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Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis
LEWIS MUMFORD'S REGIONALISM
Lewis Mumford's idea of regionalism is an integral part of his writings
and it allowed him to reflect upon problems of much deeper and broader
significance than architecture. The recent return of the question of regionalism
to architectural debates only makes Mumford's way of opening up mental
compartments and of making new, unorthodox syntheses - his own unique
legacy of free thinking - all the more alive and vital.
The notion of "regional" appears in Mumford's writings as early
as 1924 in Sticks and Stones. He begins the discussion with what he terms
the "imperial" Beaux- Arts architecture whose hold was still
strong in the United States thirty years after its apotheosis at the 1893
World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Along with the associated City
Beautiful movement, this style is, according to Mumford, an expression
of "conspicuous waste" creating "new slums in the districts
behind the grand avenues," which he likens to congested human "sewers,"
the equivalent of "icing on a birthday cake," which detracts
from the "realism" needed for the "the colossal task"
of "the renovation of the city."
In addition, the "imperial facade" is the "very cloak and
costume" of an "imperialist approach to the environment":
it only displays a "negligence of the earth," using the land
as a means of "profitable speculation and exploitation" rather
than as a "home," resulting in "depletion and impoverishment"
and the "poor quality" of the "great mass of modern houses"
that are "no longer framed for some definite site and occupants."
The alternative Mumford proposes is that of a "regional" architecture.
Although unclear about what form it will take, Mumford goes on to say
that it will be based on a deeper perception of "place" and
evolve out of the "new frameworks provided" by "regional
planning." Citing the precedent of "genuine regional planning"
in Ontario, Canada, he specifies that the new regionalist framework "will
redistribute population and industry" and will "serve economically."
Within it, regional sources would no longer be ignored or depleted "for
the benefit of ...the capital city." Moreover the more creative modes
of architecture that might be derived from "achievements in science
...experiments in democracy" will "no longer be stifled"
as they had been in the "imperial" framework.
In Mumford's The Brown Decades (1931) regionalism is not far from his
mind. Even if it is not mentioned by name, many passages echo the same
preoccupations as in his previous works, in particular the passage on
Thoreau who, by embracing "the totality of the natural environment,"
was a forerunner of a "fresh effort and action" against the
"relentless spread of venal and mechanical civilization," and
that on Frank Lloyd Wright's Oak Park and Prairie Style houses which,
"with their low pitched roofs, their rambling plans, their marked
horizontality," were "deliberate adaptations to the landscape,"
revealing a "sense of place."
Technics and Civilization follows in 1934. Here Mumford makes a brief
historical sketch of regionalism, tracing its roots as a broad cultural
phenomenon, which has influenced architecture as well as literature and
philosophy back to the 18th century. It was then that regionalism first
arose, in his view, as a form of opposition to the "de-regionalising
processes" that "machine civilization" embodied. Mumford
tries to distinguish his own view from this early form of regionalism
by arguing that the latter's "besetting weakness lies in the fact
that it is in part a blind reaction," an "aversion from what
is," rather than "an impulse toward what may be." If Mumford
looks forward to a "rational resettlement of the entire planet"
into "regions," it is in order "to create a higher quality
of life, material as well as social and spiritual" for the future.
In The South in Architecture (1941) Mumford first formulates his own deeply
original syncretic theory of regionalism in architecture. The reason the
United States cannot "create a regional architecture" at present,
he argues, is that "we are only beginning to know enough about ourselves
and our environment." In order to help overcome this lack of national
self-knowl- edge, he devotes a study to H. H. Richardson. Richardson was
"our first true regional architect," Mumford writes, because
"he interpreted New England to itself and gave it a better sense
of its own identity: he modified its Puritanic austerities: he gave to
its buildings a color that they lacked: a color derived from its natural
granites and sandstones, from weathered shingles and from the autumnal
tints of sumach and red oak." For all its "romanticism,"
Richardson's was "not an architecture of escape" from the "triumphant
industrialism and rampant commercial enterprise," which was "loud,
spectacular and vulgar." On the contrary, Richardson used his architecture
as a means of criticism: "No one better confronted his age than Richardson
did; no one exhibited more vigorously the strength to meet that age halfway
and yet not be drowned by its corrupt vices, its contempt for beauty,
its indifference to humanity." Mumford admires Richardson's last
works the most because in them Richardson becomes the first "regional"
and "romantic" architect to "realize that his architecture
must harmonize with the ever spreading forms of the machine," and
"embrace, by creating fresh forms, the railroad station and the office
building and all the other rising phenomena of the Industrial Age."
