Mumford y Bay Region-1-50 PDF

VERNACULAR, REGIONAL AND MODERN
LEWIS MUMFORD’S BAY REGION STYLE
AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF WILLIAM WURSTER
Jane Castle
2006
SUPERVISOR: PETER KOHANE

CO-SUPERVISOR: ANN QUINLAN
THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES
Thesis/Dissertation Sheet
Surname or Family name: CASTLE
First name: JANE Other name/s: ELIZABETH
Abbreviation for degree as given in the University calendar: MArch
School: ARCHITECTURE Faculty: FACULTY OF THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
Title:
Vernacular and Modern: Lewis Mumford’s Bay Region Style and the Architecture of William Wurster
Abstract 350 words maximum: (PLEASE TYPE)
This thesis examines aspects of the work of American writer and social critic, Lewis Mumford, and the domestic
buildings of architect William Wurster. It reveals parallels in their careers, particularly evident in an Arts and Crafts
influence and the regional emphasis both men combined with an otherwise overtly Modernist outlook. Several
chapters are devoted to the background of, and influences on, Mumford’s regionalism and Wurster’s architecture.
Mumford, a spiritual descendent of John Ruskin, admired Wurster’s work for its reflection of his own regionalist ideas,
which are traced to Arts and Crafts figures Patrick Geddes, William Morris, William Lethaby and Ruskin. These
figures are important to this study, firstly because the influence of their philosophical perspective allowed Mumford,
almost uniquely, to position himself as a spokesman for both Romanticism and Modernism with equal validity, and
secondly because of their influence upon early Californian architects such as Bernard Maybeck, and subsequently
upon Wurster and his colleagues.
Throughout the thesis, an important architectural distinction is highlighted between regional Modernism and
the International Style. This distinction polarised the American architectural community after Mumford published an
article in 1947 suggesting that the “Bay Region Style” represented a regionally appropriate alternative to the abstract
formulas of International Style architecture and nominated Wurster as its most significant representative. Wurster’s
regional Modernism was distinct from the bulk of American Modernism because of its regional influences and its
indebtedness to vernacular forms, apparent in buildings such as his Gregory Farmhouse. In 1948, Henry-Russel
Hitchcock organised a symposium at New York’s Museum of Modern Art to refute Mumford’s article. Its participants
acrimoniously rejected a regionalist alternative to the International Style, and architectural historians have suggested
that authentic regional development in the Bay Region largely ceased because of such adverse theoretical and
academic scrutiny.
After examining the influences on Mumford and Wurster, the thesis concludes that twentieth century regional
architectural development in the San Francisco Bay Region has influenced subsequent Western domestic
architecture. Wurster suggested that architects should employ the regional and vernacular rather than emulate
historical styles or follow theoretical models in their buildings and Mumford, upon whose work Critical Regionalism
was later founded, is central to any understanding of the importance of the vernacular, regional and historical in
modern architecture.
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part in the University libraries in all forms of media, now or here after known, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. I retain all property
rights, such as patent rights. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis or dissertation.
I also authorise University Microfilms to use the 350 word abstract of my thesis in Dissertation Abstracts International (this is applicable to doctoral
theses only).
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COPYRIGHT STATEMENT
‘I hereby grant the University of New South Wales or its agents the right to
archive and to make available my thesis or dissertation in whole or part in the
University libraries in all forms of media, now or here after known, subject to the
provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. I retain all proprietary rights, such as patent
rights. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all
or part of this thesis or dissertation.
I also authorise University Microfilms to use the 350 word abstract of my thesis in
Dissertation Abstract International (this is applicable to doctoral theses only).
I have either used no substantial portions of copyright material in my thesis or I
have obtained permission to use copyright material; where permission has not
been granted I have applied/will apply for a partial restriction of the digital copy of
my thesis or dissertation.'
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Peter Kohane and co-supervisor Ann Quinlan, for their
direction, insightful comments and editorial thoroughness. Both inspired numerous rewrites of
many “final” drafts, and vastly improved my knowledge of academic writing and research.
Linda Corkery also offered supervision assistance and very kindly gave encouraging and
helpful suggestions. For her help, I am extremely grateful.
Daniel Gregory (grandson of Warren and Sadie Gregory who commissioned the Gregory
Farmhouse) very graciously invited me to visit the building and spent many hours answering
my questions about the farmhouse and many other aspects of Wurster’s work and Bay
Region architecture. He and Evie Gregory (the original owners’ daughter-in-law) showed
great kindness, humour and hospitality at the family’s beautiful Scotts Valley property. Without
their help, I would have been unable to complete a large part of this thesis and I thank them
wholeheartedly.
Robert and Rose, thank you for putting up with the loss of so many weekends and evenings,
for taking a month out to drive me around the Bay Region and for the editorial assistance
each of you offered. And to Jude, at least you got to spend more quality time with your
granddaughter than you may have ever thought possible.
ABSTRACT page ii
PREFACE page iv
A NOTE ON THE USE OF THE TERM “VERNACULAR” IN ARCHITECTURE
INTRODUCTION page 1
CHAPTER ONE page 7

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO MUMFORD’S REGIONALISM
CHAPTER TWO page 32

LEWIS MUMFORD’S STUDY OF REGIONAL ARCHITECTURE IN AMERICA
CHAPTER THREE page 57

THE BAY REGION STYLE:
VERNACULAR ORIGINS, REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND LEGACY
CHAPTER FOUR page 84

WILLIAM WURSTER’S REGIONAL MODERNISM
CHAPTER FIVE page 119

WILLIAM WURSTER’S GREGORY FARMHOUSE:
A CASE STUDY OF REGIONAL MODERNISM
CONCLUSION page 140
REFERENCES page 143

ABSTRACT
This thesis examines aspects of the work of American writer and social critic,
Lewis Mumford, and the domestic buildings of architect William Wurster. It
reveals parallels in their careers, particularly evident in an Arts and Crafts
influence and the regional emphasis both men combined with an otherwise
overtly Modernist outlook. Several chapters are devoted to the background of,
and influences on, Mumford’s regionalism and Wurster’s architecture.
Mumford, a spiritual descendent of John Ruskin, admired Wurster’s work for
its reflection of his own regionalist ideas, which are traced to Arts and Crafts
figures Patrick Geddes, William Morris, William Lethaby and Ruskin. These
figures are important to this study, firstly because the influence of their
philosophical perspective allowed Mumford, almost uniquely, to position
himself as a spokesman for both Romanticism and Modernism with equal
validity, and secondly because of their influence upon early Californian
architects such as Bernard Maybeck, and subsequently upon Wurster and his
colleagues.
Throughout the thesis, an important architectural distinction is
highlighted between regional Modernism and the International Style. This
distinction polarised the American architectural community after Mumford
published an article in 1947 suggesting that the “Bay Region Style”
represented a regionally appropriate alternative to the abstract formulas of
International Style architecture and nominated Wurster as its most significant
representative. Wurster’s regional Modernism was distinct from the bulk of
American Modernism because of its regional influences and its indebtedness
to vernacular forms, apparent in buildings such as his Gregory Farmhouse. In
1948, Henry-Russel Hitchcock organised a symposium at New York’s
Museum of Modern Art to refute Mumford’s article. Its participants
acrimoniously rejected a regionalist alternative to the International Style, and
architectural historians have suggested that authentic regional development in
the Bay Region largely ceased because of such adverse theoretical and
academic scrutiny.
After examining the influences on Mumford and Wurster, the thesis
concludes that twentieth century regional architectural development in the San
ABSTRACT page ii
Francisco Bay Region has influenced subsequent Western domestic
architecture. Wurster suggested that architects should employ the regional
and vernacular rather than emulate historical styles or follow theoretical
models in their buildings and Mumford, upon whose work Critical Regionalism
was later founded, is central to any understanding of the importance of the
vernacular, regional and historical in modern architecture.
ABSTRACT page iii

PREFACE | A NOTE ON THE USE OF THE TERM VERNACULAR IN ARCHITECTURE
While this thesis primarily focuses on regionalism and its importance in the work
of Lewis Mumford and William Wurster, an examination of vernacular forms is
central to the understanding of the development of their work. Rather than using
“vernacular” as an accepted term I feel it is important to include a note clarifying
definitions of and approaches to it in architectural theory and its use in a modern
context.
Within architectural theory the word vernacular is often used ambiguously
and with little consistency, so that a relationship as nebulous as that between
vernacular and modern architecture is rarely described with clarity, and is often
reduced to a comparison of stylistic features. The word vernacular is derived
from the Latin vernaculus, or native, and is most frequently used in the study of
language to refer to the common or native language of a place or culture, usually
as opposed to its literary or academic language. The word was first extended by
analogy to architecture in the mid-nineteenth century by architect Giles Gilbert
Scott. 1 Paul Oliver, editor of Encyclopedia of Vernacular Architecture of the
World (1997) described vernacular architecture as “the term most widely used to
denote indigenous, tribal, folk, peasant and traditional architecture.” 2 Oliver
explained that he used vernacular over competing terminology, such as
indigenous, spontaneous, anonymous, folk, peasant, rural or traditional since
vernacular architecture is not always that produced by the indigenous inhabitants
of a place, nor is it necessarily rural, anonymous or confined to the dwellings of
“peasants” in socially stratified cultural systems.
Oliver pointed out that, despite many attempts to create one, there is no
accepted definition of vernacular architecture, “for the term is used to embrace
an immense range of building types, forms, traditions, uses and contexts.” 3 He
nevertheless prefaced his encyclopedia with the following working definition:
Vernacular architecture comprises the dwellings and all other buildings of a
people. Related to their environmental contexts and available resources, they
are customarily owner- or community-built, utilising traditional technologies.
All forms of vernacular architecture are built to meet specific needs
PREFACE page iv
accommodating the values, economies and ways of living of the cultures that
produce them. 4
Even if there is some agreement within architectural theory to the term

“vernacular architecture” describing the buildings of pre-industrial cultures, there
is little general acceptance of the degree to which vernacular architecture relates
to modern architecture. Theorists and historians in the U.S.A. tend to apply the
word vernacular more broadly than Australian and British writers, defining by
context whether they are referring to the folk variety or to that of an identifiable
architect. For instance American writers Marc Treib, Catherine Bauer, Alan
Michelson and Wurster (among others) often describe local types that have
appeared specifically in one area due to regional influences as vernacular,
whether they are architect designed or not. 5
Approaches to vernacular theory in architecture

