Mumford, Lewis (1895–1990)

Lewis Mumford was born in New York City. He is best known as an architectural critic and urban historian, and author of The City in History (1961), undoubtedly his greatest work. Of mixed German and German‐Jewish heritage, Mumford grew up with his mother and maternal grandfather – an immigrant and head waiter who took the boy for long walks, initiating Mumford's lifelong interest in cities. With the publication of The Culture of Cities (1938) Mumford achieved widespread recognition that grew when the New Yorker magazine hired him to write its Skyline column. A journalist by profession, he had wide‐ranging intellectual interests and wrote convincingly on a variety of topics, including technology and culture, literary criticism, social ethics, and politics. Mumford was a “public intellectual” who addressed the educated public rather than a specific academic community. Despite or perhaps because of audience, he undertook an ambitious intellectual project: the reexamination of modernity in the light of growing scientific and imaginative understandings of evolutionary processes. Mumford thought that in respect to developments in technology, architecture, and urban form, culture could be likened to the workings of nature, and like the philosopher John Dewey he held that creative innovation holds the key to evolving designs appropriate to the task of reconciling human values and natural processes.