The new sense of "regionalism" combined with "romanticism"
and "functionalism"- best expressed according to Mumford in
the Glessner House in Chicago and the Pray Building in Boston-forms "a
primitive source of modem architecture, at least in the United States."
Mumford's October 1947 article in The New Yorker attacks the formalism
of "New Monumentalism," the "New Humanism," and "Personalism"
that had started to spring up in the writings of Giedion and Gropius (among
others) in the professional magazines of the time. The problem, Mumford
feels, is that, as in the case of the older "imperial" architecture,
these new trends once more place the "premium on the facade."
A preferable alternative, Mumford suggests, is Californian architecture,
more precisely "that native and humane form of modern- ism one might
call the Bay Region Style."! The idea is obviously so outrageous
and creates such a tremendous stir that an open debate is organized at
New York's Museum of Modem Art on the evening of February 11, 1948. The
debate is titled "What is Happening to Modem Architecture?"
and the speakers confronting Mum- ford include, among others, Barr, Hitchcock,
Johnson, Gropius, Breuer, Hamlin, Nelson, and Chermayeff. Most of the
participants totally misconstrue Mumford's regionalism, and Gropius goes
so far as to accuse him of a "chauvinistic sentimental national prejudice"
inappropriate at a moment when "human problems on earth" were
becoming an "interdependent entity."2
A year later, the Museum of Civic Art of San Francisco presents an exhibition
of the Domestic Architecture of the San Francisco Bay Region (September
16-October 30, 1949) for which Mumford hammers home his position. The
Bay Region Style, he argues, has only been used as a contrast to "the
restrictive and void formulas of the so-called International Style, tied
to tags and cliches."3 It was a reaffirmation of a truly modem movement
and a defense against its postwar fakes. The argument is taken up in Wurster's
lucid exposition in the same catalogue. In the special April 1954 issue
of California Monthly, Wurster again restates Mumford's position, affirming
that "architecture is a social art" and that "buildings
cannot and should not conjure up life in any terms but those of their
own era."
But it is a losing battle. Ironically, Mumford's revival of regionalism
is probably partly to blame for the spread of regional kitsch expressed
in projects like Edward Durrell Stone's Pakistan Institute of Science
and Technology, Walter Gropius's University of Baghdad, Yamasaki's entry
for the United States Embassy in London, and many of the Hilton hotels
around the world in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
One decade later, writing in the German Rowohlts Encyclopedia (1956),
Giedion responds to Mumford's 'regionalist' challenge to neo-monumentalism,
on the one hand by appearing to accept regionalism, while on the other
ignoring the issues Mumford had brought up in his discussion of regionalism.
Giedion will claim that even de Stijl was regionalist-by referring to
the similarity of its grid and that of the Dutch landscape. He points
to regionalism's importance for "technically underdeveloped countries,"
and in addition to respecting "cosmic and enthonic aspects,"
he praises regionalism's ability to "liberate us from the tyranny
of the rectangular form." Giedion remained silent regarding Mum-
ford's critique, through regionalism, of bureaucratic and technocratic
architecture. Mumford soon after publishes an anthology of classic writings
on American architecture by Greenough, Sullivan, Thoreau, Wright, Schuyler,
Hudnut, Bauer, Stein, Hitchcock, and Johnson, among others, titled Roots
of Contemporary American Architecture (1952). It is aimed at "the
incurable inferiority complex of many Americans, especially those who
have made themselves at home in Europe without having had the good fortune
to strike any deep roots in their own country." These Americans are
"embarrassed over the genius of Frank Lloyd Wright, because it had
no aesthetic resemblance to the glib mannerisms of Le Corbusier,"
another allusion to the International Style. Mumford's own introduction,
"What the American Tradition is Not," condenses previous writing.