While vernacular architecture defies a simplistic definition, architect Charles
Correa succinctly described its usefulness to architects: “the old architecture –
especially the vernacular – has much to teach us as it always develops a
typology of fundamental common sense.” 6 However while this offers a general
sense of the way in which vernacular architecture may influence the modern
architect, like many vernacular design theories, it does not give any concrete way
of determining the motivations of a designer in turning to vernacular sources for
inspiration.
Architectural writers grapple with the problem of meaningfully discussing
vernacular architecture in a modern setting, and the terminology around the
concept is far from standardised. The term “neo-vernacular” is used, by Oliver, to
describe the squatter’s developments around many of the world’s large cities,
however he concedes that the term is often also used to describe the work of
architects who are strongly influenced by earlier vernacular designs. 7
Furthermore, many terms, including ‘vernacular’, are used by architectural writers
to describe modern architecture that is unique to a particular culture. For
instance, four theorists quoted within this thesis use differing terminology to
PREFACE page v
define the cultural importance of Wurster’s architecture: Esther McCoy described
it as “indigenous”, Mumford called it “native”, Catherine Bauer used “vernacular”
and Marc Treib “modern vernacular.” Wurster himself called the Bay Region work
“the nearest thing to a contemporary vernacular that this country has yet
produced.” 8 As Wurster is a trained, modern architect his work evidently does not
conform to what Oliver called vernacular architecture nor to what author of
Architecture Without Architects (1964) Bernard Rudofsky called “non-pedigreed
architecture”, which he explained “for want of a generic label we shall
call…vernacular, anonymous, spontaneous, indigenous, rural as the case may
be.” 9
Rudofsky is perhaps most responsible for popularising traditional
vernacular architecture and making its forms available as iconic architectural
precedents. Rudofsky’s 1964 New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
exhibition and publication Architecture Without Architects was inspired by the
richness of vernacular architecture compared to what he saw as the blandness of
modern Western designs. Rudofsky described vernacular architecture as “the
largest untapped source of architectural inspiration for industrial man” 10 and
speculated that many technological precedents usually thought to be modern are
“old hat in vernacular architecture—prefabrication, standardisation, flexible and
moveable structures…floor heating, air conditioning, light control, even
elevators.” 11
Architectural historian Eleftherios Pavlides argued that Rudofsky’s work
could be understood as contributing more than aesthetic or stylistic precedents
and illustrated something of the experiential qualities of vernacular architecture,
writing that “he sought to identify and present the qualities of regional vernacular
architecture that conveyed a sense of well-being.” 12 Pavlides offered a structured
analysis of the relationship between the vernacular and the modern in
architecture. He argued that there are, broadly, three modes of vernacular
influence upon modern architectural practice. The three are described as
“architecture as an iconic, picturesque evocation of symbolic identity; architecture
PREFACE page vi
as determined by climate, material, or function; and architecture as the
embodiment of experiential, emotional, spiritual and sensory qualities.” 13
The first of these, the iconic or picturesque evocation, describes the
stance of vernacular revivalists, who look to vernacular architecture to provide
inspiration for picturesque interpretations of “locally derived pure forms.” 14 These
revivalists attempt to capture something of an idealised past that is presumed to
be timeless and available for appropriation and reconstruction. Pavlides noted
that:
in several 19th-century North European countries the picturesque
evocation of the vernacular in general, and the Gothic style in particular,
also expressed a nostalgic response to the disappearing pre-industrial
environment, a romantic yearning for simpler times. Architects like Phillip
Webb, Edwin Lutyens and C.F.A. Voysey imitated vernacular features,
including native domestic Gothic building prototypes, adopted rules of
composition such as asymmetry for example, and were influenced by
informal qualities such as the rustic use of materials. 15
He suggested that the architectural discourse of the Arts and Crafts movement in
late nineteenth century England might be seen as an instance of this iconic or
picturesque evocation of vernacular architectural prototypes, although this
apparently considers only the aesthetic qualities of Arts and Crafts architectural
discourse and not its political or moral considerations.
Pavlides suggests that the second approach, climatic, material and
functional determinism, describes Modernist architects who looked only to those
elements of vernacular architecture that supported their ideological position.
According to Pavlides:
only features of vernacular architecture that fit the filter of Modernist
ideology served as stylistic inspiration for the design work of modern
architects. Stylistic features thought to be determined by the rational
processes included formal qualities such as the primary forms of mass
and space, flat roofs, absence of exterior decoration, repetition of masses,
and white interiors and exteriors. 16
He identified Le Corbusier’s Chapel of Notre Dame du Haut (1955) at Ronchamp

and Walter Gropius’ Sommerfeld House (1919) in Berlin as among buildings
inspired by such highly selective investigations of vernacular forms.
PREFACE page vii

The third of Pavlides’ approaches to the vernacular, the experiential,
encourages the reinterpretation of vernacular precedents, methods and
materials, however not as formulae, nor in order to reproduce past types for
either stylistic or nostalgic reasons. “The goal of the experiential approach”
according to Pavlides, “is to enhance the quality of habitation, to create places
where inhabitants will feel at home. The qualities that enhance the act of dwelling
can be learned from vernacular architecture without mimicking vernacular
prototypes.” 17 The results of this “experiential approach” to vernacular
architecture may be observed in the work and theoretical approach of Bay Area
architects like Bernard Maybeck and Wurster, who studied and understood the
vernacular precedents of their region and subtly reinterpreted these in their own
work.
Beyond the Bay Area, the same tendency may be seen in the architecture
of such geographically diverse designers as Luis Barragan and Glen Murcutt,
and Post-Modernists Christopher Alexander and Charles Moore. These Post-
Modernists, according to Pavlides “explored the expressive possibilities of a
great variety of vernacular sources.” 18 In this method of appropriating vernacular
architectural sources, the modern architect does not use vernacular precedents
explicitly, but rather interprets the principles that governed their development and
use. In Pavlides’ terminology: “The experiential approach to vernacular
architecture requires an interpretation of the vernacular though the poetic
sensibility of the architect.” 19
Kenneth Frampton also wrote of the relationship between vernacular
architecture and his own theories of Critical Regionalism. He described
vernacular architecture as that “spontaneously produced by the combined
interaction of climate, culture, myth and craft” and noted that “while opposed to
the sentimental simulation of local vernacular, Critical Regionalism will, on
occasion, insert reinterpreted vernacular elements as disjunctive episodes within
the whole.” 20 Architectural theorist Alan Michelson author of a doctoral thesis on
Wurster titled “Towards a Regional Synthesis: The Suburban and Country
Residences of William Wilson Wurster” wrote a corollary to Frampton’s analysis:
PREFACE page viii

“Vernacular architecture was a direct, unique reflection of specific regional
conditions, and he [Wurster] scrutinized it wherever possible.” 21 Where Frampton
saw vernacular forms as an influence upon regionalism, Michelson saw the
vernacular as necessarily emerging from regional.
Within this thesis the term vernacular is generally used to refer to buildings
of pre-industrial cultures and particularly to their non-architect designed
structures. It is also used to reference the owner-built developments of farmers,
miners, missionaries and other “settlers” on the West Coast of America in the
period before the late-nineteenth century. Vernacular architecture is not used to
describe architects’ designs, however many scholarly sources referenced within
the thesis do use the term “vernacular” to describe modern, architect-designed
buildings.
PREFACE page ix
PREFACE | NOTES
1
Oliver, P. 2003, Dwellings: The Vernacular House World Wide, Phaidon, London, p.12
2
Oliver, P. (ed.), 1997, Encyclopedia of Vernacular Architecture of The World, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, p.xxi
3
Oliver (ed.) 1997, p.xxi
4
Ibid. p.xxiii
5
Examples of these uses are quoted and referenced throughout this thesis.
Marc Treib, Professor of Architecture at the University of California at Berkeley is the author of An
Everyday Modernism: The Houses of William Wurster, which was published in conjunction with a
retrospective exhibition of Wurster’s work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1995-
96. Catherine Bauer was an influential writer on housing in America and Europe and author of
Modern Housing (1934). She argued for social equity in housing and believed that America
should create its own indigenous dwelling forms and not follow European styles. She met
Mumford in 1929 in New York and the two influenced each other’s work and became romantically
linked. In 1940 Bauer and Wurster were working at the University of California at Berkeley, Bauer
as Rosenberg Professor of Public Social Service. Wurster and Bauer married that year. Alan
Michelson completed his Ph.D. in art history, titled Towards a Regional Synthesis: The Suburban
and Country Residences of William Wilson Wurster from Stanford University in 1993.
6
Correa, C. 1989, ‘Transfers and Transformations’ in Khan, H. Charles Correa: Architect in India,
Butterworth Architecture, London, p.172
7
Oliver 1997, p.xxii
8
Wurster, W. 1945, ‘The Twentieth-Century Architect’ in Architecture: A Profession and a Career,
Washington D.C., American Institute of Architects Press, Reprinted in Treib, M. (ed.) 1999, An
Everyday Modernism: The Houses of William Wurster, University of California Press, California,
p.230
9
Rudofsky, B. 1964, Architecture Without Architects: A Short Introduction to Non-Pedigreed
Architecture, Academy Editions, London, unpaginated
10
Rudofsky 1964, unpaginated
11
Ibid. During the mid to late twentieth century some of these technologies were translated into
modern domestic design in the Bay Region. For example much of Charles Callister’s Berkeley
architecture can be seen as having incorporated the screening, planning and structural
technologies of Japanese vernacular architecture. Examples are shown in Chapter Three below.
12
Pavlides, E. 1997, ‘Approaches and Concepts: Architectural’ in Oliver (ed.) 1997, p.14
13
Ibid. pp.12-13
14
Ibid. p.12
15
Ibid.
16
Ibid. pp.12-13
17
Ibid.
18
Ibid.
19
Ibid.
20
Frampton, K. 1985, ‘Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of
Resistance’ in Postmodern Culture, H. Foster (ed.), Pluto Press, London and Sydney, p.314
21
Michelson, A. 1993, PhD Thesis: “Towards a Regional Synthesis: The Suburban And Country
Residences Of William Wilson Wurster”, 1922-1964, Stanford University, order no. AAC 9403985,
p.345
PREFACE page x
INTRODUCTION
This thesis examines relationships between the work of American architectural

