City of Refuge: Separatists and Utopian Town Planning 9781400884315

Table of contents :
Contents
1. The Idea of the City of Refuge
2. The Sacred Squareness of Cities
3. The Protestant Tempering of Utopia
4. Christianopolis
5. The Lord’s Grove
6. Harmony
7. Economy
8. Conclusion
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
Illustration Credits
Acknowledgments

Citation preview

City of Refuge separatists and utopian town planning

mic h a el j . l e w i s

princeton university press princeton and oxford

To Heinz and Susanne Baldermann, who kindly opened up for me their own City of Refuge in the Haasemannstraße

Copyright © 2016 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR press.princeton.edu Jacket illustrations: (front) Frederick Rapp, drawing of the central pavilion of the Economy garden; Manuscript Group 185, Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission: Old Economy Village Archives, OE-834-5; (back) Christian Gottlieb Reuter, Ohnmaßgebliches Project zu einer Stadt in North Carolina, Unitäts-Archiv Herrnhut, TS Mp. 100.6 All Rights Reserved ISBN 978-0-691-17181-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Lewis, Michael J., 1957– author. Title: City of Refuge : separatists and utopian town planning / Michael J. Lewis. Description: Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015049233 | ISBN 9780691171814 (hardcover : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Collective settlements. | City planning—Religious aspects. | City planning—Social aspects. | Utopias. Classification: LCC HX630 .L49 2016 | DDC 307.77—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc .gov/2015049233 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available Designed and typeset by Jeff Wincapaw This book has been composed in Whitman Printed on acid-free paper. Printed in China 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

1 9

The Idea of the City of Refuge

2 19

The Sacred Squareness of Cities

3 33

The Protestant Tempering of Utopia

4 57

Christianopolis

5 95

The Lord’s Grove

6 131

Harmony

7 169

Economy

8 203

Conclusion

219

Notes

239

Selected Bibliography

243

Index

249

Illustration Credits

253

Acknowledgments

City of Refuge

1

The Idea of the City of Refuge And among the cities which ye shall give unto the Levites there shall be (numbers 35:6, kjv) six cities for refuge.

Almost every society has an image of a perfect world, however vague its outlines and imprecise its coordinates. It can loom dimly in the past as a remote golden age—a lost Arcadia—or as a prophecy of things to come, in this world or the next. It can be a purely philosophical exercise like Plato’s Republic, or a political promise, the alluring dream of a socialist workers’ paradise. It scarcely matters that this perfect world is unattainable. The more distant and remote the vision, the better to cudgel the present and to expose its faults and failings. Five hundred years ago, Thomas More published a book that made it possible for the first time to speak collectively of all these notions of perfection, whether mythical, philosophical, theological, or merely administrative. His title coined that brilliant new word, the sonorous and immensely suggestive Utopia, which subsumed all these different conceptions of human perfection—Greek and Roman, Jewish and Christian—into a single irresistible vision. This vision has become a potent force in Western culture, where radical campaigns for social reform soon came to arouse the kind of rapturous millennial hopes once restricted to heavenly paradise. A good portion of the history of the past five centuries is the story of utopian revolutions and their consequences.1

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1 The city of refuge is the dissenters’ Utopia, a foursquare sanctuary for the refugees displaced by the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Freudenstadt in Swabia was designed by Heinrich Schickhardt in 1599, for whom rectilinear order was so important that he bent the church on the main square rather than violate his regular plan. fig .

This is the main utopian tradition, which aspires to perfect the world and liberate it from strife, want, and woe. But alongside it runs a second strand of thought that recognizes that the corrupt world, however much we tamper and tinker, cannot be made perfect, and that squalor and discord are the natural state of baffled human existence. This alternative tradition was carried forward by sects that had received their fill of official harassment and unofficial violence, including German Rappites, French Huguenots, and American Shakers. Seeing no hope for reforming a wicked world, they chose instead to withdraw from it. They made their way to distant sanctuaries, where they withdrew from society to establish detached and independent com10 chapter

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munities in isolation, rarely numbering more than one or two thousand inhabitants. Although they varied in their beliefs and nationality, they were keenly interested in one another. Visual motifs and forms passed from one to another like a baton in a relay race, remaining intact but taking on new symbolic meaning with each transfer. All were drawn by a single tantalizing image, that of a “city of refuge.” In character it was orderly, with repeated house types and a regular street plan; in shape it was usually a square (fig. 1). These separatist enclaves, dissimilar in theology but similar in their urban practice, form a distinct and unbroken intellectual tradition, one that runs parallel to the main channel of utopian thought. It is the living continuity of that tradition that is the theme of this book. The phrase “city of refuge” derives from the Bible, for it was only logical that Christian societies suffering persecution and seeking sanctuary look there to find solace and guidance. It was natural that they should identify themselves with the ancient Israelites on their exodus through the wilderness, and even that their towns should imitate the layout of the Israelite encampments during those wanderings. But the Bible offers another image for persecuted refugees, a strangely hopeful one, and that is the city of refuge described in the book of Numbers. There we read how Moses, following God’s instructions, allocated the Promised Land among the twelve tribes of Israel. Forty-eight cities were to be given to the Levite tribe; of these six were awarded the special designation of “cities of refuge” (‫ טלקמ ריע‬in Hebrew, Orei Miklat). Someone guilty of manslaughter could flee to one of these cities without fear of being avenged by the victim’s family: And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, Speak to the people of Israel and say to them, When you cross the Jordan into the land of Canaan, then you shall select cities to be cities of refuge for you, that the manslayer who kills any person without intent may flee there. The cities shall be for you a refuge from the avenger, that the manslayer may not die until he stands before the congregation for judgment. And the cities that you give shall be your six cities of refuge. You shall give three cities beyond the Jordan, and three cities in the land of Canaan, to be cities of refuge. These six cities shall be for refuge for the people of Israel, and for the stranger and for the sojourner among them, that anyone who kills any person without intent may flee there. (num. 35:9 15) Only much later in the Bible (Josh. 20:7–8) are the names of those six cities revealed: Kadesh, Shechem, and Hebron on the east side of the Jordan, and Bezer, Ramoth, and Golan on the west.2 A glance at a map shows that they are spaced across ancient Israel with remarkable evenness, according not to population but geography, thereby reducing as much as possible the longest potential flight of a fugitive. A refuge needs to be close at hand. 11 the idea of the city of refuge

The ancient Israelites hardly invented the idea of a sacred refuge, which is found everywhere in the ancient world. We do not know its historical origin, only that it is very old. It is older than the ancient Greeks, who knew it from the Iliad and who already had a well-established practice of designating certain temples or altars as places where a fugitive might claim asylum. This was done not for the sake of the fugitive but for that of the temple, which any act of violence would defile.3 The Greeks refused to drag fugitives out forcibly from their temples (although, as the Spartan general Pausanias found, they were quite willing to starve them out). Christianity continued this ancient practice, which was formalized in 511 at the First Council of Orléans, which granted the right of asylum to anyone who could make his way to a church or the house of a bishop. Hence, the English word sanctuary signifies both a place of refuge and the holiest part of a church building. But the Jewish tradition was unusual in declaring not merely a temple or altar but an entire city as a sanctuary.4 This is an enormously arresting idea, yet the Christian Middle Ages had no great interest in its Jewish roots. If medieval theologians contemplated the city of refuge, it was only because it prefigured the coming of Christ.5 And so the idea slumbered through the centuries, right until the dawning of the Protestant Reformation. The savage campaign to extirpate the Hussites (1420–37), the followers of Jan Hus, brought to Europe the age of religious wars. For the next two centuries, the roads of Europe would be crammed with refugees, whole populations drawing carts or lugging packs, all in search of asylum. And the peace that eventually settled over Europe did little to stem the stream of refugees. The stern doctrine of Cuius regio, eius religio (Whose realm, his religion) imposed the faith of the prince or duke on his people, which gave the dissenter but two choices: to conform or to flee. Under these new circumstances, it was possible to look with new eyes at the ancient doctrine of the city of refuge—a holy sanctuary not for the solitary refugee but for an entire population. And so the city of refuge was revived and transformed, in the process becoming something that the ancient Israelites could not have recognized. ++++ Something odd happened to those separatist societies who came to build their own cities of refuge. The further they retreated into the wilderness, the more they were noticed and scrutinized. The less they cared about the world, the more the world cared about them. Their religious enclaves were avidly studied by reformers whose motives were not in the slightest religious, and who regarded these self-contained societies as experimental laboratories in which new systems of economy, administration, and family structure could be tested and evaluated. When they came to envision their own ideal societies, they naturally drew on the example of their religious counterparts. Brook Farm, the communal society established by Boston Transcendentalists in 12 chapter

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2 When Marx and Engels spoke of “socialist Utopias,” they meant projects like Robert Owen’s New Harmony, Indiana, shown here in an imaginary view of 1825. Owen expressed his radically new socioeconomic order in terms of visionary architecture, most spectacularly in the four ventilation towers that he called “illuminators,” which were to be outfitted with gas-burners that would light up the town by night. fig .

1841, was inspired by the settlements of Shakers, Harmonists, and Moravians, as their earliest printed prospectuses make clear.6 Robert Owen imitated the economic structure of the Rappites, with their sophisticated agriculture and industry, and economic self-sufficiency (fig. 2). Charles Fourier learned from the vast communal buildings of the Shakers that functioned as dormitories, dining halls, and meetinghouses. James Silk Buckingham embraced the most durable and widespread feature of these religious sanctuaries—the belief that the right angle and the square are the most divine of all geometric forms. 13 the idea of the city of refuge

It is startling that these social reformers should look so closely at these religious enclaves, given the wide divergence in their beliefs, as wide as the gap between the free love libertinism of Owen and the stony chastity of the Shakers. Yet similar circumstances prompt similar solutions. Each sought to create overnight an entirely new social order—entirely self-contained and self-sufficient, and remote enough from the world so that the social experiment would not be contaminated—and it was only natural that the secular reformers should borrow from the experiments of their religious predecessors, and modify them. The same model dormitory built to enforce celibacy on the eve of the Millennium could also serve to pry children away from the corrupting influence of their parents. The same grid that represents the “city that lies foursquare” in the book of Revelation could also express utilitarian rationality. Even the all-controlling codes of behavior, the meddling moralism that Fourier and others practiced, were inspired by the way that religious leaders could direct the private lives of their adherents. Yet despite this productive cross-fertilization, religious and secular communal societies have generally been treated by scholars as separate and distinct entities; their underlying and essential continuity has been overlooked. Where they have not been studied in isolation, they have been flung together under the general rubric of communal Utopias. Or ignored completely: Lewis Mumford’s The Story of Utopias confidently identified a “gap in the Utopian tradition from seventeenth century to the nineteenth.”7 And yet in precisely this gap came the great flowering of Pietist utopianism (fig. 3). More recently, Robert P. Sutton’s otherwise splendid Communal Utopias and the American Experience segregates religious and secular communities into separate volumes; the result is to cut the extraordinary story of New Harmony, Indiana, into two halves, when its most fascinating aspect falls into the space between them, the lively exchange between the religious leader and the secular reformer. This segregation of religious from secular Utopians, usually at the expense of the former, dates back to at least 1880, when Friedrich Engels omitted all mention of religious reformers in his Socialism: Utopian and Scientific in 1880. And yet the same Engels, as we shall see, dealt at great length with them in his earlier writings, even analyzing the plight of factory workers in Europe by comparing them to their counterparts in George Rapp’s Harmony Society. This book is meant to serve as a corrective to this inherited Marxist viewpoint, which continues to shape our thinking and obscures the fundamental relationship between these two utopian currents, which played a consequential part in making the world in which we live. ++++ Because the city of refuge is a living tradition and not the exclusive property of any denomination, its boundaries are somewhat elastic. This book will look at sanctuaries built to house religious refugees (such as Freudenstadt and the settlements of the 14 chapter

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3 The Moravian Church, revived under Count Nicholas Zinzendorf in 1727, translated the beliefs of German Pietism into terms of town planning. Here their prolific surveyor Christian Gottlieb Reuter made a plan for a standardized (regulairen) village with an array of communal buildings at the center. To either side of the central meetinghouse (1) were residences for male and female children (2 and 3), dormitories for unmarried women and widows (4 and 5), and for unmarried men (6). The communal store and apothecary were set slightly back but were still convenient (8 and 9). fig .

15 the idea of the city of refuge

Moravians), those built by charismatic communal leaders (the three towns created by George Rapp), and even some that were purely imaginary (those planned by Albrecht Dürer and Johann Valentin Andreae). The socialist Utopias of the early nineteenth century stand at the culmination of this tradition, refuges not from religious persecution but—as they might put it—industrial capitalism. Readers might be surprised to find New Haven and Philadelphia included here, but their founders were linked to the tight circle of thinkers who kept the idea of the city of refuge alive. At the same time, not all communal separatists built such towns. The millenarian settlement that Conrad Beissel founded in Ephrata, Pennsylvania, in 1735 was quite sophisticated— with a refined musical culture, weaving and pottery factories, and a prolific printing press—but it had no urban form (fig. 4).8 Nor did the settlements of the Shakers, who will not be treated comprehensively here. Although they are central to the story of communal utopianism and would produce the most sophisticated of all communal building types, they stood outside the German intellectual-theological tradition that is the subject here. Like the Ephrata Cloisterites, they did not give their settlements the formal geometric unity that is the hallmark of the city of refuge.9

4 Not all millenarian settlements aspired to build towns. At Ephrata Cloister, in Ephrata, Pennsylvania, Conrad Beissel led the most ardent of all millenarians. Celibate and vegetarian, they would rise at midnight to keep vigil for the second coming of Christ, only to return two hours later to their wooden pillows and beds. To the left is the communal Saal (1740) and to the right the Saron, or women’s dormitory (1742–43).

fig .

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A book about Utopia should say something about terms, since Utopia, ideal cities, and formally planned towns sometimes overlap and sometimes do not. An ideal city and an ideal society are not quite the same thing; an ideal city seeks to make its physical form perfect, while an ideal society seeks to make its human relationships and social structures perfect. They do not always coincide. Utopia is always a perfect society, but it is not necessarily of perfect physical form. Thomas More’s Utopia was regular but not perfect in form (its shape was “almost square”); William Morris’s News from Nowhere, his novella about a socialist Utopia, was not at all regular in form. On the other hand, some formal city plans of absolute regularity, such as New York City’s grid of 1811, are merely a rational means of dividing parcels and have nothing to say about human commerce, behavior, or morals. The cities of refuge described in this book sought to do both: to create an ideal social order and express it in an ideal physical plan. Three other terms that sometimes overlap: “Pietist,” “millenarian,” and “separatist.” Pietism is a movement within the Lutheran Church that arose in the late seventeenth century and that stressed personal piety; it is responsible for the emergence of the modern Moravian church. Millenarians are believers in the imminence of the Second Coming of Christ; they are also known as chiliasts. Separatists are those who chose to remove themselves from the mainstream of society to establish a distinct and self-contained society of their own. They need not be religious believers, as the members of Robert Owen’s New Harmony society were decidedly not. A final thought. This book touches on the history of architecture and religion, and its principal sources are written documents, architectural drawings, and the buildings themselves. But the notion of refuge is older than the oldest of its codified social forms and reaches into our remote animal origins.10 It is basic biological truth that all defenseless and unarmored mammals, especially those like us that are not fleet of foot, must learn to hide themselves from their enemies. It is part of our primal equipment, usually remaining at the unconscious level, except when it resurfaces as an archaic survival—as in early childhood games like tag, which recapitulates the experience of chasing and being chased. It is curious that wherever tag is played, and it is found all over the world, that there is invariably a place of safety where one cannot be caught.11 To give the full anthropology of the idea of refuge, let alone its evolutionary biology, would go far beyond the scope of this book. But the reader should keep in mind that the allure of a place of refuge may have as much to do with unconscious instinct as rational thought. Otherwise, we will have a parched and incomplete picture of the austere, even forbidding settlements that we will encounter in the pages that follow.