The book does little to fulfill Mumford's wish to stem the tide of the
International Style in the United States, and even less to restore "conviction
and direction" combining, in a synthetic way, "the domestic,
the regional, the mechanical, the social and the universal" in the
American architectural profession. The Urban Prospect (1968) is an anthology
of some of Mumford's most worried, most perceptive, and most dismissed
articles on the city written during a key decade-the mid-1950s to the
mid-1960s- in the history of American cities. He criticizes the Urban
Renewal Act, urban expressways, regional councils, the Model Cities program,
the New Towns movement, and land control. He attacks Jean Gottmann for
his model of Megalopolis, which in Mumford's view is the "latest
anti-urban design for non-living" in an "anti- city" where
"mess is the message." To the "incoherent and purposeless
urbanoid non-entity" which the city has become as it "dribbles
over the devastated landscape" in the process of "producing
the greatest amount of power, prestige and profit" for the "distant
controllers" of the urban "mega machine," Mumford opposes
the idea once more. This is not surprising, since "all my thoughts
about the city have been toward laying the social foundations for urban
re-building on a regional scale in both old cities and new communities"
[emphasis added], the idea that a city is where "human interactions
and human responses" should be "the first consideration"
in order for the city to become "a place."
Mumford's almost life-long preoccupation, briefly outlined here, with
"place," "the earth," and "the land" as
a "home" rather than a means of "profitable speculation
and exploitation"-a concern linked to the vision of "the Bauer
who plants" becoming "the Bauer who builds" (Sticks and
Stones)-as well as his critique of "machine ridden civilization and
technology" brings to mind Martin Heidegger. Heidegger too writes
about place, earth, land, home, and the relation between "Bauer"
as both "builder" and "cultivator".
He too discusses the problem of homelessness as "not being redeemable
through technology and the machine." He too denounces technology
and the machine, which, although "shrinking distances in time and
space" and providing "housing," ultimately fail because
"short distance is not in itself neamess" (The Thing, 1950),
and because the "real plight of dwelling does not lie merely in a
lack of houses" (Building Dwelling Thinking, 1951).4
There is nothing strange in having such notions in common. Not only are
Mumford and Heidegger part of the same historical period, they are concerned
with the same problem: the crisis of a civilization dominated by the machine.
They both share the experience of the debates in Germany at the end of
the 1920s and beginning of the 1930s. Mumford visited Germany in 1932
to carry out research for his Technics and Civilization and to study German
planning and examples of Siedlungen. References to German books and projects
abound in Mumford's work at this time. Many of the dichotomies used by
Mumford in his regionalist theory recall well-known dichotomies developed
by German intellectuals during the first quarter of this century: culture
versus civilization, mechanical versus organic, Gemeinschaft versus Gesellschaft.
Many of these are associated with the anti-technical, anti-scientific,
anti-positivist, anti-mass movements of the period. And of course the
same oppositional categories are also to be found in Heidegger's writings.
But if Mumford and Heidegger are part of the same world, they occupy diametrically
opposed positions in it. Heidegger's idea of "the earth," "the
land," and "home" are inseparably linked with the idea
of the Volk, a specific, closed, hierarchical, regimented human group
joined by an abstract "Germanness" (Deutschtum), concrete ethnic
origins, soil (Blut und Boden), and language. In his view, these unique,
exclusive bonds (Bodem-ständigkeit) guarantee "unity" (Ganzheit),
"supremacy of character ," and other qualities that identify
a people as separate and superior. Loosening these bonds brings "decadence"
(Verderb), "alienation," and "internal disintegration"
(Zersetzung).
