Best Selling Books by Lewis Mumford

The city''s development from ancient times to the modern age. Winner of the National Book Award. "One of the major works of scholarship of the twentieth century" (Christian Science Monitor). Index; illustrations.

Technics and Civilization first presented its compelling history of the machine and critical study of its effects on civilization in 1934—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 years—and to predict the pull the technological still holds over us today. “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.”—Journal of Technology and Culture

A classic work advocating ecological urban planning—from a civic visionary and former architecture critic for the New Yorker. Considered among the greatest works of Lewis Mumford—a prolific historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and longtime architecture critic for the New Yorker—The Culture of Cities is a call for communal action to “rebuild the urban world on a sounder human foundation.” First published in 1938, this radical investigation into the human environment is based on firsthand surveys of North American and European locales, as well as extensive historical and technological research. Mumford takes readers from the compact, worker-friendly streets of medieval hamlets to the symmetrical neoclassical avenues of Renaissance cities. He studies the squalor of nineteenth-century factory towns and speculates on the fate of the booming twentieth-century Megalopolis—whose impossible scale, Mumford believes, can only lead to its collapse into a “Nekropolis,” a monstrosity of living death. A civic visionary, Mumford is credited with some of the earliest proposals for ecological urban planning and the appropriate use of technology to create balanced living environments. In the final chapters of The Culture of Cities, he outlines possible paths toward utopian future cities that could be free of the stressors of the Megalopolis, in sync with the rhythms of daily life, powered by clean energy, integrated with agricultural regions, and full of honest and comfortable housing for the working class. The principles set forth by these visions, once applied to Nazi-occupied Europe’s razed cities, are still relevant today as technological advances and overpopulation change the nature of urban life.

Their 160 letters from 1926-1958 covered a wide range of topics, including Wright''s position on the history of American architecture and contemporary practice, their friends and rivals, the invention and spread of the International Style, and political events in Europe and the United States.".

Lewis Mumford (1895-1990) is best known for his Sky Line column in the New Yorker where he served as architecture critic for over 30 years. A man of letters and part of Manhattan''s intellectual elite, Mumford wrote more than 20 books over 6 decades, bridging the seemingly disparate disciplines of architecture, technology, literary criticism, biography, sociology and philosophy.

Buried renaissance of Root, Sullivan, Roebling, W. Homer, Eakins, Ryder, others. 12 illustrations.

Lewis Mumford was the author of more than thirty influential books, many of which expounded his views on the perils of urban sprawl and a society obsessed with technics. This text provides the essence of Mumford''s views on the distinct yet interpenetrating roles of technology and the arts in modern culture.

A collection of essays by the respected social commentator on some problems faced by cities such as New York, Philadelphia, and Paris, on the architecture of Saarinen, Le Corbusier, and Wright, and on city and highway planning.

A study of the development of the personality and the community.

First published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Revealing a new side of Mumford''s remarkable personality - his formative years, this volume records how he grew up in New York City in the early 20th century, reminisces about his German extended family, his life as a penurious student, his early struggles as a writer in Greenwich Village and the events and people that shaped his thinking.

"Superbly crafted little essays, Lewis Mumford''s New Yorker pieces called ''The Art Galleries'' well deserve this handsome republication. They offer supremely tasteful guided tours of the galleries and museums of Manhattan at the time when the canon of Western art, including modernism, was being secured, against a background of tension between abstraction and realism and between aestheticism and social commitment. The essays are a gift for our own troubled times from one of the great humane and versatile critics of the twentieth century; they offer the reassurance of urbanity, poise, and commitment to art as a primary social necessity."—Alan Trachtenberg, Neil Grey Emeritus Professor of English, Yale University

A classic of American cultural history, Sticks and Stones is a discussion of early New England towns, Colonial and Federal architectural periods, and various important 19th-century architects like Henry Hobson Richardson. You will enjoy learning about the architecture making up some of the most beautiful towns in the United States.

Collection of essays and papers.

"''The Lewis Mumford/David Liebovitz Letters'' will delight anyone who likes to observe the interplay of mind and spirit between intelligent and cultivated people. The civilized intercourse reflected here is a refreshing antidote to the grinding pettiness of much of daily life. . . . Professor Knapp has done lovers of civilized discourse a real service by compiling these letters. Through her work, the reader may witness the profound communication of two lively and thoughtful men."THE ROUND TABLE OF THE SOUTH CENTRAL COLLEGE ENGLISH ASSOCIATION

A collection of twenty-six essays from the New Yorker''s "Sky Line" column.

Between 1928 and 1981 architectural and cultural critic Lewis Mumford exchanged nearly six hundred letters with Melville scholar and Harvard psychologist Henry A. Murray. "In Old Friendship" documents that richly rewarding interaction. Covering fifty years of devoted camaraderie between two exceptional minds, the book offers profound insights into the intellectual frustrations behind their significant careers and the emotional needs that framed their vibrant, often dramatic lives. To Mumford, a writer who sought to change the course of world events, iconoclastic Murray became a welcome confidant, critic, mentor, and friend. The letters reflect the wide range of public and private interests held by both men. Love’s entanglements are aired alongside literary labors. By chronicling the private worlds of these intellectual icons, this volume emerges as a crucial research tool for students of American intellectual history and culture, literary criticism, urbanism, architecture, and political arenas such as World War II and the Cold War. It offers a unique prism through which to observe the dramatic shifts in American society and culture in the twentieth century.

An in-depth look at the forces that have shaped modern technology since prehistoric times. Mumford criticizes the modern trend of technology, which emphasizes constant, unrestricted expansion, production, and replacement. He contends that these goals work against technical perfection, durability, social efficiency, and overall human satisfaction. Modern technology fails to produce lasting, quality products by using devices such as consumer credit, installment buying, non-functioning and defective designs, built-in fragility, and frequent superficial "fashion" changes. "Without constant enticement by advertising," he writes, "production would slow down and level off to normal replacement demand. Otherwise many products could reach a plateau of efficient design which would call for only minimal changes from year to year."