Sticks and Stokes

By Lewis Mumford.

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Architecture, properly understood, is civilization itself.

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

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 In the concluding chapters I have been stimulated and guided in many places by unpublished reports and memoranda written by Mr.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 into the large towns to become the casual workers, menials, and soldiers; in New England, on the other hand, it was at first only with threats of punishment and conscription that the town workers were kept from going out into the countryside to seek a more independent living from the soil. Just as the archaic speech of the Elizabethans has lingered in the Kentucky Mountains, so the Middle Ages at their best lingered along the coast of Appalachia; and in the organization of our New England villages one sees a greater resemblance to the medieval Utopia of Sir Thomas More than to the classic republic in the style of Montesquieu, which was actually founded in the eighteenth century.

The colonists who sought to establish permanent communities—as distinct from those who erected only trading posts—were not a little like those whom the cities of Greece used to plant about the Mediterranean and the Black Sea littoral. Like the founders of the “Ancient City,” the Puritans first concerned themselves to erect an altar, or rather, to lay the foundations for an edifice which denied the religious value of altars. In the crudest of “smoaky wigwams,” an early observer notes, the Puritans remember to “sing psalms, pray, and praise their God”; and although we of today may regard their religion as harsh and naysaying, we cannot forget that it was a central point of their existence and not an afterthought piled as it were on material prosperity for the sake of a good appearance. Material goods formed the basis, but not the end, of their life.

The meetinghouse determined the character and limits of the community. As Weeden says in his excellent Economic and Social History of New England, the settlers “laid out the village in the best order to attain two objects: first, the tillage and culture of the soil; second, the maintenance of a ‘civil and religious society.’ ” Around the meetinghouse the rest of the community crystallized in a definite pattern, tight and homogeneous.

The early provincial village bears another resemblance to the early Greek city: it does not continue to grow at such a pace that it either becomes overcrowded within or spills beyond its limits into dejected suburbs; still less does it seek what we ironically call greatness by increasing the number of its inhabitants. When the corporation has a sufficient number of members, that is to say, when the land is fairly occupied, and when the addition of more land would unduly increase the hardship of working it from the town, or would spread out the farmers, and make it difficult for them to attend to their religious and civil duties, the original settlement throws out a new shoot. So Charlestown threw off Woburn; so Dedham colonized Medfield; so Lynn founded Nahant.

The Puritans knew and applied a principle that Plato had long ago pointed out in The Republic, namely, that an intelligent and socialized community will continue to grow only as long as it can remain a unit and keep up its common institutions. Beyond that point growth must cease, or the community will disintegrate and cease to be an organic thing. Economically, this method of community-development kept land values at a properly low level, and prevented the engrossing of land for the sake of a speculative rise. The advantage of the Puritan method of settlement comes out plainly when one contrasts it with the trader’s paradise of Manhattan; for by the middle of the seventeenth century all the land on Manhattan Island was privately owned, although only a small part of it was cultivated, and so eagerly had the teeth of monopoly bitten into this fine morsel that there was already a housing-shortage.

One more point of resemblance: all the inhabitants of an early New England village were copartners in a corporation; they admitted into the community only as many members as they could assimilate. This copartnership was based upon a common sense as to the purpose of the community, and upon a roughly equal division of the land into individual plots taken in freehold, and a share of the common fields, of which there might be half a dozen or more.

There are various local differences in the apportionment of the land. In many cases, the minister and deacons have a larger share than the rest of the community; but in Charlestown, for example, the poorest had six or seven acres of meadow and twenty-five or thereabouts of upland; and this would hold pretty well throughout the settlements. Not merely is membership in the community guarded: the right of occupying and transferring the land is also restricted, and again and again, in the face of the General Assembly, the little villages make provisions to keep the land from changing hands without the consent of the corporation; “it being our real intent,” as the burghers of Watertown put it, to “sitt down there close togither.”