Mumford's "regionalism" has its ideological roots in anarchism,
more specifically in Henry David Thoreau's Walden and Peter Kropotkin's
ideas about "spatial power" decentralization, a process that
was indifferent to ethnic spatial differentiation. Mumford inherited these
latter ideas from his mentor Patrick Geddes, who had met Kropotkin in
1886. Mumford's regional- ism, like Thoreau's, Geddes's or Kropotkin's
could not be less connected to the idea of a prohibiting enclave, racial,
national, or social. In The South in Architecture, originally delivered
as a series of lectures to cadets who were about to leave for the front
in World War II, Mumford was conscious of the importance of regionalism
in Nazi Germany, with its "deification of Heimat ," and eager
to distinguish his own regional- ism from it. He prefaces his exposition
on Richardson by saying that "it would be useful if we formed the
habit of never using the word regional without mentally adding to it the
idea of the universal - remembering the constant contact and interchange
between the local scene and the wide world that lies beyond it,"
because "the problem of regionalism is ultimately how to live in
a world of particular interests" without ceasing "to sustain
mankind as a whole."
Apart from moral and political stances there are also basic methodological
issues that oppose Mumford and Heidegger. Heidegger's discourse is opaque
and rhetorical, dependent on an exalted tone rather than evidence. Throughout
all his writings Mumford maintained a rational argumentation, occasionally
sentimental and "Edwardian" in style, but always open to analysis.
This is not to say that his writings were indifferent to aesthetics. The
opening chapter of The Brown Decades, with its analysis of the color brown
as a "form of life," is one of the masterpieces of 20th-century
prose.
In addition, Heidegger's contemptuous dismissal of "housing"
(Building Dwelling Thinking) as not even "worthy of questioning and
...of thought" is grounded in a deeply anti-modernist attitude. Behind
it stands a condemnation of both modem technology and - as Pierre Bourdieu
has remarked - of the welfare state, in fact the very idea of social democracy.5
Heidegger' s problem is not with the placing of human priorities below
those of machine efficiency, nor with the inertia of bureaucratic practices
and centralization, but with the very existence of modem technology and
mod- em social programs that are degraded, plebeian, lax, and opposed
to the heroic essence of Heimat and Volk.
Far from anti-modernist, Mumford believes (and makes clear from the very
start) that regionalism in architecture is a necessary part of modernism.
One of Mumford's complaints about the International Style is that even
in matters of style it is not "modern" enough: he alludes obliquely
to the International Style in The South in Architecture, "today there
are hundreds of buildings ...that still lack the essential style of the
present age." In addition, Mumford shares a "common appreciation"
with the poet Hart Crane for the great work of modern engineering, the
Brooklyn Bridge, as a work of art, and devotes a long section to its aesthetic
contribution to the "feral landscape" of the city in The Brown
Decades. As early as Sticks and Stones, forty years before the polemics
of Scott-Brown and Venturi, Mumford criticizes architects because they
"neglected new elements like the bill-board, the skysign, the subway,
the tall building." He approved of "the cleanliness and strength"
of the modem steamship (Technics and Civilization) but only up to a point,
as he finds it "essentially paleotechnic in design.." And thirty
years before Reyner Banham promoted similar "Second Machine Age"
aesthetics, Mumford's sympathies are with the streamline Dymaxion Car
by Buckminster Fuller, the Union Pacific train, and the Soviet "Rail
Zeppelin, spherotrain." (Banham not only ignored this fact but obviously
having read only his postwar journalism, dismissed Mumford's critique
of modernism as containing "largely irrelevant tergiversations on
the problem of monumentality" coming from a person "too remotely
placed," who "in spite of his sociological perceptiveness,"
lacks a "real sense of the aesthetic issues involved.")
As for the welfare state, Mumford is against its "barracks architecture,"
and its "uncritical belief in constantly raising the quantitative
standard of production." In his Ribicoff Committee Statement of 1967,
he discourages the government from beginning a massive-scale housing program.
