The Earth, the City, and the Hidden Narrative of Race. Carl C. Anthony
only by car. Although Karl had been very successful at designing landscapes of affluence for wealthy clients in suburban and urban settings, he had found this work unsatisfying. The subdivisions where he had worked were designed around the automobile and devoid of outdoor spaces for social interaction. Designing landscapes for increasingly affluent clients had gradually undermined his sense of social relevance.
While growing up and working with my dad as a house painter, all our clients were white. Many were suburban residents, moving into neighborhoods where no blacks could live, such as the communities along Philadelphia’s Main Line rail line. I had become critical of a suburban lifestyle built around racial discrimination.
I was impressed that Karl had turned his back on a successful career working for rich and powerful clients to teach and work with students in inner-city communities. During those years, he was on the forefront of a current, gaining strength in the fields of architecture and planning, and committed to improving the lives of poor and working people. Karl was running something that he called a “community design” studio at the University of Pennsylvania; its purpose was to provide design service to disenfranchised communities while teaching the students to grapple with real-world problems. These studios led to important innovations in design and planning: increased citizen participation in the planning process and an acknowledgement that inner-city residents may have different needs than those of standard middle-class clients.
Karl’s vision of building commons and community was very attractive to me. It brought together my interests in environmental design and the emerging civil rights movement. During the next few years in the early 1960s, Karl’s students took on projects in a dozen inner-city neighborhoods in Philadelphia. With the rising interest in civil rights, Karl created the Neighborhood Renewal Corps that brought together students and volunteer professionals to provide architecture, landscape architecture, and planning services for African American and other vulnerable communities. The community design-and-build studio that Karl modeled was replicated in several other universities, such as Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia University, Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and University of California at Berkeley. Karl taught me to see the connections between the environment, architecture, and the quest for social justice. In some ways, he anticipated the movement for environmental justice three decades before the field even had a name. In a letter, Lewis Mumford, the great historian and philosopher of urban planning, wrote to Karl, “I can plainly see, in the work you are doing, the fresh shoots that will flower in a new age.”3
Shortly after I returned to Philadelphia following my time in Enid, Oklahoma, I came across Notes of a Native Son, a little book by the African American writer James Baldwin. The book, first published in 1955, contained his essays about growing up in Harlem and living as an expatriate in France, along with three critiques—two of popular books about the black experience and the other of a film about African American life.4 I was greatly impressed by Baldwin’s willingness to be critical of African Americans, himself, and American life, all in equal measure. I was grateful to have him as a model. Like me, he was grappling with issues of identity and seemed determined to maintain his authenticity. I wished to have direct contact with him, and later, I did.
I remember clearly the time and place I first came across the writings of Lewis Mumford, who would become a huge influence in my life as I pursued professional training in architecture. At the age of twenty, I had a part-time job after school at the Witherspoon Library of the Presbyterian Historical Society in downtown Philadelphia, returning books to their proper location on the shelf. Normally, I worked from three in the afternoon until about five, locking up when I was the last person there.
For some reason, I was drawn to a particular hardbound book with a maroon title on the spine that sat in a stack of six books on the wooden library cart. It was The Condition of Man by Lewis Mumford. Instead of putting the book away, I sat down to read:
What is man? What meaning has his life? What are his origin, condition and destiny? To what extent is he a creature of forces beyond his knowledge and control, the plaything of nature and the sport of the gods? To what extent is he a creator who takes the raw materials of existence, the heat of the sun, the stones and the trees and the soil, his very body and organs, and refashions the world to which nature has bound him, so that a good part of it reflects his own image and responds to his will and his ideal? (Mumford 1944, 3)
I was riveted. Mumford’s writing blew open a door in my mind, making it possible for me to think about architecture and buildings in a larger social and philosophical context. I had nurtured an aspiration to become an architect since my visit to the Better Philadelphia Exhibition with my third-grade class, but it hadn’t occurred to me that there was more to the field than making pretty drawings, which I loved to do. I became so engrossed in the book that I didn’t leave the library until eight o’clock that night. I decided at once that I would read everything Mumford had written.5
My Passion for Architectural History Ignited
Lewis Mumford wrote his first book, The Story of Utopia, in 1922 when he was in his twenties. This book introduced me to the notion that we can imagine new ways of organizing the places where we live to achieve more balanced and healthy lives and communities. Bringing together the dreams and schemes of utopian thinkers from Plato up to the twentieth century, Mumford enlarged my perspective on what might be possible beyond the world of our everyday lives.
I continued reading Mumford with a growing realization that a sense of history and cultural dynamics in society is integral to understanding and shaping the built environment. His Sticks and Stones: A Study of Architecture and Civilization, published in 1924, was, if not the first, one of the earliest books on American architectural history. In it, Mumford explores the relationship between America’s building practices and its cultural trends. The final essay in the book celebrates one of the most fertile periods of American architectural history: the development of the Chicago School of Architecture. I was greatly moved to learn about the ways that the social, economic, political, and technological life of the city had shaped its buildings.
I decided that I wanted to write a book like Mumford’s but about black people. However, I quickly encountered a serious problem. Mumford had documented the medieval influence on the architecture of New England, the heritage of the Renaissance on nineteenth-century American public buildings, and the influence of machine technology on the pioneers of modern American architecture. As far as I knew, there was no building enterprise (save housing projects and slums) that revealed African American aspirations for a better life. Consequently, I wondered why this was so and what there was to write about.
I wrote to Mumford expressing my appreciation for his books and asking for his advice on how I should be developing my career. I was amazed to receive a letter back from him several days later. Subsequently, we exchanged letters several times and spoke on the phone once. “Although we may not be able to meet right away,” he wrote in response to my suggestion that we meet for lunch, “I’m happy to exchange correspondence with you.” Although we never met face-to-face, Mumford’s writings shaped the pathways of my thinking about architecture, cities, and the role of humans in creating the world we live in.
Mumford’s book that engaged me most thoroughly was The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects, in which he explores the various factors that support the development of cities and argues that to find the roots of the idea of a city, we must look at the origin of the pre-human impulse toward community. The instinct of members of a species to come together has a deeply rooted biological basis as evidenced by schools of fish, flocks of birds, and so on. In forming cities, we are following a deep-seated trait that is grounded in our very being and in that of most other species.
I loved Mumford’s analysis of the effects that trends, such as urban sprawl, have on society. Although