It has been a genuine misfortune in America that, as Mr. Sullivan bitterly pointed out in The Autobiography of an Idea, the growth of imperialism burked the development of a consonant modern style. In Europe, particularly in Finland, Germany, and the Netherlands, the best American work has been appreciated and followed up, and as so often happens, exaggerated; so that the esthetic appreciation of the machine has been carried across the Atlantic and back again, very much in the way that Emerson’s individualism was transformed by Nietzsche and became the mystic doctrine of the Superman. Some of the results of this movement 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 compositions is not the mechanical rigor of form but the playfulness of spirit—they are good architecture precisely because they are something more than mere engineering. Except for a handful of good precedents, our mechanical work in America does not express this vitality. The machine has stamped us; and we have not reacted.
Moreover, in the building of separate houses in the city and its suburbs, where the demands of mechanical efficiency are not so drastic as they are in the office building, the effect of the machine process has been to narrow the scope of individual taste and personality. The designer, whether he is the architect, the owner, or the working contractor, works within a tradition whose bearing lies beyond him. Outside this mechanical tradition we have had many examples of good individual work, like the stone houses that have been erected around Philadelphia, and the more or less native cement and adobe houses in New Mexico and California: but the great mass of modern houses are no longer framed for some definite site and some definite occupants: they are 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 factory, the balustrade is done in a turning mill, the very internal fittings like china closets and chests are made in a distant plant, after one of a dozen patterns fixed and exemplified in the catalog. The business of the building worker is reduced to a mere assemblage of parts; and except for the more expensive grades of work, the architect is all but eliminated. The charming designs that the European modernists make testify to the strength of their long architectural tradition even in the face of machinery; the truth is that they fit our modern methods of house-production scarcely much better than the thatched cottage of clay and wattle. The nemesis of mechanism is that it inexorably eliminates the architect—even the architect who worships its achievements!
So much of the detail of a building is established by factory standards and patterns that even the patron himself has precious little scope for giving vent to his impulses in the design or execution of the work; for every divergence from a standardized 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 process has created a standardized conception of style: of itself it can no more invent a new style than a mummy can beget children. If one wishes a house of red brick it will be Georgian or Colonial; that is to say, the trimming will be white, the woodwork will have classic moldings, and the electric-light fixtures will be pseudo-candlesticks in silvered metal. If one builds a stucco house, one is doomed by similar mechanical canons to rather heavy furniture in the early Renaissance forms, properly duplicated by the furniture makers of Grand Rapids—and so on. The notion of an American stucco house is so foreign to the conception of the machine mode that only the very poor, and the very rich, can afford it. Need I add that Colonial or Italian, when it falls from the mouth of the “realtor” has nothing to do with authentic Colonial or Italian work?
Commercial concentration and the national market waste resources by neglect, as in the case of the Appalachian forests they squandered them by pillage. Standardized materials and patterns and plans and elevations—here are the ingredients of the architecture of the machine age: by escaping it we get our superficially vivacious suburbs; by accepting it, those vast acres of nondescript monotony that, call them West Philadelphia or Long Island City or what you will, are but the anonymous districts of Coketown. The chief thing needful for the full enjoyment of this architecture is a standardized people. Here our various educational institutions, from the advertising columns of the five-cent magazine to the higher centers of learning, from the movie to the radio, have not perhaps altogether failed the architect.
The manufactured house is set in the midst of a manufactured environment. The quality of this environment calls for satire rather than description; and yet a mere catalog of its details, such as Mr. Sinclair Lewis gave in Babbitt, is almost satire in itself. In this environment the home tends more and more to take last place: Mr. Henry Wright has in fact humorously suggested that at the present increasing ratio of site-costs—roads, sewers, and so forth—to house-costs, the house itself will disappear in favor of the first item by 1970. The prophetic symbol of this event is the tendency of the motorcar and