In other works he criticizes architectural failures of the TV A, but in
these criticisms he only opposes certain aspects of the welfare state,
those related to its overly regimenting, authoritarian tendency to function
as an "exclusive system." The idea of regionalism can be seen
as his answer to "the fallacy" of this system.
Mumford's "regionalist" antidote to "exclusive systems"
was neither a return to what he called "paleotechnic," "speculative
disorder" embodied in the libertarian 19th-century absence of planning,
nor a regression to the order of the Old World where "region"
meant something picturesque, "a place for the personal touch, for
the cherished accident" (The Transformation of Man). Furthermore,
the idea of Mumford's "regions," far from being an aristocratic,
critique of the liberties of the welfare state, is almost identical to
Kropotkin's anarchist idea of "decentralised ...small units, responsive
to direct human contact" (The City in History).
Kropotkin 's "regionalist" thinking reached Mumford through
Patrick Geddes but also possibly derived from his schoolmates, mostly
"the second generation of central European immigration that swept
into the East Side after the assassination of Czar Alexander 11."6
Mumford's anarchist definition of regionalism comes out in his belief
in civil disobedience, especially as he grows older. The following incident
is telling. At Harvard in the spring of 1970 Tzonis organized an exhibition
of the work of Arthur Glickson. As Mumford's ideas of regionalism had
significantly influenced Glickson's thinking and, since Mumford was resident
at Harvard during that year, Tzonis invited him to open the exhibition
and give a lecture. Mumford's talk departed from a discussion about Glickson's
analysis of terrain and his housing projects by linking this work with
the investigations of Patrick Geddes. He soon moved to a discussion about
the autocracy of stereotypes, con- formism, the stupidity of universal
systems, their denial of the immediate surrounding reality, and the reality
of the region. Then he spoke about the need for protest and defiance.
He ended by narrating an event that had taken place at Harvard several
years before, when the local authorities had ruled to cut all the trees
along Memorial Drive. The students, hearing about it, had decided to lie
down across the drive to stop the cutting. In the end the trees were saved
and traffic went on its way, at least for the moment. Although it was
a peculiar way for Mumford to move from Glickson's almost ecological,
cultural analysis of mediterranean landscape regions and his idealistic
- but at the same time pragmatic - housing projects to such moral, political
issues, during the lecture Mumford's transition appeared natural and consistent
to everyone.
Mumford applies Kropotkin' s general principles - to which he always remained
attached - to specific realities of the 1930s, endorsing typical welfare-state
modern housing and engineering projects that Heidegger would have abhorred.
In Technics and Civilization he celebrates the housing in Sweden "typical
of millions of such dwellings that came to Europe after 1915," thanks
to "neotechnic methods in community planning" alongside the
water-works of the same country, which he qualifies as "the new architecture"
of the "neotechnic region." In the 1932 MOMA exhibition on housing
he curates with Catherine Bauer, he presents prototypical welfare-state
housing projects such as Oud' s Kiefhoek development in Rotterdam and
Ernst May's Weimar Republic project in Romerstadt. He never stopped admiring
the engineering works of the TV A and some of the landscaping around it.
Another contrast between Mumford's and Heidegger' s approaches to "place"
and "technology" lies in their respective methods of investigation.
Heidegger pursues an abstract contemplative introspection, retreating
to a neocatholic meditational brooding about "the fourfold"
essence of dwelling, even though he had broken with the church, as Victor
Farias had shown!
Mumford on the other hand turns to history. In particular, he is drawn
by novel contemporary developments in Kulturgeschichte, embracing social
history, cultural history, and the history of science. He is inspired
by the writings of Max Weber, Werner Sombart, Franz Maria Feldhaus, and
Charles Singer. He also studies Marx and adopts the rigorous evolutionist
thinking of Patrick Geddes. He relies upon documents and firsthand testimonies;
he reviews "general" and "interpretative" histories
and seeks supporting evidence in biographies and novels.
