DURING the last hundred and fifty yearsa great change has taken place in archi-

tecture. This change has nothing to do withthe questions of superficial esthetics that agi-tated the architectural world: the quarrelsbetween the classicists and the medievalistsor between the traditionalists and the mod-ernists are all meaningless in terms of it. Irefer to the process whereby manufacture hasstep by step taken the place of the art ofbuilding, and all the minor processes of con-struction have shifted from the job itself tothe factory.

How far this process has gone everyone isaware who has watched the composition of abuilding, and who knows how suddenly thewhole work would stop if the architect wereforced to design or specify with any com-pleteness the hundred different parts, materi-als, and fixtures he draws from Sweet’sCatalog. But what are the implications ofthis process? What results must it have onthe status of the architect and the place ofarchitecture in civilization? What furtherdevelopments may we look forward to on thepresent paths: what alternatives suggestthemselves?

Some of these questions can be answered:others will lead us to push beyond the cur-rent premises upon which the discussion ofmass production and architecture is based.

IIBy an ironic accident, the first use of fabri-

cated parts in a building seems to have beenornamental: the plaster mouldings of theeighteenth century were introduced beforethe Franklin stove: but the age of inventionushered in a whole series of technical devicesdesigned to increase the comfort or the effi-ciency of the dwelling house, and along withthese improvements went a shift from hand-icraft to machine production. There arecountry districts in the United States where,until a few years ago, the kitchen sink would

have been made of sheet zinc fitted over abox made by the carpenter, or where the ice-box might have been constructed in the sameway. In the main, however, the shift wassteady and inexorable: steam-heating, gas-lighting, electricity, baths, toilets, refrigera-tors, to say nothing of radio-connections andgarages, have all led to the industrializationof architecture. Plaster, jig-saw, and cast-ironornament, the first spontaneous gifts ofindustrialism, all happily diminished; butthe technical improvements remained andmultiplied.

In the great run of modern building,except in part the country homes of the rich,mass-manufacture has taken the place oflocal handicraft. The latter has remained intwo places: the construction of the physicalshell itself, and the assemblage of the indi-vidual parts.

Now, this change was coincident with thewithdrawal of the architect from the grandbody of building during the early industrialperiod. The new factories and bridges andrailroad stations were largely the work ofengineers, while the great mass of privatedwellings became the province of the specu-lative jerry-builder who, with a few stereo-typed plans, created the dingy purlieus of allour large cities. The radical change that hadtaken place passed almost unnoticed, untilduring the last fifteen or twenty years thearchitect was called in to design small housesfor industrial villages. He was then confront-ed with two brute facts: if he designed hous-es for industrial workers in the fashion thathe did for the upper middle classes, it turnedout that the costs were so high that only themiddle classes could afford to live in them:that was the fate, for example, of ForestHills, L. I. On the other hand, when heaccepted the price limitations laid down bythe industrial corporation, or, as in Europe,the municipal housing scheme, he suddenlydiscovered that he was no longer a free man.

MASS-PRODUCTION AND THE MODERN HOUSEBY LEWIS MUMFORD

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Every variation he wished to introducewhich departed from current practice wasprohibitive in cost: his design was in fact lit-tle more than a composition of standardizedpatterns and manufactured articles. The ele-ments were no longer under the architect’scontrol; for the carpenter on the job couldnot construct a kitchen cabinet as well or ascheaply as the factory, nor had he spent somuch time in finding out exactly what com-partments and divisions the housewife pre-ferred. As for windows, doors, bathroomequipment, the architect either had to acceptthem as they came from the factory, or hehad to do without them altogether.

IIINeedless to say, this revolutionary change

had come about without any genuine reno-vation in design, and without any attempt toovercome the difficulties that the increase ofmanufactured articles brought with it. Thechief of these difficulties, as Mr. HenryWright was perhaps the first to point out,was that the building proper, without beingcheaper in its own right, accounted for onlyforty-five to sixty per cent of the total cost,whereas a hundred years before it had repre-sented, with its decoration and ornament,about ninety per cent of the total cost. Someaccommodation to this condition was made;but the adjustment was a blind and fumbling

ON THE WAY TOWARD STANDARDIZATION: A SECTOR OF BROOKLYN

The jerry-builder replacing the architect. Not only are stereotypes frequently repeated, but every house islargely an assembly of standard parts from the factory. Bathrooms have come; gardens have gone. Everyhouse is but the visible shoot upon a great underground root mechanism, constituting “the land and itsimprovement.’’

