James Marston Fitch: Selected Writings on Architecture, Preservation, and the Built Environment (review)

"In architecture there are no spectators: there are only participants." This dictum provides the overarching theme of this wide-ranging collection of the writings of James Marston Fitch (1909–2000), a towering figure in American architecture, criticism, and preservation. Wholly self-taught (though ultimately laden with numerous honorary degrees), Fitch joined the faculty of Columbia University's School of Architecture as a professor of architectural history in 1954 and went on to found, with Charles Peterson, the first program of formal study in historic preservation in the United States. His book American Building: The Historical Forces that Shaped It, first published in 1947 and subsequently revised and enlarged, pioneered a neglected subject and remains a standard reference.

Organized thematically under the broad topics of criticism, history, preservation, and climate and environment, the essays gathered and edited by Martica Sawin (Sawin was married to Fitch during the last years of his life and is his literary executor) lead us through the evolution of the author's thinking about architectural design and historic preservation. Fitch began his career as a copyist, designing archaeologically correct period houses. He soon came to reject these as deceitful anachronisms, and in "The Houses We Live In" (1933) he complains about "the futility of all this clever and laborious use of archaic detail" (p. 36), the "machines [for climate control] smuggled between floors, concealed in closets, crammed between walls" (p. 40). Instead, he becomes a devout proponent of modernism—what he calls "pure plan"—and pronounces that "utter honesty is modernism's biggest asset" (p. 31).

Fitch offers paeans both to Louis Kahn's Richards Medical Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania for its "authentic, almost startling originality" (pp. 41–42) and, even while noting that its construction required the destruction of a large area of the oldest quarter of the city, to Boston's City Hall for its "Miesian precision" (p. 49). He lauds Germany's Bauhaus, established by Walter Gropius in Dessau in 1919, as "a radiant symbol of a whole new way of life" (p. 149); with its "elegance of the economical [and] functional," its implied "responsible handling of material resources," it represented to Fitch a veritable utopia, "the fruitful application of science and technology to the architectural needs of industrial democracy" (p. 154). Its lessons came late to America. By 1932, when the landmark exhibition The International Style opened at the Museum of Modern Art, the Nazi Party was closing down the Bauhaus, and its central tenet—that the designer must be socially accountable—was soon abandoned. Decades later, Fitch would have some choice words for the same museum—"the very temple of modernism itself" (p. 170)—charging that MOMA, with its show The Architecture of the E´cole des Beaux Arts and sponsorship of Robert Venturi's 1966 Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, had prepared the ground for postmodernism, a movement Fitch loathed as a "prison house of antique gesture" that threatened "to reverse the whole evolutionary course of architectural theory since the Bauhaus" (p. 64).

In "The Palace, the Bridge, and the Tower" (1947), Fitch pays homage to the Crystal Palace, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Eiffel Tower. In each, he writes, theory, material, and technique combined to produce a radically new type; each represented "the full flowering of a structural concept" (p. 89). Other essays under the rubric of "history" discuss Mount Vernon and Monticello, the great "slave-powered" (p. 112) plantations of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, and Jefferson's brilliant plan for the University of Virginia, which Fitch pronounces America's greatest architectural achievement. He takes a holistic view of historic preservation as "the stewardship of the whole built world" (p. 173), critical not only to man's psychic and emotional well-being but also an urgent aspect of energy conservation.

It is in the realm of microclimatology that Fitch, who was an air force weather forecaster during World War II, makes...