The James Marston Fitch Charitable Foundation

James Marston Fitch  1909 – 2000

 

Born in Washington D.C. in 1909, James Fitch was raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee. His mother, Ellen Payne Fitch, came from a New Orleans family whose prosperity in the cotton business  had been destroyed by the Civil War. His father, also James Fitch, was of Scottish stock by way of New England, New York State, and Kentucky.  As a quartermaster in the U.S. Navy during the Spanish American War he had been sandbagged and robbed of the payroll funds he was transporting and he never fully recovered from his injury although he managed to work at a routine clerical job. As a boy James was made aware of the residual effects of the Confederate defeat by his mother’s bitterness over her family’s loss of wealth and prestige. Ellen Payne Fitch, however, was not one of Tennessee Williams’s faded wraiths living in the past, but a resilient woman who built or rehabilitated and sold houses to augment her husband’s modest salary. The family moved from in-town Chattanooga to a farm where they lived in a log house built under Ellen Fitch’s direction and where son James was supposed to take an interest in raising pigs and chickens.  He was fifteen when he graduated from high school and left home to attend the University of Alabama.  At the end of two years he left to work in an architect’s office, after which he enrolled in the Tulane University School of Architecture in New Orleans where his boundless curiosity about cities and his appetite for the urban and urbane experience were born.
 
A temporary suspension from Tulane together with financial problems prevented Fitch from completing his undergraduate degree in architecture. (Sixty nine years later, in 1997, Tulane was to award him an honorary doctorate.) The lack of a degree did not deter Herbert Rodgers, director of a prominent Nashville interior design firm, from hiring him to do the architectural work of replicating antebellum mansions for the firm’s wealthy clients.  For one such client he traveled to Natchez to make detailed interior and exterior drawings of one of its celebrated houses, Auburn, which he reproduced in Nashville, complete with artificially aged library paneling, a house that, ironically, is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places. During his Nashville years the city was the center of the Agrarian movement, largely composed of writers who looked back nostalgically to the pre-industrial south.  For a time Fitch associated with them, but following the 1929 Crash, he became disillusioned with their conservative politics.  Through friends who had emigrated from Germany in the 1920s he was introduced to new developments in German cinema and art, although he did not recall hearing about the Bauhaus at that time. 
 
When the Depression hit bottom his means of livelihood came to an end and, of necessity, he acquired a practical knowledge of gardening and found himself doing grounds maintenance for the homes he had designed.  During the enforced idleness of the summer of 1933 when there was no more new work for the Rodgers firm, Fitch, still scarcely aware of the modern movement in architecture, wrote an essay describing the dilemma he experienced in designing period-style houses, which were outfitted with the latest technological devices, such as air conditioning.  Working with such contradictions  produced a conflict which he decided could only be resolved by rejecting eclecticism completely.   The essay was published in Architecture, strangely enough a periodical devoted largely to the eclectic styles in building popular at the time, although it had a broad minded editor in Henry Saylor.  Fitch told an interviewer many years later, “I had written novels since the age of twelve...This was the first time I started to think of myself as a writer on non-fictional subjects.” 
 
The following summer Fitch, responding to a small notice in The New Republic, traveled north for the first time to study with Henry Wright in Hacketstown, New Jersey.  Wright was one of the leading housing and planning experts in the country and was closely affiliated with Clarence Stein, Lewis Mumford, and Catherine Bauer, advocates of regional planning.  Fitch retained a vivid recollection of driving with Wright in an open touring car through New York State to visit Mumford in Amenia, a visit that would be repeated over the years, including a trip for a filmed interview with Mumford on his ninetieth birthday.  Mumford, he acknowledged, had a profound effect on his thinking and he felt a great debt to him intellectually.
 
While ninety percent of architects and engineers were unemployed, Fitch, through a friend, was hired by Tennessee State Planning Board as Director of Population Statistics.  Far more than a statistical report, the survey he produced was a detailed study of the distribution of industry, highways, railroads, tenant farming and the general economic determinants of population distribution.  The methodology he learned in this process provided a basis for his later writing of architectural history, even for the way he was to analyze the modern city.   In his effort to account for the factors that influenced racial distribution, he contacted a Fisk University Professor of Sociology, Charles S. Johnson.  The revelation that Johnson, who was black, attended the same Episcopal church as he did, but was obliged to sit out of sight in the organ loft, caused Fitch to make a complete break with organized religion, and resulted in a profound change in his comprehension of the racial situation in the South. 
 