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one: now it came as jerry-building, a generalcheapening of materials and workmanship,again it came as smaller rooms or fewerrooms per family, or finally, it came as anabandonment of handicraft on the remain-ing parts of the building, and the increase ofready-made equipment. Decoration had notso much vanished by itself, for lack of artis-tic talent, still less because of any doctrinaireprejudice against it: it had rather beenabsorbed, or at all events transformed intomechanical fixtures. The new costs offinance, mechanical fixtures, utilities, had tobe met at some point in the design. Short ofa proportional rise in the real income ofwage-earners, there was no way of cementingthe old requirements and the new in a singlebuilding.

In a word, building has shrunk, manufac-ture has expanded. One cannot suppose thatthis process will stop short at the shell. Apartfrom the fact that this has already been part-ly conquered—as yet, however, with noappreciable saving—in the mail-order wood-en house, or in the sheet-iron garage, whodoubts that the manufacturers of steel, alu-minum or asbestos blocks, if not the large-scale motor manufacturers, looking for a newoutlet for a market glutted with cars, willfinally produce a light transportable shell,whose sections will be set up easily byunskilled labor? It would not be difficult todescribe such a house: indeed, Mr.Buckminster Fuller in Chicago, and theBrothers Rasch in Germany have alreadygone a step beyond this. The chief difference

THE ARCHITECT’S ATTEMPT TO INDIVIDUALIZE AN INDUSTRIAL VILLAGE: FOREST HILLSAn attempt that failed. The cost of spaciousness and individual design was too high for workers and the housesare now occupied by the middle classes. To the rear is seen the invasion of the jerry-building that must serve thepoorer man who wishes to live in a ‘’free-standing” house.

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between the factory-manufactured houseand the current product of the jerry-builderin Flatbush or West Philadelphia would bethat in the first case the design would possi-bly bear some living relation to the elementsout of which it is composed. The mass-housewould probably be placed on a platform, ifnot on a pedestal, in order to provide garagespace and avoid the expensive cellar; theplans would be standardized; the pipes andfittings and fixtures would be integral withthe walls and ceilings, joined together by aturn of the wrench; and the use of light insu-lating materials would both facilitate trans-portation and permit the design of large win-dows which would otherwise, in cold weath-er, make a great drain on the heating system.

What would be the advantages of the com-pletely manufactured house? There are many

potential ones. First of all, the mass-house,like the motor car, will be able to call to itsdesign and construction a corps of experts,sanitary engineers, heating engineers,hygienists, to say nothing of professors ofdomestic science, who will have their mindsfocussed, not upon solving indifferently anindeterminate number of problems, butupon getting a perfect solution for a fixedand limited problem. These research workerswill have the opportunity to deal with fun-damental mechanical and biological facts,without the distraction of attempting tocompose these facts into a traditional frame,conceived when industry and family life wereon an entirely different basis, and when theinventions of the last century were still butvague grandiose dreams in the minds ofUtopians like Leonardo and JohannAndreae.

The introduction of this council of expertswould undoubtedly hasten the rationaliza-tion of the modern house. A dozen standardplans, with all minor deviations ruled out,would probably take the place of the com-petitive chaos that provides our more tradi-tional forms of monotony and squalor, or, asin the well-to-do suburb, of standardized“variety” and fake elegance. No one would beable to pretend that individuality and per-sonality are achieved by meaningless depar-tures on the drafting board from standarddimensions: once the mechanical require-ments were granted, an equally mechanicalsolution would follow. The charm of goodbuilding, the charm due to the carpenter’s orthe mason’s feeling for his material and site,would disappear; but as compensation therewould be the austere clarity of good machin-ery; and since this charm is already a senti-mental memory in most of our building, it isan illusion rather than a reality that would bedestroyed. Undoubtedly the result would be“hard”; but such hardness is surely preferableto the spurious “softness” of imitation half-timbers, imitation slates, and imitation fires;and it would constitute a real improvementover the actual quarters in which a great partof the population now live.

ALL THIS FOR A SINGLE CUSTOM-BUILT HOUSE1917: The pride of the architect lay in giving every house, andevery possible part of every house, its individual decorativetreatment, specially full-sized and specially made. The effortwas directed at what was very accurately named “enrichment.”(House of Mr. James Wilsoy, Aymar Embury II, Architect.)

