Sticks and Stones

Lewis Mumford’s early study looks at American buildings as a record of the people who raised them. Moving from the tight-knit medieval order of the old New England town through the classical revival, the brownstone city, and the machine age, he reads each style as an expression of the community’s values and its sense of common life. He argues that architecture declined as commerce and speculation replaced shared civic purpose, and he holds up the colonial village as a model worth recovering. First published in 1924, it helped establish Mumford as one of America’s sharpest critics of cities and design. The full book is available to download free as a PDF and EPUB edition.