17 the idea of the city of refuge

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The Sacred Squareness of Cities And when you cut meat, cut it square & equal.

s h a k e r m i l l e n n i a l l aw s

The central fact of the ideal city of the Bible is its squareness. On four separate occasions, the Bible describes a model city or settlement, and in each instance it has the form of a square. The ultimate square city is the New Jerusalem, described by both John of Patmos and the prophet Ezekiel as a twelve-gated walled square. The forty-eight Levitical cities described in Numbers 35 were likewise square. And even that archetypal of all biblical settlements, the encampment of the twelve tribes of Israel during their wanderings, was itself arranged as a square. Each of these communities, whether inspired by a divine vision or else the result of direct revelation to Moses, can be said to have been sanctioned by God. Anyone looking to the Bible for guidance on how to build a community must come to the conclusion that a godly city should be square. (And when the scattered Hussites were once more in a position to build, this is precisely what they did.) A perfectly square city was not all customary in the ancient Near East, where cities tended to be round or amorphous in plan.1 The Egyptian hieroglyph niwt, perhaps the oldest of all abstract symbols for the city, shows a cross inscribed within a circle.2 The square form was usually reserved for the temple or palace within the city wall, with its four corners pointed in the cardinal directions, as at Ur and Uruk. The contrast with the otherwise formless city only served to heighten the sense of the 19

temple’s sacred geometry. To extend this geometry to the city walls, and to make them square, as the Bible proposed, was in effect to designate the entire city as a temple, as the New Jerusalem was. The oldest ideal city in the Bible, strictly speaking, is not a city at all. This is the arrangement of the twelve tribes as they pitched their tents in the Sinai during their exodus from captivity. According to God’s instructions to Moses and Aaron, as recorded in Numbers, the tribes were to arrange themselves in twelve separate groups, placed symmetrically about the central tent of meeting. The account is lengthy, consisting mostly of an inventory of the tribes and the population of each: And the Lord spake unto Moses and unto Aaron, saying, Every man of the children of Israel shall pitch by his own standard, with the ensign of their father’s house: far off about the tabernacle of the congregation shall they pitch. And on the east side toward the rising of the sun shall they of the standard of the camp of Judah pitch throughout their armies: and Nahshon the son of Amminadab shall be captain of the children of Judah. And his host, and those that were numbered of them, were threescore and fourteen thousand and six hundred. And those that do pitch next unto him shall be the tribe of Issachar: and Nethaneel the son of Zuar shall be captain of the children of Issachar. And his host, and those that were numbered thereof, were fifty and four thousand and four hundred. Then the tribe of Zebulun: and Eliab the son of Helon shall be captain of the children of Zebulun. And his host, and those that were numbered thereof, were fifty and seven thousand and four hundred. All that were numbered in the camp of Judah were an hundred thousand and fourscore thousand and six thousand and four hundred, throughout their armies. These shall first set forth. On the south side shall be the standard of the camp of Reuben according to their armies: and the captain of the children of Reuben shall be Elizur the son of Shedeur. And his host, and those that were numbered thereof, were forty and six thousand and five hundred. And those which pitch by him shall be the tribe of Simeon: and the captain of the children of Simeon shall be Shelumiel the son of Zurishaddai. And his host, and those that were numbered of them, were fifty and nine thousand and three hundred. Then the tribe of Gad: and the captain of the sons of Gad shall be Eliasaph the son of Reuel. And his host, and those that were numbered of them, were forty and five thousand and six hundred and fifty. All that were numbered in the camp of Reuben were an hundred thousand and fifty and one thousand and four hundred and fifty, throughout their armies. And they shall set forth in the second rank. Then the tabernacle of the congregation shall set forward with the camp of the Levites in the midst of the camp: as they encamp, so shall they set forward, every man in his place by their standards. On the 20 chapter

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west side shall be the standard of the camp of Ephraim according to their armies: and the captain of the sons of Ephraim shall be Elishama the son of Ammihud. And his host, and those that were numbered of them, were forty thousand and five hundred. And by him shall be the tribe of Manasseh: and the captain of the children of Manasseh shall be Gamaliel the son of Pedahzur. And his host, and those that were numbered of them, were thirty and two thousand and two hundred. Then the tribe of Benjamin: and the captain of the sons of Benjamin shall be Abidan the son of Gideoni. And his host, and those that were numbered of them, were thirty and five thousand and four hundred. All that were numbered of the camp of Ephraim were an hundred thousand and eight thousand and an hundred, throughout their armies. And they shall go forward in the third rank. The standard of the camp of Dan shall be on the north side by their armies: and the captain of the children of Dan shall be Ahiezer the son of Ammishaddai. And his host, and those that were numbered of them, were threescore and two thousand and seven hundred. And those that encamp by him shall be the tribe of Asher: and the captain of the children of Asher shall be Pagiel the son of Ocran. And his host, and those that were numbered of them, were forty and one thousand and five hundred. Then the tribe of Naphtali: and the captain of the children of Naphtali shall be Ahira the son of Enan. And his host, and those that were numbered of them, were fifty and three thousand and four hundred. All they that were numbered in the camp of Dan were an hundred thousand and fifty and seven thousand and six hundred. They shall go hindmost with their standards. These are those which were numbered of the children of Israel by the house of their fathers: all those that were numbered of the camps throughout their hosts were six hundred thousand and three thousand and five hundred and fifty. But the Levites were not numbered among the children of Israel; as the Lord commanded Moses. And the children of Israel did according to all that the Lord commanded Moses: so they pitched by their standards, and so they set forward, every one after their families, according to the house of their fathers. (num. 2:1 34) Most of this account consists of demographic information, along with a few brief instructions as to the layout of the tribes. These were neatly aligned to the cardinal directions, so that the east, south, west, and north side each held three tribes, forming a well-ordered square.3 At the center was the main gathering tent, a double square that measured 60 by 120 cubits, according to Exodus chapter 26. If one accepts the conventional estimate of the biblical cubit as eighteen inches, this would have yielded a roomy tent of 90 by 180 feet. The encampment in Numbers was not literally a city plan but a schematic diagram without fixed dimensions. Only the dimensions of the tent and tabernacle were 21 the sacred squareness of cities

fixed, since they were portable objects that would be assembled at each campsite. Otherwise, the diagrammatic layout could be recreated again and again on different sites, adjusting itself to local conditions of topography but always maintaining its essential order. With the sacred tent at the center, the tribes at the periphery formed a symbolic wall (and not merely a symbolic one, for they also comprised a defensible perimeter). These three elements—a square plan, a surrounding wall that comprised twelve units, and a system of interlocking rectilinearity in which the squareness of the whole was repeated in smaller units—would be the prototype for all the biblical cities that follow. For Christian readers, the symbolic form of twelve gates enclosing a central temple unmistakably prefigured Jesus and his twelve apostles. This overwhelming theological significance made any archaeological or anthropological considerations unimportant. And so not until the mid-seventeenth century was any serious attempt made to recreate the specific physical form of the tabernacle and encampment from the verbal description provided by scripture. The project was undertaken by Jacob Judah Leon (1602/03–1675), the learned rabbi of Amsterdam and a man with considerable knowledge and curiosity about architecture.4 He had already built and exhibited a meticulous scale model of Solomon’s Temple, which earned him the nickname Templo.5 In 1646, Rabbi Leon completed a model of the tabernacle and the camps of the twelve tribes, which he subsequently published with a commentary in his Retrato del tabernaculo de Moséh (1654).6 The scriptural accounts of the tabernacle and surrounding encampment are deceptively precise. While they specify meticulously such details as the frame of the tent (tenoned posts of acacia wood, ten cubits in length, with silver bases) and the exact population of each tribe, they are vague when it comes to the layout of the various camps. How exactly were the tents of each tribe arranged, in what shape, and how much space was to be left between them? For this scripture gives no guidance, and one must extrapolate imaginatively. (As Rabbi Leon surely did, one should test possible solutions with simple sketches.) As a pure geometrical problem, it makes the most sense to place one tribe on each of the four corners and then two more between them, forming a box, each of its four sides presenting four tribes (those at the corners doing double duty). But this contradicts the scriptural account, which places three tribes to a side, not four. This is easy to accomplish but only at the cost of leaving the four corners unoccupied. To forestall this, and to avoid leaving any open space at the corners (a military hazard), Rabbi Leon drew the camps close together so that they touched the adjoining side at their corners (fig. 5). The result is a striking but thoroughly unclassical solution.7 (The good rabbi can be pardoned if he sometimes wished that there had been nine tribes, or sixteen). Another question left unresolved by scripture is the precise form of the encampment for each tribe. These varied greatly in population, from 74,600 for the tribe of Judah to a mere 32,200 for the tribe of Manasseh, and there is no reason that they 22 chapter

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should have been identical. Yet Rabbi Leon made them identical in size and shape: each is a square enclosure of tents with its own square temple precinct at the center. Rabbi Judah’s nimble improvisation seized on the idea of the interlocking of square modules, so that the order of the tribal tents recapitulated that the order of the entire encampment. Here the squareness of the enclosure was elevated to a kind of genetic principle, so that the smallest part expressed the logic and harmony of the whole. There can hardly be a more effective image of the notion of being part of a perfect whole, of sacredness. ++++ The theme of sacred squareness was not limited to the encampments of the Israelites. It is reprised in the Levitical settlements, those forty-eight cities along with their suburbs (pasturage and common ground) that God commanded Moses to give to the Levites. Once again Numbers mandated a standard form for these cities, with precise instructions as to shape and dimension: And the Lord spake unto Moses in the plains of Moab by Jordan near Jericho, saying, Command the children of Israel, that they give unto the Levites of the inheritance of their possession cities to dwell in. . . . And the suburbs of the cities, which ye shall give unto the Levites, shall reach from the wall of the city and outward a thousand cubits round about. And ye shall measure from without the city on the east side two thousand cubits, and on the south side two thousand cubits, and on the west side two thousand cubits, and on the north side two thousand cubits; and the city shall be in the midst: this shall be to them the suburbs of the cities. (num. 35:1 6)

This is not an easy text to decipher, and once again the reader should take up pencil, paper, and ruler and try to draw the city as described. Do its suburbs extend one thousand cubits from the city, or two thousand?—the instructions imply both.8 Given the reasonable assumption that the intention was to inscribe a square city within a larger square of common land, there is only one logical solution: to make the city itself one thousand cubits square and surround it by eight squares of equal dimension. If one measured from the corner of the city along its wall for a thousand cubits, and another

5 The prototype of all cities of refuge was not a city at all but the mobile encampment of the twelve tribes of the ancient Israelites, laid out “according to all that the Lord commanded Moses.” An Amsterdam rabbi, Jacob Judah Leon, made a brilliant reconstruction of that plan around 1647—aptly timed for the great wave of Protestant town building that was to follow. following spread fig .

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thousand cubits beyond, one would arrive at that curious two thousand cubit figure. This is the only one that yields a pleasingly regular form, as vexed scholars have discovered; a reconstruction by the Moravian architect Christian Gottlieb Reuter shows the generally accepted reconstruction (fig. 6). It yields a city roughly 1,500 feet square, a thoroughly plausible size (in terms of archaeology) for a biblical city. But of all the square cities of the Bible, the most significant and emblematic example is the New Jerusalem. The prophet Ezekiel gives an extravagantly detailed description, but it mostly concerns the restored temple and its dependencies; of the city that surrounds it he offers only a tantalizing glimpse. In his vision the schematic layout of the twelve tribes has now been turned into a tangible city, each gate of which corresponds to one of the tribes in their encampment, with three each on the east, south, west, and north sides.9 After describing the vast pasturage, Ezekiel proclaims, “and the city shall be in the midst thereof. And these shall be the measures thereof; the north side four thousand and five hundred, and the south side four thousand and five hundred, and on the east side four thousand and five hundred, and the west side four thousand and five hundred. . . . And the gates of the city shall be after the names of the tribes of Israel” (Ezek. 48:15–16, 31). By not specifying his unit of measurement, Ezekiel confused matters mightily. Most modern translators take him to mean cubits, which gives a perfectly reasonable circumference of about five miles. This is close to the actual ancient Jerusalem, which the Jewish historian Josephus described as being thirty-three furlongs in circuit (about four miles).10 But other translators, most prominently Martin Luther, understood Ezekiel to be referring to the ancient reed, a unit measuring about nine and one-half feet. This gives a much more colossal city with a perimeter of thirty-four miles, a figure that would have been stupendous in antiquity. (By comparison, the circuit of the Aurelian walls of Rome stretches just over twelve miles, and even the island of Manhattan is only twenty-eight and a half miles around). The larger dimensions certainly fit with the sense of Ezekiel’s rapturous vision. After all, he wrote at a time when the actual city itself had been desolated. In 587 bc, the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar II had just conquered Jerusalem, destroying in the process the First Temple, the structure that Solomon had built some four centuries before. That loss gives meaning and poignancy to Ezekiel’s account, which offers a vision of city and temple each restored to a state of divine perfection. The fulfillment of that promise would signify that God’s favor had been secured: “and the name of the city from that day shall be, The Lord is there” (Ezek. 48:35). Ezekiel’s city was vast, but even it shrinks into nothingness in comparison with that other twelve-gated leviathan, the jasper-walled New Jerusalem described in the book of Revelation: And he carried me away in the spirit to a great and high mountain, and shewed me that great city, the holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God, Having the glory of God: and her light was like unto a stone 26 chapter

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6 Unlike Rabbi Leon’s opulent reconstruction of the encampment of the twelve tribes, Christian Gottlieb Reuter reconstructed the cities of Canaan exactly as described in scripture, with no embellishment or speculation. This simple grid of nine squares is a favorite model for cities of refuge and is the prototype for New Haven, Connecticut.

fig .

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most precious, even like a jasper stone, clear as crystal; And had a wall great and high, and had twelve gates, and at the gates twelve angels, and names written thereon, which are the names of the twelve tribes of the children of Israel: On the east three gates; on the north three gates; on the south three gates; and on the west three gates. And the wall of the city had twelve foundations, and in them the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb. And he that talked with me had a golden reed to measure the city, and the gates thereof, and the wall thereof. And the city lieth foursquare, and the length is as large as the breadth: and he measured the city with the reed, twelve thousand furlongs. The length and the breadth and the height of it are equal. And he measured the wall thereof, an hundred and forty and four cubits, according to the measure of a man, that is, of the angel. And the building of the wall of it was of jasper: and the city was pure gold, like unto clear glass. (rev. 21:10 18) These were dimensions to stupefy. In place of the four-mile circuit of the historical Jerusalem was a city measuring an unbuildable twelve thousand furlongs, that is, some 1,500 miles, a city larger than the state of Nebraska. For this reason it has invariably been understood as an image of a celestial city. For those seeking guidance on the building of an earthly city, it offered only one tangible injunction: the city must be square. The attentive reader realizes that the sacred squareness of the Bible is more than tidy architectural squareness, the practical impulse that led the Greeks to grid the plans of their colonial cities and the Romans to devise the surveying system known as centuriation, which extended the grid of the city to the surrounding countryside to mark it off into square parcels. But even that grid was not merely a convenience for the equable division of building lots. In The Idea of a Town, Joseph Rykwert speaks eloquently about the sacred meaning of the grid in antiquity; when the Roman surveyor inscribed his cardo, he was drawing the axis on which the earth turns, and when he crossed it with the decumanus, drawn right to left, he was tracing the course of the sun through the sky.11 Here was nothing less than the divine geometry and orderliness of the universe itself. In much the same way, the sacred squareness of the Bible aspired to make the earth more nearly resemble heaven. In the New Testament this idea took on heightened urgency. We read in the Gospel of St. John how a delegation was sent from Jerusalem to Bethany in order to interrogate the enigmatic preacher. Who was John the Baptist?—the Messiah, or Elias, or the prophet? His response to each question was no. When they asked him again, with palpable asperity, to declare who he was, he responded with one of the most celebrated and enigmatic statements in all of Christian scripture: “I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, Make straight the way of the Lord” (John 1:23).

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7 This Pennsylvania-German broadside of 1830 depicts the geometry of salvation. A “strait and narrow gate” leads directly to paradise while a wide gate and broad path lead to eternal damnation, as described in Matthew 7:13–14. In a strange detail, the sinuous path to hell is rendered as a green scaly surface, like the skin of a serpent. fig .

The Gospel of Matthew renders this declaration somewhat differently: “For this is he that was spoken of by the prophet Esaias, saying, The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.”12 At another point, Jesus declares that “strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life” (Matt. 7:14), which implies that the way to damnation is correspondingly crooked, an image that an anonymous Pennsylvania-German folk artist rendered with endearing literalness (fig. 7). In each case, the metaphorical meaning is clear: the Messiah is coming, and we must prepare by making straight those things that are now crooked and irregular. This injunction was not to be taken literally, as a program of highway improvement, although some millennial groups would do just that. The United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, commonly known as the Shakers, enforced on its members a thoroughgoing rectilinearity. The footpaths of their towns were made rigorously straight, and no diagonal shortcuts were permitted; at dinner they were to cut the meat on their plates “square and equal.”13 Even when they danced, they assumed a formal geometry known as the “square order” (fig. 8).14

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All these exercises and disciplines prefigured the divine order that was to come. This too was to be square in structure, as imagined by the self-taught Shaker artist Polly Jane Reed, who depicted the heavenly city as a square plat within a twelve-gated circle (fig. 9). But this is not the end of the structure, and the whole plan fairly bubbles over with smaller circles, always locked within the coordinates of the rectilinear axis and cross-axis. Even in paradise, it seems, no diagonal shortcuts are to be permitted. For the Shakers, there was no meaningful distinction between righteousness and the right angle. Of course, this conflation of meaning is made possible by the English language, which uses the same word to mean “justice” and “the opposite of left.” One finds the same dual meaning in German (recht), French (droit), and Spanish (derecho). Curiously, modern German translations suppress this parallel between justice and the right angle. Compare Martin Luther’s translation of Matthew 3:3: “Bereitet dem HERRN den Weg und macht richtig seine Steige,” with the contemporary New Geneva trans-

8 Shaker dance recapitulated divine rectilinearity in terms of movement: “At the hour when the service was to begin, they assumed a standing position, and the Brethren and Sisters arranged themselves in ranks upon opposite sides of the house, the head of the columns being separated from each other by about four feet, while at the foot of the columns they were some ten feet apart. Thus arranged, they were in readiness for their marching dance and the exercise known to them as the ‘Square Order’ ” (Charles Edson Robinson, A Concise History of the United Society of Believers Called Shakers [East Canterbury, NH: Privately printed, 1893]). fig .