Another experience he remembered as formative during the mid-1930s was working under wilderness advocate, Benton McKaye, who at the time was director of recreational resources for the Tennessee Valley Authority.  McKaye had been a prime mover behind the creation of the Appalachian Trail and stressed the importance of preserving the land in its natural state, while seeking to facilitate human access to it in the least disruptive way.  Fitch always remembered McKaye’s reprimand when he found his crew cleaning up a site along a brook that was to be photographed for publicity purposes and ordered them to return it to the way they had found it–in its natural condition.  He was deeply impressed by the TVA’s concern for the families who were to be displaced when the land was flooded and the fact that live coals from their hearths were carefully transported to their new homes.   It was field experience such as this that again laid the groundwork for the emphasis on material circumstances that would characterize his subsequent analyses of cities and buildings.
 
In 1935, Henry Klaber, who Fitch had met through Henry Wright, asked him to come to Washington to work for the Federal Housing Authority, where, working to establish minimum standards for Federally subsidized housing, he realized for the first time that there were social and political aspects of building.  The New Deal was in full swing and, as he later recalled, “Housing was the great issue in architecture at that time.”
 
Fitch’s 1933 article in Architecture came to the attention of Laurence Kocher, the editor of Architectural Record, who tracked the author down in Washington and asked him to fly up to New York for an interview.  Fitch accepted the editorial position Kocher offered and moved to New York City in January 1936, where he was soon joined by fellow-Tennessean, Cleo Rickman, who he subsequently married.  Architectural Record was a solid publication, the oldest architecture magazine in the country and Kocher’s editorial policy was committed to propagandizing modern architecture.  Where his previous working experiences had been in pseudo-historical design, in population statistics, and in government-housing policy, at Architectural Record, Fitch was now in a center of architectural news-gathering and commentary, reporting on new developments himself, and, after he became editor of the main body of the magazine, commissioning groundbreaking articles from avant gardists like Frederick Kiesler or sculptor David Smith who wrote on the integration of sculpture with contemporary architecture.  He commissioned three young landscape designers, Dan Kiley, Garrett Eckbow, and James Rose, to write a series of articles on “planned recreational environments,” asking them to respond to such questions as “How can man constructively use his free time? What physical accommodations are essential to this recreation? How shall they be designed?  The resulting article is considered a manifesto that launched a new approach to landscape design.   Fitch also wrote a number of pieces for Architectural Record himself, which remain anonymous as the staff writers’ policy was to not sign their work.
 
Through his active participation in the Book and Magazine and Writers Guild, Fitch came in contact with leading figures in the communications field who shared his interest in social and economic reform. They assumed on the basis of what they saw in the first decade of the New Deal that there was a possibility of effecting a real change in American society.  He began to learn about dialectical materialism and to apply a  materialist approach to architectural history.  He credited his friend Milton Brown’s Artists of the French Revolution with helping him to understand the relation of ethics to esthetics which enabled him to resolve what he had seen as a contradiction between Jefferson’s democratic values and his taste for classical architecture.  He began to formulate a plan for a history of American architecture based on dialectical materialism which he started to work on during his military service in World War II.
 
Drafted into the army in 1942, Fitch was assigned to study meteorology, an assignment that he believed came about because the army didn’t know what to do with a draftee of his age and radical political background.  In any event he spent the next three years being shifted from one base to another in the U.S., learning about weather.  This, it turned out, was to have a significant impact on his architectural thinking, as he began to focus on the necessary connections between climate and architecture and to reflect on ways building could benefit from or modify the impact of climate. 
 
