The Competitiveness of Nations
in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
Harry Hillman Chartrand
April 2002
Wright, F.L.,
The Living Cit
Horizon Press, NYC,
1958.
| APA Index Article Index Part One: Nature Part Two: Illusion Part Three: Decentralization Part Four: Usonians Part Five: The Present |
The internal character of a man is often expressed in his exterior appearance, even in the manner of his walking and in the sound of his voice. Likewise the hidden character of things is to a certain extent expressed in their outward form. He ought to look with his own eyes into the book of Nature and become able to understand it. The knowledge of nature as it is -not as we imagine it to be - constitutes true philosophy. But he who is not true to himself will not see the truth as it is taught by nature, and it is far easier to study a number of books and to learn by heart a number of scientific theories than to ennoble one’s own character to such an extent as to enter into perfect harmony with nature and to be able to see the truth. Wisdom in man is nobody’s servant and has not lost its freedom, and through wisdom man attains power over the stars. He must realize the presence of the highest in his own heart before he can know it with his intellect. The spiritual temple is locked with many keys, and those who are vain enough to believe that they can invade it by their own power, and without being shown the way by the light of wisdom, will storm against it in vain. Wisdom is not created by man; it must come to him, and cannot be purchased for money nor coaxed with promises, but it comes to those whose minds are pure and whose hearts are open to receive it. The highest a man can feel and think is his highest ideal, and the higher we rise in the scale of existence and the more our knowledge expands, the higher will be our ideal. As long as we cling to our highest ideal we will be happy in spite of the sufferings and vicissitudes of life. The highest ideal confers the highest and most enduring happiness... The highest power of the intellect, if not illuminated by love, is only a high grade of animal intellect, and will perish in time; but the intellect animated by the love of the Supreme is the intellect of the angels, and will live in eternity. All things are vehicles of virtues, everything in nature is a house wherein dwell certain powers and virtues such as God has in fused throughout Nature and which inhabit all things in the same sense as the soul is in man. True faith is spiritual consciousness, but a belief based on mere opinions and creeds is the product of ignorance, and is superstition. This physical body, which is believed to be of so little importance by those who love to dream about the mysteries of the spirit, is the most secret and valuable thing. It is the true “stone which the builders rejected, but which must become the corner-stone of the temple. It is the “stone” which is considered worthless by those who seek God above the clouds and reject Him when He enters their house. This physical body is not merely an instrument for divine power, but it is also the soil from which that which is immortal in man receives its strength.
What sap and leaves are to the great Oak a healthy aesthetic is to a
People.
This book is written in the firm belief that true human culture has a healthy sense of the beautiful as its life-of-the-soul: an aesthetic organic, as of life itself, not on it; nobly relating man to his environment. The sense of this natural aesthetic would make of man a gracious, integral, potent part of the whole of human life. Ethics, Art and Religion survive in civilization only as departments of this aesthetic sense, and survive only to the extent that they embody human sentiment for the beautiful. To ignore this truth is to misunderstand the soul of man, to turn him over to science ignorant of his true significance; and to remain blind to his destiny. p. 9
Salvation depends upon the realization that, with science carried far
enough and deep enough, we will find great art to be the sure significance of
all that science can ever know of life and see that art and religion are valid
prophecy of everything that science may ever live to convey. p. 10
“Once upon a time,” not so long ago, the conquering of physical or
territorial realm was the Frontier. But now to conquer the sordid, ugly,
commercialism in this machine age, this “bony fiber of the dry tree” - that
spiritual conquest is our new Frontier. Only by growing a healthy aesthetic,
organic in the souls of our young polyglot nationals can we win this victory,
greatest of all victories - Democracy. p.11
NATURE
Earth
Centralization - without plan - has overbuilt.., the properly citified
citizen... is sidewalk-happy. p.17
By elevator, the upended Street, his life is thus limited and confused,
contained instead of expanded; a vicarious life virtually sterilized by
machinery, by medicine, by more and more stimulants. His demoralization has only
begun.
