Sticks and Stones: A Study of American Architecture and Civilization by Lewis Mumford

Author:Lewis Mumford
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Architecture -- United States
Publisher: Standard Ebooks
Published: 2024-11-11T22:29:13+00:00

III

With the tran­si­tion from re­pub­li­can to im­pe­ri­al Rome, nu­mer­ous mon­u­ments were erect­ed to the Di­vine Cae­sar. With­in a much short­er time than marked the growth of the im­pe­ri­al tra­di­tion in Amer­i­ca, a sim­i­lar ed­i­fi­ca­tion of pa­tri­ot­ic mem­o­ries took place.

In the restora­tion of the orig­i­nal plan of Wash­ing­ton, which be­gan in 1901, the ax­is of the plan was so al­tered as to make it pass through the Wash­ing­ton Mon­u­ment; and at the same time the place of the Lin­coln Memo­ri­al, de­signed by the late Mr. Hen­ry Ba­con, a pupil of Mr. McKim’s, was as­signed. This was the first of a whole se­ries of tem­ples de­vot­ed to the na­tion­al deities. In the Lin­coln Memo­ri­al, in the McKin­ley Memo­ri­al at Niles, Ohio, in the Hall of Fame at New York Uni­ver­si­ty, and in their pro­to­type, Grant’s Tomb, one feels not the liv­ing beau­ty of our Amer­i­can past, but the mor­tu­ary air of ar­chae­ol­o­gy. The Amer­i­ca that Lin­coln was bred in, the home­spun and hu­mane and hu­mor­ous Amer­i­ca that he wished to pre­serve, has noth­ing in com­mon with the sed­u­lous­ly clas­sic mon­u­ment that was erect­ed to his mem­o­ry. Who lives in that shrine, I won­der—Lin­coln, or the men who con­ceived it: the lead­er who be­held the mourn­ful vic­to­ry of the Civ­il War, or the gen­er­a­tion that took plea­sure in the mean tri­umph of the Span­ish-Amer­i­can ex­ploit, and placed the im­pe­ri­al stan­dard in the Philip­pines and the Car­ib­bean?

On the plane of pri­vate cit­i­zen­ship, a sim­i­lar move­ment took place: while be­fore 1890 one can count the tombs in our ceme­ter­ies that boast loud­ly of the own­er’s earth­ly pos­ses­sions and pow­er, from that time on­ward the minia­ture tem­ple-mau­soleum be­comes more and more fre­quent. In fact, an en­tire his­to­ry of ar­chi­tec­ture could be de­duced from our ceme­ter­ies; all that has so far been de­scribed could be marked in the progress from the sim­ple slab, carved in al­most At­tic pu­ri­ty with a weep­ing wil­low or a cu­bis­tic cherub, that char­ac­ter­ized the eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry, to the bad let­ter­ing and the more awk­ward head­stones of the ear­ly nine­teenth cen­tu­ry; and from this to the in­tro­duc­tion of pol­ished gran­ite and iron or­na­ment in the post-Civ­il War ceme­tery, down to the me­chan­i­cal­ly per­fect mau­soleum, where the corpses are packed like the oc­cu­pants of a sub­way train, that some of our more ef­fu­sive­ly pro­gres­sive com­mu­ni­ties boast of to­day. As we live, so we die: no won­der Shel­ley de­scribed Hell as a place much like Lon­don.

The Ro­man de­vel­op­ment of New York, Chica­go, Wash­ing­ton, and the less­er me­trop­o­lises, had an im­por­tant ef­fect up­on the homes of the peo­ple. His­tor­i­cal­ly, the im­pe­ri­al mon­u­ment and the slum-ten­e­ment go hand in hand. The same process that cre­ates an un­earned in­cre­ment for the land­lords who pos­sess fa­vored sites, con­trib­utes a gen­er­ous quo­ta—which might be called the un­earned ex­cre­ment—of de­pres­sion, over­crowd­ing, and bad liv­ing, in the dor­mi­to­ry dis­tricts of the city. This had hap­pened in im­pe­ri­al Rome; it had hap­pened again in Paris un­der Napoleon III, where Hauss­mann’s sweep­ing re­con­struc­tions cre­at­ed new slums in the dis­tricts be­hind the grand av­enues, quite

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