Now, with due respect to the slickness and perfection of the best machine-work, we enjoy it because of the use that it fulfills: it may incidentally achieve significant form, but no one retains a pickle bottle, beautifully shaped though Messrs. Heinz and Co.’s are, for this reason: it was meant for pickles and it vanishes with the pickles. This is not merely true of today: it is true of all ages: the common utensils of life return to the dust, whereas those things that hold the imprint of man’s imagination—the amphorae of the Greek potters, the fragile crane-necked bottles of the Persians, the seals of the Egyptians—are preserved from the rubbish heap, no matter how frail they may be or how small their intrinsic value.
There is something in man that compels him to respect the human imprint of art: he lives more nobly surrounded by his own reflections, as a god might live. The very rage of iconoclasm which the Mohammedans and Puritans and eighteenth-century liberals exhibited betrayed a deep respect for the power of art; for we destroy the things that threaten our existence. Art, in a certain sense, is the spiritual varnish that we lay on material things, to insure their preservation: on its lowest terms, beauty is justified because it has “survival value.” The fact that houses which bear the living imprint of the mind are irreplaceable is what prevents them from being quickly and callously replaced. Wren’s churches are preserved beyond their period of desuetude by Wren’s personality. This process is just the opposite to that fostered by the machine-system, and it explains why, in the long run, machine-work may be unsatisfactory and uneconomical—too quickly degraded.
Art, in fact, is one of the main ways in which we escape the vicious circle of economic activity. According to the conventional economist, our economic life has but three phases: production, distribution, and consumption. We work to eat so that we may eat to work. This is a fairly accurate portrait of life in an early industrial town; but it does not apply to the economic processes of a civilized community. Everywhere, even in regions of difficulty, something more comes out of production than the current income and the current saving of capital: sometimes it is leisure and play, sometimes it is religion, philosophy, and science, and sometimes it is art. In the creation of any permanent work of art the processes of dissipation and consumption are stayed: hence the only civilized criterion of a community’s economic life is not the amount of things produced, but the durability of things created. A community with a low rate of production and a high standard of creation will in the long run be physically richer than a modern city in which the gains of industry are frittered away in evanescent, uncreative expenditures. What matters is the ratio of production to creation.
Here lies the justification of the modern architect. Cut off though he is from the actual processes of building, he nevertheless remains the sole surviving craftsman who maintains the relation towards the whole structure that the old handicraft workers used to enjoy in connection with their particular job. The architect can still leave his imprint, and even in the severely utilitarian factory he can take the simple forms of the engineer and turn them into a superb structure like Messrs. Helmle and Corbett’s Fletcher Building in New York. To the extent that honest engineering is better than fake architecture, genuine architecture is better than engineering: for it strikes the same esthetic and humane chord that painting and sculpture appeal to by themselves. The freedom to depart from arbitrary and mechanical precedent, the freedom to project new forms which will more adequately meet his problem are essential to the architect. Up to the present he has been able, for the most part, to exercise this freedom only on traditional buildings, like churches and libraries and auditoriums, which are outside the reaches of the present commercial regime and have therefore some prospect of durability.
But before the whole mass of contemporary building will be ready to receive the imprint of the architect, and before the handicrafts reenter the modern building to give the luster of permanence to its decorations and fixtures, there will have to be a pretty thoroughgoing reorientation in our economic life. Whilst buildings are erected to increase site values, whilst houses are produced in block to be sold to the first wretch who must put a roof over his family’s head, it is useless to dwell upon the ministrations of art; and, unfortunately, too much of our building today rests upon this basis and exhibits all the infirmities of our present economic structure.
From the aspect of our well-to-do suburbs and our newly-planned industrial towns, from the beginnings of a sound functional architecture in some of our schools and factories, it is easy to see what the architecture of our various regions might be if it had the opportunity to work itself out in a coherent pattern. For the present, however, it is impossible to say with any certainty whether our architects are doomed to be extruded by mechanism, or whether they will have the opportunity to restore to our machine-system some of the freedom of an earlier regime; and I have no desire to burden this discussion with predictions and exhortations. But if the conclusions we have reached are sound, it is only the second possibility that holds out any promise to the good life.
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