Nevertheless - relentlessly - over him, beside him, beneath him, even in
his heart as he sleeps is fear. Fear. Fear forever ticking in his taxi-meter of
triple rent - rent for land, rent for money, rent for being alive - each of them
goading the anxious “consumer’s” unceasing struggle ...
p.19
Thus the system is steadily increasing in man his animal instincts, his
fear of being turned out of the hole into which he has been accustomed to crawl
in again each evening to crawl out again next morning. Natural horizontality - true line of
freedom on earth - is going, gone. The citizen condemns himself to...
pig-piling. What he aspires to is a
sterile urban verticality, actually unnatural to him because he is upended,
suspended and traffic-jammed by this verticality due to his own mad excess.
p.20
The Shadow-of-the-Wall -
Primitive Instincts Still Alive
Cave-dwellers bred their young in the shadow of the wall. Mobile wanderers bred theirs under the
stars in such safety as seclusion by distance from the enemy might afford. p.21
Instead of expanding our spiritual strength as human beings by means of
these new scientific advantages, we are content to practice artifice without
art. The Substitute or Imitation is
the signpost of our cultural lag. Science can do little or nothing about
all this. It is up to the American
spirit seeking above things for organic (natural) forms truly essential
to a culture of our own. p. 24
Democracy: Gospel of
Individuality
the citizen is now trained to see life as a cliche whereas the architect
should train his own mind, and thereby the citizen’s, to see the nature of glass
as Glass, the board as Board, a brick as Brick; see the nature of steel as
Steel: see all in relation to each other as well as in relation with Time,
Place, and Man.
What then is the Nature of this idea we call organic architecture? We are here calling this architecture The
Architecture of Democracy. Why?
Because it is intrinsically based on Nature-law: law for man not law over
man. So understood, so applied.
It is simply the human spirit given
appropriate architectural form. p. 25
At more ancient is the wisdom, and it too is modern, that recognizes this
new democratic concept of man free in a life wherein money and land-laws are
established as subordinate to rights of the human being. That means first of all that good
architecture is good democracy.
So dignity and worth would come to our society if the individual were
thus individual: true individuality, no longer written off as some kind
of personal idiosyncrasy by way of “taste” but protected as essence, to be
understood as the safest basis for interpretation of science, the practice of
art, and ultimately the inspiration of a true religion. This is the modern world today; it always
was; it always will be. Now in
order to become organic we will learn to understand that form and
function are as one...
This new sense-of-the-within naturally unfolding, taking form by the
culture of art, architecture, philosophy and religion, natural; all being
content to look within to the Spirit for the solution of every human problem
and, by expanding the means so found, enlarging and achieving new, varied
expressions of life on earth… this
would be the old wisdom, ancient as Laotze at least; yet modern. That is modern Architecture and modern
manhood. p.
26
ILLUSION
Social and Economic
Disease
To look at the cross-section of any plan of a big city is to look at
something like the section of a fibrous tumor. p. 31
A
Makeshift
Three major artificialities have been drafted and grafted by law upon all
modern production; hangovers from petty customs originating in feudal
circumstances... Rent for money;
rent for land; really only extrinsic forms of unearned increment; and the third
artificiality is traffic in invention. A graft by way of patents is another but
less obvious form of “rent”. p.
33
Rent
a new army of lawyers. It
becomes impossible to hold, operate, or distribute land, sell or buy money, or
manufacture anything, safely, or even marry, make love or die, without the guide
and counsel of these specialists in the extraordinary entanglements of rent, of
rules, of regulations applied to this or that involute commercial expedient with
courts of counters where the attempt to put law above man is made in this
complex game we now call our civilization in the prosperity of the machine
age... p. 35
But what about the man of ideas who labors out of the unknown essential
sustenance for all? What about the
imaginative individual who gives reality to thought? The planner-designer - he who gets
results from materials so far as the life of society is concerned with them?
Where in all this is the Artists
Agrarian, Artist Mechanic, the inspire Teacher, Inventor, Scientist - in short
the Artifex?
… Facades of false fortune place false premiums upon false traits of his
character... p.37
The
Artifex
Meantime, essential right-mindedness and decency of the artifex have
moved him to go on working in this confusion of our machine age; trying to
cultivate justice, generosity, and pity; best of all, the beauty of individual
responsibility
in the midst of chaos. Upstream almost all the way without very
well knowing why or how, worshiping not a golden god hidden in a cave but a
great spirit ruling all by Principle. ... p. 38
An
Experiment
Our new nation, called a republic, was an experiment in freedom, eagerly
manned by refugees from despotism and monarchy of all nations. Soon we became a great federation of
states, the greatest ever known, these United States of America. United, the states became a nation - call
it Usonia...