writer and cultural critic Lewis Mumford (1895-1990) and his contemporary, San
Francisco Bay Region architect William Wurster (1895-1973). Significant
philosophical links between Mumford and Wurster become apparent through
historical investigation of Mumford’s regionalism and Wurster’s regional approach
to Modernist design. The notable early work of both men dates from the mid-
1920s: Mumford’s Sticks and Stones (1924) laid the foundations of his
architectural regionalism and is centrally concerned with his study of the history
and authentic development of American architecture, while Wurster’s Gregory
Farmhouse (1927) is lauded as one of America’s most significant experiments in
regional modern design, marking the beginning of the period in his work
described by Marc Treib as “essays in modern vernacular.” 1
Significantly, both Mumford and Wurster are shown to have been greatly
interested in vernacular architecture. For Mumford it represented a crucial aspect
of his study of American cultural history, as he sought examples of authentic
continuity between America’s regional vernacular buildings and its nineteenth
and twentieth century architecture. 2 In 1947 Mumford wrote an article in The New
Yorker in which he praised California’s “Bay Region Style” as an example of
authentic regional development and named Wurster as its leading designer. 3
America’s leading architectural Modernists of the mid-twentieth century
vehemently opposed Mumford’s suggestion that the Bay Region’s architecture
was a distinct regional form and ridiculed Bay Region domestic design. 4 However
despite this opposition, the theorists and buildings researched in this thesis
contribute to the assertion that Bay Region architecture was an influential,
progressive and contemporary Modernist school, that acknowledged historical
precedents and developed as a uniquely regional architectural form suited to the
culture and environment of America’s West Coast.
This thesis further argues that Wurster’s architecture was influenced by
general principals and specific prototypes from California’s vernacular buildings.
For both Mumford and Wurster this interest in the vernacular is traced broadly to
INTRODUCTION Page 1
the legacy of founding studies in European and world architecture made by
James Fergusson (1808-1886) and, more significantly, John Ruskin (1819-
1900). 5 Ruskin’s nineteenth century political, moral and aesthetic studies of
European Gothic building represented the foundation of the Arts and Crafts
movement, the legacy of which profoundly influenced Mumford’s work and was a
significant force in the development of Bay Region Style architecture.
Two related arguments are also advanced, arising from the study of
regionalism in the work of Mumford and Wurster. The first is that an important
general dictum for modern architects arises from Mumford’s regionalism: that
regional cultures will stagnate if they refuse to acknowledge the universal and,
conversely, for modern architecture to progress, it must necessarily see local
building traditions and culture as an influence equally as important as global
practice. 6 Secondly it is argued that Wurster’s work has been influential in
showing how regional influences play a role in modern architectural practice.
Vernacular sources informed Wurster’s modern domestic designs, at times by
offering stylistic forms and building materials, but more generally by suggesting
approaches to design and localised ways of dwelling that had developed in the
Bay Region, providing a continuity of lived experience for him to build upon.
The thesis is structured as two parallel historical studies, examining the
influences and development first of Mumford’s life and work, and subsequently of
Wurster’s. Chapter One provides an overview of Mumford’s historical placement,
and describes how his writing was related to the philosophies of the Arts and
Crafts movement in Britain, particularly to Ruskin, William Morris (1834-1896),
Patrick Geddes (1854-1932) and William Lethaby (1857-1931). In Chapter Two
the development of Mumford’s regionalism is examined in detail. Three important
elements in this examination are: the influence of the Arts and Crafts movement;
Mumford’s investigation of American architecture leading to his “discovery” of the
Bay Region Style; and his opposition to the International Style, the dominant
force in mid-twentieth century American architecture. Mumford’s impact upon
later writing on regionalism is then examined through a brief analysis of the
INTRODUCTION Page 2
extent of his influence upon the work of later twentieth century Critical
Regionalists Alexander Tzonis, Liane Lefaivre and Kenneth Frampton.
A parallel historical analysis leading to William Wurster’s work is examined
in Chapters Three and Four, through a study of the development of Bay Region
architecture. In particular these chapters examine the influence upon Modernist
Bay Region design of Californian vernacular architecture and the domestic work
of the Bay Region architects who preceded and greatly influenced Wurster and
his colleagues. Perhaps most significant among these was Bernard Maybeck
(1862-1957). The important similarities between Mumford’s philosophical lineage
and Wurster’s can be seen in the extent to which early twentieth century Bay
Region architecture was shaped by the ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement.
This was expressed through Maybeck’s involvement in the Ruskin and Hillside
Clubs, which espoused Romantic-era ideals and sought to establish regionally
appropriate built development in the hills above Berkeley. In chapter four,
Wurster’s work is examined in detail, and in particular it is explained how his own
region and its vernacular architecture played a significant role in his design work.
It is also argued in this chapter that Wurster’s legacy has been to show that
regionalism and vernacular precedents are not distinct from Modernism, and that
his application of these elements to the built environment of the Bay Region has
influenced subsequent designers of modern domestic architecture. The final
chapter provides a case study of one of Wurster’s most important buildings, the
Gregory Farmhouse. In this chapter its regional and vernacular qualities are
examined in detail.
Methodology
Following a period of literature review and research of published sources,
analysis was undertaken of the Bay Region’s vernacular and architect-designed
buildings. Areas investigated included: San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland,
Piedmont, Mill Valley and surrounding areas; the Scotts Valley, and the regions
south of it, including Pasatiempo and Big Sur; as well as Monterey and the rural
district around Stockton. Site visits were made to the buildings of significant
INTRODUCTION Page 3
architects in the area, including Maybeck, Wurster, Charles Callister, Charles and
Henry Greene and Julia Morgan among others.
Interviews were important to the research methodology. Daniel Gregory,
the grandson of Wurster’s clients Warren and Sadie Gregory supplied many
personal anecdotes and historical details, and arranged an extensive site visit to
the Gregory Farmhouse where measured drawings, photography and video
footage were taken. Evie Gregory, a client of Wurster’s and the daughter-in-law
of Warren and Sadie Gregory also provided invaluable personal details about
Wurster and the early period of the Gregory Farmhouse.
Research was undertaken in the archives of the San Francisco Museum
of Modern Art (SFMoMA), Bancroft Research Library at the University of
California, Berkeley Campus (UC Berkeley) and, most significantly, in the
Environmental Design Archives, also on the UC Berkeley campus, which houses
the Wurster Collection. Primary sources were examined and copied, including
plans, letters, articles, transcripts of lectures and other documents donated to the
college by Wurster towards the end of his career. Due to Wurster’s limited
publication as a writer, journals and newspaper articles became an invaluable
source of information, particularly as Wurster often expanded his theoretical
position in interviews. Also particularly valid to this thesis was The New Yorker to
which Mumford contributed for several decades, transcripts from the New York
Museum of Modern Art symposium ‘What is Happening to Modern Architecture?’,
the catalogue to the 1949 exhibition ‘The Domestic Architecture of the San
Francisco Bay Region’ and journals such as Pencil Points, Architectural Record
and Arts and Architecture.
The Bay Region was chosen as a field of study because it represents a
good example of a documented architectural form infused with strong regional
and vernacular influences. Its links to important historical figures in regionalism
and vernacular study in the U.S.A. and Britain make it uniquely suited to a
historical investigation of the evolution of regional modern design. Furthermore
Bay Region architecture had an important influence in the mid-century on
Australian Modernist design, as is documented by Robyn Boyd within this thesis,
INTRODUCTION Page 4
and the lessons learned from the regional modernist designs of the region have
continuing relevance to Australia’s quest for architectural self-definition.
INTRODUCTION Page 5
INTRODUCTION | NOTES
1
Treib, M. (ed.) 1999, An Everyday Modernism: The Houses of William Wurster, University of
California Press, California, p.23
2
Although this thesis concentrates on Mumford’s architectural writing, his study of regionalism in
America is far broader, covering American cultural artefacts in all areas of the arts. See
particularly his books The Golden Day (1926), The Brown Decades (1931) and Sticks and Stones
(1924).
3
Mumford, L. 1947, ‘The Sky Line’, in The New Yorker, October 11, 1947, pp.96-99
4
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) 1948, ‘What is Happening to Modern Architecture? A
Symposium at the Museum of Modern Art’ in The Museum of Modern Art Bulletin, Spring 1948:
Vol. XV, No.3, Museum of Modern Art, New York, gives a transcript of the most significant
altercation of the controversy between Mumford and America’s leading architectural Modernists.
Two excellent contemporary analyses are given in Gail Fenske’s 1997 essay ‘Lewis Mumford,
Henry-Russell Hitchcock and the Bay Region Style’ and Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre’s
2003 work ‘Critical Regionalism’.
5
Both were influenced by Augustus Pugin’s (1812-1852) writing, as mentioned in the text below.
6
Tzonis, A. & Lefaivre, L. 2003, Critical Regionalism, Architecture and Identity in a Globalized
World, Prestel, Munich. advance a similar argument, which they claim was also indebted to
Mumford’s work. See p.6 and pp.24-39.
INTRODUCTION Page 6
CHAPTER ONE | HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO MUMFORD’S REGIONALISM
Despite an informal education and a career largely devoted to non-academic and

journalistic cultural criticism, Lewis Mumford has gained stature as one of the
most respected intellectual voices in twentieth century America. 1 Mumford wrote
over thirty books and hundreds of articles that contributed to the study of
American society and culture between the 1920s and 1980s, mainly on the
subjects of architecture, literature, art and technology. His writing on regionalism
developed over several decades and has fundamentally influenced subsequent
architects, planners and theorists. Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, the
founders of the Critical Regionalist school, have also expressed an explicit
indebtedness to Mumford’s work in the development of their regionalist
philosophy. 2 This chapter examines the most significant influences upon the
development of Mumford’s regionalism and discusses how the vernacular,
ancient and traditional architecture of Europe and Asia has been relevant to his
work and to that of four of his significant predecessors.
The first of these four is nineteenth century Scottish architect and
architectural historian James Fergusson. Fergusson was influential in promoting
the idea that within the traditional buildings of pre-industrial societies (which this
thesis accepts as vernacular buildings) the true and pure principles of
architecture may be discerned. 3 While not overtly aligned with the Ruskinian
tradition in which we will place Mumford, Fergusson was nevertheless among the
most widely read of nineteenth century writers on architecture. Hanno Kruft,
editor of A History of Architectural Theory: From Vitruvius to the Present (1994)
described Fergusson’s Illustrated Handbook of Architecture (1855) as “the
standard architectural history of the Victorian age.” 4 Remnants of Fergusson’s
ideas will be seen to be present in Ruskin’s work, in that of Arts and Crafts
writers Morris and Lethaby and in Mumford’s own work also. Fergusson’s
architectural analysis was overtly scientific, which contrasted sharply with
Ruskin’s anti-rationalism. 5 Ruskin had argued in The Seven Lamps of
Architecture (1849) that only a moral or spiritual attitude to architecture was
CHAPTER ONE | HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO MUMFORD’S REGIONALISM Page 7

appropriate since “every subject should surely, at a period like the present, be
taken up in this spirit, or not at all.” 6
Mumford’s writing contains an interesting tension between the rationality
of Modernism and the spiritual approach he adopted from his Arts and Crafts
antecedents. This Arts and Crafts approach, founded in Ruskin’s work, held that
the Gothic period represented architectural and social models worthy of
emulating. Mumford, by contrast, remained forward-looking, with a largely
favourable view of technology’s ability to redeem. While he retained an
appreciation for pre-industrial architectural forms, it was within a broader regional
philosophy that he understood them as precedents. As will be expanded upon in
the following chapter, this allowed him to use the universal themes of Modernism
to discuss architecture, without forgoing his belief in the importance of the
localised, the cultural and the historical in the development of vernacular and
regional forms.
Mumford’s writing was greatly influenced by a socialist tradition that led
from Ruskin’s work. The writers in this tradition were not just vociferous about
humanitarian concerns but fiercely anti-establishment and predisposed to action.
Susan Zlotnick described the Ruskinian tradition’s reaction to the economic
rationalism of nineteenth century industrial England:
Carlyle, Ruskin and Dickens belong to this tradition of humanitarian
concern. Faced with the innumerable examples of human wretchedness
associated with early industrialism—from child labor, to urban squalor, to
unsafe workplaces—these social critics called for immediate intervention,
while the political economists seemed willing to accept misery in the short
term because they believed that an unregulated market would benefit
everyone in the long run. 7
This tradition was also one with an extreme position against modernity and
mechanisation. That Mumford, whose career spanned much of the twentieth
century, was its representative during the ascendancy and climax of the
Modernist movement created a tension throughout his entire work, as he
struggled to unite the philosophical debt he owed to a Romantic and anti-
rationalist movement with his wholehearted support for the ideals of Modernism. 8

Moreover this tradition was focused not on the aesthetic, but the moral, spiritual
and social study of architecture. The idea that architecture could be made up of
intangible qualities, social constructs, historical and regional principles was
assiduously continued by Mumford, and was a key element in his writing on
regionalism. It was in this element of the continuation of Ruskin’s tradition that he
was most opposed by the proponents of International Style Modernism, who
reduced Mumford’s arguments about distinct regional types entirely to stylistic
features, ignoring Mumford’s regional arguments and his notion that a continuity
of spirit, not of style, may exist between architectural periods. 9
Nineteenth century studies of world architecture

