Lewis Mumford
Lewis Mumford Lewis Mumford was born in Flushing, Queens, New York, on 19 October 1895, and died in Amenia, New York, on 26 January 1990. He studied at the City College of New York and at the New School for Social Research but never completed a formal degree — tuberculosis contracted in his youth interrupted his studies, and he later served as a radio electrician in the United States Navy during the First World War. A largely self-taught polymath, Mumford produced one of the twentieth century’s most influential bodies of work on the history of technics, the city, and architecture, while also serving as associate editor of The Dial and, for more than three decades, as architecture critic for The New Yorker. His intellectual formation owed more to Patrick Geddes — the Scottish urbanist and biologist whom Mumford called his “avowed master” — than to any academic institution; from Geddes he inherited a periodization of the phases of technics and a holistic approach integrating biology, sociology, and technology. He also absorbed from Thorstein Veblen a critique of absentee ownership and wasteful production, and from Peter Kropotkin and Ebenezer Howard the ideal of a cooperative, regionalist urbanism. ...