Though with no corresponding revisions of traditional, Romish, or feudal,
property-rights; and not much, if any, consideration given to appropriate new
economy, our new country was founded upon a more just freedom for the individual
than any before known... Then arose
indiscriminate private wealth by way of fortuitous survivals of despotisms:
feudal money-getting and property-holding. The new nation carelessly adopted them.
An economic order more suited to monarchy and despotism than freedom was let
loose with fresh ascendancy. Now
see a new free-for-all race for power of riches, riches of power. It soon outran such culture as appeared,
or bought it ready made. Unnatural
reservoirs of capital as predatory accumulation made away with what little
cultural understanding the new country had originally borrowed - a culture of no
indigenous integrity... As a matter
of course the original idea of Freedom grew thin so far as culture went, and
grew dim or died.... Riches in
general so rapidly overwhelmed any indigenous culture that so-called “American
architecture” fell to the great low in eclecticism of all time. “Culture” attempted thus ready-made
became a mere commodity.... pp.39-40
Here ... a self-determining polyglot people on incomparable ground,
subscribing to the highest ideal of human freedom yet known, sprang into being
as a nation with a curious bastardized culture: its culture a quarreling
collection of ready-made cultures of the world, borrowed, pieced together by
uncultivated “taste”... Thus
quondam bastardization of the new nation’s character was artificially elected
and applied: an artificiality soon to be confirmed by “higher” education! pp. 40-4 1
Meantime the more fancified citizenry also committed promiscuous adultery
by the purchase of atrocities in the name of the Louis’ and their mistresses.
Paris was capital not only of the
pseudo-English colonial venture in culture: it now became the capital of our own
pseudo-aesthetic interests. p.
42
So, once again, this time in the latter days of the nineteenth century
and early in the twentieth, our American academic world mistook the setting sun
for dawn. “Pseudo” by official
order was duly confirmed as Precedent and ruled over popular education. “American” in culture became the highly
respectable following-after into general outer darkness which we now see in
perspective as the present “International” cliche. p. 43
The Culture
Lag
The Jeffersonian democratic ideal, so inspiring in the beginning, is
really the highest form of aristocracy this world has ever seen: aristocracy
genuinely a quality of the man himself- not merely bestowed upon him by heredity
or privilege: now a matter of character”
But (this) aristocracy lacked spiritual nourishment... Indigenous culture was - to this day -
left to languish. Except as the
cultural mask might be imposed by architects - themselves no more than drapers
and haberdashers of the arts -shallow couturiers who functioned as
“artists”...
This cultural mask has thus covered and concealed our true nature. In the name of some bad forms of
surface-decoration, or the cliche internationale, our country was and still is
being taught to call it Architecture...
Such substitute for culture - suitably urban –as we have set up in the
big cities of these United States, thus betray the country. It functions as something imposed upon
American life because we - the people - could not or would not learn the value
of culture really grown out of the daily circumstances of our life...
p.44
For the
Individual
Buddha believed in nonvicarious effort - the spirit - only: that is to
say, only in effort disciplined from within...
And Jesus taught the dignity and worth of the individual as developed
from within. “The Kingdom of God is
within you”: the potential of individuality. Christianity in his name diverted his
teaching, professionalized and confused it in creeds and churches. Even by the Gothic
cathedral.
The Church, with its creeds that Jesus did not want... too often
emphasized the desirability of the disappearance of individuality: this, more
ore less, is also the politics of fascism or of communism; similar to the
practice of monarchic, socialistic or communistic peoples. Meantime the Protestant succeeded in
bringing individuality back, but only partially; as a compromised
Ideal.
Some five hundred years before the life of Jesus, the Chinese philosopher
Laotze preached the sense of Individuality as a reflection of the organic unity
of the Cosmos: the true source of human power, the all pervasive
“state-of-becoming”! Our own
democratic ideal of the social state seems originally conceived as some such
unity. That is to say, Democracy
was conceived as the free growth of humane individuality, mankind free to
function together in unity of spirit... p.45
Out of American “rugged individualism” captained by rugged captains of
our rugged industrial enterprises we have gradually evolved a crude, vain power:
plutocratic “Capitalism. Not true
capitalism... The actual difference
between such “individualism” and individuality of true democracy lies in the
difference between cowardly selfishness and noble
selfhood!