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There is no need to go here into the vari-ous technical improvements that may bepossible in the mass-house. It is enough toassume that such matters as artificial coolingand heating, the removal of dust, and theutilization of sunlight would receive compe-tent attention, and it is even possible thatentirely untried methods, such as the heatingof walls by electric grids, or complete insula-tion from outside air would be tested, if notincorporated in the mass-house. Suchdwellings would represent a real advancefrom the standpoint of hygiene and con-structive soundness; and since a good part ofour population needs to be re-housed, itspresent quarters being unsanitary, crowded,vile, ugly, and entirely out of key with thebest features in the modern environment, themass-house holds out, on the surface, veryattractive promises. Does the architect shrinkfrom the prospect? He had better not. As aprofession he has permitted something farworse than the scientifically designed mass-house, namely the unscientific one of thejerry-builder, to appear; and since he hasshown as yet no capacity to face or masterthe real problem of housing, he cannot in allconscience turn away from this spectacle.

IVLet us grant, then, the mechanical advan-

tages of the mass-house; and along with thisits practicability. We must now ask anotherquestion: to what extent would the mass-production of such houses be a solution ofthe housing problem, and how far would thisform of manufacture meet all the needs thatare involved in the dwelling house and itscommunal setting? Those who talk about thebenefits of mass-production have been a lit-tle misled, I think, by the spectacular successof this method in creating cheap motor cars;and I believe they have not sufficiently takeninto account some of its correlative defects.Let us consider a few of these.

First of all: the great attraction of the man-ufactured house is the promise not only ofefficiency but of cheapness, due to the com-petitive production of houses in large quan-tities. It is doubtful if this will prove to be a

great element in reducing the cost of hous-ing. The reason is simple. The shell of thebuilding is not the largest element in thecost; the cost of money, the rent of land, thecost of utilities, including streets, mains, sew-ers and sewage disposal plants, are among themajor items on the bill. The two new spotswhere mass production would take the placeof present methods, namely, in the shellitself, and in the assemblage of the parts,offer only a minor field for reductions. Tocut the cost of the shell in half is to lower thecost of the house a bare ten per cent. TheNew York State Housing and RegionalPlanning Commission has shown that thelowering of the interest rate one per centwould effect as great a reduction; and thelowering of it to the level justified by thesafety and durability of housing investments

STANDARD PARTS FOR A THOUSANDBUILDINGS

1930: Showing the evolution of a metal baseboard fromimitative decoration toward impeccable utility and clarity.Decoration has not vanished by itself because of prejudiceagainst it: rather it has been absorbed or transformed intomechanical fixtures.

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would reduce the costs far more drasticallythan the most ingenious cheese-paring onthe structure.

Moreover, with respect to the other parts ofthe house, the fixtures, the mechanical appa-ratus, the finish, it remains true that whileslight economies are possible through furtherstandardization, a good part of these items isalready produced by mass-methods—andmost of the possible economies have beenwrung out. Novelties in plan or design, suchas those suggested in the Dymaxion house,should not obscure the fact that the greatchange in the shell is only a little change inthe building as a whole. For lack of propercost accounting our experimental architectshave been butting their heads against thissolid wall for years; but there is no reasonwhy they should continue. Land, manufac-tured utilities, site-improvements, andfinance call for a greater share of the costthan the “building” and labor. Mass produc-tion will not remedy this. To use cesspoolsinstead of sewers, artesian wells instead of acommunal water system, and cheap farmingland instead of urban land, as some of the

advocates of the manufactured house havesuggested, is merely to camouflage the prob-lem: and it is more than a little naive: forsuch expedients are temporary dodges,which may occasionally be favored by asandy soil or inaccessibility to traffic, butthey cannot count for two pins in any com-prehensive and universal solution of thehousing problem. There are many districtswhere an artesian well would cost as much asthe house itself; and except in a communistsociety there are no spots on the earth wherethe Law of Rent is not operative—so thatany large movement towards the open land,such as is now taking place fifty miles fromNew York, is immediately recorded in a con-version of farmland into building lots, with aswift rise in price. In short: the manufacturedhouse cannot escape its proper site costs andits communal responsibilities.

