ABSTRACT
The Regional Planning Association of Amer ica (RPAA), the body that had invited Unwin to the United States, was formed in 1923. It was a small group of architects, de velopers, and planners but they were linked with im port ant friends such as Eleanor Roose velt and the Russell Sage Foundation. They were concerned with the mounting post-World War I urban crisis and believed the future of the cities depended less on the excellence of isolated buildings than on the quality of the urban fabric made up of built wholes. They also believed that these built wholes should be decentralized into the regions of the coun try. Among the key initi ators of the group were Clarence Samuel Stein, an architect, Benton MacKaye, a forester, and Lewis Mumford, an author. The first major pro ject of the RPAA was one proposed by an RPAA member, Benton MacKaye (1879-1975). The idea he presented in his 1921 art icle ‘An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning’ was the Appalachian Trail. It was what we would refer to today as a greenway. The idea had first appeared in an art icle with the same title that he had published in the Journal of the Amer ican Institute of Architects two years earl ier. The trail was planned as a footpath extending from Maine to Georgia. Its purpose was to ‘lead civilization to the wilderness’. It was not implemented by the RPAA, but in part the RPAA was successful in promoting it to various groups of mountain clubs. As a result, most of the trail was completed by the mid-1930s. The RPAA also became involved in ‘the preser va tion of large areas of the nat ural envir on ment, including parts of the wilderness, as a green matrix for shaping a “regional city” and for serving its various-sized, spatially well-defined, special ized communities’. Mumford was initially involved with English writings and experiments about the regionalism de veloped at the end of nine teenth century. His ideas were influenced by the writings of the Scottish biologist, planner, and regionalist ad voc ate Patrick Geddes, who in turn had been influenced by the works of the French regionalist geographers and administrators that we discussed in the previous chapter, without much regard for their polit ical beliefs and ac tiv ities. By the beginning of the 1920s, Mumford had become increasingly absorbed by architecture. A year after the founding of the RPAA, Mumford published Sticks and Stones: Amer ican Architecture and Civilization (1924), in which he used
regionalism as a framework through which to present the first his tory of Amer ican architecture. Many of the ideas were taken from the writings of Viollet-le-Duc and Ruskin. The very title of the book alluded to Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice and Ruskin’s com mit ment to the social respons ib ility of the architect. Mumford juxta posed regionalism to the ‘imperial’ Beaux-Arts architecture, very successful in the United States at that time. He condemned Beaux-Arts architecture as ‘conspicuous waste’, as ‘icing on a birthday cake’, as ‘putting in a pleasing front upon a scrappy building, upon the monotonous streets and the mean houses’, and as ‘new slums in the districts behind the grand avenues’. He complained that it ‘placed a premium upon the mask’, upon the ‘imperial facade’, upon ‘the very cloak and costume’. The BeauxArts tradition did nothing but apply an ‘imperialist approach to the envir onment’, encouraging ‘a negligence of the earth’, using the land for ‘profi t able specu la tion’ rather than ‘home’. It led to the ‘depletion and impoverishment’ of nature. Instead of this, ‘achievements in science’ and ‘experiments in demo cracy’ should be harnessed to ‘serve eco nomic ally’ the ’capital city’.1