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9 Although the Shakers built no geometrically formal towns as did other communal societies, the idea of the heavenly city preoccupied them, and it was a favorite subject of their devotional “gift drawings.”

fig .

lation, “Bereitet dem Herrn den Weg! Ebnet seine Pfade!” Luther’s rendition suggests something deep and profound, a comprehensive making right (richtig) of things. By contrast, to make something eben (even), as the New Geneva version commands, is to smooth it flat rather than to point it in the right direction—a considerable loss of metaphorical power. As it happened, the communal societies described in this book invariably used Luther’s translation, and for them rectilinearity would be obligatory. And this idea would be given indelible architectural expression by an artist who admired Luther greatly: Albrecht Dürer. 31 the sacred squareness of cities

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The Protestant Tempering of Utopia The one thing that everybody knows about Utopia is that it means “no place” (Οὐτοπία in Greek). But few know that it is pronounced just the same as eutopoeia (εὖ τόπος), meaning “good place.” In short, Utopia is that great good place that is nowhere to be found. And with this word, coined exactly five hundred years ago, Thomas More gave us history’s most famous pun. Thomas More (1478–1535) hardly intended Utopia to be a manifesto for Protestant ideal communities (fig. 10). He bitterly opposed the Reformation and paid with his life for his opposition. In writing Utopia, his goal was much the same as that of Plato’s Republic, as a speculative philosophical essay as to what a perfectly ordered society should be. Yet there was much in Utopia that Protestants could find congenial. The emphasis on reason over superstition, the utopian practice of electing priests by popular vote, the absence of all images of God in their temples, the common ownership of property as in the early Christian Church—all of this suggested a distinct Protestant sensibility. It is no surprise that as soon as Martin Luther heard about it, early in 1518, he decided to read it.1 The most radical idea in Utopia is that in order to make an ideal city one must also make an ideal society. Nothing could be more modern. The Middle Ages had no interest whatsoever in ideal cities. To the medieval mind, only one city could truly be 33

10 Sir Thomas More was fifty when he was painted by Hans Holbein in 1527. Here the author of Utopia presents himself as contemplative, melancholy, and disarmingly unshaved. fig .

ideal, and that is the one that Saint Augustine described in his book The City of God. No city or government built on human laws could ever be perfect so long as human nature itself was imperfect. All that we could hope for in this fallen world is that our rulers practice justice, without which every society degenerates into tyranny. As Augustine wrote in a famous passage, “What are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms?”2 The certain belief in a divine paradise served to inoculate medieval society against the promise of a purely earthly paradise and to channel any utopian fervor into safely spiritual channels. When the medieval mind tried to imagine paradise, it was more likely to see it as a verdant garden, the innocent splendor of the Garden of Eden as Hieronymus Bosch imagined it, than as an achievement of city planning. Well before Utopia, Italian humanists had already begun to speculate about the perfect form for a city.3 The first and most celebrated imaginary city was Sforzinda, devised around 1464 by the Florentine sculptor and architect Antonio Averlino (c. 1400–c. 1469), known as Filarete. With its sixteen radial streets, converging at a central square, it expressed for the first time in physical terms the Renaissance 34 chapter

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11 Filarete’s ideal city of Sforzinda: a star-shaped city within a circular moat, its sixteen streets all converging at a central square with a palace and cathedral. Its ideal geometry was also politically prudent: in times of internal strife, the circular inner wall would protect rulers from their subjects. fig .

vision of perfect government: a wise and benevolent ruler at the center, from whom all power radiated outward (fig. 11).4 Filarete devoted a whole treatise to his Sforzinda and its buildings, his Trattato di architettura, a bizarre and jaunty affair written not in Latin but in colloquial Italian. He was followed by Francesco di Giorgio Martini (1439–1501), the Sienese painter-architect whose own treatise was filled with plans for regular and symmetrical cities (fig. 12).5 And sometime in the 1480s, an artist in Urbino painted several idealized urban views in which classical buildings form a measured and gracious backdrop for civic life (fig. 13). 35 the protestant tempering of utopia

12 Most of Francesco di Giorgio’s treatise addressed fortifications and defense, but its most influential illustration may have been this page with a few designs for geometrically regular ideal cities. It was widely circulated in manuscript, and Dürer may have drawn his own round bastion designs from it. fig .

Yet as appealing and ingenious as these proposals were, they were the work of artists whose principal interest was in the making of beautiful form. More, however, was a statesman and administrator, and his preoccupations were law, policy, and social order. Architecture and town planning were secondary concerns, treated in Utopia with a few brisk paragraphs, and without accompanying illustrations. More set out to do something much greater than to imagine an ideal city: to imagine an entire ideal civilization. 36 chapter

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fig . 13 This celebrated image of The Ideal City (ca. 1480–84) has been attributed to Fra Carnevale, among others. It depicts the city as a place of formal decorum, where debate, discourse, and all the transactions of civic life took place in a setting of dignity and order.

For this task More was superbly equipped. An administrator of rare brilliance, he first served as undersheriff of London and then as Master of Requests, a now defunct position where he expedited cases brought by the poor. Before running afoul of Henry VIII, he had risen to the post of Lord Chancellor of England. In each of these posts, More had to confront practical problems, and he did so with conspicuous benevolence, or so the philosopher Erasmus reported: “some he assists with money, others he protects by his authority, others he advances by his recommendation. . . . You would say that he had been appointed the public guardian of all those in need.”6 More’s intelligence shows in the way he grasped the essential interconnectedness of things. As undersheriff, he came to see that the supply of labor, the price of grain, the distribution of land, and the rule of law all knitted together seamlessly. One could not tamper with one without affecting all. At one point in Utopia, the narrator poses a question that More himself must have frequently asked his associates: why was it that although thieves were continuously dispatched to the gallows—“hanged so fast, that there were sometimes twenty on one Gibbet”—the supply of thieves never diminishes?7 More was acute enough to recognize the immense and impersonal historical forces that were at play. Answering his own question, he traced the infinite supply of thieves back to a fundamental change in the English economy, the shift from openfield farming to sheep-raising. These were the first faint intimations of the enclosure movement that would culminate in the late eighteenth century—and More saw where things were headed. Lured by the profits of the wool industry, landowners drove off their tenants and destroyed their villages, so as to enclose their fields as sheep pastures. The countryside was drastically depopulated as its dislodged farmers made their way to the city, where they found no work and had no option but to beg, steal, or starve. In short, these wretched thieves were the victims of a vast collective tragedy. To put them to death was the height of injustice. 37 the protestant tempering of utopia

More could not realize it, but he was describing the central event of modern European history, the collapse of feudalism and its replacement by capitalism. He did recognize that this development would shatter Europe’s existing social order: “while Money is the Standard of all other Things, I cannot think that a Nation can be governed either justly or happily.”8 It is More’s anguish over these looming changes that gives Utopia its peculiar urgency and that makes it, for all its quaint language and contrived anthropology, an extraordinarily modern book. All this is spelled out in the first of Utopia’s two books, which analyzes the social and economic problems of present-day England. Most modern readers skip over this part, advancing directly to the fantastic description of the island republic of Utopia. This is unfortunate, for one must read both parts to understand that Utopia is not the dreamy reverie that the word has come to suggest but a careful thought experiment aimed at practical social reform. Utopia, however, is much more than a tract on land and monetary reform in England. By 1516, accounts of unknown societies were pouring forth from the New World, each offering a model test case of an entirely different culture, economy, and system of laws. So More couched his account of an ideal society not as a Socratic dialogue but rather as a spirited travelogue in the vein of the travel accounts of Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, and Sebastian Cabot.9 All of these figures are conflated in the person of More’s narrator, a Portuguese traveler with the coy name of Raphael Hythloday, meaning “teller of nonsense”—More’s way of distancing himself from his bitter critique of modern England. More gives his narrator a plausible but wholly fictitious backstory. Hythloday supposedly sailed with Vespucci on his fourth voyage (1503/1504?) but stayed behind on the island of Utopia, living there for five years before returning to Europe. The spurious specificity with which he describes the world of the Utopians—“their Soil, their Rivers, their Towns, their People, their Manners, Constitution, [and] Laws”—gives Utopia a piquant sense of authenticity.10 At a time when the New World was still essentially terra incognito (the Aztecs would not be encountered until 1519 and the Incas in 1526), Hythloday’s account hardly seemed fantastic. As described by Hythloday, Utopia is a crescent-shaped island in the South Atlantic, two hundred miles wide, containing fifty-four “large and well built” cities, all with the same “Manners, Customs, and Laws” (fig. 14). The most important was the walled capital, Amaurot, situated on a broad river sixty miles inland. Like all of Utopia’s cities, it was made as square as possible and “divided into four equal parts,” each with a central marketplace.11 Each quarter also had its own public hospital (although in order to prevent contagion these were placed outside the city walls). But its most radical aspect, by far, was its total abolition of property and money (and also, inevitably, of lawyers). More gave much thought to how a society might function without private property rights. Food in Utopia was distributed from central warehouses, on demand, and families dined in great communal halls (unless they were too sick to attend) placed 38 chapter

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14 Thomas More was unfortunate in his illustrators. The naive woodcut that served as Utopia’s frontispiece was uninspired; its emblematic little towered buildings seem like secondhand pilferings from Hartmann Schedel’s Nuremberg Chronicle. Subsequent editions were little better. fig .

at an equal distance from one another.12 Because food was always available, there was no motive to hoard. Likewise, because there was no property, there was no theft—and no luxury goods whatsoever, as Utopia had neither a luxury class to consume them nor luxury trades such as jewelers to make them. Instead, Utopians showed their contempt for frivolous metals such as gold and silver by using them to make chamber pots. There were also no tailors: Utopians made their own clothing, and it was identical, except for certain variations to distinguish men from women, and the married from the unmarried. As a result, Hythloday explained, novelties in dress were unknown: “the fashion never alters.”13 Nor could there be changes in architectural fashion. Every ten years, all Utopians were required to exchange their houses with their neighbors by drawing lots. But these houses scarcely belonged to them in the first place. Because there was “no Property among them, every Man may freely enter into any House whatsoever,” their free-swinging doors having no locks. No private house could ever be made an object of display or personal vanity. As a consequence, Utopia was almost entirely free of crime. Only a few select offenses such as treason warranted capital punishment (and, strangely, flagrant and repeated adultery). Because all the inhabitants worked and were not burdened with supporting an idle leisure class, the Utopians needed to labor only six hours a day, leaving time for study or, if desired, the learning of a second trade. But all had to learn farming, for which reason families were periodically rotated between the city and country. Some of Utopia’s rules are paternalistic to an extent we would think oppressive: in order to leave one’s district, permission and a passport were required. Utopia also 39 the protestant tempering of utopia

strictly controlled the size of its cities, limiting each to six thousand families of between ten and sixteen members, not counting small children: “this Rule is easily observed, by removing some of the Children of a more fruitful Couple, to any other Family that does not abound so much in them.”14 Once a city approached its maximum population of ninety-six thousand, the excess population was distributed to another; and if the island as a whole grew overpopulated, a colony was established on the mainland. All this suggests a monastic model of life (communal dining and labor), informed by the example of early Christianity (common ownership of property), and a certain modern spirit of paternalism. But Utopia was by no means an expression of official Catholic doctrine. For one thing, there was lively religious pluralism. The great founder Utopus had “made a Law that every Man might be of what Religion he pleased,” and consequently some worshipped the sun, others the moon, one of the planets, or some historical personage.15 Also in violation of Catholic doctrine was the Utopian acceptance of divorce, although it was granted reluctantly and only after an investigation by the senators and the senators’ wives.16 Euthanasia was also permitted. Those suffering from an incurable disease would be visited by Utopia’s priests and magistrates, who would encourage the sufferer to die a voluntary death—to either “starve themselves, or take opium, and so . . . die without pain.”17 Such a death was not compulsory, and those who chose to die a natural death would be cared for until the end. But the Utopians despised those who took their lives without the formal consent of the Senate, and in these cases they would throw the suicide’s body into a ditch. Perhaps the strangest custom that More invented for Utopia was that, prior to any proposed marriage, both bride and groom had to view their future spouse naked in the presence of an elderly chaperone. Only in this way could each be certain that the other was healthy and not deformed. One never buys the cheapest of horses, so went the Utopian proverb, before first removing the saddle and inspecting it.18 Strangely, the one aspect of Utopia that does not strike us as odd—the fact that its cities were square with straight blocks of streets—would have seemed peculiar indeed to contemporary readers. Renaissance humanists believed that ideal cities should be circular, for reasons that Leon Battista Alberti summarized in his De re aedificatoria (c. 1452): “It is obvious from all that is fashioned, produced, or created under her influence, that Nature delights primarily in the circle. Need I mention the earth, the stars, the animals, their nests, and so on, all of which she has made circular?” (Alberti diluted his lofty Platonic idealism with ruder considerations: at a time when enemies were as likely to be found within the city walls as without, it was good to build cities with an inner and outer wall to “form a kind of circle within a circle.”19) The circular city even had the sanction of classical antiquity: according to Vitruvius’s Ten Books on Architecture, cities were be built “in circular form, to give a view of the enemy from many points.”20

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But the cities of Utopia were square, not circular, and their internal division seems to have been right-angled. Not only was each city drawn into four quarters, but the internal streets were evidently straight and regular: “The Streets are made very convenient for all Carriage and are well sheltered from the Winds. Their Buildings are good, and are so uniform that a whole Side of a Street looks like one House. The Streets are twenty Foot broad; there lie Gardens behind all their Houses; these are large, but enclosed with Buildings, that on all Hands face the Streets; so that every House has both a Door to the Street, and a back Door to the Garden.”21 Such a regular arrangement of parallel streets with rows of identical houses backed by gardens is to us utterly commonplace. But it is only commonplace because More made it so. His is the first theoretical account of such a city, in which social equality was expressed by means of absolute architectural uniformity. Not even the most inspired of Italian humanists, such as Filarete or Francesco di Giorgio, had yet organized their ideal cities around unified rows of parallel houses. The closest prototype to More’s layout lay far back in ancient Roman history: the castrum, the Roman military encampment with its gridded organization of rows of tents. But the castrum goes unmentioned in Utopia, part of whose charm is that it makes no appeal to ancient authority. More was intrigued by the cultures of the New World that evidently knew nothing of classical antiquity. Rather than relating the culture of Utopia to classical models, he invents its own ancient history, as in the backstory he gives to its buildings: “[A]t first their dwellings were humble, mere huts and shacks, built of wood gathered at random, the walls plastered with mud. The roofs came to a point and were thatched with straw. But now all houses have a handsome appearance and are built three stories high. The outer sections of the walls are made of fieldstone, quarried rock, or brick, and the space between is filled up with gravel and cement. The roofs are flat and are coated with a sort of plaster which is not expensive but is formulated so as to be fireproof and more weather-resistant than lead.”22 In addition to creating this mythic architectural history, More devised entirely new building types to serve new social practices, such as the communal dwelling/ dining hall around which the neighborhood life of Utopia was centered: “In every Street there are great Halls that lie at an equal distance from one another, which are marked by particular Names. The Syphogrants [senators] dwell in these, that set over thirty Families, fifteen lying on one side of it, and as many of the other. In these they do all meet and eat.”23 How different this was from Filarete’s Sforzinda, which was also filled with new building types to serve new social practices, such as the outrageous ten-story Tower of Virtue and Vice (fig. 15).24 Such caprices were undeniably amusing, but they were essentially sterile; one could enjoy them as follies but not develop them further. More’s idea of a communal dwelling, by not assuming definitive form, could be revisited again and again in the cities of refuge of the next few centuries.

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15 Filarete wrote his treatise to propose his ideal city of Sforzinda, but his wanton architectural fantasies invited scorn. Giorgio Vasari thought it was “mostly ridiculous, and perhaps the most stupid book that was ever written” (Lives, 5). Perhaps he was thinking of Filarete’s ten-story Tower of Vice and Virtue, with its curious two doors. One led up a steep stair to thirty-nine lecture halls devoted to the sciences, and the other led comfortably downward to taverns, gambling dens, food booths, and a brothel. Filarete placed the police above the prostitutes, “for vice must be reined” (Trat tato d’architettura, bk. 18). fig .

Such is the strange allure of Thomas More’s island republic—that strange synthesis of the tangible and the theoretical, distilled from Plato, the Bible, and travelers’ accounts from the New World—all laminated and compacted in More’s breathtakingly original mind as he surveyed with mounting alarm the coming collapse of Europe’s feudal society. In the end, More’s lack of architectural illustrations proved to be a strength rather than a weakness. It is frustrating to have no images of More’s strangely modern, flat-roofed, sheer-walled houses or his multipurpose community buildings. But by not committing himself to a specific architectural form and style, as Filarete did, More ensured that his ideas would not be quickly dated. By enlisting the reader’s imagination, it profoundly increased the book’s influence and longevity. For almost as soon as it was read, Utopia would inspire artists to draw it, or to draw similar ideal cities. Of these, the first, and by far the most talented, was Albrecht Dürer. ++++ To think about cities systematically and in visual terms was one of the first artistic trials faced by Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528). During his youth, Nuremberg produced one of its greatest achievements in early printing, Hartmann Schedel’s Nuremberg Chronicle (1493), known in German as the Weltchronik. This was an illustrated history of the world with some 645 woodcuts, showing fairly accurate views of European cities such as Vienna or Prague, although the depictions became increasingly fanciful as the focus moved further afield to Constantinople and Jerusalem. (And where there was 42 chapter

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no definitive source material, Schedel did not scruple to reuse the same image two or three times). It is generally assumed that Dürer worked on the Weltchronik as a young man. The principal illustrator was Michael Wolgemut, under whom Dürer was then serving his apprenticeship, and the publisher, Anton Koberger, was his godfather—so tightly plaited was Nuremberg’s cultural world.25 During the process, Dürer would have learned to think comprehensively about a city in the way a municipal surveyor might, as a complete physical totality comprising buildings, squares, streets, and walls. Perhaps he even drew the topographic view of Nuremberg itself, with its intricate mosaic of red-tiled rooftops (fig. 16). The Weltchronik is the last definitive statement of medieval Europe’s understanding of itself in visual terms before the discovery of the Americas shattered that understanding. What could Dürer have learned from it? That the world contained a great variety of cities, all picturesquely irregular, with monumental buildings huddled around some public square in the midst of a random jumble of private buildings. Of course, by this time Italian artists had already begun to imagine cities of ideal

fig . 16 Hartmann Schedel’s Weltchronik is the last definitive statement of medieval Europe’s understanding of itself in visual terms before the discovery of the Americas shattered that conception. Nuremberg, as a center of printing, would be the great conduit for disseminating the results of that discovery.