The first article he wrote when he became an  editor at Architectural Forum after being discharged from the army was called “Microclimatology.” The book that he had been working on, American Building: The Forces That Shape It, published in 1948, contained in its first half a history of American architecture from Native American settlements to the mid-twentieth century that placed building firmly in a social and political context; the second part was devoted to an analysis of how to use architecture to produce the optimum  environment for the flourishing of human activity.  Thus with one publication Fitch established a reputation as both an historian and an expert on the relationship of architecture to environment.  At Architectural Forum he had an office next to Jane Jacobs who became a life-long friend and fellow activist.   He recalled this time in an interview:  As members of the editorial staff of the most dynamic journal of the day, we were willy-nilly at the center of many controversies.  But none, as it turned out, was more pregnant than the convulsive consequences of urban renewal.  Though I was at first attracted to the cosmetic and sanitary aspects of “slum clearance,” I became increasingly dismayed as the wholesale destruction of our central cities became increasingly apparent.  Being an architect, my concern was principally with the physical fabric; not being an architect, Jane’s was principally for the people whose lives were being disrupted.  The results of this exposure, in my case, was the creation of the graduate program of historic preservation at the Columbia University School of Architecture.  The result, in Jane’s case, came sooner and was much more explosive.  It took the form of a book called Death and Life of Great American Cities.  This remarkable polemic, aimed straight at the heart of the academic planning and architectural community, launched a scathing critique of the formalist, unscientific, ultimately anti humanistic criteria of design professionals.
 
Impressed by Fitch’s approach to the relationship of architecture to climate, Elizabeth Gordon, editor of House Beautiful, offered him a position as architecture editor, and asked him specifically to direct a “climate control” project.   Starting at the end of 1949, for the next three years, each issue of House Beautiful offered plans for “climate-wise” houses in different areas of the United States, designed by Fitch and others.  Fitch’s lead-off article, “The Scientists Behind Climate Control” introduced a panel of experts in climatology who would be “offering in upcoming issues specific guides on how to wring more comfort from your climate.”    
 
House Beautiful also devoted an eight-page photo essay to the house the Fitchs built on a hillside in Stony Point, New York, complete with handsome photographs by Ezra Stoller and Fitch’s own text.  During their early years in New York, Jim and Cleo Fitch lived in a backyard house they had discovered and rehabilitated in exchange for rent.  When he was away in the army the house was torn down to make way for a housing project.  After a few years of renting in the city, they acquired, together with friends, a tract of land on a hill overlooking the Hudson River in Stony Point in New York’s Rockland County, where, doing much of the work themselves, they built a house in which Fitch could put some of his theories into practice (see page....).  
 
However, they did not stay long facing their spectacular view.  The United States was in the throes of the McCarthy era and by 1953 the editorial policy at House Beautiful had changed as Elizabeth Gordon began to equate modernism in design with communism.  The Fitchs were deeply distressed by the climate of fear and distrust generated by the House Un-American Activities Committee investigations and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch-hunting.   As he explained the situation: I resigned from the editorial board of House Beautiful in the spring of 1953.  The decisive issue was, of all things, whether the Gropian/Miesian/Bauhaus version of modern architecture was “communistic,” hence somehow un-American, while that of the San Francisco Bay region which the magazine editorially supported was safely “American.”  I had argued for months against such an absurd posture, but realizing that the magazine, as the high-style end of the Hearst empire would inevitably be drawn into the red-baiting frenzy, I decided that I had no choice but to resign in protest.  Cleo and I sold our recently completed and much publicized house, lock, stock and barrel, including the flowers in bloom in the garden and the pictures on the walls and sailed on the France on the very day that the Rosenbergs were executed for alleged conspiracy.
 
In the course of writing his history of American building, Fitch had become interested in the 19^th century American sculptor Horatio Greenough who had lived much of his life as an expatriate in Florence and Rome and whose writings urged a functional approach to design far ahead of its time.  He decided to live in Italy on the proceeds of the house sale, with the intention of writing a book on Greenough.  On arrival he found that someone else had laid claim to the Greenough archives so the book did not materialize, but he had ample time to familiarize himself with Italy’s architectural heritage and to experience the patterns of urban development in Italian towns and cities.  In the middle of their Florentine year a letter arrived from the architectural historian Talbot Hamlin saying that he was retiring from Columbia University’s School of Architecture and that Fitch was the only person who could take his place. This brought him back to the United States in 1954 to start a new phase of his career as a professor of architectural history at Columbia, an affiliation that was to last for the next twenty-five years.   The McCarthy era witch-hunting was not over, however, and Fitch had his passport cancelled by the State Department and had to sue for its reinstatement.
 