Mumford’s examination of vernacular American architecture may be seen as
extending from studies of Gothic and world architecture from the 1830s in Britain.
The nineteenth century British interest in Gothic architecture was largely founded
in architect and writer Augustus Pugin’s work from the 1830s. This interest was
subsequently developed and greatly popularised by Ruskin and Fergusson in
their contemporaneous studies during the mid-nineteenth century. Ruskin studied
Gothic building traditions and saw in their construction methods a celebration of
the humanity of craftsmen and their society’s pre-capitalist moral values. 10
Krishan Kumar in his introduction to William Morris’s News From Nowhere wrote:
Ruskin, who was probably the single most important influence on Morris,
taught him that architecture was a moral and social thing - that it
expressed the spirit of an age, and of the lives of the ordinary people. It
was an index of the health or diseased state of society. Gothic art and
architecture, Ruskin held, as opposed to classical and Renaissance forms,
celebrated the skills of the ordinary artisan, his joy and creativity in
labour. 11
In Ruskin’s The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and The Stones of

Venice (1851-3) he expanded upon the political and moral themes that had been
first introduced into architectural writing by Pugin. 12 Introducing this moral
investigation Ruskin wrote in The Seven Lamps of Architecture that every branch
of human endeavour becomes:

the actual expression of some ultimate nerve or fibre of the mighty laws
which govern the moral world. However mean or inconsiderable the act,
there is something in the well doing of it, which has fellowship with the
noblest forms of manly virtue; and the truth, decision, and temperance,
which we reverently regard as honourable conditions of the spiritual being,
have a representative or derivative influence over the works of the hand,
the movements of the frame, and the action of the intellect.
And as thus every action, down even to the drawing of a line or utterance
of a syllable, is capable of a peculiar dignity in the manner of it, which we
sometimes express by saying it is truly done (as a line or tone is true), so
also it is capable of dignity still higher in the motive of it. For there is no
action so slight, nor so mean, but it may be done to a great purpose, and
ennobled therefore; nor is any purpose so great but that slight actions may
help it, and may be so done as to help it much, most especially that chief
of all purposes, the pleasing of God. 13
Fergusson, whose work was in many ways related to both Ruskin’s and
Pugin’s nevertheless differed markedly in both his method and conclusions. He
advanced his historical and ethnographic study of architecture by scientific
method, having taken advantage of Britain’s colonisation of India to travel
throughout the region in the 1830s and document its architecture. His work
contains a detailed and previously unattainable body of information on the
architecture of Eastern Asia, and particularly the Indian sub-continent. Kruft
described Fergusson as “a Victorian positivist” and “a thinker who had a system
of schemas, categories and tables to hand with which he could absorb any
concept. He developed a universal aesthetic and produced a points system by
which, by means of three aesthetic categories, the value of a work of art could be
judged.” 14 Fergusson’s method was premised on an enticing (almost Gnostic) a-
priori assumption that traditional exotic architecture was based upon “true
principles” that were absent from his own century’s Classical revival styles of
architecture. Moreover he believed that Europe too had once possessed such
knowledge; he wrote in his A History of Architecture in All Countries: From the
Earliest Times to the Present Day (1865):
…not only was I able to extend my personal observations to the examples
found in almost all countries between China and the Atlantic shore, but I
lived familiarly among a people who were still practicing their traditional art

on the same principles as those which guided the architects of the middle
ages in the production of similar but scarcely more beautiful or original
works. With these antecedents I found myself in possession of a
considerable amount of information regarding buildings which had not
previously been described, and—what I considered of more value—of an
insight into the theory of the art, which was even more novel. 15
What is fascinating about Fergusson is his comparative obscurity

compared to the extent of his influence on subsequent architectural writing and
the esteem with which his work was regarded in the nineteenth century. Ruskin
wrote of Fergusson in the Stones of Venice: “I hope to find in him a noble ally,
ready to join with me in war upon affectation, falsehood, and prejudice, of every
kind: I have derived much instruction from his most interesting work, and I hope
for much more from its continuation.” 16 Yet Ruskin was concerned to attenuate
the similarities between his work and Fergusson’s and he devoted an appendix in
The Stones of Venice passionately refuting the link. In the appendix he wrote
disparagingly of Fergusson’s method: “But there is no end to the fallacies and
confusions of Mr. Fergusson’s arrangement. It is a perfect entanglement of gun-
cotton, and explodes into vacuity wherever one holds a light to it.” 17
Despite the fact that Fergusson’s Victorian prejudices and reliance on
scientific method eventually rendered his work anachronistic, his influence, or at
least the legacy of his ideas, can be traced throughout subsequent writing in
architectural theory. Compare for instance the quote from Fergusson above with
Mumford’s writing in 1939: “Some of the finest modern work I have seen – in
domestic design at all events – is what has been done in the last five years in
Hawaii and the Pacific Northwest; it is based not on any copying of traditional
oriental forms but upon an understanding of the principles behind them.” 18 In his
opposition to the glorification of Gothic Revival architecture Fergusson was at
odds with much of his age. He chided the architects of Gothic buildings (whether
Gothic or Gothic Revival) for missing “one of the most obvious and most
important elements of architectural design,” 19 that being, for Fergusson, the use
of massive materials to create grandeur. Rather, he thought they used smaller
materials which displayed their much less important skills in construction. He also

expressed a reaction against reviving the Gothic in terms that were almost
exactly those Mumford would advance against Ruskin and Pugin a century later.
Fergusson wrote in 1865 that when a reaction finally came to Europe’s previous
300 years of “copying classical forms…it was not, unfortunately in the direction of
freedom; but towards a more servile imitation of another style, which—whether
better or worse in itself—was not a style of our age...” 20 Compare this with
Mumford’s later criticism (discussed again in Chapter Two), which argued: “Pugin
and Ruskin…sought to give to some moment in the development of Gothic
architecture, such as the style of Thirteenth Century Lombardy which Ruskin
favoured, the same stereotyped authority that Palladianism had claimed for the
Classic.” 21
Despite his admiration for ornament, Fergusson also advanced many
arguments that seem to anticipate those of Modernism. He believed that function
should guide design, writing that true architecture “consisted in designing a
building so as to be most suitable and convenient for the purposes required.” 22
Another idea advanced by Fergusson was the general dictum that principle was
important to design but that style was not: “the wigwam grew into a hut, the hut
into a house, the house into a palace…but it never lost the original idea of a
shelter.” 23 Or indeed his counsel (in a manner of speech we may compare with
Wurster’s plainness in later chapters) to those who questioned where to look for
guidance if not to the Gothic, “‘our own national style’…The obvious answer, that
it is to be found in the exercise of common sense, where all the rest of the world
have found it...” 24 Furthermore the Orientalism that so influenced America’s
nineteenth and early twentieth century architects, such as Frank Lloyd Wright
and Bay Region architects, Bernard Maybeck, Charles and Henry Greene or
Harwell Hamilton Harris owes much to Fergusson’s pioneering studies and
drawings of the buildings of Asia. 25
Fergusson’s writing, although thoroughly Victorian, was strangely
prescient. When Mumford, in Sticks and Stones wrote of the settlement of New
England as a period of authentic historical and regional architectural
development when “good building was almost universal” 26 Fergusson had again

pre-empted him, albeit with Victorian ethnographic values, arguing that within
authentic architectural traditions:
…where European civilization or its influences have not yet
permeated…not only the Egyptian, the Greek, and the Gothic architects,
but even the indolent and half-civilized inhabitants of India, the stolid
Tartars of Thibet and China, and the savage Mexicans, succeeded in
erecting great and beautiful buildings. No race, however rude or remote,
has failed, when working on this system to produce buildings which are
admired by all who behold them… 27
Beyond some general principles they held in common however,

Fergusson differed substantially from the Ruskinian tradition in which Mumford is
placed. The socialism that underpinned this tradition, as well as its understanding
that architecture must be a moral and social study, are absent from Fergusson’s
work. In his rational and scientific scheme, and his conception of architecture, the
roles of architect, builder, engineer or stonemason are entirely distinct, and,
except for that of the architect, purely mechanical. Fergusson claimed:
The art of the builder consists in merely heaping the materials together, so
as to attain the desired end in the speediest and readiest fashion…the
art…of the engineer consists in selecting the best and most appropriate
materials…and using these in the most scientific manner, so as to ensure
an economical but satisfactory result. Where the engineer leaves off, the
art of the architect begins. His object is to arrange the materials of the
engineer, not so much with regard to economical as to artistic effects, and
by light and shade, and outline to produce a form that in itself shall be
permanently beautiful. He then adds ornament, which by its meaning
doubles the effect of the disposition he has just made, and by its elegance
throws a charm over the whole composition. 28
He claimed that “this division of labour is essential to success, and was always
practised where art was a reality.” 29 Fergusson’s system is perhaps realistic and
more descriptive of modern building methods than the appeals to medieval
society made by Ruskin and Morris, yet to those Romantic-era followers of
Ruskin and Carlyle there could have been little so repugnant as such a
vindication of modern society and particularly its concomitant technologies such
as the division of labour. Indeed Gothic architecture was valued by Ruskin
precisely because it represented the antithesis of the industrial institution of

divided labour. For Ruskin, division of labour represented a monumental assault
on human dignity. He wrote, “We have much studied and much perfected of late
the great civilised invention of the division of labour; only we give it a false name.
It is not truly speaking the labour that is divided; but the men; divided into mere
segments of men – broken into small fragments and crumbs of life.” 30
Where Fergusson devalued the workman’s contribution to architecture,
Ruskin and his followers saw Gothic building as celebrations of the liberated
worker. In Gothic cathedrals Ruskin praised the “fantastic ignorance of those old
sculptors… [the] ugly goblins and formless monsters” and cautions not to mock
them “for they are the signs of the life and liberty of every workman who struck
the stone; a freedom of thought, and rank in scale of being…which must be the
first aim of all Europe at this day to regain for her children.” 31
The influence of John Ruskin’s philosophy and regionalism

Mumford’s influences were extremely broad and, while this thesis concentrates
on his British philosophical antecedents, American thinkers and social
philosophers were also of great importance to him. In particular Mumford
admired writer Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) and philosopher and
environmentalist Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), as well as his colleagues on
the influential journal The Dial. These included sociologist Thorstein Veblen
(1857-1929) (whose work is later analysed in this thesis for its influence on
Wurster’s Gregory Farmhouse) and writer and critic, Van Wyck Brooks (1886-
1963). This chapter however explores how Mumford’s work was in large part
prefigured by a series of writers in Britain sharing Mumford’s profound interest in
architecture and (perhaps with the exception of Fergusson) an indebtedness to
John Ruskin. Mumford’s work has been highly influential among academic
philosophers, historians, architects and the public, yet, like Ruskin, he was a self-
appointed critic of the arts, architecture and culture rather than an academic
philosopher of any identifiable tradition. His association with Ruskin is perhaps
not surprising given that Mumford’s education largely consisted in browsing in the
New York Public Library. Ruskin’s influence in the decades around the turn of the

