The Brown Decades by Lewis Mumford
"The Brown Decades" by Lewis Mumford is a critical examination of American architecture and urban development from 1865 to 1895, a period Mumford characterizes as the decline of American civilization following a brief cultural renaissance. He argues that this era, often referred to as the Gilded Age, was marked by a shift from a tranquil, nonindustrial lifestyle to one dominated by industrialism and commercialism, which led to significant moral and aesthetic challenges. The rapid industrial growth resulted in overcrowded, chaotic cities with inadequate living conditions and a compromised natural environment, particularly in the eastern United States.
Mumford highlights key figures who countered these trends, such as naturalists like Henry David Thoreau and George Perkins Marsh, who emphasized the importance of nature and ecology. He also celebrates influential architects and engineers, including Frederick Olmstead, who designed Central Park, and Louis Sullivan, who innovated skyscraper design. The Brooklyn Bridge, a notable engineering marvel of this time, exemplifies the blending of artistic vision and functionality. Overall, "The Brown Decades" stresses the critical role of these individuals in addressing the social and aesthetic crises of their time and underscores the importance of thoughtful urban planning and architecture in shaping the relationship between cities and their environments.
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Subject Terms
The Brown Decades by Lewis Mumford
First published: 1931
Type of work: Cultural history
Critical Evaluation:
THE BROWN DECADES is a study of the building arts in America between 1865 and 1895. It is based on the assumption that these years were the autumn period of American civilization; that they followed the brief “renaissance” summer which was ended by the Civil War. Mr. Mumford begins by asserting that the prevailing style of life in this period was not conducive to the arts. The old style of life, which was quiet, ordered, and based on a nonindustrial culture, gave way to a new one dominated by business and production. This change endowed the postwar decades with two kinds of problems. The first was the moral problem, and this is a subject that has been gone over thoroughly by the historians. The Gilded Age was an age of excess, and its central figures were those who achieved success by heroic dishonesty. They were inclined to look upon industrial expansion as purely a matter of dollars and cents; accordingly, they endowed this period with a brutal system of labor and an extraordinarily ugly series of centers of production. The second problem faced by Mr. Mumford is closely allied to the first: the new money that went into burgeoning factories and buildings and bridges had the aim principally of practicality, and the urban centers of America were created with the built-in problems which are today so evident.
These problems were of two orders, Mr. Mumford points out. First, the natural landscape, particularly in the East, was sacrificed to the interests of production. Factories and especially railroads dominated the structure of the cities and of the countryside into which they swiftly overflowed. Second, the cities themselves took on the chaotic, vertical character they continue to exhibit. They became overcrowded and unhealthful, and they forever united in America the large city with the large slum.
The heroes of THE BROWN DECADES are our great naturalists, engineers, conservationists, and architects. It was these men, Mr. Mumford declares, who, laboring against the odds of bad taste and mass indifference, in a manner redeemed this thirty-year period. The first of these is Henry David Thoreau, who, although not directly connected with reforms in our cities, was the principal figure to direct our attention back to the beauty and values of nature. A second naturalist praised by Mumford is George Perkins Marsh, the first man in America to deal practically with the idea of human ecology. He pointed out in his MAN AND NATURE, published in 1864, that geography was by no means a study of natural formations and divisions, rather, it had to be understood as a branch of ecology, because geography was continually in the process of change as a result of human action. The moral and aesthetic influence of men such as Thoreau and Marsh, Mr. Mumford asserts, affected and in a manner created our great school of conservationists. He points out that conservationism began actually in our cities, and that Frederick Olmstead, the designer of Central Park in New York City, was just as important as wilderness figures such as Thoreau, John Muir, and John Audubon. Indeed, the creation of Central Park is one of the central episodes of THE BROWN DECADES, since it brought into the open the great conflict between those who wanted land for purposes of rental and taxation and those who conceived of it as necessary for beauty and recreation. The landscape park, according to Mumford, was an affront to the reigning business ethic. It was to prove in New York and in other cities, however, both beautiful and useful. Olmstead justified his park by pointing out that cities did not have to grow haphazardly; in a famous statement, and one basic to our present conception of urban development, he demonstrated that a park was not simply an adjunct of a city, but its proper center. As he proved in Central Park, the landscape could become important for its direction of transportation and for the creation of new residential neighborhoods.
The men who worked with nature are not the only heroes of THE BROWN DECADES. The Roeblings, those engineers who designed and built the Brooklyn Bridge, are central to Mr. Mumford’s thesis that the time was saved from artistic negation by a few men of great learning and strong will. The importance of the Brooklyn Bridge was not only that it was the first attempt to expand the city from Manhattan, but that it was one of the first combinations of engineering and artistic design. The steel cables of the suspension, Mr. Mumford believes, were no more important than the stone of the supporting masonry and the design of towers and piers. The bridge was the first public structure since the Washington Monument to be of architectural as well as engineering importance. In the use of steel as structural support it opened up a whole new world of uses, and in uniting metal with masonry it brought the customary materials of construction into a new age of their design.
There are many great architects whose works are studied in THE BROWN DECADES: principal among them are Henry Richardson, John Root, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Richardson is singled out as the man responsible for the creation of a new architecture, a man whose influence equaled that of Christopher Wren. It was Richardson who departed from the old formulation that Gothic architecture was suited for churches and “classical” for other public buildings. He brought back to life a massive Romanesque style, and his libraries, railroad stations, and tall buildings demonstrated that a variety of styles was available for any form. He departed from traditional practice when he considered windows not as merely parts of a facade, but as integral to interior design. And he contracted with the best artists America had to offer for their advice on color, design and proportion. He was par excellence the artist in masonry, and he handed on to his successors a real feeling for the texture of his medium.
Root carried the principles of Richardson about as far as they would go; his Monadnock Building is one of the great monuments of the Chicago of the late nineteenth century. It is fifteen stories tall, an immense height for a non-steel structure. Its importance, according to Mumford, is its simplicity and its mastery of form. Instead of creating an enormous brick box, the kind of thing which, purely in terms of dollars and sense, would have been most practical, he lavished a tremendous amount of time and energy on the imaginative design of window-units and spacing, making the Monadnock one of the lightest and airiest buildings of the century, in spite of the fact that it was at the same time one of the most massive.
Louis Sullivan, according to Mumford, was the most original and inventive of the architects of this period. It was he who designed Chicago’s enormous Auditorium Building, a triumph of simplicity, formal design, and function. He thought out a theory of the skyscraper, which, although confined by his premise that the unit of construction was the steel cage, worked out in practice to such masterpieces as the Wainwright Building in St. Louis (1891), and the Schiller Building (1892) and the Gage Building (1898), both of Chicago. Sullivan was most important, Mumford suggests, for the amount and kind of ornamentation he brought to buildings of masonry and steel. This was for him the great realm of individuality, and he brought to the building trades a renewed use of sculpture and design. Perhaps most important, Sullivan was a literate man, and he brought into articulation many ideas that had been only half expressed, and badly at that. He conceived of architecture as a “social manifestation,” and he held strongly to the organic view of building design. Structures had not only to express their function individually, but were obliged to fit into a larger community. He went on record for spaciousness and wrote that those who allow congestion and disharmony in the design of buildings were bringing “outlawry” into the life of cities. In short, he symbolized the great and thoughtful amount of social consciousness that distinguished the best minds of the Brown Decades.