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fig . 17 Albrecht Dürer’s Erasmus of Rotterdam (1526) shows an introspective scholar, lost in thought and surrounded by books, some with markers in them. This suggests something of his hesitancy, for Erasmus was broadly sympathetic to the Reformation but refused to break with the Catholic Church. Perhaps this is why Erasmus is said to have disliked the portrait, which was certainly not as flattering as of the one by Hans Holbein.

geometric form. Dürer would learn this during the course of his two extended study trips to Venice, in 1494–95 and again in 1505–7. But Utopia brought revelations of a different order. It is unclear when Dürer first heard about Utopia, although he certainly knew it. At the latest, he would have come across it in 1520 when he traveled to Rotterdam to make the preliminary sketches for his famous engraving of Erasmus. Utopia was dedicated to Erasmus; perhaps it is even one of the books Dürer shows on the desks of the moody humanist (fig. 17). But Dürer was no Latin scholar, and four years passed before he could read it in German, only after it was published in Basel as Von der wunderbarlichen Innsul Utopia genannt, das andere Buch (1524). This was the first translation of the Latin text into a modern language, a sign that the Germans were far more curious about the book than the English (who would not translate it until 1551). Dürer’s response to Utopia can be seen in an idiosyncratic treatise on fortifications that he published the year before his death. Although we know him as a painter and printmaker, he was not unusual in turning his mind to military matters; it reflected the Renaissance conviction that any object could be made beautiful and useful—a building, a painting, an instrument of war—by means of disegno, formal design based on the order of geometry. This was idealism, but there was also the less lofty motive of money. Leonardo da Vinci had shown by his appointments in Milan and Paris that an artist/military engineer could count on patronage in good times and bad. Nuremberg was one of Europe’s most prosperous cities but had not yet modernized its fortifications; Dürer evidently hoped for the appointment, and a treatise would demonstrate his expertise.26 So in 1527, he compiled his Etliche Underricht zu Befestigung der Stett 44 chapter

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Schloss und Flecken (Comprehensive treatise on the fortification of cities, castles, and towns), the first treatise on the subject published in German.27 Unfortunately for Dürer, what he regarded as the central contribution of his treatise—his new system of fortifications—turned out to be inconsequential. He had the misfortune to hit on a scheme of round bastions (fig. 18) at the very moment when the polygonal bastion was coming into vogue. Francesco di Giorgio Martini had recently realized that the introduction of gunpowder made traditional medieval fortifications obsolete.28 Roughly circular cities with stone walls had two great defects: cannon fire could easily shatter its vertical walls, while enemy sappers could undermine them— that is, literally dig mines beneath them, fill them with explosives, and blow them up. Francesco provided the first systematic countermeasures, outfitting the walls with projecting bastions that flared out from the walls like the barbs of a fishhook (fig. 19). This provided a continuous clear field of fire along the base of the walls, so that there was no blind spot around the entire circuit of the city. Dürer’s designs had none of this, despite his years in Venice; his manual was obsolete at birth. Much more interesting is the afterthought with which the work concludes, a curious proposal for an ideal, rectilinear city. It would have been enormous: its walls measured some 4,300 feet to a side, and at the center was a plaza eight hundred feet square on which stood the palace of the king (fig. 20). Its most noteworthy aspect is its insistent squareness. Within the series of square walls was a square citadel, and in between a cordon of twelve square blocks—square within square within square.29 This hardly seems remarkable to us, who have lived happily in gridded cities since the seventeenth century, and who scarcely know any other kind. But in

18 Dürer’s ideal city was to be surrounded by a cordon of low-slung, circular bastions. He thought through the construction in detail, intending the masonry walls to be strengthened by a ring of massive revealing arches. fig .

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19 Francesco di Giorgio Martini’s design for an angled bastion on page 49 of his treatise may well be the oldest documented representation of a polygonal bastion with sharply angled returns. fig .

1527 there was nothing like it. While Dürer’s quirky bastions were soon ignored, this enigmatic city plan kept the book alive through the centuries. Like Utopia, Dürer’s city plan was simultaneously beautiful and regular in form even as it was the expression of a well-governed society, with its various classes, trades, and professions mutually entwined in lucid and harmonious order. Formal geometric order and social order, it seemed to say, were inseparable. But while Utopia was a literary-philosophical treatise, Dürer wrote a visual treatise. Although it sufficed for More to list a few specific building types—temples, hospitals, communal dining halls, slaughterhouses, and row houses—Dürer insisted on showing his city in its entirety. This he did with joyous fanatical comprehensiveness. He depicted no fewer than 1,073 separate buildings, not counting the countless minor structures such as taverns, barbershops, bread stalls, and public fountains (fig. 21).30 These buildings accommodated forty-seven different trades or professions, from carpenters and beer brewers to goldsmiths and tentmakers, and even to the lone bell-ringer who had his lodging in the church tower. This was the complete complement of a prosperous royal residence. There were even two separate bathhouses for men and women (perhaps Dürer was thinking of the celebrated pair of woodcuts he made around 1496 at the start of his independent career). Given that each household accommodated seven or eight individuals, and that the central palace had its own resident staff of attendants and squires, 46 chapter

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20 Dürer’s ideal geometry: a square citadel within a square city within a square wall. It corresponds to Renaissance notions of ideal form, but the Gothic stone masons of Nuremberg would have understood it as an example of quadrature, the derivation of form through the subdivision of a square. fig .

the population of Dürer’s city would have been about ten thousand, that of a prosperous late medieval city. Every one of these buildings was placed according to the most minute pragmatic considerations, such as its proximity to the wall or gate, its relationship to the sun and wind, and even the amount of noise it produced. Since the prevailing winds came from the west and north, Dürer tilted his city forty-five degrees so that its corners faced the cardinal directions. He placed the foundries in the south corner, a direction from which the wind almost never came, so that the winds would blow their toxic fumes away. The granary huddled in the north corner, where it would be protected from the heat of the sun, while the church choir faced directly into the east, oriented in accordance with traditional practice to the rising sun. Dürer paid attention to the smallest nuances of location. He recommended that those who lived along the moat should build shops in their ground stories and rent them out. The finest of these (among which he counted money changers, spice mer47 the protestant tempering of utopia

facing page fig . 21 Albrecht Dürer’s ideal city portrayed a complete urban economy, with forty-seven separate trades and professions distributed across 1,073 separate buildings. His caption precisely noted the position of each, down to the forty houses he allotted to the beer brewers:

1. Church choir 2. Church nave 3. Church tower 4. Church sacristy 5. Parsonage 6. Small garden 7. Large garden 8–11. Foundries for bronze, copper, etc. 12. Market square, two hundred by three hundred feet 13. Town hall, with prison below, and four large houses for the nobility, organized around a diagonally placed central courtyard X. Eight large houses for the nobility, the inner four with a diagonally placed central courtyard 14. Royal gate 15–16. Eighty houses for soldiers 17–18. Forty houses for the gentry 19–20. Two rows of eleven houses and two rows of twenty-two houses “for those who practice quiet trades” 21. Sixteen houses “for those who practice quiet trades” 22–23. Two rows of eleven houses and two rows of twenty-two houses for coppersmiths, turners, smiths, etc. 24. Ten houses for coppersmiths, turners, smiths, etc. 25. Twelve houses for coppersmiths, turners, smiths, etc. 26. A strong vaulted arsenal, with granary above and wine cellar below 27. Forty houses for builders and woodworkers 28. A public bath for women, and thirty-six houses for the king to apportion 29. Twenty houses for the king to apportion 30. A strong vaulted arsenal, with granary above and wine cellar below 31. Forty houses for builders and woodworkers 32. A public bath for men, and thirty-six houses for the king to apportion 33. Twenty houses for the king to apportion 34. Warehouse for woodworkers and wood storage, two hundred by four hundred feet

35. Six houses for the overseers of the arsenal 36. Eight houses for wagon makers along the wall (on which to lean their poles and wood) and eight houses for saddle makers 37. Eight houses for bridle makers (at right) and eight for makers of horse armor 38. Eight houses for makers of spurs, etc. (at right) and eight for makers of spears, halberds, swords, and daggers 39. Three large shops for carpenters (at right) and eight houses for turners, pattern makers, etc. 40–41. Forty-eight houses for the king to apportion (or divide into smaller units) 42. Twelve houses for rope makers (at right); twelve for tailors 43. Twelve houses for furriers (Kürschner) along the wall; twelve for leather workers 44–45. Forty-eight houses for the king to apportion 46. Twelve houses for victualers (at right); twelve for tent makers and weavers 47. Twelve houses for shoemakers on wall; twelve for victualers (Pfragner) 48. Twenty houses for goldsmiths, sculptors, painters, silk manufacturers, and masons 49. Ten houses for tinsmiths and ten for makers of nails, fine metalwork, etc. 50. Ten houses for metalworkers and makers of jousting armor; ten houses for armorers, barrel makers, etc. 51. Twenty houses for makers of decorative plate armor and helmets 52. Granary for salt, lard, dried meat, grain, peas, barley, millet, etc. 53–54. Forty houses 55–56. Seventy-two small houses with butcher stalls 57–58. Sixty houses for the bakers 59–60. Forty houses for the beer brewers (pier preuen heuser) The tiny booths around the central square and throughout the town are reserved for barbers, taverns, and bread stalls (Brotpencke, i.e., Brotbänke)

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fig . 22 Machiavelli reconstructed the castrum—the rectilinear fort of a Roman legion— on the basis of the description of the Greek historian Polybius. As in the Roman colonial city, its two principal streets intersected at a forum, marked here as the marketplace. The 1560 English edition of The Arte of Warre anachronistically equipped the Roman encampment with modern cannons.

chants, silkworkers, and the apothecary) would line the side with the king’s portal; the more humble shops would have less exalted locations. The barbershops would be located on the central square, “divided equally along the four sides.” He lodged his noblemen, officers, and artists in the southeast corner, where the prevailing winds made it the healthiest quarter. Dürer’s most striking debt to Utopia is the manner in which he treats every street as a block of uniform and continuous row houses, so that, just as More prescribed, “a whole side of a street looks like one house.” It is the principal feature of Dürer’s city, and there is nothing like in it in any previous city planning. But even if the idea came from Utopia, More gave no suggestion how it might be depicted. For this there was another source close at hand: Machiavelli’s Art of War, published in 1521, five years after the appearance of Utopia.31 Machiavelli depicted the Roman castrum that was first described by the Greek historian Polybius: a vast fortified enclosure arranged as an “exact square” (τετράγωνον ἰσόπλευρον), each of its sides measuring more than two thousand Roman feet, and each marked by a single central gate. Here was space for the two full legions of a Roman consular army, each along with the allied troops, perhaps ten or eleven thousand in all.32 50 chapter

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Machiavelli showed the strict orthogonal organization of the camp: the northsouth and east-west roads, the repeated parallel streets, and the ten rows of tents in which the troops bivouacked (fig. 22). And to permit quick and easy movement, the internal streets were made wide enough to accommodate a company of infantry marching in close formation (the principal north-south street was thirty-one braccia— about seventy feet—in width).33 (Only in one aspect does Machiavelli depart from Polybius, making his city somewhat more rectangular than square.) The castrum was a military encampment, of course, which is only a provisional city, but it takes little imagination to see a row of tents as a row of houses. In fact, Machiavelli called it “a mobile city,” an abstract geometric order that could be replicated anywhere: And to draw up these encampments, there must be very practiced men and excellent architects, who, immediately after the captain has selected the place, know how to give it form and distribute it, distinguishing the streets, dividing the encampments with ropes and with spears so that they are ordered and divided practically at once. And so that no confusion arises, the camp must always wind up in the very same mode so that each one knows on which street and in which space he has to find his encampment. And one must observe this every time and in every place, so that it may seem a mobile city that carries with it the same streets, the same houses, and the same aspect wherever it goes.34 In short, in contrast with the irregular cities of the Weltchronik, each of which was shaped by the vagaries of its site, the castrum was an abstract conceptual order that could be replicated at will. It was indeed a mobile city, and just as Roman legions carried the castrum with them where they went, variants of Dürer’s foursquare city would soon be conveyed across Europe and beyond by religious refugees. One can only speculate that Dürer drew on Machiavelli, of course. Other than a perfunctory suggestion that the palace of his ideal city should be built “according to the doctrine of Vitruvius or other competent experts,” he named no authorities, ancient or modern.35 But he had ready access to The Art of War and other such works through his friend, the scholar and collector Willibald Pirckheimer. Nuremberg was then at the height of its power, financially and intellectually. By virtue of its international trade network and superbly crafted products, it was one of the three principal cities of the Holy Roman Empire, along with Prague and Cologne. It was a center of publishing and printing, and therefore for the exchange of ideas. This allowed Pirckheimer to amass one of the great humanist libraries in northern Europe, of which Dürer made good use. 23 The first map of Tenochtitlán was published in Nuremberg, and by an associate of Dürer. Here too was a foursquare inner city, with a portal in the center of each of its sides. following spread fig .

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So rich and variegated are the sources for Dürer’s city—More and Machiavelli, Moses and the New Jerusalem—that it scarcely seems necessary to add another. But it has long been speculated that there is one additional source, if an extremely unlikely one: Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital. The city was first seen in 1519 by Hernán Cortés, who described it in a famous letter published three years later. That original publication had no illustrations, and not until the edition of 1524 was there a printed image of Tenochtitlán.36 The image is vexing—much of it was depicted in the imaginary fashion of the Weltchronik, with curiously medieval buildings and round fortified towers—but the specific details of the temple precinct, with its twin temples and gruesome skull rack, show that a lost map must have served as a model for the woodcut (fig. 23).37 It cannot be definitely proven that the image was ever seen by Dürer, but it would have been remarkable if he had not; it was the sensation of the age. Moreover, it was published in Nuremberg, and by Friedrich Peypus, a printer with whom Dürer frequently worked. Unlike those fantasies of Sforzinda or Utopia, Tenochtitlán was emphatically real, a teeming metropolis of perhaps a quarter of a million inhabitants, ten times as big as Nuremberg. Had the Weltchronik appeared two decades later, it would have been the showpiece of the book, for it presented a strictly regular geometric form, something that was true of no European city at that time. Cortés’s description captures the regularity and order of the city that startled the Spanish conquistadors: “This great city of Tenochtitlán is built on the salt lake, and no matter by what road you travel there are two leagues from the main body of the city to the mainland. There are four artificial causeways leading to it, and each is as wide as two cavalry lances. The city itself is as big as Seville or Córdoba. The main streets are very wide and very straight.”38 Every lavish amenity, Cortés noted, was contained within this well-organized city: each type of commerce relegated to a particular street or quarter; an array of squares including one twice as large as that of the city of Salamanca, serving sixty thousand per day; a system of aqueducts; even a royal zoo and aviary. What would have captured Dürer’s attention was Tenochtitlán’s underlying formal order: a square central citadel at the convergence of four straight streets, with a gate in the center of each of its walls, much like the Roman castrum. At any rate, for someone seeking confirmation in the 1520s that the ideal expression of order was the square would have found it confirmed from all sides, not only from Utopia but also from scripture and ancient military practice, classical antiquity, and even the newest discoveries from the Americas. ++++ With Dürer’s ideal city, Protestant city planning may be said to have begun. To be sure, his book has nothing explicit to say about religion, but he was already sympathetic to the Reformation; he enjoyed close personal relations with the key reformers, especially Erasmus, Zwingli, and Melancthon, and he was an open admirer of 54 chapter

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Martin Luther. When Nuremberg formally embraced the Reformation in 1525, Dürer unquestionably supported it. And so he created his ideal city in a mental atmosphere of Protestantism. One of Luther’s central precepts was the “priesthood of all believers” (Priestertum aller Gläubigen). This doctrine rejected any division between clergy and laymen, and insisted that all Christians were entitled to teach the Gospel. This implied a different understanding of the relationship between church and community. No longer was the physical church building a distinct, consecrated object standing within a secular matrix; instead, the entire congregation itself constituted the body of the church. The consequence of this was to make the church building less holy and the town more so. The church proper, in the extreme version of this doctrine, would be merely a preaching space, more lecture hall than sacred vessel. This helps explain the blithe way that Dürer dislodged his church to the corner of the plan, instead of placing it at the center as Filarete had. Dürer’s city established the square as the canonical form of Protestant urbanism. He was the first to render the sacred square city of scripture in terms of real architecture—drawn to scale and made buildable—so as to serve as an image of orderliness, purity, and holiness. This differed sharply from the urbanism of the Italian humanist tradition, which was more likely to seek knowledge in classical antiquity than the Bible. Whatever its origins were (and they were complex and ramified), it is appropriate that they first came together in a book published in Nuremberg, one of Germany’s first Protestant cities and the center of German publishing—because the dissemination of the Etliche Underricht would ensure that whenever subsequent German readers browsed through Utopia, they would imagine it in terms of the latticed geometry of Dürer’s ideal city.