century would have been difficult to avoid in general reading: his writing largely
defined the British Romantic movement, has arguably shaped the policies of
modern Labour parties and greatly influenced diverse figures such as Leo
Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, Marcel Proust, Bernard Maybeck and George Bernard
Shaw. 32 He was also the greatest intellectual influence upon the Arts and Crafts
movement and Lethaby and Morris, leaders within that movement, were, in turn,
important influences upon Mumford.
Mumford is placed within a unique tradition of socialist polymaths:
American cultural historian David Shi called him “a spiritual descendant of
Emerson and Thoreau, Morris and Ruskin.” 33 These writers may perhaps today
be loosely considered environmentalists, although their intellectual base was far
broader than the term implies and “public intellectuals” is a more apt label.
Ruskin, as founder of this tradition, is particularly difficult to classify. He was an
artist, art critic, social theorist, political scientist and architectural writer,
contributing significantly to each field. Like Mumford he was a public intellectual
and not an academic specialist; Kruft described him as a “utopian theorist and
man of letters.” 34 He was perhaps most greatly influenced by Scottish writer and
social critic Thomas Carlyle, whose dislike of modernity and strong associations
with German Romanticism contributed to Ruskin’s anti-modern and anti-
rationalist position. 35 Michael Lowy and Robert Sayre, authors of Romanticism
Against the Tide of Modernity (2001) described Carlyle as “the only one of his
[Ruskin’s] predecessors with which he identified completely and whom he
venerated unreservedly…only Carlyle manifested an opposition to modernity that
was as violent, as pure, and as absolute as Ruskin’s own.” 36 This trait was
passed unadulterated from Ruskin to Morris, who wrote “…apart from the desire
to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred
of modern civilisation.” 37 Mumford too inherited a dislike for modernity, but not
with the passion of his predecessors, and he maintained a belief that the modern
age could yet produce utopian living conditions.
Broad influences such as the Bible, Joseph Turner’s artwork, nature,
poetry and European architecture figure at least as prominently in Ruskin’s prose

as does any particular thinker or philosophical tradition and the breadth of
Ruskin’s themes and influences is well summed-up by John Rosenberg, editor of
The Genius of John Ruskin (1963), who exclaimed that: “one cannot read Ruskin
for very long without a sense of bafflement, perhaps of rage, but always of
revelation…his works are as burdened with contradiction as experience itself.” 38
Although not strictly aligned with any tradition, Ruskin may be compared broadly
with nineteenth century socialists Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels
(1820-1895). His questioning of the legitimacy of rationalism (in an age of broad
public acceptance that progress was both inevitable and virtuous) associates him
with nascent European anti-rationalist philosophies and movements which
emerged following Emmanuel Kant’s (1724-1804) work, particularly the German
Romantic tradition, and German anti-rationalist philosophers such as Wilhelm
Dilthey (1833-1911) and Franz Brentano (1838-1917) precursors to Edmund
Husserl’s (1859-1938) phenomenological philosophy and the existential
philosophies of the twentieth century. 39 However while sharing certain traits with
such German philosophers, Ruskin and the writers of the British Arts and Crafts
and Romantic movements tended to be general and political, writing practical
and popular works aimed at a non-academic audience. Most of Mumford’s
immediate influences, including Morris, and Lethaby, lay within this tradition.
Lethaby was one of a number of mentor-figures with whom Mumford
initiated correspondences which continued throughout his life. Two others, also
indebted to Ruskin, included American architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959)
and Scottish scientist and writer Patrick Geddes (1854-1932). Geddes, a Scottish
biologist and botanist is colloquially known as the “professor of things in general”
and was perhaps the most formative influence on Mumford in his early career,
particularly given Geddes’ generalist approach. Essentially an environmentalist
he described himself as a landscape architect, introducing the term to Britain. He
was described by philosopher Monroe C. Beardsley as inadequately studied but
nevertheless an “extraordinary Victorian” who “deserves to be recorded along
with Morris as a follower of Ruskin, but one who struck out on his own in many
directions.” 40 For Mumford, both Geddes and Ebenezer Howard (1850-1928), the

founder of the British Garden City Movement and another follower of Ruskin,
were extremely important writers who served as intellectual role models. 41 Author
Robert Wojtowicz argued in his 1996 book Lewis Mumford and American
Modernism: “Mumford never finished college, but in Geddes and Howard, he
found the direction he needed in life.” 42 Mumford’s emergence as an intellectual
public figure may be attributed to his discovery of intellectuals in a tradition
following Ruskin, who were generalists and not academic specialists.
The writers in the Ruskinian tradition in which we identify Mumford have
historically had a regional emphasis. Ruskin had written passionately on
regionalism and the importance of regional distinctions, believing that
architecture connected a culture to its environment through time. Miller wrote that
Mumford learned “from John Ruskin that every stone has a tongue and every
tongue tells a story.” 43 Ruskin read the character of a people through their
architecture: “It is true” he wrote, “greatly and deeply true, that the architecture of
the north is rude and wild…I believe it is in this very character that it deserves our
profoundest reverence.” 44 Regional architectural differences were important to
Ruskin because regional differences in building reflected the character of the
people. The characteristics of the Gothic builder he distilled as “1. Savageness or
Rudeness. 2. Love of Change. 3. Love of nature. 4. Disturbed imagination 5.
Obstinacy. 6. Generosity.” 45 He wrote lyrically of regional differences and, to
Ruskin, industrial processes only removed local character from buildings and
detracted from the regionally developed characteristics of society. Mumford
continued Ruskin’s argument; however his regionalism represented more than
just a modernisation of Ruskin’s philosophy. Miller commented that Mumford
“…was one of the first critics to break down that [Ruskin's] false distinction
between architecture and building, and to open our eyes to the beauty and worth
of vernacular forms.” 46 Where Ruskin had concentrated only on what he believed
to be “architecture” which he distinguished from building or engineering.
Mumford, whose architectural regionalism examined the entire built environment,
branded this element of Ruskin’s architectural analysis “a downright false one.” 47

The most significant Arts and Crafts figure to follow Ruskin was William
Morris, whose writing also contained passionate regionalist arguments. While he
absorbed Ruskin’s writing completely, he also expanded his architectural
analysis to the study of non-Gothic domestic vernacular British forms. He wrote
in 1895 of his own house, Kelmscott Manor:
so much has the old house grown up out of the soil and the lives of those
that lived on it; needing no grand office-architect, with no great longing for
anything else than correctness, and to be like Julius Caesar; but some thin
thread of tradition, a half-anxious sense of the delight of the meadow and
acre and wood and river; a certain amount (not too much let us hope) of
common sense, a liking for making materials serve ones turn, and
perhaps at bottom some little grain of sentiment. This I think was what
went to the making of the old house; might we not manage to find some
sympathy for all that from henceforward; or must we but shrink before the
Philistine with one, Alas that it must perish! 48
Morris’s greatest architectural

delight was the only house he
ever commissioned, The Red
House (1859) (Figure 1, Figure
2), which he devised as his
“earthly paradise.” It was

designed by his friend, Arts
and Crafts architect Philip
Webb (1831-1915). The cost
of the house forced Morris to
sell it within five years,
however his successful Figure 1: Philip Webb, The Red House (1859), Bexley Heath
manufacturing firm grew from
the experience of constructing and furnishing the building. To suit Morris’s love of
hand crafted and well made things and hatred of machine made things, each
piece was designed and manufactured by Morris and his acquaintances. Friend
and biographer John William Mackail recalled in his The Life of William Morris
(1899): “not a chair, or table, or bed; not a cloth or paper hanging for the walls;

nor tiles to line fireplaces or passages; nor a curtain or a candlestick; nor a jug to
hold wine or a glass to drink it out of; but had to be reinvented…to escape the
ugliness of the current article.” 49 The house was made of red brick, unusual
enough in 1859 for the dwelling to be named for it. The intention in the design
was to create a modern and informal dwelling based on craft principles, however
without referencing or mimicking historical styles. Faia and Lester Wertheimer in
Architectural History (2004) wrote: “the importance of [the Red House] lay in its
informality, its absence of decoration and its simple vernacular. With their
emphasis on basic form, sound materials, and good craftsmanship, Morris and
Webb anticipated the
Modern movement by at
least fifty years.” 50
Morris had also
explored the regionalist
idea of a garden city,
where the rural and city
functions were
combined. His model,
following Ruskin, was
based upon an
Figure 2: Philip Webb, The Red House (1859),
idealisation of social Bexley Heath, floor plan
bonds and city planning

from the Middle Ages. His vision of London as a garden city is laid out in News
From Nowhere (1890) 51 :
The soapworks with their smoke-vomiting chimneys were gone, the
engineers’ works gone, and no sound of riveting and hammering came
down the west wind from Thorneycrofts…both shores had a line of very
pretty houses, low and not large, standing back a little way from the river;
they were mostly built of red brick…and looked, above all, comfortable,
and as if they were, so to say, alive and sympathetic with the life of the
dwellers in them. There was a continuous garden in front of them going
down to the water’s edge, in which flowers were now blooming
luxuriantly... 52

This utopian vision was directly threatened by modernity. Morris blamed
industrialists, the market economy, the power of the machine and modern
industrial methods for environmental degradation and the devaluation of
humanity. For him they were responsible for the “short-sighted reckless brutality
of squalor that so disgraces our intricate civilisation.” 53 This sentiment is carried
forcefully into American writing through the work of Van Wyck Brooks, who
greatly influenced Mumford early in his career. Wyck Brooks wrote disparagingly
of the destructive methods of European settlement of the U.S.A., in terms
Mumford was to reproduce almost verbatim in Sticks and Stones, describing
development for profit as the antithesis of authentic regional development. 54
William Lethaby: Bridging the Arts and Crafts Movement and modernity
As an architect in Britain roughly contemporaneous with Maybeck, Lethaby
worked during a unique period in history, participating in and contributing to the
Arts and Crafts movement at a time when its philosophy was becoming
untenable. Like Mumford, Lethaby was cautiously optimistic about technology
while maintaining a respect for the ancient, handmade and vernacular. Gillian
Naylor in her book The Arts and Crafts Movement argued that Lethaby had tried
to “reconcile two traditions – the rational and the romantic.” 55
Fergusson must also be recognised as a major influence upon Lethaby’s
work. Fergusson’s books were standard reference works throughout the
nineteenth century, and Lethaby deferred frequently to Fergusson in matters of
fact. 56 They differed absolutely in their view of the source of architectural
inspiration: for Lethaby it was nature, whereas Fergusson claimed “no true
building was ever designed to look like anything in either the animal, vegetable or
mineral kingdoms.” 57 However despite differing on its source and meaning, both
Lethaby and Fergusson viewed the world’s vernacular architecture as providing
fundamental axioms that should guide architects in their practice. Where
Fergusson had discussed the true principles of architecture Lethaby claimed:
“certain ideas common in the architecture of many lands and religions, the

purpose behind structure and form which may be called the esoteric principles of
architecture.” 58
Lethaby’s Architecture, Mysticism and Myth (1891/92) is, like Fergusson’s
earlier A History of World Architecture (1867), an attempt to document aspects of
global vernacular built form, and is distinguished by its emphasis on the
symbolism behind buildings rather than aesthetic or formal description. Lethaby
later described his book as “the most ignorant work ever published” 59 but
maintained its underlying thesis for a new work, Architecture, Nature and Magic
(first published 1928), a quarter of a century later. This underlying thesis, as
Lethaby explained it, was that:
…the development of building practice and ideas of the world structure
acted and reacted on one another…[and] beyond this specific and direct
interaction, Nature was further the source of much of what is called
architectural decoration in a way that is not recognised in the histories, or
attributed to ‘aesthetic design’, whatever that may be… 60
Echoing Fergusson’s reverence for

vernacular design principles that had evolved
over millennia, Lethaby despised the
architectural individualism and sham styles of
his age describing the advancement of
architectural styles as an end in themselves
as “the terror.” 61 He argued that architects
needed instead to look to the pure forms, the
“types ready to hand.” 62 Like both Ruskin
and Fergusson, Lethaby believed that beauty
in buildings arose from adherence to utility:
“that is what we have to get back into our
buildings – high functional beauty.” 63
Architectural writer Trevor Garnham in his
1993 book on Lethaby’s building Melsetter
Figure 3: William Lethaby, Melsetter
House (Figure 3), an important example of Arts House, 1898, Orkney

and Crafts architecture, suggested that Lethaby’s had used vernacular
precedents in the design, however not as an attempt to create or revive a style:
The selection of a familiar vernacular model should not be seen as
an arts and crafts style, for that would simply continue the 19th century’s
action replay of history going nowhere, but establishing a guiding
framework within which the work of craftsmen might begin to resonate with
these deeper meanings. 64
To Lethaby, building must exist in a continuum to have any meaning. In

