Architecture: Memories of Mumford

When I first met Lewis Mumford at his home in Sunnyside Gardens, the “Utopian community” he’d helped to found (this was in the early Thirties), he struck me as humorless, guilt-ridden, and conceited. When I tangled with him almost a decade later during the conflict between interventionists and non-interventionists, I thought him racist for insisting that the whole German people should pay the price for Hitler’s madness. Soitisa tribute to author Donald L. Miller that I came away from his exhaustive biography of Mumford, who died last month at 94, with a grudging respect for the man the New York Times obituary called “a visionary social critic.”

In addition to his Lewis Mumford: A Life (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 628 pp., $24.95), Mr. Miller has also edited The Lewis Mumford Reader (Pantheon, 391 pp., $14.95), a collection of writings from many of Mumford’s more than thirty books. Miller makes it clear there were many Mumfords: the architectural critic and exponent of modernism and regional planning; the cultural and political commentator; the historian and teacher. Miller analyzes the multi-faceted Mumford, balancing flaws and virtues, and includes a fascinatingly detailed report of his hero’s wide-ranging sex life.

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Selden Rodman

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When I first met Lewis Mumford at his home in Sunnyside Gardens, the “Utopian community” he’d helped to found (this was in the early Thirties), he struck me as humorless, guilt-ridden, and conceited. When I tangled with him almost a decade later during the conflict between interventionists and non-interventionists, I thought him racist for insisting that the whole German people should pay the price for Hitler’s madness. Soitisa tribute to author Donald L. Miller that I came away from his exhaustive biography of Mumford, who died last month at 94, with a grudging respect for the man the New York Times obituary called “a visionary social critic.”

In addition to his Lewis Mumford: A Life (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 628 pp., $24.95), Mr. Miller has also edited The Lewis Mumford Reader (Pantheon, 391 pp., $14.95), a collection of writings from many of Mumford’s more than thirty books. Miller makes it clear there were many Mumfords: the architectural critic and exponent of modernism and regional planning; the cultural and political commentator; the historian and teacher. Miller analyzes the multi-faceted Mumford, balancing flaws and virtues, and includes a fascinatingly detailed report of his hero’s wide-ranging sex life.