“Isms” only aggravate misuse of vicarious powers... Like the abuses of any good thing abuses
of individuality will bring reactionary consequences... If creative ability is our concern, we
seem to have failed... Quantity
uprises at the expense of quality.., surely the antithesis of Democracy. p. 46
Democracy cannot afford mere personality to be mistaken for true human
individuality. Nor can the human
will and intellect ever produce true individuality. Any such attempt could make only a mimic,
or a monster: perhaps at best a scientist. Should our own great or near-great ever
become able to draw the line between the Curious and the Beautiful, this
difference between personality and individuality will come clear. Salvation of our culture therefore lies
in practices which would be evident enough if we evolve true definitions of the
character of our purpose and the nature of our circumstances. p.47
And true individuality has no more to do with the crass methods of
mercantile egotism such as ours than with communism or socialism at its other
extreme. Democratic individuality,
a salient essence of all human life, is the fundamental core of Art and Artist -
creative...
Great religious leaders - Buddha, Jesus, Abdul Bahai, Mohammed, Laotze
especially - wanted no formalism by institutionalizing religion: tolerated no
bureaucracy or officialism in the realm of the Spirit. Such integrity of the soul wanted not
even disciples! p.
48
Now, we are here reading an actual consideration of the nature of the
future city of democracy: a city with greater future for human individuality: a
life deeper organic sense, true to man’s Spirit - individuality being
fundamental integrity of the soul of man in his own time and place - and so most
valuable asset of the human race. Without this city of its own America will
have never known a culture of its own. No great architecture can arise from us
or for us based upon the expedient use of the ancient city. Wherever there will be the democratic
city, individuality of conscience and the conscience of individuality will be
inviolate. p.49
The Inexorable Law of
Change
In no planning which the old city received has modern spacing been based fairly enough upon the new time scale of modern mobilization - the human being no longer on his feet or seated in the trap behind a horse... but in his motor car or going on his plane... Urban life, originally, was a festival of wit, a show of pomp and a revel of occasion while all was still in human scale. p. 49
Illusion
And yet, coming to the greatest of them, New York, for the first time,
one has the illusion that we must be a great people to have raised this heavy
barrage of relentless commercial mantraps so high; to have grandly hung so much
book-architecture upon cumbrous old-fashioned steel framing, so regardless.
Inhabited at such enormous cost not
alone in money but in all human values as well... p.51
Exaggerated perpendicularity has no such bill-of-health. It is now the terrible stricture of our
big city. Whatever is perpendicular
casts a shadow: shadows of the skyscraper fall aground and where crowded are an
utterly selfish exploitation. Because, if the civic rights of the
neighbor down there below, in the shadows, were to be exercised, there would be
no ‘skyscaping’ at all. p.54
The Light of
Day
Although skyscraperism fits so well into the primitive psychology of the
“rugged individualist” of the industrial revolution - he who from an office
fifty stories up above the man in the street casts his ominous shadow p.
54
the vertigo of verticality... p. 55
The light of day? Streams of
more and more insignificant facades and dead walls rise and pour out of hard
faced masses behind and above human beings all crawling on hard pavements like
ants to “hole in” somewhere or find their way to this or that cubicle... Tier above tier rises the soulless
habitation of the shelf.... This
vast prison with glass fronts...
Therein lurk the ambitions and frustrations of human beings urbanized out
of scale with its own body... p.
56
A City should now be the planned consequence of better understanding of
what the nature of the machine may mean to the man with a conscience... p.
58
Forces Tearing the Vortex
Down
Miracles of technical invention with which our “hit-and-run” culture has
had nothing to do are - despite misuse - new forces with which any indigenous
culture must reckon.
ONE: Electrification. Given
modern electrification, distance is all but annihilated so far as human
communication go; and by electric light human occupation continuously
illuminated...
TWO: Mechanical mobilization. Given the steamship, airstrip, and
automobile, the human sphere of contact immeasurably
widens...
THREE: Organic architecture. Given the Principles of nature, material
resources become something no longer to be fought against but fought for. ...
With organic architecture his
resource, man is a noble feature worthy of his own ground... Planned revolution by evolution is now
organic.
The sense of space in spaciousness is not only scientific (it always was)
but now fruitful, a genuine becoming. Congested senseless verticality both
inartistic and unscientific! To
this spiritual awakening of the architect comes the space-loving human being as
client. To freedom-loving democracy
all stricture is as intolerable as it ought to have been so long ago. pp.
