Background
Lewis Mumford was born in Flushing, Long Island, New York, on October 19, 1895.
( Featuring a new introduction by Casey Nelson Blake, thi...)
Featuring a new introduction by Casey Nelson Blake, this classic text provides the essence of Mumford's views on the distinct yet interpenetrating roles of technology and the arts in modern culture. Mumford contends that modern man's overemphasis on technics has contributed to the depersonalization and emptiness of much of twentieth-century life. He issues a call for a renewed respect for artistic impulses and achievements. His repeated insistence that technological development take the Human as its measure--as well as his impassioned plea for humanity to make the most of its "splendid potentialities and promise" and reverse its progress toward anomie and destruction--is ever more relevant as the new century dawns.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0231121059/?tag=2022091-20
( Technics and Civilization first presented its compellin...)
Technics and Civilization first presented its compelling history of the machine and critical study of its effects on civilization in 1934â??before television, the personal computer, and the Internet even appeared on our periphery. Drawing upon art, science, philosophy, and the history of culture, Lewis Mumford explained the origin of the machine age and traced its social results, asserting that the development of modern technology had its roots in the Middle Ages rather than the Industrial Revolution. Mumford sagely argued that it was the moral, economic, and political choices we made, not the machines that we used, that determined our then industrially driven economy. Equal parts powerful history and polemic criticism, Technics and Civilization was the first comprehensive attempt in English to portray the development of the machine age over the last thousand yearsâ??and to predict the pull the technological still holds over us today. Â â??The questions posed in the first paragraph of Technics and Civilization still deserve our attention, nearly three quarters of a century after they were written.â?â??Journal of Technology and Culture
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226550273/?tag=2022091-20
( This offers the first broad treatment of the city in bo...)
This offers the first broad treatment of the city in both its historic and its contemporary aspects. ?For distinction, entertainment, information, scholarship, and general human interest this is one of the most distinguished books? (Forum). Index; photographs.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0156233010/?tag=2022091-20
Lewis Mumford was born in Flushing, Long Island, New York, on October 19, 1895.
He attended Stuyvesant High School until 1912.
He studied evenings at the City College of New York for five years but did not receive a degree.
Instead he became a student of the cities, beginning with New York City, whose libraries, theaters, and museums were his academy.
He emphasized the importance of environmental planning. Later, he wrote a series of "Skyline" essays for the New Yorker magazine which were intimate visits to buildings and quarters of the city that illustrated New Yorkers' aspirations and failures in their continuing act of building and rebuilding. In 1915 Mumford read Patrick Geddes's essays expressing an organic view of society and claimed Geddes as his mentor in the years after 1923 when they met. In 1916 Mumford gained experience in the labor movement by serving as investigator of the dress and waist industry. Briefly in 1917 he worked for the Bureau of Standards in Pittsburgh, testing cement. He served as a radio operator in the U. S. Navy in 1918. The following year he became an editor of Dial magazine and then went to London in 1920 to serve as acting editor of the Sociological Review. Returning to New York City, he wrote The Story of Utopias (1922). The English utopian planner and advocate of garden cities, Ebenezer Howard, inspired Mumford toward an active role in city and regional planning. He helped organize the Regional Planning Association of America (1923) and served as special investigator for the New York Housing and Regional Planning Commission, beginning in 1924. He edited the pioneering regional planning issue of Survey Graphic (1925) and helped edit five volumes of The American Caravan (1927 - 1936). In city planning, he advocated the conservation of "green belts, " with self-contained cities supporting residence, work, markets, education, and recreation. The new cities were to be constructed on a pedestrian's scale with organic coherence among the urban functions. In his writing, Mumford tried to define the American conscience: its traditions and allegiances and the forces that periodically betrayed it. Louis Sullivan is the hero of Sticks and Stones; Henry Hobson Richardson is the hero of The Brown Decades and The South in Architecture; both men were gargantuan talents who wedded art and technology to give a distinctively indigenous form to American architecture. In his pioneering study Herman Melville (1929), Mumford disclosed his tragic sense of art and life. In Technics and Civilization(1934) and The Culture of Cities (1938) Mumford tried to show that artifacts are instruments of a civilization's cultural and social process and to examine architecture and machines in terms of the social conditions that nurture them. They 1935 and 1951 Mumford wrote a series of books (the "Renewal of Life series, " he labeled them) concluding with The Conduct of LifeMen Must Act (1939) called for American intervention in World War II. The 1950's were very prosperous for Mumford's literary works. His early books including Sticks and Stones, The Brown Decades, and The Golden Day were all republished in 1995. After the war Mumford worried about the ruin of cities through wholesale urban renewal, the growing dominance of highways, and the military mind's domination of foreign and nuclear policies. He held visiting professorships at North Carolina State College, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1964, Mumford made six twenty-eight minute films based on The City In History. In his much later work The Myth of the Machine (1970) he looks down upon technology, labeling the megamachine as the "guilty party. " Mumford died in 1990.
( Technics and Civilization first presented its compellin...)
( Featuring a new introduction by Casey Nelson Blake, thi...)
( This offers the first broad treatment of the city in bo...)
As a city planning consultant, he forcefully urged ideas throughout the world.
His thesis was that contemporary civilization must undergo a moral reformation to have the quality of life known to many earlier societies.
Quotations:
Art, he affirmed, is man's declaration against a universe that is "inscrutable, unfathomable, malicious. .. Not tame and gentle bliss, but disaster, heroically encountered, is man's true happy ending. "
In Faith for Living, he wrote that "in a world in which violence becomes normalized as part of the daily routine, the popular mind becomes softly inured to human degeneracy. "
In his most searching book, The City In History (1961), he wrote, "We need a new image of order, which shall include the organic and personal, and eventually embrace all the offices and functions of man. "
Quotes from others about the person
Ramachandra Guha noted his work contains "some of the earliest and finest thinking on bioregionalism, anti-nuclearism, biodiversity, alternate energy paths, ecological urban planning and appropriate technology. "