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Christianopolis In 1598, Friedrich I, the furiously ambitious Duke of Württemberg, established a town for religious refugees at the extreme northern edge of the Black Forest. He hoped to attract the beleaguered Protestants of Austria, where the Counter-Reformation was in full vigor. Other European princes had done the same from time to time since the beginning of the Reformation, but Friedrich was the first to make the city itself a physical emblem of a Protestant sanctuary. The result was the first formally planned city of refuge, and he gave it the hopeful name Freudenstadt—literally, “city of joy.” Duke Friedrich I (1557–1608) was an unlikely architectural innovator. He began his career obscurely, as count of the minor territory of Württemberg-Mömpelgard, but he unexpectedly came into possession of the Duchy of Württemberg when its ruler, his second cousin, died without issue. This opened a vein of ambition so deep, and so comical, that it even caught the attention of Shakespeare. In fact, if the duke is known at all to the English-speaking world, it is primarily through The Merry Wives of Windsor. The story is worth telling, as it illuminates the duke’s mixed motives in creating Freudenstadt. Once Friedrich realized that he would inherit Württemberg, and that a broader scope was opening to him, he traveled in 1592 to England, where he besought Queen Elizabeth I to make him a Knight of the Garter. For the next five years he vexed her with letters and ambassadors, and even had a coin struck showing himself prematurely wearing the gold collar of the order, a gesture of appalling impudence. When the queen finally approved his investiture in 1597—resignedly, one suspects—she delayed his formal notification until it was too late for him to travel to the ceremony. Only in 1604 was he was officially invested at Windsor Castle—and by proxy.1 The comically bothersome duke would have been known to members of Elizabeth’s court, for which reason it is generally assumed that they were the first audience 57

for The Merry Wives of Windsor. The in-joke comes in act 4, when Doctor Caius, a “renowned French physician,” speaks in broken English with a hotel keeper: Host: Here, master doctor, in perplexity and doubtful dilemma. Caius: I cannot tell vat is dat: but it is tell-a me, dat you make grand preparation for a duke de Jarmany: by my trot, dere is no duke, dat the court is know to come; I tell you for good vill: adieu. “Dere is no duke,” Shakespeare scoffed, but on the Continent there was indeed. The duke worked to make his presence felt by strengthening the military and economic power of his newly expanded duchy. The building of Freudenstadt was part of this campaign. On the one hand, his industrious Austrian Protestants would find ready employment in his silver and copper mining operations.2 On the other hand, the town would serve as a bastion to the west of his duchy, where he had hopes of acquiring the bishopric of Strasburg across the Rhine. And so his motives for establishing Freudenstadt were as much dynastic and mercenary as they were religious, and likely more so. The duke’s timing was curious. In that very same year, 1598, King Henry IV of France had proclaimed the Edict of Nantes, establishing freedom of conscience for French Protestants and bringing to an end more than three decades of religious war. The edict neither granted full equality, nor would it be permanent—Catholicism would remain the official state religion, and the edict would be revoked eighty-seven years later—but it was nonetheless a milestone. In promulgating the idea of official religious tolerance, it was a crucial precursor to the modern secular state. For Protestants, the edict was the most auspicious event since the Reformation itself. And perhaps this is what prompted the duke to act, if only to ensure that refugees who might otherwise have made their way to France would remain in a congenially Germanspeaking territory. As designer of Freudenstadt, Duke Friedrich appointed Heinrich Schickhardt (1558–1635), one of the most prolific and amiable architects of the German Renaissance.3 He is one of the few architects of the era to leave a complete record of his career, permitting us to trace the development of Freudenstadt from initial conception to final form. He was well-traveled, having visited Italy twice, the second time as part of the duke’s entourage, which he recorded in a travel diary that he later published.4 While in Italy, Schickhardt undertook to acquaint himself with works he only knew at secondhand, and whenever possible to meet their architects. He was sufficiently informed about Italian fortification theory to seek out Buonaiuto Lorini, one of the architects of Palmanova. This was the fortified city in the Veneto that had just been laid out in 1593 but was already celebrated for its fully realized circular plan and nine-pointed system of bastions (fig. 24).5 It was perhaps the most exquisitely realized of all the ideal cities of the Renaissance. Here the promise of Filarete’s Sforzinda was fulfilled, an all-powerful, all-seeing central hub from which its streets radiate like the 58 chapter

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24 The Venetian fortress town of Palmanova (1593) is the physical manifestation of absolutism, all power radiating from a central hub. It successfully spliced together the two themes of Renaissance urbanism, the centrally planned city and the ideal fortification of mutually supporting polygonal bastions.

fig .

spokes of a wheel. The subordination of everything to the center was an eloquent manifestation of absolutism, but it did not befit a Protestant sanctuary town. At least so Schickhardt seems to have thought, for when he returned from Italy to make his first sketches for Freudenstadt in the winter of 1598–99, he ignored the example of Palmanova in favor of Dürer’s Etliche Underricht.6 The seventy-year-old book gave him the entire conception of Freudenstadt: the square plan, the four central gates, the gridding of the interior into smaller squares, the opening of the center as a public square (fig. 25). Even the specific arrangement of lots—long blocks of houses running parallel to the walls—paraphrases Etliche Underricht, which must have lain open on Schickhardt’s drafting table. His only substantial modification was to scale down Dürer’s plan to suit a smaller city, reducing the four-by-four grid to three-by-three. Finally, one of the nine squares, that in the lower right, was reserved as a citadel for the ruler, which in good military fashion was equally fortified from danger coming from outside the town and from within. This first sketch of Freudenstadt was left unfinished, perhaps because the three-by-three grid worked awkwardly with the system of central gates and made for 59 christianopolis

25 Freudenstadt may have meant “City of Joy,” but its founders took the customary precautionary measures in the event its citizens became less joyous: a bastioned citadel for the Duke of Württemberg was placed in the corner. But the spiky bastion aimed at the town square was erased at the last minute in favor of a gentler curve. Was it considered too provocative?

fig .

26 Schickhardt’s second plan for Freudenstadt arranged the streets to run parallel to the outer walls, but the corner citadel made a completely regular plan impossible. fig .

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27 Schickhardt’s solution in his third plan was to move the fortress to the town center, the position most appropriate for the age of absolutism of which the Duke of Württemberg was a keen advocate. fig .

an untidy layout. Schickhardt abandoned it for a different kind of rectilinear plan. Instead of subdividing one large square into a grid of smaller ones, he superimposed five increasingly smaller squares, in concentric fashion, within his town wall (fig. 26). Each of these squares was formed by a single line of house lots, again of square form. Now the order of the main streets and the order of the superimposed blocks did not clash, but gave emphasis to the intersection of the two cardinal axes. The duke approved this design, to which Schickhardt made two modifications. He reduced the number of superimposed squares from five to a more manageable three. And he moved the citadel back to the center, where it Dürer had intended it, although it was now turned forty-five degrees for defensive purposes (fig. 27). It was this plan that was traced on the building site, 1,500 feet square, when the town was formally laid out on March 22, 1599. In all, there were 490 building lots with a continuous ground-story arcade running around the central square. This makes it contemporary with the first other great arcaded square north of the Alps, Paris’s Place des Vosges (begun in 1605 as the Place Royale). 61 christianopolis

One can still appreciate the lucid clarity of Freudenstadt today (fig. 28).7 Over time, Schickhardt’s geometry had gained in regularity until, in the final version, nothing was permitted to violate its abstract clarity, not even the church. Within his trellis of squares there was only one place of honor, which was reserved for the duke. All the church could do was squeeze itself subserviently into a corner. Dürer had also moved his church to a corner of his grid, although he gave it a conventional form. But Schickhardt bent his church in the shape of an L, placing two separate naves at a right angle to each other (fig. 29).8 Nothing could be less in the spirit of the Renaissance, and it helps that the church was built in a late Gothic style, with net vaulting and a Gothic tower over the entrance to each nave. The choice of Gothic was peculiar, but well into the seventeenth century German architects continued to make late Gothic designs—German historians speak of both Spätgotik and Nachgotik, that is, late Gothic and post-Gothic. Curiously, it was invariably Protestant architects, not Catholics, who built these Gothic laggards, a sure sign that nationalist considerations were at play, and a reluctance to identify with the modern architecture of Catholic Italy. The execution of the building was not carried out by Schickhardt, who had no use for the Gothic, but by Elias Gunzenhäuser, an architect with experience in complex roof construction (fig. 30).9

28 Freudenstadt’s tight and orderly geometry dissolves at the periphery—yet another instance of an ideal city that was unable to provide for organic growth. fig .

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29 Once the duke claimed the center of Freudenstadt for himself, its church had to shift for itself. In the end, it ingeniously accommodated itself in the corner of the town square, preserving symmetry with its twin towers and twin naves. The building of 1601–8 was severely damaged in World War II and subsequently rebuilt. fig .

30 It was common practice in reformed congregations to seat men and women separately, but the church at Freudenstadt took the process to its logical conclusion. Its two angled naves ensured that they could barely see one another during the service, and only the minister at the elbow of the church could see both. fig .

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It seems vaguely impertinent to build a religious sanctuary and then to give such a clearly deferential position and form to the church. Yet such was a consequence of the Reformation. In these decades of Catholic-Protestant conflict, it was for the prince to determine what confession his people followed, which gave to the church a subordinate role that it had not had during the Middle Ages. It was precisely this heightened control over church and state that made possible the age of absolutism. If the plan of the Freudenstadt church was sui generis, it was nonetheless a striking prophecy of how a nonhierarchical and nonprocessional spatial order might govern the plan of a Protestant church. Freudenstadt grew swiftly; by 1609, it had two thousand inhabitants. Yet Friedrich I seems to have lost interest in the city as a princely residence, and he never built his central citadel nor the mighty girdle of polygonal bastions that Schickhardt proposed (fig. 31).10 A few years before his death in 1608, he asked his architect to make a design for enlarging the city from three to five squares (see fig. 1 in chapter 1). It was only partially realized when an outbreak of the plague in 1611 killed half the residents.11 It never quite recovered, and the initial promise of Freudenstadt went unrealized. Still, as an image it was unforgettable, and it begat a long lineage of Protestant sanctuaries that runs into the nineteenth century. ++++ Freudenstadt would not have been so influential were it not for a book that overtly connected Protestantism with such square-planned, uniformly built cities. This was Christianopolis, the work of one of Germany’s most extraordinary polymaths, Johann Valentin Andreae (1586–1654).12 With his Christianopolis, Andreae effectively rewrote Utopia, this time as a Protestant fable (fig. 32). Andreae came from an unusual family, steeped in religion and science.13 His father was a Lutheran minister, but his mother held the highly unusual position (for a woman) of ducal apothecary in Stuttgart. During his erratic youth, Andreae flitted from interest to interest. He wrote two comic plays in the style of the English stock companies then touring Germany, then he dabbled in mystical theology and alchemy.14 While a student at Tübingen, he apparently wrote one of the founding works of Rosicrucianism; shortly thereafter he was expelled.15 His precocity was tamed somewhat by a journey to Geneva, where he came to admire the purposeful and sober conduct of life under Calvinism. In 1614, a trio of events announced his coming of age: in one year he married, took a post as deacon in the Württemberg town of Vaihingen, and published his Collectaneorum mathematicorum—the first of a stream of learned Latin treatises that he would issue with dependable regularity over the next forty years.16 The Collectaneorum mathematicorum was an illustrated compendium of mathematical knowledge, distilled from the experts in each field, and it showed Andreae’s

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31 Schickhardt’s most ferociously defended proposal for Freudenstadt, with massive angled bastions, a moat, and a deep sloping glacis, all carefully drawn in section. The spirited perspective of the citadel suggested that this was a presentation drawing, meant to charm the duke. Charmed or not, he never built the costly citadel and fortifications. fig .

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32 After dabbling in mysticism and alchemy in his youth, the German theologian Johann Valentin Andreae became a champion of reason and universal education. His Christianopolis would rewrite Utopia from the standpoint of reformed Protestantism. fig .

33 Tycho Brahe’s celebrated observatory of Uraniborg placed festive cupolas on it cardinal axes—a brilliant way of providing precise alignments for his measuring instruments. Brahe took astronomy as far as it could go before the invention of the telescope, and Andreae included a plan of the observatory in his curious Collectaneorum mathematicorum. fig .

omnivorous range of interests. He began with Euclidean geometry and advanced in turn to astronomy, surveying, fortification design, and much else. The central scientific debate of his generation was between the heliocentric and geocentric model of the universe—does the earth revolve about the sun as Copernicus proposed, or vice versa?—and Andreae reproduced four different possible models of the solar system. He belonged to a newly emerging culture of experimental science and intellectual debate that would subject every item of received authority to skeptical inquiry. Andreae’s idiosyncratic chapter on architecture shows just how freely his mind could range. He begins in conventional fashion with a perfunctory account of the classical orders and then goes on to show ideal plans of square houses and a square city. At this point, standard architectural treatises would show a great building from classical 66 chapter

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antiquity, such as the Pantheon, or perhaps Michelangelo’s plan of St. Peter’s. But the only actual building that Andreae shows is Uraniborg, the celebrated observatory of Tycho Brahe, the Danish astronomer (fig. 33). It is a stunning choice, but one can see why Andreae admired him. During the 1570s, in two remarkable feats of observational science, Brahe showed that both supernovas and comets were celestial bodies that existed beyond the orbit of the moon. This demolished one of the fundamental principles of ancient astronomy (and philosophy), which was that the heavens are fixed and unchanging, and only our sublunary world is subject to change. Andreae evidently admired the way that authority was swept away by observation, and his chapter on architecture elegantly reprises Brahe’s achievement: first he illustrates the classical orders, the very embodiment of the authority of classical antiquity, and then he undercuts that authority by celebrating the building of the great liberator from ancient authority—a modern building for which there was no prototype in the ancient world. Uraniborg was a square in plan and so was the ideal city that Andreae illustrated, a city that looked surprisingly like Heinrich Schickhardt’s Freudenstadt (fig. 34).17 Here was the same arrangement of concentric squares, the same four streets in the cardinal directions, the same angled corner bastions. One wonders if Schickhardt assisted Andreae. They certainly knew one another: Schickhardt’s nephew Wilhelm Schickard (note the different spelling) was Andreae’s classmate at Tübingen and a close intimate. He too was a polymath: astronomer, professor of Hebrew, and inventor of the first calculating machine. He was also a competent printmaker who made engravings for the astronomer Johannes Kepler (who had been Brahe’s apprentice).18 The combination of overlapping interests—astronomy, mathematics, architecture, printmaking—suggests that Andreae turned to the uncle and nephew for assistance. Andreae’s fascination with Schickhardt’s model Protestant refuge did not end with the Collectaneorum mathematicorum. A roundabout chain of events brought him to it once more. In 1618, Andreae devised a plan for a visionary “Christian Union,” a pan-German literary society devoted both to learning and the cause of reformed Protestantism. The idea was hugely ambitious (one scholar identified it as a forerunner of England’s Royal Society), and Andreae quickly secured about thirty members.19 But 1618 also marked the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War, and the society disintegrated as soon as it began. One of Andreae’s friends in the venture was Tobias Adami, a German intellectual who had just returned from Naples with an extraordinary story to tell.20 He had befriended Tommaso Campanella, a brilliant and eccentric Dominican friar, who was serving a life sentence for treason. Despite horrific conditions and repeated bouts of torture, the good friar managed to write prolifically, and his manuscripts were periodically smuggled out by German friends and published in Frankfurt. It was one of these manuscripts that Adami carried with him, an account of a Utopian community that Campanella called the Civitas solis, the City of the Sun. He would not get around to publishing the manuscript until 1623, but in the meantime he showed it to Andreae. 67 christianopolis

34 Andreae made his publishing debut with an odd grab bag of mathematical knowledge called the Collectaneorum mathematicorum (1614). To illustrate the application of mathematics to the design of fortifications, he offered a diminutive version of Freudenstadt with only a single row of houses, backed by public gardens, some to be used for medicinal purposes. fig .

