Works by
Howard Mansfield
(Writer)

We would have cities of glittering white towers planted in green parks, as the great modern architect Le Corbusier dictated. Or we would have cities with no downtown, cities spread across the countryside with each family on its homestead, as Frank Lloyd Wright proposed. Or we would live in paradise on the 100th floor with our airplane hangared next door, as Hugh Ferriss and the other skyscraper utopians of the 1920s promised.

One thing was for sure: the city of tomorrow would put to shame the city of yesterday, just as the refrigerator made the icebox obsolete. Another thing was for certain, too: we would be happier, more peaceful (and productive) people. Here is Le Corbusier: "Free, man tends to geometry." And if we followed the "radiant harmony" of his geometry, he said, the world's cities could become "irresistible forces stimulating collective enthusiasm, collective action, and general joy and pride, and in consequence individual happiness everywhere…the modern world would begin to emerge from behind its labor-blackened face and hands, and would beam around, powerful, happy, believing…."

There were others—too many to quote—who promised deliverance through their brands of architecture: the right angle, the curvilinear road in the park, the tower of glass. Each fervently preached that his was the magic geometry that, like tumblers on a lock, would open the way to the good life.

Cosmopolis: Yesterday's Cities of the Future is a pattern book of expectations. The book is generously illustrated with a gathering of plans from the City Beautiful to the Italian Futurists, La Cite Industrielle, World's Fair utopias, science fiction visions, and the grand plans of the Moderns. Cosmopolis is the story of the ideal city we never achieved, and the great plans that went into making over precincts of our urban landscape.

"Memory is a defining characteristic of New England-this great desire to mark the landscape with historical monuments, to crowd little museums full of small acts of homage, and to tell certain stories."

Each essay in the book is about a moment of commemoration-or the failure to commemorate. At such moments, our aspirations are on full view. When we seek to honor something, we are staking a claim: This is us. In history, unlike heredity, we choose our ancestors.

Mansfield visited many small museums and local historical societies which he calls "memory houses." He examined the changes in Town Meeting and the changes in our local landscape: the loss of the elms, and the bulldozing of an entire neighborhood, Boston's West End. He explored the histories of Franklin Pierce, Thoreau, Johnny Appleseed and Jack Kerouac.

"We have journeyed a long way, once ever so optimistically, and find ourselves far removed from the one-room schoolhouse and the swimming hole, from the horse car and elm-lined Main Street," says Mansfield. "We try nostalgia, elegy, jeremiad. All our efforts at recollection, and somewhere the past itself, are in the memory house."

Author Howard Mansfield remembers the first time he heard about Atwood. A neighbor told him, "There was this man who lived in Greenfield in the 1930s. He covered an old house top to bottom in cement and stone. He built a swimming pool, floated an airplane in the pool all winter. Took the airplane out of the pool, flew to the White House, landed right there, and had lunch with the President." From this intriguing report—all true, though not in that order—sprang Mansfield's five years of work on the book.

Mansfield immerses himself deeply in the search for restoration. He travels with Civil War reenactors to help recreate the Battle of Antietam; he enrolls in auctioneer school to observe the endless recycling of artifacts, and he compares the process to the sterile preservation of these same objects in displays and museums; he observes the ongoing work of preserving the USS Constitution, "Old Ironsides," a ship which has been replaced over the years board by board.

The act of restoration, Mansfield concludes, whether it's rebuilding antique engines or reviving the village model of community organization, must contain an element of renewal. Rejecting the sentimentality of nostalgia and the superficiality of commercial images, Mansfield argues for an understanding of restoration that is as much concerned with the future as it is with the past, that preserves and communicates a spirit as well as a form.

In Part One of this new book by Howard Mansfield, "Axis Mundi," he writes about how we choose the landmarks of our home place. He explores our allegiance to stone in the monuments of grief, and in unusual old bridges on back roads, which were built without mortar: "One part ancient engineering, one part farmer's wall." He visits monuments minor (prized walking canes), unexpected (radio telescopes), and famous (the Washington Elm, whose story is wrong about the facts, but right about the truth).

Part Two, "Flaneurs," teaches us to be tourists of the near-at-hand, looking close to home at changes in the land both man-made and natural. And in Part Three, "Rpm," Mansfield describes the forces that topple our original axis mundi, unsettling us and the land as building booms and asphalt connect people in unexpected ways.

Howard Mansfield explores the loss of cultural memory, asking: What is the past? How do we construct that past? Is it possible to preserve the past as a vital force for the future? Eloquently written, The Bones of the Earth is a stunning call for reinventing our view of the future.