LOOKING FORWARD TO LOOKING BACKWARD
17
(Ledoux, Soane and Schinkel have an imposing modernity); and
the Gothic revival undoubtedly affected the modern taste for elusive,
incommensurable arrangements and the interest in technical sources
of forms, whatever the misunderstandings of the neo-Gothic architects
(echoed by Mumford!) about the constructive and functional char–
acter of Gothic buildings. Conversely, Mumford tends to accept the
programmatic definitions of functionalism uncritically, on their face
value. And in assimilating, as he does, modern architectural
~tyle
to
cubism, which is anything but organic and social in
his
sense, his social
judgment of the style becomes even more mysterious and confusing.
If
republican Germany produced it and the Nazis have restricted its
use, it should also be remembered that the Italians have in turn wel–
comed it as "rational architecture."
Mysticism of the Organic.
His stylistic concepts and analogies are
not merely incidental to Mumford's program; they are material as–
sumptions and elements of a method which, when applied to our own
issues, entail
his
reformist outlook. Just as he describes the past in
terms of a baroque style and lifeless revivals, expressing social decay,
so the new civilization
is
described as an "organic" style already evi–
dent in the later 19th and the 20th century, apart from actual eco–
nomic and social relations. To complete the new tendency, inherent for
Mumford in the psychology of new forms of technique and in a spon–
taneous, unlocalized feeling for the organic, one must rebuild the
environment and get rid of bad obstructing habits inherited from the
past. "Biotechnic standards of achievement must produce a system
of values destructive to metropolitan finance."
There is an engaging historical dialectic in Mumford's conception
of the modern "organic style." The universal middle ages are organic
on a local, ascetic, un-technological level; the nationalistic, baroque
technology denies the organism; then, annihilating and uniting both,
the new civilization (our own), regional and international, is organic
through greater mastery of technique. But nothing is more unclear
than Mumford's idea of the organic. In both books an object is certi–
fied as organic if it is alive or extremely complex, if it serves or per–
tains in some way to a living being, or if it is an institution responsive
to the biological needs of all individuals. So, to establish the organic
sources of modern architecture, he points to the fact that the Victorian
Crystal Palace- a gigantic showcase for industrial arts that by Mum–
ford's standards are anti-vital and decadent- was the deSign of a
gardener inspired by the greenhouse, and that the first applications of
concrete were in gardening. But with as much plausibility one might
argue that modern architecture has a religious origin since the first
building entirely in concrete was a church (1894); or one might say