The Civitas solis was located on the island of Taprobane in the Indian Ocean (a part of modern Sri Lanka). Its form was circular and consisted of seven concentric walls, corresponding to the seven planets then known. Each wall was elaborately painted in a didactic manner, giving scientific, mathematical, or historical instruction, and they also bore tablets that recorded the laws of every country in the world. At the center was a vast, round temple, 350 paces across, consisting of freestanding columns supporting a dome. Here ruled the great priest, known variously as Hoh or Metaphysic. Campanella had read Utopia, and his City of the Sun was run on similar socialist principles (although he improved on Thomas More by requiring only four hours of labor per day from each Solarian, as opposed to the six demanded of the Utopians.) But he was far more radical than More, dispensing not only with private 68 chapter

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property but with the family unit itself. After all, the only reason that that one acquires a family and property is to gratify self-love. Take away self-love, Campanella says, and “there remains only love for the state.”21 Campanella, like Andreae, was a scientific freethinker who appreciated the philosophical revolution that astronomy was bringing about. He had already written a bold treatise in defense of Galileo, the manuscript of which Adami may well have had in his possession (it would be published in Frankfurt in 1622). But Campanella’s skepticism about ancient authority exceeded anything Andreae could have imagined. For example, in the City of the Sun, the state would be responsible for breeding and would ensure that it was conducted according to correct eugenic principles. State magistrates would observe men and women exercising naked at the Palestra and on that basis choose the best breeding pairs. Large, well-formed men and women were paired with one another, but skinny women were coupled with heavyset men, and vice versa, so that the result was a well-bred race.22 Because breeding depended on proper matching, any deception was an act of treason against the state. Anyone who used makeup to appear more beautiful, high heels to seem taller, or long robes to conceal ill-formed feet, was punished with death.23 These were dangerous ideas, especially coming from a man who had faced the Inquisition and been stretched seven times on the rack. One can see why Campanella was happy to have the book removed from his prison cell. To judge by his subsequent actions, Andreae was both disturbed and excited by the Civitas solis. He began at once to write his own utopian tract, curbing some of Campanella’s most outrageous proposals in the process. The result was the Reipublicae Christianopolitanae descriptio (1619), the first account of an explicitly Protestant Utopia—here he imagined what his ill-fated pan-German “Christian Union” might accomplish. The debt to the Civitas solis is obvious: both are ideal socialist republics that have abolished private property, presided over by benevolent magistrates. But the City of the Sun was a round city of seven rings about a central temple; Andreae’s was a square city of five squares about a central temple. Now the image of Freudenstadt that he had adapted as a model of ideal geometry in his Collectaneorum mathematicorum was drawn again into service, this time as the model for an ideal society (fig. 35). Of course for a Protestant Utopia, there was no better model. It was the first fully realized city of refuge, and its plan must have been lying on Andreae’s desk when he devised Christianopolis, perhaps delivered by Schickhardt himself. The architect was certainly available. Fires in 1617 and 1618 had burned out large sections of Vaihingen, and Schickhardt was sent in his capacity as court architect to plan the reconstruction; while there he built the south portal to the parish church. There is no more logical candidate for the authorship of Christianopolis’s handsome engravings. While Andreae drew freely from Campanella, he was careful not to cite him by name, a man who was after all a Catholic theologian and a convicted criminal. He was less circumspect about citing the celebrated Thomas More as an influence, although he modestly allowed that his own ideal city was “less serious and less witty.”24 But like 69 christianopolis

fig . 35 In 1619, Johann Valentin Andreae published Christianopolis, his vision of a Protestant Utopia. All property was held in common, children were raised communally, and necessities were provided from the public storehouse. The moral order was as strict as the geometry: no visitor was admitted until he had passed three separate examinations into his character, conduct, and intellect.

both of their books, Andreae’s purports to be the firsthand account of a visit to a real place, an island republic in the tropics, perfectly ordered and regulated, and smoothly running despite its lack of property. And like his models, Andreae used facetious names. Thus he describes how he sailed on the good ship Phantasy into the Academic Sea, until “hurricanes of envy and false accusations . . . began to stir up the Ethiopian Sea against us.” There he was shipwrecked on a small island to which he gave precise parameters (a triangular island, each side about ten miles long) and an utterly absurd location (“10 degrees away from the Pole, 20 degrees from the Equinoctial Circle, and roughly below the 12th point of the Bull”).25 There he found the religious sanctuary known as Christianopolis. 70 chapter

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Like More’s Utopia, Christianopolis was divided into four quarters; its buildings were uniform and stood in straight rows; food was distributed from a central repository. The city was ruled by an enlightened triumvirate, consisting of a minister named Abialdon, a judge named Abiefer, and the director of learning named Abida. They practiced a rigorous paternalism: there was no private land ownership or currency— and in consequence no lawyers, another point of similarity with Utopia. Also unknown were orphanages and orphans. Children lived in communal dormitories, so it scarcely mattered if their parents remained alive: “For there is no one in this republic who has only individual parents,” Andreae remarks. “The state itself is a parent to each.”26 Even such minor details as the treatment of animals show Andreae’s attentive reading of More and Campanella, both of whom disliked cruelty to animals but understood it was a necessary evil. More felt that the act of butchering offended one’s sense of pity and left the task to slaves to perform. Campanella described how the Solarians were vegetarian at first but came to realize that even plants and herbs had feelings, so they compromised by eating meat but never the flesh of useful animals such as horses or oxen. While Andreae also believed that “men become coarse from the daily custom of shedding blood,” he was not sure how to avoid it; he could only claim vaguely that the slaughterhouse district of Christianopolis was arranged to have “no suggestion of the bestial about it.”27 For all their ostensible similarities, Civitas solis, Utopia, and Christianopolis are fundamentally different in conception. Campanella was a priest and philosopher who was deeply interested in science, and much of his book is devoted to describing fantastic inventions of the future.28 By contrast, More was concerned with the practical minutiae of regulating a society, its commerce, and its laws. Finally, Andreae, as a theologian, was primarily concerned about the spiritual life of his subjects, their education, and their moral upbringing. Therefore, while More’s Utopia and the City of the Sun were theoretically plausible foreign civilizations in remote locations, Christianopolis was quite clearly a European settlement occupied by refugee Lutherans. Andreae invented for it a founding myth that had great relevance at a moment when the Thirty Years’ War was beginning to send refugee populations across Europe, and beyond: “For when the world raged against the good and drove them out of her boundaries, religion, an exile, gathering about her the comrades whom she regarded the most faithful, after crossing the sea and examining various places, finally chose this land in which to establish her followers.”29 But not all refugees were welcome in Christianopolis. Any prospective visitor was carefully vetted to ensure that he was not an undesired guest, a class that included fanatics, mountebanks, meddlers, “drug-mixers who ruin the science of chemistry, imposters who falsely call themselves Brothers of the Rosicrucians”—the long list suggesting that Andreae must have had bitter personal experience with each of these types of charlatan.30 Before gaining admittance, the visitor had to pass three

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examinations into his character, conduct, and intellect. Only then was he permitted to enter through the east gate and behold Christianopolis. That visitor should be pardoned if, having traveled all the way to the Southern Hemisphere and “the Antarctic zone,” and then run this triple gauntlet of interrogations, his first reaction was intense disappointment at finding a small Württemberg town concealed within the fortifications. Like Freudenstadt, Christianopolis consisted of a square perimeter and successively smaller squares within, each containing a continuous row of buildings, with a public square in the center: Its shape is a square, whose side is seven hundred feet, well fortified with four towers and a wall. It looks, therefore, toward the four quarters of the earth. Eight other very strong towers distributed through the city, intensify the strength; and there are sixteen smaller ones that are not to be despised; and the citadel in the midst of the city is well-nigh impregnable. Of buildings there are two rows, or if you count the seat of government and the storehouses, four; there is only one public street, and only one market place, but this one is of a very high order. . . . At this point there is a circular temple a hundred feet in diameter. As you go forth from the buildings, the intervals, storehouses, and the rows of houses are each twenty feet wide and the wall is twenty-five feet. All buildings are in three stories, and public balconies lead to these. All this can, however, be better understood from the accompanying plate. All buildings are made of burnt stone [i.e., brick] and are separated by fireproof walls so that a fire could not do very severe damage.31 Andreae modified the plan of Freudenstadt in one critical respect: “If you measure the buildings, you will find that from the innermost street, being twenty feet in width, the numbers increase by fives even up to one hundred.” In other words, starting at the periphery and moving toward the center, each successive street and row of buildings was five feet wider. Instead of the unmodulated plan of Freudenstadt, with its streets and houses all alike, Christianopolis presented a formal hierarchy that ascended from workshops to residences to buildings of culture. The visitor walking from town gate to town center would experience this hierarchy as a dramatic spatial sequence, a rhythm of ever wider streets alternating with ever wider buildings to achieve release in the great open plaza at the center. For all their obvious similarities, Freudenstadt and Christianopolis differ in this one critical respect, the one as regular as a metronome and the other accelerating toward a crescendo.32 At the perimeter of Christianopolis were the utilitarian buildings, fourteen to a side, and grouped according to their function. “The whole city,” as Andreae puts it, was “one single workshop, but of all different sorts of crafts.”33 To the east he placed the agricultural district, with buildings for storing grain and vegetables; to the south seven bake shops and seven mills, which ground flour, cut lumber, and produced paper. To 72 chapter

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the north were the slaughterhouses, well appointed with wash houses for cleaning linen and clothing so that there was “no suggestion of the bestial about it.” Finally, Andreae placed the mechanical trades to the west, with seven buildings with forges for working metal and seven more for making “salt, glass, brick, earthenware, and . . . all industries which require constant fire.” Labor was not performed brutishly but with a constant “testing of nature herself . . . subjected to the laws and instruments of science.”34 Apart from its curious corner church, Freudenstadt had nothing like this complex and highly articulated organization of activities. Andreae’s meticulous assignment of a specific trade to each quarter of Christianopolis clearly derives from Dürer, as does his encyclopedic inventory of all the useful trades. Still one wonders how closely he read Dürer if he placed his slaughterhouses to the north, where the prevailing northerly winds would sweep their stench through the town. (Or did Andreae assume that in the Southern Hemisphere prevailing winds ran in the opposite direction?) Inside this utilitarian outer square followed two squares containing houses. These came in two sizes, those in the outer tier measuring forty feet long and fifteen feet deep, and those in the inner tier measuring forty by twenty-five. The street between the rows measures twenty feet, a generous width for a town that permitted no horses or wagons inside. The houses themselves are quite simple, consisting only of a bathroom, a sleeping apartment, and a kitchen, the latter two divided by a simple wood partition. Like the houses of Utopia, these were not considered private property. Instead they were maintained “at the expense of the state, and provision is made by the carefulness of inspectors that nothing is thoughtlessly destroyed or changed.”35 This freed brides from the need to bring a dowry; newlyweds would simply choose their furniture out of the community storehouse and lug it to their house. Although Andreae reports that there were 264 of these three-room apartments, they were not the only dwelling units. The towers contained rooms for officials and their families, and the college (see below) had dormitories for boarders above the age of six. All this would have housed a sizable population, surely far more than the four hundred citizens that Andreae explicitly mentions (“Cives hic vivunt 400”).36 Perhaps he missed a zero and meant four thousand.37 Or perhaps he reserved the term “citizen” for adult males, in which case he meant four hundred families, or a population of some two thousand. This would be comparable to the population of Freudenstadt. (And it would have been better suited to a town that had an armory, observatory, pharmacy, library, fourteen mills and bakeshops, and more.) At last, within these rows of houses, came the innermost square of buildings, which was the “center of activity of the state,” what Andreae called the “Collegium.”38 The encyclopedic learning that Campanella had inscribed across his concentric walls was imparted here in twelve vaulted halls, each a thirty-three-foot square. Four of them were reserved for the traditional administrative components of a city-state— the treasury, library, state archives, and armory—but the rest reflected Andreae’s 73 christianopolis

inexhaustible interests in science and alchemy. There was a printing shop (xlii); a laboratory “dedicated to chemical science” (xliv); a pharmacy, like that where Andreae’s apothecary mother had practiced her craft (xlv); a “place given over to anatomy, that is, the dissecting of animals” (xlvi); a natural science laboratory or “hall of physics” (xlvii); and “a very roomy shop for pictorial art” (“Pictoriæ artis officina amplissima,” xlviii). Immediately adjoining the painting studio were an observatory and mathematics library (xli and l), where charts of every type of projection, flat, concave, and convex, represented graphically the movement of celestial bodies. The climax of this sequence of square upon overlapping square was the central temple, a round tower 70 feet high and 316 feet in circumference (fig. 36). Its lower story contained the religious meeting space, a circular room lighted with windows all around. Andreae notes approvingly that its walls were adorned with “sacred pictures” and makes a point of distancing himself from Calvinists and other iconoclasts “who forbid the decorating of the temples of God” (lxxxii). Above the religious space was the council hall, on whose walls are representations of good and bad government, of the Last Judgment, and of great statesmen, such as John Frederick, Elector of Saxony, and Andreae’s own sovereign, Christopher, Duke of Württemberg. Here, under the gaze of these Protestant worthies, the twenty-four councilmen of Christianopolis would meet in session with the ruling triumvirate. There is much about Andreae’s city that we would call enlightened. Its justice system strove to be compassionate and stressed the prevention of crime rather than punishment; punishments were mild, especially for crimes against property.39 (Andreae never paused to explain how, if all property was held in common, poverty would ever exist in the first place.) Like Thomas More’s Utopians, the inhabitants of Christianopolis detested war. There was the regrettable necessity of an armory, filled with catapults and other instruments of war, but the residents regarded them with horror and loathing. Even the physical fabric of the city was as salubrious as could be, with welllighted streets, ample drinking water, and a stream diverted through the alleys to rid the houses of their effluvia. The price for this was that in many respects the individual was subordinated to the state. With its shared ownership of property, absence of money, and communal raising of children, Christianopolis was the forerunner of the socialist state. This was something rather different from the communism of early Christianity; it was paternalist, state-run communism. Not only were their children educated communally but citizens could be summoned to perform public work, including constructing roads, standing guard, erecting public buildings, and working in the fields at harvest time. They even were required to wear color-coded clothing (green for workers, blue for scholars, red for politicians). Despite Andreae’s intricate scheme of government, with his ruling triumvirate and council of twenty-four advisers, one has the sneaking suspicion that the real power in Christianopolis rested in Achitob, the state economist who determined what everyone should receive. 74 chapter

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36 The concentric tiers of Christianopolis increase in importance as they approach the center, where they culminate in the college buildings around the square and the church in the center, the only circular form in the entire complex. fig .

The lives of these citizens were regulated in the smallest of ways. Prayer was compulsory; bathing was to be performed in private in order to avoid the temptations of nudity. No funereal monuments were permitted, only a simple iron cross with the name of the deceased. And although women were encouraged to study, they were allowed no voice in the council or in church. Perhaps this was his greatest debt to the City of the Sun, the idea that personal individuality, property, and family life were expressions of self-love, and threatened loyalty to the state. Take them away, as Campanella said, and “there remains only love for the state.” Was Andreae consciously echoing the Dominican when he wrote, “sed parentem ipsam Rempublicam” (The state itself is a parent to each)? ++++ 75 christianopolis

37 Johann Amos Comenius (1592– 1670), bishop of the Moravian Church and brilliant philosopher of education. He pioneered the concept of learning through objects and created the Orbis sensualium pictus, the first illustrated children’s textbook. fig .

There is one other peculiarity of Christianopolis besides its communist structure, and that is the emphasis on learning. Andreae placed a college at the center of his town, including not only lecture rooms but laboratories for chemistry and physics, as well as an observatory for astronomical research. He pointed out that a newly invented telescope had just been added to Christianopolis’s collection of astronomical instruments, although he did not bother to list them (he coyly suggested that those interested should consult the works of Tycho Brahe). In other words, besides passing on old knowledge, the professors here were avidly creating new knowledge. This was not so much the medieval university but a prediction of the modern research university. This aspect of Christianopolis particularly impressed Andreae’s friend Johann Amos Comenius, the formidable Moravian intellect who is regarded as the father of modern pedagogy (fig. 37). Comenius appreciated Christianopolis’s encyclopedic approach to learning, which influenced his own idealistic vision of universal education, which he would dub “pansophy.”40 This was the doctrine of omnes omnia omnino, the idea that everything must be taught to everyone.41 Comenius later declared that it was from Andreae that he “obtained almost the very elements of my thought.”42 76 chapter

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Comenius appreciated the timely union of pacifism, education, and religion in Christianopolis, which appeared just as the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) was beginning its frenzied work of destruction, when throngs of refugees were slogging their way across Europe, driven in turn before successive waves of armies—French and Spanish, Swedish and Danish. Comenius himself was cruelly battered by the war; driven from his home in 1622, he lost his wife and two daughters to the plague. Yet no sanctuary towns on the model of Andreae’s book would be built for him and his fellow refugees. For Germany it was an era of massive, catastrophic depopulation; the Electoral Palatinate lost half its population, Württemberg perhaps two-thirds. Heinrich Schickhardt would live to see his model refuge of Freudenstadt burned in 1632, and he himself survived only a few more years. It is one of history’s cruel jokes that the architect of this city of religious tolerance would die during the religion-crazed war, stabbed to death by marauding soldiers. If the promise of Christianopolis could not blossom in ravaged Germany, it found more fertile soil in England, especially in Puritan circles. English Puritans were Calvinist in their theology, and they stayed in lively contact with their fellow Calvinists in Holland, Germany, and Bohemia. They formed a kind of international Calvinist intelligentsia that closely followed the work of Andreae, Comenius, and other church reformers. But during the 1630s, the church-state establishment of England was busily suppressing Calvinism, in part because of this same international character but also because of the doctrine of predestination, a linchpin of the Calvinist faith that was deemed heretical by the Church of England. In 1628, King Charles I officially forbade any public discussion of predestination, a decree that was tantamount to the official suppression of Puritanism, of which predestination was a cardinal doctrine.43 In that same year, an extraordinarily able spokesman for Andreae’s ideas appeared in England. This was Samuel Hartlib (c. 1600–1662), an intellectual of mixed German and English parentage who had grown up in Prussia and studied at the universities of Königsberg and Cambridge. For the rest of his life, he was the principal conduit between the intellectual worlds of Germany and England, and he seems to have known and corresponded with everyone. Hartlib’s “invisible college”—so he called it—of correspondents included John Milton, Christopher Wren, Richard Boyle, Robert Hooke, John Evelyn, and Samuel Pepys (Hartlib often appears in Pepys’s diaries).44 It was through Hartlib that English learned society came to know the works of Andreae. While still in Germany, Hartlib was a member of Andreae’s short-lived Christian Union, and he took part in the discussion over the founding of an ideal colony, free from the depredations of war, perhaps somewhere in the Baltic; Hartlib instead preferred Virginia.45 Although this came to naught, Hartlib, once in England, found an appreciative audience among disaffected Puritans contemplating their own cities of refuge. One of these was the dynamic Puritan minister John Davenport (1597–1670), who would found the colony of New Haven, the first to show the unmistakable influence of Christianopolis and the first city of refuge in the New World (fig. 38). 77 christianopolis

38 New Haven, Connecticut, was the first religious sanctuary in the Americas to express its social order through ideal geometry. Its layout and dimensions were derived from the Bible, but the concept of a compact and enlightened Protestant sanctuary came from Andreae’s Christianopolis. fig .