Architecture (1911) Lethaby stated: “No art that is only one man deep is worth
much; it should be a thousand men deep, we cannot forget historical knowledge,
nor would we if we might.” 65 Lethaby looked continually to the origins of
architecture through ethnology, anthropology and mythology to provide
alternative sources from which contemporary designers could explore meaning in
architecture, and restore an authenticity to architecture beyond the restraints of
historicism. In his 1911 work Architecture Lethaby wrote:
ancient architecture had a meaning and a message; it was religious,
magical, symbolic and cosmological. It is the large content of it in these
senses that makes it quite a different thing from the commercial grandeurs
in the ecclesiastical and department-store ‘styles’ of the present day which
we call by the same word, architecture. 66
Lethaby believed that symbolism could strengthen the relationship

between nature and culture although he thought the relationship was being
eroded by the emerging dominance of a scientific perspective, arguing “…the
passing of the old ages of magic into the ages of science has opened a widening
abyss between them and us and a great gulf is thus set between ancient magic
architecture and modern scientific buildings.” 67 He believed ancient buildings
were designed around an understanding of their purpose and he was concerned
that architecture was becoming guided by aesthetic principles rather than by an
understanding of content and meaning accessible to a majority of people.
Lethaby represented a turning point in the Arts and Crafts tradition, and it
can perhaps be attributed to his struggle to reconcile Romantic and rational
philosophies that Mumford was able to maintain certain Arts and Crafts ideals
while remaining above all a Modernist thinker. Michael Saler wrote in The Avant-

Garde in Interwar England (1999): “Lethaby was the most influential of Ruskin
and Morris's apostles in the early years of the new century… [he] propagated
Ruskin’s definition of art as the joyful expression of the individual’s spirit. He
helped restore the medieval workshop tradition, with its emphasis on fitness for
purpose and truth to nature…his own attempts to train designers for modern
industry at the Central School became the model for the more successful
German industrial design movement.” 68 The Bauhaus school is central to this
German movement, and it is ironic that Lethaby should have been influential
upon Mumford as well as on the Bauhaus, which prefigured much of International
Style architecture. 69
What this perhaps shows is the fragility of the divide between Arts and
Crafts philosophy and Modernist philosophy. Since the time of Fergusson and
Ruskin the “Modernist” ideas of fitness to function, truth to materials and cautious
use of ornament had been present in architectural theory. While Lethaby followed
Ruskin and Morris in his commitment to the Arts and Crafts movement, he also
recognised that the ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement could be applied to
modernity, and reluctantly abandoned the idea of recreating medieval conditions.
Architectural historian Shams Naga argued that this was a difficult position for
Lethaby to take, claiming that it represented a dilemma for the remaining Arts
and Crafts thinkers of the twentieth century. While architects like Lethaby “were
rooted in nineteenth century Romanticism, they preached rationalism which
caused much controversy. They are considered on the one hand prophets of the
Modern movement and on the other traitors to the Romantic movement.” 70
After William Morris’s death in 1896 Lethaby became the founding
principal of the Central School of Arts and Crafts and a leading advocate for the
Arts and Crafts movement. Lethaby’s connection to Morris and Ruskin can be
most easily recognised in their commonality of thought regarding architecture
and labour. Lethaby wrote that “labour, work, art really make up what should be
one body of human service.” 71 However, unlike Ruskin and Morris, Lethaby
witnessed the twentieth century’s rapid adoption of technological change and the
eventual catastrophe of World War One. Garnham summarised Lethaby’s

predicament: “during the 1890s we can see [him] emerge as a major architectural
critic, witness his mind struggling to reconcile the contradictions tearing at the
age, to hold onto his love of crafts, to foster his interest in symbolism and to
pursue the obligation he felt to the rationalist, scientific age.” 72
Even by the late 1920s, despite his complete intellectual acceptance of
the realities of the Modernist period, Lethaby was never really able to break with
the past or deny the value of craft. He says in the introduction to Architecture,
Nature and Magic (1928):
however desirable it might be to continue the old ways or revert to past
types, it is, I feel on reviewing the attempts that have been made,
impossible. We have passed into a scientific age, and the old practical
arts, produced instinctively belong to an entirely different era…In saying
that the old ways are closed to us, please do think I would have it so if it
might be otherwise; my own mind rests with the poetries of ancient art and
I am altogether inadequate for the methods of science. However, I do see
that science has a new magic wonder of its own, and that the manufacture
of sham antiquity in our buildings is vain and silly. 73
While Lethaby came to acknowledge and respect the place of the machine he
remained a Romantic figure continuing Ruskin’s opposition to such modern
necessities as divided labour, and never let science’s successes blind him to its
failings. Where Lethaby perhaps saw a defeated Arts and Crafts tradition, the
younger American, Mumford, was more inclined to genuinely accept the
challenge of the age.
The development of Mumford’s regionalism

Mumford made valuable contributions to urban and regional planning in his
extensive architectural writing, which included among other books Sticks and
Stones (1924), The South in Architecture (1942) and Roots of Contemporary
American Architecture (1952) and several decades as the architectural writer for
The New Yorker. His overwhelming vision was for the development of authentic
American architecture in an America made up not just of large cities, but of
regions planned according to local environmental conditions, developing in
accordance with local history and traditions. 74 And yet in a departure from Ruskin

and Morris, his regional emphasis should not to be thought of as pastoral.
Mumford was fully cognisant of the city as the dwelling place of modernity and,
unlike the writers of the Arts and Crafts movement, he envisioned realistic rather
than utopian responses to modern urban development within his regionalism, for
example his response to the urban and suburban architecture of the Bay
Region. 75 The Arts and Crafts movement’s socialist scepticism of a market
economy as a basis for society remained an element of Mumford’s writing
throughout his life, however his recognition of Bay Region architecture as a
positive regional model is a good example of his departure from the Arts and
Crafts tradition. Far from utopian or socialist, Bay Region architecture was a
school of predominantly urban, even suburban, upper middle-class, Modernist
architecture consisting of mainly detached dwellings in expensive locations.
Patrick Geddes also had a profound influence on Mumford’s early interest
in regionalism and the possibility for a regional modern city. Bruce Pfieffer and
Robert Wojtowicz, Mumford’s biographers in Frank Lloyd Wright & Lewis
Mumford: Thirty Years of Correspondence (2001), described Geddes as “the
Scottish polymath who proposed an evolutionary and regional approach to
modern society.” Geddes was the role model from whom Mumford developed his
focus on the modern city as the locus of cultural and intellectual life. After reading
Geddes, Mumford began documenting New York, following its transport routes,
noting its geography and describing its architecture in detail, from major buildings
through to owner-built structures. 76 Early in his career Mumford became the
secretary and spokesman of the Regional Planning Association of America,
which he joined in 1923. Pfieffer and Wojtowicz described the association and its
activities as:
a loosely organized group of architects, planners, economists and writers
who embraced Geddes’ regionalism and Howard’s garden city model as a
two-pronged solution to the metropolitan sprawl overtaking the East Coast
of the United States. Over the next decade, the association effectively
combined Geddes’ and Howard’s ideas to form the “regional city,” a self-
contained community that was of moderate density yet closely balanced
with its rural surroundings. 77

The vehemence of Mumford’s anti-technological tone in his early writing,
for instance in the first edition of Sticks and Stones, can be seen to have been
prefigured by arguments stretching from Carlyle and Ruskin to Morris and
Geddes. These ideas had lost much of their potency by the early decades of the
twentieth century and, later in his career, Mumford re-evaluated his early work,
that had been written under the strong influence of Geddes. For instance, in the
preface to the 1954 edition of Sticks and Stones he noted “…in the spring of
1923, meeting Patrick Geddes in New York for the first time, I fell under the spell
of his sharp critical reaction against our machine-ridden civilisation.” 78 Although
Mumford evidently matured beyond his early influences, Ruskin’s ideas and
those of his many followers represented recurring themes throughout his work.
Mumford may have broken with Arts and Crafts tradition by engaging with the
Modernist movement and by his fascination with the possibilities of machine
technology, however he remained in part a Romantic figure, troubled by the
actual and potential evils that technology represented. While his ever-developing
regionalism was forward looking rather than seeking a return to past ages, he
never abandoned the idea of the garden city, although Mumford biographer
Donald Miller highlighted Mumford’s extreme disappointment of the results when
he saw the actual Garden Cities, Letchworth and Welwyn, that had been built in
Britain. 79
Although a Modernist, Mumford dissociated himself from the International
Style, which he saw as a rationalist and theory-driven approach to architecture.
He genuinely believed that many of the world’s social and environmental
problems could be solved by the type of non-positivist scientific approach
suggested by Geddes and other writers. Casey Blake, summarising Mumford’s
influences in his introduction to Mumford’s Art and Technics, wrote:
Convinced that Geddes's holistic approach to evolution and social devel-
opment opened the door to a reintegration of science and the humanities,
and to a postindustrial "organic" culture, Mumford began a
correspondence with his new mentor in 1917…At the same time, Mumford
read widely in the work of such thinkers as William James, John Dewev,
Henri Bergson, Peter Kropotkin, and Alfred North Whitehead who, like
Geddes, were promoting a nonpositivist scientific method that emphasized

the subjective elements of human consciousness. Mumford’s
antipositivism also drew him to political and cultural critics of industrial
capitalism, including the English romantics and Fabians— John Ruskin,
William Morris, George Bernard Shaw, and Sidney and Beatrice
Webb… 80
In the twentieth century Mumford had no choice but to accept Modernity

and as his regionalism developed it increasingly insisted upon architecture’s
openness to influences from past and present, and local and universal. He
argued in Technics and Civilisation (1934) that human beings could no longer
hope to exist as pre-machine beings. Rather the race should look to a new
societal model, rather than attempt to resurrect an idealised past as Morris had
done. Society could no longer hope to undo technical progress but must
embrace, understand and move beyond it; constructing a future humanity rather
than a past one:
…our capacity to go beyond the machine rests upon our power to
assimilate the machine. Until we have absorbed the lessons of objectivity,
impersonality, neutrality, the lessons of the mechanical realm we cannot
go further in our development toward the more richly organic, the more
profoundly human. 81
A central failing of the Arts and Crafts movement had been its blinkered
approach to technology, which rendered the movement unable to continue into
the twentieth century. Gillian Naylor wrote “Theirs was a personal and subjective
approach, and although they came to appreciate intellectually the fact of a
machine as the normal tool of our civilisation they were unable or unwilling to
absorb [these] lessons of objectivity.” 82
Mumford’s regionalism developed as a response to the Romantic
tradition’s inability to engage with the modern period, and conversely, the inability
of most Modernists to accept the ancient, vernacular, traditional and local as
meaningful and relevant to modern culture. Technological advances in
communication and transportation in the twentieth century realised the idea of a
global or universal culture, however Mumford, far from fearing universal culture’s
potential to overrun the regional, instead embraced the modern period as a time
when local and regional elements of cultures could flourish, enriching universal

culture through diverse regional influences. His regionalism was a philosophy
intended to show that Modernist architecture was not a style awaiting
classification, but rather that it was a way of proceeding. To him, Modernism
meant building the appropriate building for the location, learning from the local
and the universal and embracing the ideals of both Romantic and rational
traditions.