The second hole in the program is the factthat mass-production brings with it thenecessity for a continuous turnover. Whenmass-production is applied to objects thatwear out rapidly, like shoes or rubber tires,the method may be socially valuable,although the late Thorstein Veblen hasshown that some of these potentialeconomies are nullified by the commercialhabit of weakening the materials in order tohasten the pace of destruction. When, how-ever, mass methods are applied to relativelydurable goods like furniture or houses, thereis great danger that once the original marketis supplied, replacements will not have to bemade with sufficient frequency to keep theoriginal plant running. Our manufacturersof furniture and motors are driven desperate-ly to invent new fashions in order to hastenthe moment of obsolescence; beyond a cer-tain point, technical improvements take sec-ond place and stylistic flourishes enter. It willbe hard enough, in the depraved state ofmiddle class taste, to keep our mass housesfrom being styled in some archaic fashion,pseudo-Spanish or pseudo-Colonial, as thefad of the day may be; and once mechanicalimprovements bring diminishing returns thisdanger will be a grave one.

MODEL OF THE “DYMAXION” HOUSEBUCKMINSTER FULLER, DESIGNER*

*Walls (no windows) of transparent casein; inflated duralumin floors; heat,light, refrigeration supplied to it individually, through central mast, by Dieselengine; water from well.

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MASS-PRODUCTION APARTMENT HOUSES HUNG ON MASTSTHE BROTHERS RASCH, GERMANY

Two rows of hollow masts with a set of passages between. The ground is clear. Masts hold one another inposition by system of cables; anchored by cables; floors hung on cables. Proposed in 1928

FROM ANOTHER CONTINUOUS ROW (STEEL HOUSES RESTING ON THE GROUND)THE BROTHERS RASCH, GERMANY

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There is still another defect in the manu-factured house, just the opposite of the ten-dency to foist new style, in order to increasethe turnover. One might call this the modelT dilemma. Mass-production, just because itinvolves the utmost specialization in labor-saving machinery and the careful interlink-age of chain processes, suffers, as I havepointed out elsewhere, from rigidity, frompremature standardization. When the cheap-ening of the cost is the main object, massproduction tends to prolong the life ofdesigns which should be refurbished. In thecase of the dwelling house, the continuanceof obsolete models would possibly be as seri-ous as the rapid alterations of style; and it ishard to see how mass production can avoideither one or the other horn of this dilemma.

VWhat, then, is the conclusion? So far as the

manufactured house would base its claimupon its social value, that is, upon the possi-bility of lowering the cost of housing to thepoint where new and efficient dwellingscould be afforded by the owners of Ford cars,its promises are highly dubious. Grantingevery possible efficiency in design or manu-facture, the mass-house, without any siteattachments, would still represent an expen-diture of from six to ten times the amountinvested in automobiles of similar grade; andthis leaves us pretty much in our presentdilemma. The new houses might well be bet-ter than the present ones—they could scarce-ly be worse. But, if better, they would not beradically cheaper, and since a new cost, a costthat is excessive in the motor industry, name-ly competitive salesmanship, would be intro-duced, the final results promise nothing forthe solution of our real housing problem—the housing of the lower half of our incomegroups, and particularly, of our unskilledworkers. The manufactured house no morefaces this problem than the semi-manufac-tured house that we know today.

This does not mean that the processes ofmanufacture will not continue to invade themodern house; nor does it mean that the

architect’s present position in relation to theproblem is a happy one. The question iswhether he is able to devise an approach tothe housing problem and to house designwhich will bring with it all the efficienciespromised by the Brothers Rasch or by Mr.Buckminster Fuller, and which will at thesame time give scope to the particular art andtechnique of which he is master. Is there per-haps a more radical approach to the problemof housing than the engineer and themechanically-minded architect have con-ceived? I think there is; for though Mr. Fullerfor example believes that he has swept asideall traditional tags in dealing with the house,and has faced its design with inexorablerigor, he has kept, with charming uncon-sciousness, the most traditional and senti-mental tag of all, namely, the free-standingindividual house. If we are thorough enoughin our thinking to throw that prejudice aside,too, we may, I suspect, still find a place forthe architect in modern civilization. I shalldeal with the alternative to the purelymechanical solution of our problem in a sec-ond article.

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“A LARGE SAVING IN THE SHELL IS ASMALL SAVING IN THE FINAL HOUSE”

A little more than half of the building cost goes forconstruction itself. The shaded areas in this chart ofthe construction dollar represent factors of land andfinancing that mass production cannot very muchaffect

Chart from Primer of Housing, by Arthur C. Holdenandothers, Workers’ Education Bureau Press