(2 of 2)
Muses & Monuments. The city which for Mumford best maintained the precarious balance between creativity and destruction was 5th century Athens in which the gods were reduced to man size. Although the streets were narrow, the lanes dung-heaped, the houses cramped, and public gardens nonexistent, "in Athens, at least, the muses had a home." By contrast, ancient Rome was a swarming ant heap, where monumental arches glorified the conquests of a rapacious army, gigantic hippodromes housed unspeakable spectacles of torture, and vast public baths cleansed the body, if not the mind, of the previous day's gluttony. At no other time in history, claims Moralist Mumford, did architectural splendor conceal such urban depravity.
The current state of the city is fast approaching Rome's spectacular decline and fall, if it has not already surpassed it. Long gone is the dream that idyllic greenbelt towns such as Radburn, N.J., would dot the tranquil, ordered landscape. Frank Lloyd Wright's proposal for Broadacre City (one acre for every family) now seems a "clear anticipation (romantically rationalized) of the contemporary exurban sprawl." The most influential treatise of his generation, Mumford reluctantly concedes, was Le Corbusier's The City of the Future, with its proposal for widely spaced skyscrapers set in parklands through which thread elevated, multideck highways. Cities, like Holland's rebuilt Rotterdam or present-day Philadelphia, may rebuild their centers with intelligence and sensitivity. Mumford believes they have: "As a leader in urban planning, Philadelphia now occupies the place that Boston did in the 1890s." But, warns Mumford, "such cores can be kept alive only by dealing with all the factors that affect the city's life" and threaten to destroy it: greed, avarice and pride.
The Angry Prophet. Preacher Mumford has long pinned his hopes on spiritual and physical remedies, but after 40 years of sermonizing his patience is growing thin. The gentle Job has become the raging Jeremiah as he casts his eyes upon signs of Rome reborn: rising rents, spreading slums, suffocating crowds, proliferating bathrooms, expensive roads, "and above all, the massive collective concentration on glib ephemeralities of all kinds, performed with supreme technical audacity. These are the symptoms of the end: magnifications of demoralized power, minifications of life. When these signs multiply, Necropolis is near, though not a stone has yet crumbled. For the barbarian has already captured the city from within. Come, hangman! Come, vulture!"
*Technics and Civilization (1934), The Culture of Cities (1938), The Condition of Man (1944), The Conduct of Life (1951).