Much of Fitch’s earlier journalistic writing on architecture had been published anonymously in connection with his various editorial positions, but now he began to write for scholarly journals as well, dealing with aspects of history and developing his ideas on the relation of esthetics to material prosperity. A collection of these articles was published in 1961 by Columbia University Press under the title Architecture and the Esthetics of Plenty.  The table of contents is indicative of the range of his interests, a range that exemplified his wariness of over-specialization and led him to encourage students who might lack academic credentials, but had demonstrated their capabilities in other forms of endeavor.

  
In the early 1960s Fitch was asked by the U.S. State Department to meet with an architectural historian from Czechoslovakia who needed assistance in selecting architecture books for her university library.  In the course of this meeting he learned about the extensive government-sponsored programs in preservation in Czechoslovakia and the specialized training of preservationists to carry on this work.  He traveled to Czechoslovakia and subsequently to other countries to see at first hand what was being done in this field and returned to the U.S. determined to see that similar training would become available in the United States.  The result was the founding, together with Charles Peterson, within Columbia University’s School of Architecture, of the first program of formal studies in historic preservation in the United States.  Shortly after the initial courses were established it became a full-fledged graduate program leading to a Master’s degree and the first “Fitchians” went forth as a task force that was to assume leadership in the nation’s growing preservation movement.  The start of this program coincided with a turning point in the attitude toward historic buildings and districts as the public awoke to the devastation caused by the sweeping urban renewal programs of the 1950s.  The destruction of McKim, Meade and White’s Pennsylvania Station with its soaring steel skeletal structure, modeled after the stone vaults of the Baths of Caracalla, galvanized popular support for the creation of a Landmarks Commission.  The Preservation movement gathered steam and programs to train preservationists proliferated. 
 
In 1979 when he reached Columbia’s mandatory retirement age, Fitch embarked on a series of new careers; he had already served as the first conservator of Central Park  (1974-75); he spent two years at the University of Pennsylvania setting up a graduate program in preservation; he produced the first comprehensive book on the subject, Historic Preservation: Curatorial Management of the Built World; and he became a partner and director of historic preservation in the architectural firm of Beyer, Blinder, Belle.  “His vision was a guiding force at the firm,” according to Richard Blinder, “in all aspects of historic preservation and historic district planning.  The projects he worked on included the master plan for the restoration of Grand Central Terminal; the restoration of the Cathedral of the Madeleine, Salt Lake City; the Tweed Courthouse in Manhattan; the South Street Seaport Museum and Master Plan; the Ellis Island National Monument; and the restoration of three bridges and arches in Central Park.  He was a mentor to many members of the firm who have become dedicated leaders in the field of historic preservation.”
 
During the 1980s and into the nineties he continued to travel widely as a consultant and lecturer and to publish critical essays, such as “Physical and Metaphysical in Architectural Criticism” or “Murder at the Modern,” in which he excoriated those who he felt had betrayed modern architecture. The man who had never graduated from college ultimately received five honorary doctorates and every possible award in the field of historic preservation.
 
In his conversation Fitch never uttered an incomplete sentence or allowed a thought to remain half formed.  His prose is similarly lucid and eloquent as it shapes his cogent arguments.  Each of his essays can be taken as a demonstration of methodology in the particular area of investigation it presents.  He was that rare thinker, the generalist who can bring a remarkable knowledge of specifics to a variety of topics.  At the same time he was a specialist who could make complicated subjects both accessible and interesting for a general audience.
 
At a time when technological developments have expanded the horizons of building in the most extravagant ways and architecture, like the economy, has become global, we need Fitch to remind us that the fundamental purpose of architecture is first and foremost to serve human needs, in his words, “to make it possible to be human”.  This does not mean that he ignored the iconic function of architecture—just read him on Jefferson—but he applied a standard that was both rational and esthetic—the esthetic for him was what functioned best in terms of the realization of human potential.  Or, as he put it when asked to comment on the relation between ethics and esthetics, “Ethics deals with your reasons for doing something, for acting, and esthetics deals with the consequences of your acts; they are different sides of the same coin.  Frank Lloyd Wright determined that the final visible form of his acts would be an _expression of his ethics.”
 

For more about James Marston Fitch:

The Whole Built World at Risk, by James Marston Fitch

Columbians Ahead of Their Time -- James Marston Fitch

David Dunlap's New York Times Obituary

Selected Writings of Jame Marston Fitch, with a foreword by Jane Jacobs, will be published by W.W. Norton in 2007.