CHAPTER ONE | NOTES
1
Mumford spent some time in formal tertiary education at New York’s City College, starting in 1912,
however he found academic specialisation limiting, and embarked instead on a course of self-directed
education, primarily in the New York Public Library. For a discussion of his acceptance as an
intellectual voice in America see, for instance, Richard T. LeGates and Frederic Stout editors of The
City Reader (3rd edition 2003, Routledge New York, p.92), who refer to Mumford as “the last great
public intellectual.”
2
A discussion in the following chapter contains detailed references to Mumford’s influence upon
Critical Regionalism.
3
See for example Fergusson’s introduction in Fergusson, J. 1865, A History of Architecture in All
Countries: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day, John Murray, London
4
Kruft, H. 1994, A History of Architectural Theory: From Vitruvius to the Present, Princeton
Architectural Press, U.S.A., p.335
5
Anti-rationalism should not be thought of as synonymous with anti-scientific. Most of those mentioned
in this thesis as anti-rationalists, certainly Ruskin, Morris and Mumford, were interested in science and
believers in the scientific method. Their “anti-rationalism” resides in variously held beliefs that
rationalism and the positivist scientific method has limits and that its results must be seen contextually,
not as absolute truths or as ends in themselves, and certainly not as applicable the human realm, for
instance to the social sciences, economics, or architectural theory.
6
Ruskin J. 1907 (first published 1849), The Seven Lamps of Architecture, Routledge New Universal
Library, London, p.6
7
Zlotnick, S. 2004, ‘Contextualizing David Levy’s How the Dismal Science Got Its Name’, in Colander,
D. Prasch, R. Sheth, F. (eds.), Race, Liberalism, and Economics, University of Michigan Press, p.93
8
Luccarelli, M. 1995, Lewis Mumford and the Ecological Region: The Politics of Planning, The Guilford
Press, New York and London, pp.59-60 gives Lucarelli’s analysis of Mumford’s Modernist position.
9
This is most evident in the arguments at the ‘What is Happening to Modern Architecture’ symposium
at New York’s MoMA (MoMA, 1948), which are examined in later chapters. Mumford’s call for an
extension to other places of Bay Region principles was interpreted as him suggesting redwood be
used universally as a building material.
10
See for example Ruskin, J. 1997, Unto This Last and other Writings, Penguin Classics, London
pp.75-80 (the extract comes from The Stones of Venice, Vol II, which was first published in 1851)
11
Morris, W. 1995 (first published 1890) News from Nowhere or, An Epoch of Rest, Krishan Kumar
(ed.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p.viii
12
This analysis of Pugin’s contribution is found in Kruft 1994, p.327
13
Ruskin 1907, pp.4-5
14
Kruft 1994, pp.334-35
15
Fergusson, J. 1865, A History of Architecture in All Countries: From the Earliest Times to the
Present Day, John Murray, London, p.iii
16
Ruskin, J. 2005 (first published 1851), The Stones of Venice, Kessinger Publishing, p.385
17
Ibid. I owe the discovery of this point to the mention of it in Peter Kohane’s thesis, Kohane, P. 1993,
Architecture Labour and the Human Body: Fergusson, Cockerell and Ruskin, PhD thesis, University of
Pennsylvania, U.M.I. Dissertation Services, Michigan (order no. 9331805) p.417
18
Mumford, L. 2000, Sidewalk Critic: Lewis Mumford's Writings on New York, Princeton Architectural
Press, p.229 (Originally published as ‘The Sky Line: The American Tradition’ in The New Yorker,
March 11, 1939)
19
Fergusson 1865, p.14
20
Ibid. p.xiii
21
Mumford, L. (ed.), 1972, Roots of Contemporary American Architecture: 37 Essays from the Mid-
Nineteenth Century to the Present, Dover Publications, New York, p.9
22
Fergusson 1865, p.6
23
Ibid. p.6
24
Ibid. p.xiv
25
For one account of Fergusson’s influence on Orientalism see MacKenzie, J. 1995, Orientalism:
History, Theory and the Arts, Manchester University Press, p.95; Lisa Germany (Germany, L. 2000,
Harwell Hamilton Harris, University of California Press, California) discusses Orientalism in the work of
Harris and Greene and Greene; Wright’s use of Japanese forms is well documented.

26
Mumford, 1955, (first published 1924) Sticks and Stones: A Study of American Architecture and
Civilisation, Second Revised Edition, Dover Publications, New York, p.13
27
Fergusson, 1865, p.6
28
Ibid. pp. 9-10
29
Ibid. p.10
30
Ruskin 1997, p.87 (from The Stones of Venice, Vol II)
31
Ibid. pp.85-86
32
Lowy, M. and Sayre, R. 2001, Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, Duke University Press,
p.146 give one good account Ruskin’s influence. It is also well documented in many other sources.
See also Pugh, M., 2002, The Making of Modern British Politics, 1867-1945, Blackwell Publishing,
Oxford, pp.123-124
33
Shi, D. 2001, The Simple Life, University of Georgia Press, p.230
34
Kruft 1994, p.335
35
Ruskin commented that he owed more to Carlyle than to any other writer in Ruskin, J. 1905, The
Complete Works of John Ruskin, T.Y. Crowell & Co, London, 1905, p.339
36
Lowy & Sayre 2001, pp.128-9
37
Morris, W. 1910-15, ‘How I Became A Socialist’, in The Collected Works of William Morris, Vol. 23,
Longmans, Green and Co., London, p.279
38
Ruskin, J. 1998 (first published 1964), The Genius of John Ruskin, John D. Rosenberg (ed.),
University of Virginia Press, p.10
39
Discussions of philosophical backgrounds to Mumford and Ruskin may be found in various texts.
See for instance Pepper, D. 1996, Modern Environmentalism, Routledge, London, p.190; Richard
Wrightman Fox (ed.), 1998, A Companion to American Thought, Blackwell Publishing, p.17. For an
overview and criticism of the development and legitimacy of rationalism and the exact sciences see
Husserl, E. 1970, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology,
Northwestern University Press, Evanston
40
Beardsley, M. C. 1975, (first published 1966), Aesthetics from Classical Greece to the Present: A
Short History, University of Alabama Press, p.307. For an account of Mumford’s correspondence with
Geddes see See Novak, F. (ed.) 1995, Lewis Mumford and Patrick Geddes: The Correspondence,
Routledge, London
41
The Garden City was a city designed to be integrated with its own agricultural production, and was
described in Howard’s 1898 book To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform. The Garden City
model was realised in two separate developments in the UK, first at Letchworth, a development built at
the turn of the century and again, after World War I in the development of Welwyn Garden City.
42
Wojtowicz, R. 1996, Lewis Mumford and American Modernism: Eutopian Theories for Architecture
and Urban Planning, Cambridge University Press, U.S.A., p.2
43
Miller, D. 1989, Lewis Mumford: A Life, Grove Press, N.Y., p.172
44
45
46
Miller 1989, p.173
47
Mumford, L. 2000 (first published 1952), Art and Technics, Columbia University Press, N.Y., p.119
48
Morris referring to his house Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire, from Morris, W. 1895, ‘Gossip About
an Old House on the Upper Thames’, in The Quest, Number IV, November 1895, Messrs. Cornish
Brothers, Birmingham
49
Mackail, J. 2001 (first published 1899), The Life of William Morris, The Electric Book Co., London,
p.156
50
Wertheimer, F. and Wertheimer, L. 2004, Architectural History, Kaplan AEC Architecture, p.79
51
see Kruft 1994, p.342
52
Morris, W. 1970 (first published 1890), News From Nowhere, Routledge and Kegan Paul Press,
London and Southampton, pp.5-6
53
Morris, W. 1993, News From Nowhere and Other Writings, Penguin, London, p.245
54
Lucarelli analyses Mumford’s debt to Brooks on this point in Lucarelli 1995, pp.42-43
55
Naylor, G. 1971, Arts and Crafts Movement: A Study of Its Sources, Ideals, and Influence on Design
Theory, MIT Press, p.47
56
Throughout Lethaby’s work are references like “…Mr Fergusson tells us that the temple of Herod
was 100 cubits long in the body, 100 cubits high, and 100 cubits broad on the façade…” Lethaby, W.
1892 (first published 1891), Architecture, Mysticism and Myth, Percival & Co., London, p.65

57
Fergusson 1865, p.5; see also Lethaby, W. 1956 (first published as serial in The Builder, 1928),
Architecture, Nature and Magic, Gerald Duckworth & Co, London, p.16
58
Lethaby, 1892, p.v; The idea that vernacular architecture contains a store of “true principles” is
attractive, though perhaps specious. It is clear from the discussion of the term vernacular in the
preface to this thesis that the remnants of this idea live on in the writing of prominent vernacular
theorists, such as Bernard Rudofsky, Paul Oliver or Eleftherios Pavlides. Although Mumford often
refutes it, he nevertheless frequently subscribes to similar notions, for instance speaking of the
architectural innovation achieved of returning to the “simple elemental forms of the seventeenth
century farmhouse.” (Mumford (ed.) 1972, p.10)
59
Lethaby 1956, p.10
60
Ibid. p.16
61
Ibid. p.147
62
Lethaby, W. 1908, ‘The Theory of Greek Architecture’, in RIBA Journal vol.15 1908, p.215
63
Lethaby, 1956, p.146
64
Garnham, T. 1993, Melsetter House, Phaidon, London, unpaginated (Chapter heading ‘Folklore and
the Historical Sense’)
65
Lethaby, W. 1955, Architecture: An Introduction to the History and Theory of the Art of Building,
Oxford University Press, London, p.192
66
Lethaby 1956, p.63
67
Ibid. p.147
68
Saler, M. 1999, The Avant-Garde in Interwar England: Medieval Modernism and the London
Underground, Oxford University Press, U.S.A., p.104
69
The Central School, under the direction of Lethaby, taught arts and crafts, using practitioners as
teachers and usually employing practical methods. Its influence on the Bauhaus is well documented.
See for instance Maciuika, J. 2005, Before The Bauhaus: Architecture, Politics, and the German State,
1890-1920, Cambridge University Press, UK, pp.104-131
70
Naga, S. 1992, William Richard Lethaby: The Romantic Modernist, PhD Thesis, University of
Pennsylvania, U.S.A., p.6
71
Lethaby, W. 1938, Form in Civilisation: Collected Papers on Art and Labour, Oxford University
Press, London, p.229
72
Garnham 1993, unpaginated (Chapter heading ‘Far and distant from the land of unsought gain’)
73
Lethaby 1956, p.16
74
See for instance Mumford’s discussion of New England village development in Mumford 1955, ch.1,
or Mumford (ed.) 1972, p.10
75
While critical of much American domestic architecture, Mumford is sanguine about modern urban
development in America throughout his writing – see for example Mumford 1955, p.86
76
Lloyd Wright, F. Pfieffer, B. Mumford, L. 2001, Frank Lloyd Wright & Lewis Mumford: Thirty Years of
Correspondence, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, p.7
77
Lloyd Wright, Pfieffer, Mumford 2001, p.8
78
Mumford 1924, preface
79
Miller 1989, p.470
80
Blake, C. ‘Introduction’ in Mumford, L. 2000 (first published 1952), Art and Technics, Columbia
University Press, N.Y., pp.xi-xii
81
Mumford, L. 1934, Technics and Civilisation, Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., London, p.363
82
Naylor 1971, p.8