It is not customary to speak of New Haven as a city of refuge, which implies a remote enclave of separatists, huddled together in the wilderness, and not a large and thriving city. But this is to make an artificial distinction between settlements that remained constrained within their geometric confines, or that lost their population (as celibate communities will), and those that achieved great worldly success. As its name 78 chapter

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shows, New Haven was in its origins as much a sanctuary as Freudenstadt—the settlement of beleaguered Puritans smarting from the oppression of Charles I. It was not foreseen that within a few years he would be deposed and executed, and that England would be ruled by those same recently beleaguered Puritans. Had things turned out differently, New Haven might have remained a sanctuary for refugees. (Something of the same sort might be said for Philadelphia, which was established in 1681 for England’s subjugated Quakers, whose situation improved unexpectedly with the Glorious Revolution of 1688. It too lost the urgency that made it a needful refuge in its earliest years.) At any rate, the founder of New Haven was thoroughly versed in the philosophy of the city of refuge, which he absorbed through Andreae’s friend Hartlib. Davenport befriended Hartlib upon his arrival in England, and the two men maintained a lifelong friendship. The friendship was mostly epistolary, as Davenport moved to the Dutch Republic in 1633—his way of evading official persecution—and in 1637, he sailed to America to found New Haven. His four years spent in Amsterdam and Rotterdam were decisive for his subsequent actions.46 The Dutch Republic was a democratic state run on Calvinist lines and a cosmopolitan center of Protestant thought. There were, of course, wealthy Protestant states in Switzerland, Germany, and England, but Holland’s democratic government, maritime commerce, and cosmopolitan culture made it a lively crossroads for religious and political refugees—and a place where English Puritans might mix freely with French Calvinists, English Baptists, and Sephardic Jews. Davenport would have met no Jews in England, which would not permit them to settle until 1655. It seems likely that he met Jacob Judah Leon, the learned Amsterdam rabbi who made the celebrated reconstruction of Solomon’s Temple. Unfortunately, there is no firm documentary evidence connecting Rabbi Leon to Davenport’s circle until 1646 (a letter to Hartlib praising the quality of the rabbi’s model).47 But Davenport would have had much to discuss with the rabbi, for New Haven was steeped in the Hebrew Bible: in the code of laws that governed it, in its physical layout, and even in its dimensions. Davenport conceived New Haven as a Bible commonwealth, which dispensed with English common law and substituted in its place the Mosaic law of the Old Testament. He believed profoundly that “the Scripturs doe holde forth a perfect rule for the direction and government of all men,” and his reading of those scriptures was uncompromisingly literal.48 For example, since Mosaic law does not mention trial by jury, New Haven had no juries; all cases, including capital cases, were ruled on by a panel of magistrates. Davenport likewise drew his plan for New Haven from scripture, and just as literally. In this respect he resembled King Solomon, who did not “act by his own wisdom in building in the Temple, but he was guided therein by the perfect pattern.” For Davenport that pattern was—as John Archer proposed in a brilliant 1975 article—the ideal city of the Levites as described in Numbers 35:1–6, which yielded a grid of nine squares (see fig. 6 in chapter 2).49 79 christianopolis

But this was not Davenport’s only biblical source.50 From Ezekiel 45:2 came the town’s physical dimensions, each square of New Haven measuring about 750 feet (or five hundred cubits).51 From Exodus 26, with its detailed description of the tabernacle, came the dimensions of New Haven’s central meetinghouse, a wooden structure fifty feet square (corresponding to the thirty cubit length of the tabernacle).52 And from Numbers 3:38 came the precise location of Davenport’s house and that of Theophilus Eaton, the governor of New Haven, who lived just to the east of the meetinghouse square, just as Moses and Aaron pitched their tents “before the tabernacle toward the east.”53 These scriptural models were all latent in the Bible, but Davenport is unlikely to have brought them together into coherent unity without the example of Christianopolis, which showed that a compact geometric solution was the best way of expressing a covenanted Protestant community. Of course Andreae’s monumental architecture and vast panoply of fortifications were out of the question for a struggling colony, and the provisional encampment of the Israelites was a much more realistic model. But Davenport clearly admired the prominence of education and learning in Christianopolis, for he tried to recruit Andreae’s friend Comenius to New Haven in order to establish a university. This was through Hartlib, who continued to keep Davenport informed about the activities of Andreae and Comenius.54 In the end, Davenport drew on the ideas of Andreae, Hartlib, and Comenius; an array of city designs, including Dürer’s ideal city, Christianopolis, and likely Freudenstadt as well; a variety of biblical models from across the Old Testament; and perhaps even the archaeological speculations of Rabbi Leon and other Amsterdam intellectuals. Such is the elaborate scaffolding of ideas that make up the deceptively humble plan of New Haven. ++++ As splendidly as New Haven embodied the idea of a colonial city of refuge, it was not imitated. For one thing, Davenport did not publish his ideas, as did Dürer and Andreae. His New Haven was a refuge for his chosen elite, not a model for the world. Perhaps it might have been imitated nonetheless, but shortly after it was built, the Great Migration of Puritans to America came to a halt.55 The English Civil War established Puritan rule in England, and those who now fled were disenfranchised Cavaliers who had no tradition of separatist enclaves. And before another dissenting minority would build a city of refuge, four decades would pass. William Penn (1644–1718) could establish his Quaker colony of Pennsylvania because of two converging factors. Penn’s late father was owed a good deal of money by Charles II, the English king who came to the throne in 1660 with the Restoration. At the same time, England’s Quakers, a new and ascendant denomination, were coming under increasing persecution. They could not attend university or hold public office, and if they published tracts deemed blasphemous, they could be imprisoned (Penn 80 chapter

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did and was). By granting Penn the tract of land that would become the colony of Pennsylvania, the cash-strapped king simultaneously settled his debt and found a way of peaceably deporting his vexatious Quakers. Penn arrived in late 1682 to lay out the new colony’s capital of Philadelphia on a level tract of land between the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers, which ran parallel at that point.56 In many respects, it resembled New Haven; there was the same taut grid and the same public square at the center reserved for civic buildings (fig. 39). But it was considerably larger, and the principal north-south and east-west streets were made twice as wide as the others, like the cardo and decumanus of an ancient Roman town. And instead of a single public square, there was an additional smaller square of eight acres in each of the city’s four quadrants. If he could, Penn would have aligned his grid with the cardinal points of the compass, but he reluctantly tilted the city seventeen degrees to follow the adjoining rivers (although he printed the plan as if it were oriented precisely north-south). The sources for Philadelphia’s grid plan are not as complex as the rich synthesis of New Haven. Although Penn was quite cosmopolitan, having lived for two years in France and traveled several times through Germany, all he needed to create his plan

39 Ideal geometry requires ideal topography. William Penn wanted to make Philadelphia absolutely regular, with its principal intersection in the center of a true grid. But the irregular terrain forced him to move his major east-west street to the north so that the public buildings on its main square were better situated. (He was able, however, to give his plan the pleasing ratio of the golden section). fig .

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for Philadelphia he could find in London. Most of that city had been consumed in the course of a catastrophic four-day fire in 1666, and for the next few years, its reconstruction was the central preoccupation of English public life. Penn was in Ireland at the time of the fire but returned home immediately; by that time, the first ambitious plans for the rebuilding were being unveiled. When it came time to undertake something similar, to lay out an entirely new city on cleared land, the London experience offered the logical model. Whether or not he was conversant with each of the proposed rebuilding schemes, his surveyor would have known them. This was Thomas Holme (1624–95), a surveyor and military engineer who would actually draft the plan of Philadelphia.57

40 Richard Newcourt’s plan for the rebuilding of London is a curious abstraction: a grid of sixty-four squares, it made no allowance for topography, the course of the city walls, or even the location of existing buildings. Only the hasty notation that the cathedral of St. Paul’s was to be located in one of the squares shows a connection to physical reality. Not since the Romans had laid out London was the city so regular.

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Of all the plans made for rebuilding London, the most famous of all, the celebrated Baroque proposal made by Christopher Wren, with its sweeping diagonals and rond-points, had the least to say to Penn. Far more interesting was the proposal of Richard Newcourt (d. 1679), a topographic draftsman who proposed a grid of uncompromising mathematical severity. Newcourt’s London would have consisted of sixty-four blocks, nine gates, four small squares, and one massive public square center; only the Thames River offered a relief from the straight line (fig. 40).58 The subordination of absolutely everything to right angles is breathtaking. Nothing could be further removed from Wren’s courtly display of processional diagonals than this prosaic essay in Cartesian coordinates. Newcourt was blithely indifferent to physical reality, and a much more feasible version of his design was submitted by Robert Hooke, the legendary scientific polymath.59 To this day it is unknown if there was any connection between the two men, but Hooke’s plan looks very much like an attempt to adapt Newcourt’s ideal scheme to the constraints of the site. He preserved the idea of a grid with four regularly spaced squares, but he deftly fitted them into the meandering course of the medieval streets at the periphery that had survived the fire (fig. 41). Hooke was a key member of the “invisible college” of correspondents organized by Samuel Hartlib, that enthusiastic proponent of a learned society modeled on the ideas of Andreae. Hartlib may or may not have lent Hooke his copy of Christianopolis, which at any rate was too miniature a model for London. Still, Hooke’s plan has the same determined rationality as Andreae’s, particularly in the way that he evenly distributed parish churches across London, giving them identical sites so that they would inevitably adopt the same ground plan. Here one senses a scientific empiricist at work, and not the philosopher-theologian. Neither Newcourt nor Hooke set out to design a proper city of refuge, but they suggested a practical model for Penn, who was haunted by the memory of the great fire, and whose plan for Philadelphia was both a critique and a revision of London. The gridded regularity of the Newcourt proposal suggested not only Quaker egalitarianism but a practical means of fire prevention. Penn stressed this in the “Instructions” he gave to his commissioners for laying out the colony: “Let every house be placed, if the Person pleases in ye middle of its platt, as to the breadth way of it, that so there may be ground on each side for Gardens or Orchards or feilds, yt may be a greene Country Towne, wch will never be burnt, and allwayes be wholesome.”60 A second glance shows that Philadelphia’s geometry is nowhere near as absolute as that of New Haven. Its grid is conspicuously relaxed. High Street (now Market Street), the main street running from river to river, is not in the center of the grid but dislodged two streets to the north. Evidently High Street was not high (or dry) enough. This pushed the upper two squares up to the edge of the plan, while the lower two sit comfortably in the middle of their quadrants. At the same time, the spacing of the streets is not consistent, so that the city blocks are variously rectangular or square,

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41 This intriguing proposal for rebuilding London after the fire of 1666 is ascribed to Robert Hooke, England’s acerbic scientist-philosopher-architect. The plan was characteristically rational: a grid of square blocks and markets, with sixteen new parish churches evenly spaced between them. Most of these were entered from the north, which placed the pulpit at the south—Hooke’s attempt to create a prototypical Protestant church model. fig .

unlike New Haven, where each of its nine blocks is identical. Presumably, these minor variations were the surveyor’s accommodations to matters of drainage and elevation— an absolutely regular plan requires an absolutely regular topography—but they show that Penn did not regard geometric order as an absolute. For one thing, Penn did not take his urban model literally from the Bible. The Quaker religion, with its practice of silent service, is not a Bible-reading faith. Unlike Puritanism, it attaches as much importance to the “inner light” as to scripture. So the depiction of order in Philadelphia’s plan is not the absolute idealism of New Haven but something more akin to the egalitarian space of the Quaker meeting, where there is no pulpit or central focus, and where anyone is permitted to stand and speak from the heart; all this differs from the Puritan meetinghouse, where all authority centered in the pulpit. Thus, Penn placed no meetinghouse at the epicenter of his plan, as did Davenport, but instead provided for “the Store house . . . Market and State houses.”61 For Puritan New Haven, there was no such array of public buildings; the meetinghouse was both church and state, and authority centered there as unconditionally as in any absolutist citadel. ++++ Although the American colonies acted on the ideas of Andreae and others, Europe built no refuge cities in these decades, and there any speculations about the ideal form of Protestant city remained theoretical. The ideas of Dürer, Schickhardt, and Andreae made their way into the mainstream of German thought about town planning, but shorn of their provocative social content. One sees this in the ideal town plans proposed by the military engineer Johann Melchior von Schwalbach (1581–1635). 84 chapter

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Schwalbach was an expert on fortification design who had seen much service, traveling through North Africa and Syria, and inspecting the formidable defenses of Malta. For a period during the Thirty Years’ War he had oversight of all fortifications in Saxony. At the time of his death, he was working together with Wilhelm Dilich, the architect and talented vedutist (topographic illustrator), to prepare a ravishing illustrated compendium of his fortification theory, his Kurtzer und grundlicher Berichtt, which was completed and bound the following year. It is now in the collection of the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal.62 Schwalbach’s treatise concludes with five ideal town designs, each encased within a ten- or twelve-sided polygonal wall. All were generously scaled, with a central market square and a regular arrangement of broad streets—the major ones were forty to fifty feet across, and even the minor streets were twenty to twenty-five feet wide. Schwalbach depicted the full range of types of towns in Protestant Germany—a provincial town, a town with a fortified citadel, a market town, a princely residence with armament works, and a university town (there was no bishop’s residence or monastic buildings). No town made any absolutist claims; Schwalbach himself owed allegiance to his Saxon elector (and ultimately to the emperor); it would have been presumptuous to imagine a town for another, unspecified supreme power. Instead, Schwalbach’s well-ordered towns rested on municipal authority, expressed in the ensemble of civic and commercial buildings around the market square at the center of each (fig. 42). But there was another source of authority: each of Schwalbach’s towns contained a residence for the military administrator known as the Gubernator.63 He was the appointed official in charge of the town fortifications and garrison, and his duties were distinct from those of municipal officials. His presence in each of Schwalbach’s towns testified to the crucial role of fortifications during the Thirty Years’ War and to the impossibility of building a proper city of refuge while it raged, at least not in Europe. Thus Schwalbach’s ideas went into the growing corpus of visionary and wholly unrealistic town plans that would serve as models at such a time when sanctuaries would be needed.64 That moment came without warning in 1685, when some 150,000 Protestants were peremptorily flung from their homes in France. On October 18, Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, which his grandfather had issued in 1598, vouchsafing French Protestants freedom of conscience. These French Protestants, or Huguenots, seemed to prove the doctrine of the Protestant work ethic, for they comprised an unusually high proportion of merchants and skilled workers. They also proved to be exceptionally reliable soldiers.65 There immediately arose lively competition to win 42 Johann Melchior von Schwalbach borrowed freely for his fortification treatise of 1636, and his ideal town designs easily mix ideas new and old: modern polygonal bastions but also three late Gothic churches with fan vaulting. At the center, he placed the Rathaus, market hall, arsenal, and the residence of the Gubernator—a locus of municipal power balancing the princely power of the citadel at the other end of a broad ceremonial avenue. following spread fig .

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them as immigrants, especially in those territories of Germany depopulated in the course of the Thirty Years’ War. The first to act was Friedrich Wilhelm, the elector of Brandenburg-Prussia, who moved with lightning speed. No sooner did he hear of the Edict of Fontainebleau than he issued his own Edict of Potsdam on October 29, 1685, offering a variety of concessions to Huguenots who would settle on his territory. Although Friedrich Wilhelm’s motives intermingled self-interest with compassion, his offer was tempting: immigrants would have freedom from taxes and tolls; their ministers would be paid by the Prussian state; and they would be ruled by French magistrates. His alacrity paid off handsomely: perhaps half the total number of refugees who made their way to Germany eventually came to Prussia, about twenty thousand Huguenots in all.66 This influx would greatly benefit Prussia, economically and culturally (for one thing, the most distinguished Prussian architects throughout the next century would have French names: Cayart, Gontard, Gilly, de Bodt, Simon, and Catel). But for all his hospitality, Friedrich Wilhelm built no new settlements for his Huguenot immigrants. Instead he coaxed them into settling into areas depopulated by the recent religious wars, offering practical incentives. If they claimed abandoned houses, he could grant them free of charge “wood, lime, and other materials” for their repair.67 Only after the elector died did his son Friedrich III (later Friedrich I of Prussia) provide a more formal home for his refugees. In 1691, he instructed Johann Arnold Nering, his Oberbaudirektor, to design the gridded extension of Berlin that later became known as the Friedrichstadt.68 Nering’s neat grid simply followed the line of Berlin’s ring of fortifications and provided no great public spaces or grand avenues; this was a new residential quarter and not an independent city (fig. 43). This accounts for the treatment of the Gendarmenmarkt, the main square of the Friedrichstadt. Instead of a solitary French temple, there were two churches, a French Calvinist and a German Lutheran one, each serving as a pendant for the other. Friedrich III’s message was unmistakable: he desired good Prussian citizens, not a state within a state. Strangely, the idea of accommodating the Huguenots in a specially designed city of refuge came not from any of the great German princes but from a lesser branch of the Hohenzollerns. This was Johann Friedrich, margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach, the ruler of a tiny, cash-strapped principality in Bavaria. In 1686, he instructed his court architect, Georg Andreas Böckler, to design a town for 2,500 inhabitants, to be called Onoltzbach. Böckler (c. 1617–87) was an architect, a military engineer, and an author of manic productivity, who published one of the first translations of Palladio into German.69 As someone steeped in the literature of architecture, he made a thoroughly scholarly design for Onoltzbach, fusing ideas from across two centuries of Protestant town design (fig. 44). In form it was a smaller Freudenstadt: a square town built around a square central market, although only 800 square feet instead of 1,500, leaving space for just one street between its central square and outer wall. In each of its four quarters 88 chapter

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he located a fountain square. (Had Böckler seen the published plan of Philadelphia, with its four secondary squares?) But Freudenstadt had only a single class of dwelling, whereas the Huguenots would be divided into noblemen, prosperous burghers, and workers. To accommodate them, Böckler devised a hierarchical ladder of buildings, graded from dignified little workers’ houses (two and a half stories high and thirty feet wide) to self-confident palaces on the market square (five stories tall and fifty feet wide). To show that all were members of the same religious community, each was essentially the same five-bay composition with a cut stone portal at the center. The only element that was not easily integrated into this supremely regular organization was the textile mill and stable building, which Böckler thrust unobtrusively into the lower left of his drawing—the northeast corner—as an afterthought.

