16
PARTISAN REVIEW
period as anti-vital, he must condemn its architecture as socially dead.
This period "shows the fatal lack of connection between architecture
and the dominant social sources of order." The proof that "architec–
ture in the social sense was dead" lies in ' "the series of dusty revivals
that took place . . . society itself is the main source of architectural
form; only in terms of living functions could living form be created."
These banal tautologies and prejudices presuppose an indifference to
the qualities of post-mediaeval architecture incredible in Mumford;
it must issue from his prophetic zeal, not from his sensibility. When
he admires a building, he infers that it is connected with the "domi–
nant social sources of order," or with some stilI healthy part in a
diseased organism; if it is bad, then
it
lacks such a connection. Hence
if he values the work of Richardson (1838-1886 ) , he is led to con–
clude--on what evidence, I do not know- that this great architect
was basing his art "organically on the technical resources and social
principles of the new society," and that "he entered deeply into the
problems of his age and became familiar with its social and economic
forces." Richardson "proved that organically conceived, a railroad
station had no less capacity for beauty than a mediaeval fortress or a
bridge." But what has all this to do with the social principles of a
new society? Richardson in his forms still clung to the past. He used
traditional materials and accepted the existing social order no less than
the inferior builders of his time. His successful constructions were
made for the very men whom Mumford cannot condemn enough
as
ruthless despoilers of the environment and enemies of the organic.
In designing the great warehouse in Chicago for the notorious land–
speculator, Marshall Field, Richardson accepted the contemporary
city and commercial needs: it was built to suit the interests of a man
who, by Mumford's criteria, was personally responsible for much of
the evil of the Chicago environment. Mumford betrays himself again
when he cites "Berlage's handsome Bourse in Amsterdam as a parallel
example of great force and merit"; this is precisely a building which
serves the financial functions that Mumford never tires of denouncing.
The criticism of post-Renaissance architectural revivals as a sign
of impotence is too easy and superficial; it induces the false conclusion
that because we have a style of our own, our society is more healthy
and ordered. By proceeding from literature, music and painting
in
the same reductive spirit, one would have to draw the opposite con–
clusion. The charge of stylelessness in architecture has been repeated
already for a hundred years, but it is becoming more and more evi–
dent how much the architecture of the 20th century owes to these
revivals and what originality some of them possessed. Their nature
~
hardly exhausted by their imitative aspect. The values of a geometri–
cal, elemental simplicity are already clear in neo-classic architecture