64-65
Looking
Backward
Earlier in time human intercommunications could only be had by direct
personal contact. Commercial or
social communication was slow and difficult. The City was of necessity a close-built
mass - a mart, the only general meeting place, therefore the only distribution
center. So the pattern of the
feudal city grew to serve human needs as they then were. Human concentration, then, was not an
unmixed evil. Such cities as there
were grew as organisms; grew naturally as the organism of our own body grows;
the natural result of proper feeding. Acceleration of tissue by circulation and
chemical activity such as characterizes a malignant tumor did not then manifest
itself. The city then was not
malignant. The ancient city was not
opposed to the course of normal human life in relation to natural beauty of
environment; it was as inevitable as it was desirable. Cities of ancient civilizations grew to
relieve pressures then caused by the lack of integration now possible to us.
Those ancient civilizations have
perished.
Perhaps learning lessons from the past, modern European cities wisely
resisted skyscrapering and remained nearer human scale... pp.
67-68
Freedom or
Conscription
Character is a healthy individual growth of freedom from
within...
Aristocracy from within, which our forefathers hoped to see a reality -
interpreted by Thomas Jefferson as “the bravest and the best”. p.72
DECENTRALIZATION
Integration on the New Scale of
Spacing
After our long journey - at least 500 years long - away from the original
art of Architecture the mother-art, other arts, though not so integral with the
daily life of the human being, now show signs of
awakening.
N.B. Usonia is Samuel Butler’s suggestion of a name for our nameless
nation (see his Erewhon). p.77
First, decentralization, then planned reintegration. Reinterpretation of our life by modern
art and science will soon point the way forward to this realization. So work, leisure and culture: Art,
Religion and Science; all will be, nearly as possible, one. Only then may each man be a whole
man, living a full life. p. 78
If the true architect’s faith still lives, it must live as it has always
lived: as honest experiment made by courageous, intelligent radicals in love
with the poetic principle - and practicing these principles as architecture. p.
80
Broadacres
It is significant that not only have space values entirely changed
to time values, now ready to form new standards of movement-measurement,
but a new sense of spacing based on speed is here. p. 82
Analysis
The countryside is the place for the skyscraper. p.
84
Democracy by
Definition
Democracy: the integrated society of small units each of the highest
quality imaginable and all characteristic. Genuine. p. 84
Land and
Money
What the nation has been calling democracy is really only mediocrity
rising into high places -mobocracy...
Interior discipline of trained imagination is needed for good
citizenship, and needed to adapt modern machine craft to such higher uses as
would expand and enrich the quality of all human life. This, too, is a matter of good natural
architecture.
But first of all we need a new aesthetic ... p.85
Organic
Architecture
Organic architecture has demonstrated the fact that severe
machine-standardization need be no bar to even greater freedom of
self-expression than ever known. p.
87
Action
All history plainly shows that “force” did not nor can it ever
organize growth of anything but resentment, hatred, revenge, more war -
the epitome of all ill-will. p.89
Feudal
Unworthy survivals of feudal thinking have made of our survivals of the
medieval city a monstrous conspiracy against the freedom of life. p.89
Banking heavily on Yesterday the banker is continually stalling, or
already betraying Tomorrow. p.90
Our
Architecture
Call architecture organic to distinguish it from the pseudo-classic order
of the schools, derived mainly from grafted attempts at reclassification called
the “international style”. A
cliche. p.91
The New
City
The architecture of the city may now be basic. Yes. As architecture is basic to essential
structure anywhere of the timeless sort we can now build. This is no less the structure of whatever
is music, poetry, painting or sculpture - or whatever else man’s interior
sensibilities may thrive upon when disciplined from within by an ideal. Architecture must see civic life in terms
of such human freedom as here prophesied: recognize native ground as the sure
basis of a free life in a free city. p. 95
When democracy triumphs and builds the great new city, no man will live
as a servile or savage animal; holing in or trapped in some cubicle on an
upended extension of some narrow street.... p. 96
Usonia
Modern gifts - glass, steel in tension, steam, electromagnetic sciences,
chemistry, new atomic dissonance, alchemy; these and more, coming to here,
implement the new era. We do not
recognize their real significance. But we begin to use our own human gifts
of creative imagination in the light of organic principles; the poetic
principles and ever new ethics of right and wrong according to organic law,
these will protect us. p.97
Values
Architecture (organic) knows architectural values only as human values,
values true not only to Nature but to humanity as
nature...