These regulations have a positive side as well; for in some cases the towns helped the poorer members of the corporation to build houses, and as a new member was voted into the community, lots were assigned immediately, without further ado. A friend of mine has called this system “Yankee communism,” and I cheerfully bring the institution to the attention of those who do not realize upon what subversive principles Americanism, historically, rests.

What is true of the seventeenth century in New England holds good for the eighteenth century in the Moravian settlements of Pennsylvania; and it is doubtless true for many another obscure colony; for the same spirit lingered, with a parallel result in architecture and industry, in the utopian communities of the nineteenth century. It is pretty plain that this type of pioneering, this definite search for the good life, was conducted on an altogether different level from the ruthless exploitation of the individual muckers and scavengers who hit the trail west of the Alleghanies. Such renewals of the earlier European culture as the Bach Festival at Bethlehem give us a notion of the cultural values which the medieval community carried over from the Old World to the New. There is some of this spirit left even in the architecture of the Shaker community at Mount Lebanon, New York, which was built as late as the nineteenth century.

In contrast to the New England village-community was the trading post. Of this nature were the little towns in the New Netherlands which were planted there by the Dutch West India Company: the settlers were for the most part either harassed individuals who were lured to the New World by the prospects of a good living, or people of established rank who were tempted to leave the walks of commerce for the dignities and affluences that were attached to the feudal tenure of the large estates that lined the Hudson.

The germs of town life came over with these people, and sheer necessity turned part of their energies to agriculture, but they did not develop the close village-community we find in New England; and though New Amsterdam was a replica of the Old World port, with its gabled brick houses, and its well-banked canals and fine gardens, it left no decided pattern on the American scene. It is only the country architecture of the Dutch which survives as either a relic or a memory. These trading posts like Manhattan and Fort Orange were, as Messrs. Petersen and Edwards have shown in their study of New York as an Eighteenth Century Municipality, medieval in their economy: numerous guild and civic regulations which provided for honest weight and measure and workmanship continued in force within the town. In their external dealings, on the other hand, the practice of the traders was sharp, and every man was for himself. Beginning its life by bargaining in necessities, the trading post ends by making a necessity of bargaining; and it was the impetus from its original commercial habits which determined the characteristics of the abortive city plan that was laid down for Manhattan Island in 1811. Rich as the Dutch precedent is in individual farmhouses, it brings us no pattern, such as we find in New England, for the community as a whole.

II

Since we are accustomed to look upon the village as a quaint primitive relic of a bygone age, we do not readily see that its form was dictated by social and economic conditions. Where the village had to defend itself against Indians, it was necessary to lay it out completely, so that it might be surrounded by a stockade, and so that the meetinghouse might be such a rallying center as the bell-tower or the castle was in Europe, or as the high temple site was in classic times. But in the eighteenth century the Indian figured less in the scheme of colonial life, and along the seacoast and river—as at Wells Beach in Maine or Litchfield in Connecticut—the village became a long strip upon a highroad, and the arable land stretched in narrow plots from the house to the water, so that the farmer might better protect his crops and his livestock from the fox, the wolf, the woodchuck, the hawk, the skunk, and the deer.

I emphasize these points of structure because of the silly notion superficial observers sometimes carry away from the villages of Europe or New England; namely, that their irregularity is altogether capricious and uneconomical, associated only with the vagaries of the straying cow. It would be more correct to say that the precise reverse was true. The inequality in size and shape of plots shows always that attention was paid to the function the land was to perform, rather than to the mere possession of property. Thus, there was a difference in size between home lots, which were always seated in the village, and purely agricultural tracts of land, which were usually on the outskirts; and in Dedham, for example, married men had home lots of twelve acres, while bachelors received only eight. Another reason for the compactness of the village was a decree of the General Court in Massachusetts, in 1635, that no dwelling should be placed more than half a mile from the meetinghouse in any new plantation. Even irregularities in the layout and placement of houses, which cannot be referred to such obvious points as these, very often derive from an attempt to break the path of the wind, to get a good exposure in summer, or to profit by a view.

All this was genuine community planning. It did not go by this name, perhaps, but it achieved the result.