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 bathroom, its elegant furnace, its dainty garbage-disposal system, has become more and more a thing to get away from. The real excuse for the omnipresent 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 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 sentimentalities 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 sometimes been the brutal emblem of the warrior, like that of the Assyrians: it has remained for the architecture 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 architecture 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 description are either aristocratic relics of the age 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 means 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.
VIII
Architecture and Civilization
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 workplace—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 role 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-cooperation in India—I select these at random as matters which during the
