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 reintroduce 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 formulae 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 wholehearted 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.
II
In order to get our bearings, we shall pull apart, one by one, the principal elements in our heritage of civilization in the United States, and examine them separately. This is a dangerous convenience, however, and I must emphasize that these strands are tightly intertwined and bound up. It is only in thought that one can take them apart. No one has ever encountered man, save on the earth; no one has ever seen the earth, save through the eyes of a man. There is no logical priority in place, work, and people. In discussing the community one either deals with it as a whole, or one’s discussion