What is building without intimate relationship to the ground it stands
upon and the inhabitants who occupy it? p. 102
Our youth should be so educated as to discern and stand square with the practical, instead of oblique to the expedient; able to know with sure mind the difference between the merely Curious and the truly Beautiful.
Recapitulation
Once again: “All fine
architectural values are human values, else not valuable.” Humane architectural values are
life-giving always, never life-taking. p. 105
USONIAN
A Legacy We Have Received From
the Past
Are we all parasites?... Only as idle heirs of civilization... No
man should ever be so bound or time-bound. Nor should any man be a slave to or for
‘a living’. The proper free man
should do, in the main, what he really wants to do when he wants... p.
109
Individuality
At present, the multiplicity of systems, subversive schemes, especially
the 57 varieties in our modern architecture, have gone down so completely as the
common expedient as to be too often mistaken by us for civilization
itself.
The old order is breaking up under the load our senseless weight puts
upon us...
Political partisanship becomes a form of gangsterism. “Party politics” are no true product for
nourishment of sentient individuality. Various eclecticisms are the only feature
our nation yet knows... p. 110
Specious
Authority
Therefore if instead of the organic architecture of Broadacre City we
continue to have mere styles-formula retained by the A.I.A. as architecture,
this cataclysm will come because so many mere money-makers have neither the wit,
imagination, nor integrity to discriminate between personality the exterior, and
individuality the interior; and more capacity for enmity than for gratitude. p.
111
Architecture and Acreage
Together Are Landscape
Architectural features of any democratic ground plan for human freedom
rise naturally by and from topography... built in sympathy with omnipresent
nature that deep feeling for beauty of terrain... would seek: beauty of
landscape not so much to build upon-as to build with...
p.112
And - to repeat - organic architecture is no less essential to the
structure of painting, sculpture, music and religion because, by way of nature,
mankind is spiritually awake to the uses and great purposes of all the arts that
are needed to make the culture of a civilization. Inevitably therefore architecture as the
great mother-art and moderator contains in principle the essential basis,
philosophy, and structure that should inspire them all! Architecture lives again as it has ever
lived - the great final proof of quality in any civilization whatsoever. Always true basis or cornerstone of a
culture. p. 113
The ideal of organic unity held firmly in mind, well in hand, the
architect would himself gradually become a spiritual power, equal to his vast
new opportunities. pp.
113-114
The Usonian
Vision
Such integrated distribution of living all related to ground - this
composes the new city embracing the entire country... The city becomes the nation. p.
119
Great architects will surely then develop creative buildings not only in
harmony with greenery and ground but in intimate patterns of the personal lives
of individual owners... “Styles” no
longer fashionable, style itself will have a chance to flourish everywhere.
Style now indigenous. pp. 119 &121
Architecture alive: the cultivator of youth - preserver of beauty of
nature - guide and counselor of the growing American family as well as
conservator of crops, flocks and herds. The philosophy of organic architecture
looks and sees these all together as the field in which the architect is born to
practice. p. 131
See the architecture of heavy enclosure for human life (the
fortification) vanishing! A new
kind of building to take its place comes to view - like magic - building now
more natural to our time... The
hard and fast lines between outside and inside (where he is concerned) tend to
disappear.
Mis-education
And, too, the fashionable house of the past period-of-the-periods was not
only a sodden box-mass of some kind - masses of building materials punched full
of holes “a la” some desiccated mode or ancient fashion recorded by museums -
but often the result of mania for the antique which made every house a bazaar, a
museum, a junk shop. p.
141
To
Begin
Beginning at the beginning is apparently an art in itself long lost...
“organic”... it also indicates
where part is to part as part is to whole. But before it is truly significant we
must realize form and function as one. p. 142
Change Will Take
Effect
But should we fall to imitating machines in planning our buildings, even
if inspired by steamships, automobiles, airplanes, bathtubs, refrigerators and
water closets, then comes the streamline dogma - novel but dogma all over again.
This time the dogma is the cliche:
“Form follows Function. p.
143
inferior desecrators. p. 144
The creative artists? Well -
naturally he is himself one who by nature is as important to society as society
is important to itself. Which
should mean that he is by nature (and by office) the qualified leader in any
society, natural, native interpreter of the whole visible forms of any social
order in or under which we choose to live. If worthy to be so accepted, happily so.
If rejected by our society, it will
be because society will not learn to see the true radical as the romanticist he
is. The romanticist we are bound to
discover as the true realist: to see the creative artist, then, as modern seer
of the poetic principle. Not only
is he way-shower but, with experienced command of modern ways and means, he is
our natural leader toward a coveted culture of our own. p.