For Mumford, writing history is not an end in itself, but a hermeneutic
handle with which to get a grip on current problems. Technics and Civilization
is undertaken, as he states in his introduction, in order "to understand
the dominant role played by technics in modem civilization." To do
this he proceeds to "explore in detail the preliminary period of
ideological and social preparation." If he also occasionally succeeds
in writing excellent history - the first chapter of Technics and Civilization
is one of the early classics of the "history of material life,"
while the book's sixth chapter is still the best concise sketch of the
history of regionalism - he does so only in passing.
We believe Mumford's penetrating theory of regionalism, which made him
successful in identifying, interpreting, and predicting so many problems
of the urban and natural environment, was very much the result of his
particularly broad historical perspective, encompassing such a great range
of human affairs, of putting, so to speak, Geddes's "outlook tower"
over a historical horizon. Conversely, Heidegger's blindness, which ultimately
made him unable to feel it necessary to distinguish between mass murder
and a traffic jam, was due to the absence of a historical under- standing
in his work, as the ungenerous, polemically uncaring essay on Building
Dwelling Thinking reveals. The absence of this broad historical perspective
in Heidegger and its presence in Mumford probably contributed to Heidegger's
opting for an exclusivist and totalitarian definition of Heimat and to
Mumford's inclusive and anarchist reinterpretation of the "re- gion."
It is always difficult to keep to a straight path in dealing with Mumford's
writings. His background is polymorphic and his interests constantly shift.
This is why his texts are relevant to so many different con- temporary
debates today. But there is an- other reason Mumford's regionalism seems
inextricable from so many other themes in his writings. In The South in
Architecture, Mumford tries to explain his interest in architecture: "It
is fortunate that we can turn to architecture for help in stating the
more general human problem that lies be- fore us today," because
"the problems raised by architecture" are "similar to those
raised in every other department of social life ... [and] some observation
which seems at first glance to have a purely architectural or aesthetic
significance will lead you to trace its ramifications to conclusions in
a quite different field."
Of all the themes that preoccupied Mumford - "the machine, the city,
the region, the group, the personality" (Technics and Civilization)
- the region is the most important means for pursuing his aim of stating
"the more general human problem." Indeed, whether he was criticizing
the Beaux Arts "imperial facade," the City Beautiful, machine
civilization, Heimat, the International Style, New Monumentality, or the
Megalopolis, he did so consistently from the standpoint of a regionalist.
In what we believe to be Mumford's last public statement, which is also
his last attack against the International Style, delivered during an event
organized at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in April 1982 to commemorate
the 50th anniversary of the International Style Exhibition at MOMA, that
standpoint remains unchanged:
There is no international society, therefore there is no such thing as
an international architecture ….. I saw what happened after the first
atom bomb was used, and within three weeks I had written an article denouncing
it as a menace to mankind …….. We are now at a stage where only
the utmost ruthlessness with ourselves, with our habits of life, with
our own outmoded ways of thinking will save us. Thinking about an international
style when we don't have an international society is absurd. 8
ACKNOWLEDGMENT: We wish to thank Anthony Alofsin. our coauthor in our
first article on Mumford and critical regionalism. "Die Frage des
Regionalismus," in M. Andritsky, L. Burckhardtetal., editors, Fur
Eine Andere Architektur, vol. I, (Frankfurt: Fisher, 1981) pp. 121-134.
NOTES
1. "Skyline," The New Yorker (Oct. 1947).
2. "What is Happening to Modem Architecture," The Museum of
Modern Art Bulletin 15, no. 1 (Spring 1948): pp. 1-21.
3. "Introduction," Domestic Architecture of the San Francisco
Bay Region (San Francisco, 1949).
4. In Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, A. Hofstader, editor
(New York: Harper, 1971).
5. Pierre Bourdieu, L' Ontologie politique de Martin Heidegger (Paris:
Minuit, 1988).
6. "A New York Adolescence," The New Yorker (Dec. 7, 1937).
7. Victor Farias, Heidegger et Ie Nazisme (Paris: Verdier, 1987).
8. G. S. D. News (Summer 1982).
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