In a loose, inconsecutive way, the objectives of regional planning have been dealt with by the conservation movement during the last century; and if the art itself has neither a corpus of experience nor an established body of practitioners, this is only to say that it has, as it were, broken through the surface in a number of places and that it remains to be gathered up and intelligently used. When regional planning starts its active career, it will concern itself to provide a new framework for our communities which will redistribute population and industry, and recultivate the environment--substituting forestry for timber-mining, stable agriculture for soil-mining, and in general the habit of dressing and keeping the earth for our traditional American practice of stripping and deflowering it. Architecture begins historically when the “Bauer” who plants becomes the “Bauer” who builds; and if our architecture is to have a substantial foundation, it is in a refreshened countryside that we will perhaps find it.
Let us now turn to industry. The medieval order was disrupted in America before it could fully take root. As a result we have no craft-tradition that is properly native, with the exception of the shipbuilders and furniture-makers of New England, whose art has been on the wane since the second quarter of the nineteenth century. We have covered up this deficiency by importing from generation to generation foreign workmen, principally Germans and Italians, in whose birthplaces the art of using wood and stone has not been entirely lost; but we are still far from having created an independent craft-tradition of our own. If art is the fine efflorescence of a settled life, invention is the necessity of the roving pioneer who every day faces new difficulties and new hazards; and accordingly we have devoted our energies to the machine, and to the products of the machine. All that we cannot do in this medium we regard as “mere” art, and put it apart from the direct aims and practices of everyday life.
Our skill in working according to exact formulæ with machines and instruments of precision is not to be belittled: socially directed it would put an end to a hundred vapid drudgeries, and it would perhaps give the pervasive finish of a style to structures whose parts are now oddly at sixes and sevens. Unfortunately for us and for the world in general the machine did not come simply as a technological contribution: it appeared when the guild had broken down and when the joint stock company had gotten its piratical start as a Company of Gentleman-Adventurers. As a result, our mechanical age was given an unsocial twist; and inventions which should have worked for the welfare of the community were used for the financial aggrandizement of investors and monopolizers. In architecture, all the skill of the technologist and all the taste of the artist have become subservient to the desire of the financier for a quick turnover of capital, and the ground landlord for the maximum exploitation of the land. The sole chances for good workmanship occur when, by a happy accident of personality or situation, the patron asks of the architect and engineer only the best that they can give.