Sticks and Stones: A Study of American Architecture and CivilizationMumford, Lewis
History
Sticks and Stones: A Study of American Architecture and Civilization
Mumford, Lewis
Architecture -- United States
From the standpoint of architecture, the early part of the nineteenth
century was a period of disintegration. The gap between sheer utility
and art, which the Renaissance had emphasized, was widened with the
coming of machinery. That part of architecture which was touched by
industrialism became crude beyond belief: the new mills and factories
were usually packing boxes, lacking in light and ventilation, and the
homes of the factory workers, when they were not the emptied houses
of merchants and tradesmen, made to serve a dozen families instead of
the original one, were little more than covered pens, as crowded as
a cattle market. At the same time that the old forms were undermined
by the new methods of mechanical production, a sentimental longing to
retain those forms, just because they were old, seized men’s minds;
and so industrialism and romanticism divided the field of architecture
between them.
It was no accident that caused romanticism and industrialism to
appear at the same time. They were rather the two faces of the new
civilization, one looking towards the past, and the other towards
the future; one glorifying the new, the other clinging to the old;
industrialism intent on increasing the physical means of subsistence,
romanticism living in a sickly fashion on the hollow glamour of the
past. The age not merely presented these two aspects; it sought to
enjoy each of them. Where industrialism took root, the traditions
of architecture were disregarded; where romanticism flourished, on
the other hand, in the mansions, public buildings, and churches,
architecture became capricious and absurd, and it returned to a past
that had never existed. Against the gross callousness which a Bounderby
exhibited toward beauty and amenity, there was only the bland piety of
a Pecksniff.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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