8. Faith, Hope, Not Much Charity: The Optimistic Epistemology of Lewis Mumford

Lewis Mumford's discursive map, uncovering the trajectories of modem consciousness and Western social philosophy, dates back to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and the great tradition of American Romanticism However, Mumford's discursive map of the idea of the city cannot be reduced to architecture and city planning alone. His world of ideas draws on such thinkers and concepts as Ebenezer Howard's Garden City, Benton MacKaye's Eutopian ideas, Patrick Geddes' regional planning, and Frank Lloyd Wright's organic architecture (Broadacre City), anticipated by Louis Henri Sullivan. Mumford's theoretical constructions also reflect the worldviews of Simmel, Tönnies, Spengler, and Toynbee, as well as other influential social theories of the last two centuries, Mumford was apparently the first among twentieth-century intellectuals to grasp that human creation, interaction, self-fulfillment, and the search for perfectibility all take place in the city.

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Coping with the Past: Patrick Geddes, Lewis Mumford and the Regional Museum

Environment and History ◽

10.3197/096734097779556006 ◽

1997 ◽

Vol 3 (1) ◽

pp. 97-116 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

John L. Thomas

Keyword(s):

The Past ◽

Lewis Mumford

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A Model House and a House's Model: Reexamining Frank Lloyd Wright's House on the Mesa Project

Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians ◽

10.2307/25068203 ◽

2005 ◽

Vol 64 (4) ◽

pp. 522-551

Author(s):

Robert Wojtowicz

Keyword(s):

University Of Pennsylvania ◽

General Context ◽

Special Importance ◽

Frank Lloyd Wright ◽

Machine Age ◽

Photographic Evidence ◽

Technical Innovations ◽

Textile Block ◽

Lewis Mumford ◽

The University

This article examines Frank Lloyd Wright's House on the Mesa project, which, despite its familiarity to most historians of twentieth-century architecture, has never been thoroughly studied within the general context of Wright's expansive oeuvre and the specific circumstances of the Museum of Modern Art's 1932 Modern Architecture: International Exhibition. Numerous drawings for the project survive in the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives at Taliesin West, although only photographic evidence survives of the original model. Scattered references to the project appear in Wright's writings, most notably his correspondence with wealthy Denver businessman George Cranmer, whose family served as a kind of inspirational muse for the architect. Of special importance is a letter from Wright to critic Lewis Mumford recently discovered in the Lewis Mumford Papers at the University of Pennsylvania. Handwritten on the back of a photograph of the project's model, Wright's letter sheds new light on some of the project's technical innovations, which included textile-block walls, cantilevered roofs, and stepped casements. Less a response to the International Style, as is commonly held, the project was Wright's model of individualized, machine-age luxury for a merit-based democracy.

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Difficulties at the Metalevel

Runaway ◽

10.5149/northcarolina/9781469631738.003.0003 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Anthony Chaney

Keyword(s):

Family Relations ◽

Arms Race ◽

Double Bind ◽

Kurt Vonnegut ◽

Atom Bomb ◽

Logical Paradox ◽

Administration Hospital ◽

Catch 22 ◽

Lewis Mumford ◽

The Stranger

The narrative setting for chapter 2 is the Veterans Administration Hospital in Palo Alto, California, in the 1950s, where Bateson lead the double-bind research group investigating paradox and disorder in family relations. The chapter traces the early development of the double-bind theory of schizophrenia and its source in Russellian logical paradox. It discusses the double bind as a resonant and empirically rich example of similar constructs that distilled the modern predicament as an impossible dilemma. Other examples include Joseph Heller's catch-22, Reinhold Niebuhr's reformulation of original sin and his Serenity Prayer; Albert Camus's concept of the absurd and his novel The Stranger; and constructions in Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s Slaughterhouse Five. Double-bind equivalents as reactions to the atom bomb are described in works such as Joanna Greenberg's I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, Allen Ginsberg's Howl, and the film Rebel Without a Cause. Meanwhile, social critics such as Lewis Mumford used psychiatric and systems theory language and paradoxical constructions to talk about the failure of "pragmatic liberalism," the arms race, and policies of nuclear deterrence.

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