Sidewalk Critic, Lewis Mumford's Writings on New York

Mumford has nothing against the Rockefellers personally. He praises the Rockefeller Apartments on West Fifty-fourth Street. He likes the modesty of their drab brick facades, the interior layouts, especially the convex bays provided as dining alcoves, and the sympathetic scale in relation to the street. He is grateful to the new Museum of Modern Art for not looking like a temple or a palace and for enclosing a luxury of space behind a spartan front. He writes rapturously about the Cloisters, another cultural showpiece funded by the Rockefellers, though he cannot resist adding that perhaps this museum of medieval art has a hidden capitalist agenda. "Maybe this is an experimental model to help us face more cheerfully the Dark Ages," i.e., the economic collapse precipitated, as Mumford saw it, by industrial tycoons like Rockefeller.

Mumford wants the city to be rational. This is a function of his essential humanism. He wants a livable city, and for this people need adequate light, air, open space, ease of access, and a sense of community. This calls for rational planning. Mumford's ideal locale is Sunnyside Gardens, Queens, where he lived for a time, because it places these things within affordable range. He is an early champion of the Regional Plan Association, because he recognizes the critical relationship of suburbs and city, a dysfunctional link that will become even more problematic with the emergence of mass suburbanization in the years after World War II.

Today, Mumford is useful mainly as an antidote, as a corrective to Nietzschean attitudes that we all tend to get so excited about. He was still writing when these antirationalist ideas began to surface in the early '60s. He took vicious exception to Jane Jacobs's 1961 Death and Life of Great American Cities, which he described as "Mother Jacobs' Home Remedies for Urban Cancer." Jacobs, an editor for Architectural Forum, lived in Greenwich Village and led the crusade against Robert Moses in his attempt to run a highway through Lower Manhattan. Her book was an attack on city planning as then practiced. She celebrated diversity, attacked the uniformity of planning, and lit into Ebenezer Howard, father of the British Garden Cities movement and a hero of Mumford's.

In 1966, Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture continued the turn against planning with remarks like "Main Street is almost all right." In the following decade, Rem Koolhaas's Delirious New York extolled what he called "the culture of congestion," an urban condition that Mumford would have considered simply pathological. Nor would he have looked favorably on Diana Agrest's depiction of the city as the "subconscious of architecture," the messy, unruly grab bag of memories, desires, and traumas lurking beneath the ordered surfaces envisioned by design.

Today, some of us who write about architecture find ourselves in the position of latter-day (or reborn) Surrealists. This is partly because of the work we're seeing. Buildings by Koolhaas, Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, and others operate most fully in a relationship of intersubjectivity with the viewer. Also, at this moment in history, psychology offers an interpretive language critics and general readers are likely to share, even if it hasn't been applied extensively to architecture in the past.