CHAPTER TWO | LEWIS MUMFORD’S STUDY OF REGIONAL ARCHITECTURE IN AMERICA
In his early architectural writing, particularly

Sticks and Stones (1924), Mumford had
sought regional examples of American built
form, but had yet to acknowledge the
importance of architecture away from the
East Coast of the country. Sticks and
Stones, although one of the seminal works
on American architecture, largely ignores
the bulk of the country; even the Chicago
school is only briefly mentioned and
Mumford had by that stage only seen it in
Figure 1: Lewis Mumford, 1940s
photographs. 1 He rectified the omission of a
serious study of Louis Sullivan (1856-1924) and Frank Lloyd Wright in The
Brown Decades. However it was not until 1947 that his architectural writing
finally referenced the history of the Bay Region, through to Wurster and other
contemporary West Coast architects. In his writing over the following years
Mumford continually lauded the Bay Region Style as a “native and humane
form of Modernism” 2 and contrasted it with the “tags and clichés” 3 of the
International Style, a polarisation that was to dominate the ensuing
architectural debate.
Mumford’s identification of the Bay Region Style represented the
culmination of his study of the history of American architecture and his desire
to discern authentic regional development within it. In the Bay Region he
discovered a school of architectural design that he believed was not only
unique, but moreover incorporated the ideals of his own regionalist
philosophy. Like the designers of the Arts and Crafts movement, the Bay
Region’s architects had incorporated regional history into their work, but while
the past represented an end in itself for the Arts and Crafts movement, it
represented to the Bay Region’s architects one part of a far broader, forward-
looking philosophy. Furthermore the mid-twentieth century Bay Region
architects were unmistakably Modernists, but to Mumford, their ability to
incorporate the local and the historical made their Modernism more worldly
CHAPTER TWO | LEWIS MUMFORD’S STUDY OF REGIONAL ARCHITECTURE IN AMERICA Page 32

and mature than that of much contemporary European Modernism and
International Style architecture. 4
Mumford’s regionalist perspective

It is not necessarily possible to define Mumford’s regionalism since it
developed and changed over his career; Lefaivre complains that Mumford “did
not make things easy for anyone wishing to get a clear overview of his
regionalist paradigm” 5 He was nevertheless explicit about many points within
it and his writing in the decades before his discovery of the Bay Region Style
had made it plain that his regionalism was concerned with architecture’s
suitability to its local conditions and had little to do with style or aesthetics.
Rather it was engaged with abstract concepts of universal and local forces
and questions about dwelling, and the authentic development of a cultural
home. He wrote in 1941 that “regional forms are those which most closely
meet the actual conditions of life and which most fully succeed in making a
people feel at home in their environment.” 6 While Mumford described the
aesthetic and spatial qualities of buildings he was explicit about the difference
between instances of architectural design and the architectural principles
behind them; crucial to his regional schema was that the same principles
would produce different results in different contexts. In 1941, discussing Frank
Lloyd Wright he wrote,
…as a proper regional adaptation, Wright’s open type of plan was
admirable, given the time and the place for which it was created. But to
take a form that grew out of such a highly localized characteristic and
to attempt to universalize it is as serious an error as not understanding
its fitness and appropriateness in its own environment. The universal
element in Wright’s architecture is not his open plan: it is rather the
recognition that the plan must be in conformity, not merely with the
climate and the landscape and the soil and the native materials, but
with the social institutions and the dominant types of personality in the
region.” 7
Mumford was critical of inward-looking theories which associated

regions with notions of purely local or with singular national identity, and his
opposition to these became more urgent in The South in Architecture (1941),
consisting of four essays that he delivered as lectures to students at Alabama
College, and written while the Nazis dominated Europe. He began the lecture

series with an impassioned speech in favour of the US entering the war in
Europe, which anticipated his architectural argument about the interplay
between the regional and the universal through a series of contemporary
analogies to America’s regional and global responsibilities: “Can I, in decency”
he asks his audience “ stay at my desk to write about the historic
achievements of American culture at a time when, for lack of energy and will
and moral conviction, all those achievements, and everything else we value,
may be swallowed up by the destruction of the great civilisation that supported
them?…[would I] stay at my desk when a grass fire had broken out and was
threatening the home of a neighbour?” 8 For Mumford the logical conclusion of
any bounded and radically local analysis, of the type he criticised as “self-
sufficient and self-contained” 9 was not regionalism, but cultural stagnation.
Mumford described regional development as a long-term process: “it
takes generations for a regional product to be achieved,” he said of
winemaking, “…so it is with architectural forms. We are only beginning to
know enough about ourselves and about our environment to create a regional
architecture.” 10 Mumford distinguished authentic regional development from
speculative development, mimicry of past styles, or any belief that design may
be codified. On this last point Mumford believed that the International Style
faltered as an authentic architectural response, since he saw in its rules
“restrictive and arid formulas” 11 that were no less limiting than those that
governed Classical revivalists. It is an important element of his regionalism
that architecture is simultaneously of its region and of its time and, crucially,
that it is never thought of as having reached a point of conclusion or
perfection.
In Roots of Contemporary American Architecture (1952) Mumford
argued that revival architects believed they had found perfection in Classical
forms, and had been copying and measuring the Classical to discover the
rules of design since the time of the earliest printed books. Images of ancient
Greek and Roman buildings had begun to advance extinct forms of
architecture as more legitimate than local ones. In the sixteenth century,
Mumford argued, these printed images of distant, ancient buildings “seemed
fresh and modern, whereas the recent past seemed fusty, old-fashioned and
ridiculous…no one thought of measuring or copying or reproducing the local,

vernacular architecture.” 12 He called mistaking ancient Greek and Roman
forms for perfection “the brittle error of the Renascence modes.” 13
Although Ruskin had been similarly opposed to the predominance of
Classical forms in nineteenth century architectural design, Mumford’s
diversion from his philosophical heritage is suggested in his argument that
Ruskin, too, had made the same mistake: “this error had been taken over
even by the opponents of the Renascence modes, like Pugin and Ruskin; for
these men sought to give to some moment in the development of Gothic
architecture, such as the style of Thirteenth Century Lombardy which Ruskin
favoured, the same stereotyped authority that Palladianism had claimed for
the classic.” 14 A similar error is continued, according to Mumford, by any
theory that supposes that “time does not make a difference: that it is possible,
by some formula for proportion, some fixation on special forms, to possess an
eternal quality in art without doing justice to the time-bound, the local, the
living and the subjective, and therefore the unique and finally incalculable.” 15
In this broad swathe he included not just the revival architects, but those who
sought perfection in geometrical constructs like the golden mean, and
particularly those who believed that Modernism provided a system of design
in which a single approach was suitable internationally. 16
Furthermore, for Mumford, regionalism as a basis for architecture
implied that human cultural associations with a region would be
acknowledged by the built environment. Commercial approaches to
development (land seen purely for its real estate or speculative value or
regions developed purely for the exploitation of their resources) Mumford
found particularly repugnant, as had the Arts and Crafts writers before him.
He argued in Sticks and Stones, his early overview of American architecture,
that the bulk of America’s architecture had little authenticity because the
country itself had been settled in a tradition that viewed the land “not as a
home, a permanent seat of culture, but as a means to something else –
principally as a means to the temporary advantages of profitable speculation
and exploitation.” 17 Where communities were built around mining, trapping,
trading, timber and other temporary ventures which brought quick wealth but
little long-term stability or cultural development, the legacy was a detestable
built environment. Most of America’s urban development had occurred in

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VERNACULAR, REGIONAL AND MODERN

LEWIS MUMFORD’S BAY REGION STYLE

AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF WILLIAM WURSTER

SUPERVISOR: PETER KOHANE

Surname or Family name: CASTLE

First name: JANE Other name/s: ELIZABETH

Abbreviation for degree as given in the University calendar: MArch

School: ARCHITECTURE Faculty: FACULTY OF THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT

Abstract 350 words maximum: (PLEASE TYPE)

Sunday, 4 June 2006

FOR OFFICE USE ONLY Date of completion of requirements for Award:

THIS SHEET IS TO BE GLUED TO THE INSIDE FRONT COVER OF THE THESIS

Date - Sunday, June 04, 2006

Date: June 4, 2006

Date: June 4, 2006

CHAPTER ONE page 7

CHAPTER TWO page 32

CHAPTER THREE page 57

CHAPTER FOUR page 84

CHAPTER FIVE page 119

CONCLUSION page 140

REFERENCES page 143

ABSTRACT page iii

Even if there is some agreement within architectural theory to the term

Approaches to vernacular theory in architecture

He identified Le Corbusier’s Chapel of Notre Dame du Haut (1955) at Ronchamp

PREFACE page vii

PREFACE page viii

This thesis examines relationships between the work of American architectural

Despite an informal education and a career largely devoted to non-academic and

CHAPTER ONE | HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO MUMFORD’S REGIONALISM Page 7

CHAPTER ONE | HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO MUMFORD’S REGIONALISM Page 8

Nineteenth century studies of world architecture

In Ruskin’s The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and The Stones of

CHAPTER ONE | HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO MUMFORD’S REGIONALISM Page 9

CHAPTER ONE | HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO MUMFORD’S REGIONALISM Page 10

What is fascinating about Fergusson is his comparative obscurity

CHAPTER ONE | HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO MUMFORD’S REGIONALISM Page 11

CHAPTER ONE | HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO MUMFORD’S REGIONALISM Page 12

Beyond some general principles they held in common however,

CHAPTER ONE | HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO MUMFORD’S REGIONALISM Page 13

The influence of John Ruskin’s philosophy and regionalism

CHAPTER ONE | HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO MUMFORD’S REGIONALISM Page 14

CHAPTER ONE | HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO MUMFORD’S REGIONALISM Page 15

CHAPTER ONE | HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO MUMFORD’S REGIONALISM Page 16

CHAPTER ONE | HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO MUMFORD’S REGIONALISM Page 17

Morris’s greatest architectural

“earthly paradise.” It was

CHAPTER ONE | HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO MUMFORD’S REGIONALISM Page 18

bonds and city planning

CHAPTER ONE | HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO MUMFORD’S REGIONALISM Page 19

CHAPTER ONE | HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO MUMFORD’S REGIONALISM Page 20

Echoing Fergusson’s reverence for

CHAPTER ONE | HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO MUMFORD’S REGIONALISM Page 21

To Lethaby, building must exist in a continuum to have any meaning. In

Lethaby believed that symbolism could strengthen the relationship

CHAPTER ONE | HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO MUMFORD’S REGIONALISM Page 22

CHAPTER ONE | HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO MUMFORD’S REGIONALISM Page 23

The development of Mumford’s regionalism

CHAPTER ONE | HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO MUMFORD’S REGIONALISM Page 24

CHAPTER ONE | HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO MUMFORD’S REGIONALISM Page 25

CHAPTER ONE | HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO MUMFORD’S REGIONALISM Page 26

In the twentieth century Mumford had no choice but to accept Modernity