV: Contemporary Work
   5. V: Esthetics
   6. VI: Sociology
7. Colophon
8. Uncopyright

Imprint

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Architecture, properly understood, is civilization itself.

W. R. Lethaby

What is civilization? It is the humanization of man in society.

Matthew Arnold

This is an attempt to evaluate architecture in America in terms of our civilization. I have not sought to criticize 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 examine our development in cities and buildings for himself, 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, appeared. 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 (Chapter Six), in The New Republic, and in The American Mercury. I thank the editors for their permission to draw on these articles.

Lewis Mumford.

Sticks and Stones

A Study of American Architecture and Civilization

I

The Medieval Tradition

I

For a hundred years or so after its settlement, there lived and flourished in America a type of community 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 architecture 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.

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 conception 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 of the northern American seaboard prolonged for a little while the social habits and economic institutions which were fast crumbling away in Europe, particularly in England. In the villages of the New World there flickered up the last dying embers of the medieval 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 reestablished with the founding of a new settlement. In England the depauperate peasants and yeomen were driven