145
The Word
‘Organic’
Such then is the true significance of the word ‘organic’. We often refer to this quality as
“entity”. p.146
The Usonian on His Own
Acreage
The poor are poor because of triple rent: rent for land, rent for money,
rent for ideas. p.146
housings for nobodies, not homes for somebody p. 147
THE PRESENT
The
Usonian
To the Usonian! He is the
American citizen. For him our
pioneer days are not over! Perhaps
pioneer days never should be. But
the American frontier has shifted in many ways. Efficient and brave, our forebears took
life in their own hands and often in the covered wagon went ever westward to
clear grand new ground for more humane habitation. But they only blazed the way for another,
unexpected, instrument of an efficiency that, by way of their own “rugged
individualism.” became the exaggeration of their own good qualities; and now
unchecked this menace grows on into the curse of exaggeration of the
capitalistic centralization of our big city. As a consequence, inane mediocrity or
vulgar profanity, we now see, has come out of our new power only to push the
lives of citizens around? With
courage and strength of the grand paternal inheritance, he the pioneer was
native forerunner of the type of domination we see today building its own mortal
doom and naming it for a monument to progress. The milestone and the gravestone - our
skyscraper - in the potential cemeteries that our proudest cities are to become.
The skyscraper thus will mark the
end of an epoch; put a period to the plutocratic republic of America, which the
industrial revolution raised to the 9th degree by the exercise of selfish
inconsiderate prowess; and mark the beginning of another revolution. Machine power is running away with man
and running away from the Western world to contaminate worlds of the “yellow
man” the East. Consequences of our
own industrial revolution, not foreseen, have crossed the Pacific and the
Atlantic. Perhaps our salvation
will lie in what such capitalistic centralization by machinery as ours is now
will eventually do to the “yellow man” himself - as it has already done to the
“white man”. That right might be
our only hope in any impending future which the nature of humankind seems to
have staged for us - the coming war between dark and bright - the war between
Occident and Orient - West and East. White and yellow? Yes, this impending consequence is our
only hope - the atom is it? -but before that time comes the machine may have
done its work for the yellow man that it already has done for us. His increased numbers -say nine to one -
may not be able to tip the balance in his favor. pp.196-197
The New
Pioneer
is this the best power of which we as a people seem capable? Well, if it is infallibly to be on that
basis, we are at the tail end of a civilization! The end, not the middle, not even
the beginning of a great one.
A good statesman would be naturally a scientist, an architect of human
happiness. p.
198
...Whereas the only impregnable human defense we have on earth is faith
in ourselves and in our own kind. p.199
Nature
We have too much of the blinding externalities as well as the manifest
disadvantage of ancient Roman law we have adopted by way of Oxford and Cambridge
as paternal influence. p.
200
To Have and To
Hold
The valiant special man (non-common) among us - he alone is free. But even so he is free at his own peril;
enemy, and therefore the dislike of the common man pursues him to some bitter
end for both. p. 202
honest individual freedom, non-conformity, is growing to be a desperate
and dangerous adventure for any loyal citizen. I have described true discipline as
developed from within, as the expression of soul instead of something applied by
force in some form. As things are,
the freedom won by such discipline will only be something on the way to the
county poorhouse. Or to jail. pp.202
The light of the West is the light of the diamond, iridescent like the
stars. The light of the East
glowing incandescent like of colored gems burning with the lovely light of Earth
in the palm of the hand. p. 203
the true greatness of a people like ours does not lie in centralized
wealth and science promoted and distinguished from a profound Art, Architecture
and Religion. These three are the
soul of a culture. From the union
of these with Science comes the freedom of a people. p.204
But until science is qualified by art and religion truly free and reconciled with both, in co-operation and inspiration vital to new art forms to enrich the spirit, human misery will only deepen. p. 205
Democracy in
Overalls
Ideas always precede and configure the facts. p.
206
An architect’s struggle... in these United States lies in trying to get any profound study of any sort in the Arts into good form... Noble life demands a noble architecture for noble uses of noble men. Lack of culture means what it has always meant: ignoble civilization and therefore imminent downfall. p.207
The Wage
Slave
Inevitably he will come face to face with this new reality in the words of Latoze: “The reality of the building does not consist in the four walls and roof but in the space within to be lived in.” p. 218