Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1781

Pencil notes by Heath for a letter to the Architectural Record over the name of Arthur C. Holden on the subject of Community Organization.

No date

Gentlemen:

     Architecture is the organization of environment.

     Men had environment before they had houses — environment as organized by nature and from which they sprang. Architecture is the human organization of environment. It began, doubtless, with temporary structures — shelters, dwellings, altars and shrines, and as these grew into larger and more permanent forms architecture became perhaps a cult and from that a profession and eventually under its plans not buildings alone but their common settings and surroundings, small communities, even splendid cities, arose. These ancient organizations of material elements into beauty and use were acts of archi-technology, highest art, things dreamed and made, but of them only ruins remain.

     All this physical creation was based on the political organization of men. The grandeur that rested on tribute and taxation, on captives and slaves could not endure and now only crumbling ruins remain. These cities were only citadels of authority and power, of the arch-rulers and destroyers of men, for their indulgence and munificence, their depravities and displays. There was no architecture of industry and exchange nor the habitations of common men. Only after the old empires went down and since wider freedom and deeper knowledge of physical things taught men how to create wealth faster than the modern political states could capture or destroy it has there been any architecture of industry and exchange or of the haunts and habitations of productive men.

     Cities of today are not built on the spoil of kings or subsidies from the hand of taxing powers. They are founded on wealth uncaptured from its producers and left to the free enterprise of those who created it. This their architecture reflects. For their sites and streets and the structures thereon — their real (permanent) estate — is given over almost entirely to productive uses. These properties, largely unappropriated by government, remain under the free enterprise of their owners; thus they are occupied productively (so far as free enterprise and employment thereby is permitted to extend). Theirs is the architecture of production and peace. Only small parts of the real estate of modern cities (except in Washington, D.C.) is “socialized,” under full and outright control of the political state. The function of these parts is substantially as of old. For they too are built and maintained by the same political authority from revenue similarly derived; and the architecture of these public buildings and works still bears much of the style and stamp of their ancient predecessors.

     The modern city is distinguished from the ancient chiefly in that basically it is a community of property under productive instead of profligate administration. And its architecture bears out this distinction. In the replanning of a city or any regional part this should be kept unfailingly in mind; for it is not sufficient that the plan be adequate and efficient in the design and organization of its physical elements. The design of its administrative organization is vital to its enduring success. For it is vain to wish and plan ideal results and ends until the truly authentic means is sought and designed. Only one alternative appears: Either the __________________ and new building must be financed by expropriation of owners (or by funds levied politically on other productive property) and the project therefore administered under the old-time political authority with its age-old corruptions and waste as in the ancient cities or the project must be financed and administered by some form of organization of the regional owners in which their proportionate ownership and final authority is retained. It is useless to attempt compromise of these opposites for all experience teaches that no proprietary or voluntary authority can escape ultimate domination by a coercive authority to which it is in any way attached. The material interest may be selfish in both cases, but in the one that interest is served only by and in return for giving services to others, while in the other case the material interest is served or most served by reducing others to servitude under it.