43 To accommodate its Huguenot refugees, Berlin built a new district outside its Baroque walls in 1691; this was the gridded Friedrichstadt (upper right). The French church was paired with its German counterpart, forming the dynamic ensemble of the Gendarmenmarkt but also expressing symbolically the equality of the French and German Protestants. fig .

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Böckler worked quickly but not quickly enough. Just as he was finishing his elegant design, Johann Friedrich died of smallpox, and in the confusion of the ensuing regency the project was shelved. The hosiery workers who might have settled at Onoltzbach slogged another forty miles further to the small town of Erlangen, where they were welcomed by Johann Friedrich’s cousin, Christian Ernst, the margrave of Brandenburg-Bayreuth.70 The first arrived in May 1686, and their numbers soon swelled to about 1,500. Before the summer was out, they were already building their church and first houses, confirming the Huguenot reputation for industriousness. Just as his cousin had done, Christian Ernst instructed his court architect to lay out a new quarter to accommodate them; in effect it was an entirely new town (fig. 45). The margrave’s architect, Johann Moritz Richter (1647–1705), devised something quite rare: an orderly and regular city of refuge, yet one that satisfied the Baroque taste for movement and surprise. Unlike the paper exercises of Dürer or Andreae, Richter’s Erlangen was conceived in terms of processional movement. The town was laid out on the road between Nuremberg and Erlangen, and the visitor entering from the south would pass from one spatial experience to another. First the main avenue—the principale Rüe on the plan—widened into a modestly scaled square, set at a right angle to the direction of movement, devoted to faith and commerce; to the left was the church and to the right the town’s customhouse. Then the street contracted again only to widen a second time, this time into a true square, twice as big as the first. A great textile mill formed its west side while its east was lined with five grand houses with large gardens to the rear. Parallel to this processional spine ran four smaller streets, lined with regular rows of houses; a total of 168 building lots were available. One hardly needs to be an expert in allegory to be shocked by the symbolism of not placing the church on the Grande Place. Neither square is presided over by a single monument, but each is animated by a pair of matched equivalents. The lesser square juxtaposed the Calvinist Temple with the customhouse (Douane) that was to reap the benefits of Calvinist industry; on the great square, the lucrative hosiery works on one side faced the houses of their proprietors on the other. Unlike Christianopolis, there was no central religious structure. After all, the Huguenots had been welcomed for mercantile rather than theological reasons, and the margrave no more wanted an enclave of separatists than did Friedrich III in Berlin. This was the point of Richter’s adroit balancing act, which gave the Huguenots their own distinct quarter, even as it knitted them into the fabric of the old town.71 ++++

44 Had it been built, Onoltzbach would have been the first Huguenot city of refuge. Its houses rose sharply in stature as they approached the center, demonstrating that every grid plan does not necessarily express strict equality. facing page fig .

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fig . 45 Erlangen reinterpreted the city of refuge in mercantilist terms: the most prominent site is given to the textile mill, while the Protestant church is placed on an equal footing with the customhouse.

Andreae’s Christianopolis and its precocious synthesis of theology, philosophy, and architectural theory updated Dürer’s ideal city for an age of religious conflict. He condensed Dürer’s proud, princely residence into a stronghold for an elite community of exiles, that is, a city of refuge. If it began life as a theoretical exercise, as did Thomas More’s Utopia, the religious wars that followed its publication made it a highly relevant and quite practical manual. But the seventeenth century was not the great age of sanctuary cities that one might expect. Freudenstadt and Erlangen were exceptions. It takes only a moment to realize why this should be so, and why the same forces that drove refugees across Europe discouraged the building of such cities. It was not merely the political and economic turmoil that crippled building activity; the administrative apparatus of every Protestant state was naturally wary of any denomination outside its jurisdiction. The unruly dissenters who vexed one state were unlikely to turn into obliging subjects of another. Only the economic self-interest of the rulers of Prussia or Württemberg could overcome those qualms. 92 chapter

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In short, the latent potential of the city of refuge could not be realized under the conditions of church-state relations in Europe. So Davenport’s Puritans and Penn’s Quakers recognized. With the eighteenth century, the focus of separatist action would shift to the New World, and especially the colony of Pennsylvania. The denominations and sects that established their model communities there would devise their own architectural and urban forms. But when they came to do this, the city of refuge was already a well-established concept, both in its architectural form and its bundle of social and economic thought, on which they could draw freely, modifying and adapting as needed. It is suitable that the first denomination to do this, and to transplant the city of refuge to the New World, was precisely the one that had coined the concept of a city of refuge three centuries earlier: Jan Hus’s Unitas Fratrum, the Moravian Church.

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The Lord’s Grove Thirty miles northeast of Frankfurt, Germany, surrounded on all sides by open fields, stands a pair of forlorn but peculiar Baroque palaces (fig. 46). Although surmounted by extravagant mansard roofs, which take up fully half their height, they are without sculpture or ornament, and defiantly prim. Deprived of their context, they are unhappily beached. Yet these are the vestiges of the most influential city of refuge of all: Herrnhaag, “the Lord’s Grove,” the refugee settlement that Count Nicholas Zinzendorf founded in 1738. It flourished for only a dozen years, and its population never exceeded a thousand, yet it was the prototype, directly or indirectly, for almost every city of refuge that would follow. This is not because it consolidated ideas about community, economy, and geometry in an unusually forceful way (although it did) but because it was carried by a religion with a worldwide reach. This is the Unitas Fratrum (Unity of the Brethren), known in German as die Brüdergemeine and in English as the Moravian Church.1 In the formal geometry of its 1738 plan, Herrnhaag resembled its precursors, the gridded settlements of Freudenstadt, Onoltzbach, and Erlangen. But these settlements were not designed by the refugees who fled there but by court architects serving the local ruler. Those rulers viewed their towns in mercantilist terms, as important sources of revenue, and only secondarily as holy enclaves for their industrious inhabitants. The Moravians’ settlements were the first examples of villages designed and built by a vibrant religious community that made them a formal instrument of theology. No other denomination built in such systematic fashion. Unlike most of the rest of Protestant Germany, the Moravian Church was distinguished by its central organization and relative independence from the state. It was only natural that Moravians would exert a disproportionate influence on subsequent communal and millenarian 95

46 Left, the Schwesternhaus (Sisters’ House) of 1742, and right, the Zinzendorf House of 1744, all that remains of Count Zinzendorf’s model town of Herrnhaag.

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societies, especially in America.2 Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and Salem, North Carolina, are only the best-known creations of the worldwide Moravian diaspora. The Moravians would not perfect their city of refuge until 1738, but they had been thinking about it for three centuries. After all, they were the first Protestants, and then the first Protestant refugees, and it was natural that they would be the first to revive the term “city of refuge.” This happened in 1420, in the course of a conflict— little-known in the English speaking-world—that still shapes the map of Europe: the Hussite Wars. These battles began with the shocking death in 1415 of the early Protestant reformer Jan Hus. Hus had been invited to present his ideas about church reform to the ecumenical Council of Constance, but no sooner did he arrive than he was arrested, tried for heresy, and burned alive. His enraged followers, who included most of the Czech population, drew themselves together to fight the mighty Holy Roman Empire.3 In view of the celebrated pacifism of the later Moravians, it is worth pointing out that the Hussite Wars were remarkably savage, even for an age when brutal warfare was the norm. Because Hus had been tried and executed despite his safe conduct pass, the Hussites distrusted any promises made during negotiations. There were frequent massacres on both sides. Outnumbered and surrounded, the Hussites nevertheless hung on for two decades, defeating the imperial forces again and again. 96 chapter

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The Hussite Wars were a strange conflict in which mobile encampments played a dominant role. Wooden wagons were chained together to form a square known as the Wagenburg, a kind of portable fortress. Quickly set up and just as quickly disassembled, it provided the Hussites with a mobile base of operations. But despite their imaginative tactics and overwhelming numbers, the Hussites were querulous and splintered into at least six separate factions. It was the most radical of these, the Taborites, who promulgated the idea of the city of refuge. The Taborites arose out of a sudden chiliastic fervor that seized the Hussites in 1420. (The term “chiliasm” derives from khilioi—the Greek word for “thousand”—and refers to the belief in the imminent return of Christ to the earth and the beginning of his thousand-year reign—that is, the millennium.) A certain young Moravian priest, Martin Húska, nicknamed Loquis for his eloquence, was the “chief author, publicizer and defender” of chiliasm among the Taborites.4 Much of modern Moravian thought has its roots in Taborite ideas. They sought to reinstitute the primitive early Christian Church, based on the Sermon on the Mount and its implicit endorsement of radical communism and communal ownership of property. Anything for which there was no explicit biblical mandate—such as monastic orders, devotional images, sacerdotal vestments, or the doctrine of purgatory—was to be ruthlessly suppressed. During their brief heyday, the Taborites were great burners of monasteries. In a general way, their ideas were anticipated by the English reformer John Wycliffe, but here they were 97 the lord’s grove

carried out for the first time on a large scale. This was the formative moment of the “spiritualization of politics,” which the sociologist Karl Mannheim identified as “the point that politics in the modern sense of the term begins.”5 The Taborites were centered at their hilltop citadel of Tábor in southern Bohemia, some sixty miles south of Prague. They chose that name with care: the original Mount Tabor in Galilee figures prominently in the Hebrew Bible as a strategic crossroads, while according to Christian tradition, it was also the site of the Transfiguration. For the Taborites, the name was double-edged; it evoked both an impregnable stronghold and a place of transformative holiness. Since then the word Tabor has entered the German language to mean any fortified religious citadel. At the precise moment when Húska was stirring up the Taborites in 1420, a call went out for the faithful to abandon their residences and to make their way to one of five designated cities of refuge (Útocˇištné meˇsto), which alone would be spared the destruction that God was about to visit upon the earth.6 It is not certain (although it is likely) that Húska was one of the “certain Taborite priests” who preached the doctrine. According to a contemporary chronicle, they urged that all those desiring to be saved from the wrath of Almighty God, which in their view was about to be visited on the whole globe, should leave their cities, castles, villages, and towns, as Lot left Sodom, and should go to the five cities of refuge. These are the names of the five: Plzen ˇ , which they called the City of the Sun, Žatec, Louny, Slaný, and Klatovy. For Almighty God wished to destroy the whole world, saving only those who had taken refuge in the five cities. They alleged in support of this doctrine prophetical text falsely and erroneously understood, and they sent letters containing this material through the kingdom of Bohemia. And many simple folk, accepting these frivolous doctrines as true . . . flocked to these priests from various parts of the Kingdom of Bohemia and the Margravate of Moravia, with their wives and children, and they threw their money at the feet of the priests.7 Like their biblical prototypes, these five Czech cities of refuge were widely spaced, stretching out in a broad crescent to the west of Prague, where Taborite sentiment was strongest. It is curious that only five cities were named and not six as in the Bible (perhaps Tábor was envisioned as the sixth town). We will never know if was persuasive Martin Húska himself who first proclaimed the Czech cities of refuge, for he left no record; in 1421, he too was seized and burned at the stake. The whole story is poorly known because of subsequent events. In 1437, the more moderate Hussites, alarmed at Taborite radicalism, made common cause with the imperial troops, and they crushed their common foe. In the general destruction, many records were lost, and we know far too little about these ephemeral settle98 chapter

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ments: How many Czechs actually made their way to the cities of refuge? How were they administered? We know that Tábor was briefly run as an early Christian commune, with a strict moral code and a suppression of private poverty; were the other Taborite cities similarly managed? Whatever the reality of the Taborite sanctuaries, the very idea was breathtaking in its radicalism. In our age of effortless and unthinking freedom of travel, we can scarcely imagine what a terrifying prospect it was to leave one’s home. In feudal society, every person’s existence was determined according to his position in the feudal hierarchy, with its network of interlocking rights and obligations. To leave one’s native town or village was not merely to move but to be wrenched out of society itself—and to be dislodged from one’s rightful place in the universe. This was homelessness in the ultimate sense of the word, and only the threat and promise of the imminent millennium could justify it. The victorious imperial forces did not entirely stamp out Hussite radicalism. Crushed and dispersed, it smoldered underground until 1457, when the Taborite remnant formally reconstituted themselves as the Bohemian Brethren (Cˇeští bratrˇi). For the next two and a half centuries, they kept their heads down, especially during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48). The Czech territories, including Bohemia and Moravia, that had tolerated Protestantism were reclaimed for Catholicism after the fateful Battle of the White Mountain in 1620. There followed another round of fierce persecution. As sometimes happens, persecution serves to temper resolve and focus energy, and as we have seen, the suffering of John Amos Comenius led directly to his most profound work and his concept of a humane and universal education. His ideas would play the decisive role in the Moravian Church when it reemerged from its long twilight existence in 1722, and primarily through their influence on Zinzendorf. ++++ History knows the founder of the modern Moravian Church simply as Count Zinzendorf (fig. 47), although the full name and title of the extraordinary Saxon nobleman is Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf und Pottendorf (1700–1760). Zinzendorf grew up in an atmosphere of intense learning and cultivation. His father was privy councilor to the Saxon court at a time when Saxony was reaching the apogee of its influence and visual splendor under its elector August the Strong (1670–1733). Saxony was then the most prosperous and sophisticated Protestant court in Germany, and it would be decades before it was eclipsed by the rise of Prussia. Unlike other Protestant states, such as Holland, Switzerland, or England, where power was dispersed among influential aristocratic and mercantile interests, Saxony was an absolutist state, in which power was vested in the centralized state. And so it was in the curious position of being able to express Protestant ideas and values with the absolutist swagger of a Catholic monarch. 99 the lord’s grove

47 Count Nikolaus Zinzendorf, the founder of the revived Moravian Church, began by welcoming religious refugees to his estate and soon became one himself. fig .

During Zinzendorf’s youth, religious affairs in Saxony were agitated. Although the state was officially Lutheran, August the Strong had acquired the Polish-Lithuanian crown in 1697. This required his conversion to Catholicism, a concession he made for tactical reasons. The union of kingdoms made a cultural crossroads of Saxony, whose cosmopolitan capital, Dresden, drew on both Catholic and Protestant culture. But the conversion also offended his Protestant subjects and made its Lutheran establishment intensely wary of any weakening of its own internal authority. In order to assuage fears among his Saxon subjects that they would be forced to convert to Catholicism, August the Strong turned over the whole Lutheran religious and educational apparatus to the Privy Council. Young Zinzendorf was destined to serve in the Saxon court, and this can only have increased his consciousness of great responsibility. Zinzendorf studied at Wittenberg (like Hamlet) and Halle, and received a law degree. Halle was then the epicenter of a dynamic new theological movement known as Pietism. The doctrine urged the simplest and most sincere worship, and in many ways it resembled that of the contemporary Quakers, who likewise deplored the 100 chapter

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entanglement of the church with the state. Coming right after the religious wars of the seventeenth century, these ideas were immensely attractive and passed eagerly from one dissenting denomination to another. Zinzendorf had a family connection to Pietism: his godfather was Philipp Jakob Spener (1635–1705), the founder of Pietism. Spener was an ambitious thinker (his dissertation was a systematic refutation of Hobbes), and as he rose in the Lutheran church hierarchy, he came to believe that it had been hopelessly corrupted by its partnership with worldly authority. He drew up a sweeping program of reform titled Pia desideria, or Earnest Desires for a Reform of the True Evangelical Church (1675). From the Latin phrase in its title, Pia desideria, comes the term “Pietism.” Spener declared six specific principles, including the idea of a universal priesthood, in which the laity would jointly share in the governance of the church, and a style of preaching that shunned learned rhetoric for plain and simple prose.8 Finally, he promoted Bible study in private groups, which he called ecclesiolae in ecclesia (little churches within the church), an idea that he picked up from Comenius.9 For sumptuous, ostentatiously decorated churches he had no use, and neither would his Moravian followers.10 All of this, of course, was deeply offensive to the Lutheran establishment, and Spener eventually came to grief. He lost his position as chaplain of the Saxon court at Dresden and was dispatched to Berlin, where he held a minor post until his death in 1705.11 Zinzendorf was only five when Spener died, but he was thoroughly instructed in Pietist thought by August Hermann Francke (1663–1727), the brilliant professor of theology at the University of Halle. Francke presented a somewhat modified version of Spener’s doctrine. While Spener stressed simplicity of worship and tended to focus on the introspective and private aspects of devotion, Francke laid his emphasis on practical good works—foreign missions, the publishing of tracts, muscular charity. Zinzendorf took these doctrines to heart and, imitating Francke’s executive energy, made them central to the revived Moravian Church. In 1722, Zinzendorf purchased from his grandmother the estate of Berthelsdorf, intending to run it according to Pietist principles as a model community. Word spread quickly: during that summer, a party of ten Moravian refugees arrived, led by Christian David, a trained carpenter and charismatic lay preacher.12 David built them a house, just a mile from Berthelsdorf, which they dubbed Herrnhut, literally “Watched of the Lord.” So began the exodus. In short order, Zinzendorf was host to several hundred pilgrims from Moravia and Bohemia, and David was put to building more houses. The refugees were pious but unruly, and they fell into the separate factions that were the inevitable consequence of their furtive and leaderless existence. The role of organizer fell to Zinzendorf. In 1727, he formally reestablished the Moravian Church as the Unitas Fratrum (since which time the older church was referred to as the Ancient Unitas Fratrum). By this point, the refugee settlement had grown into a village. For this first essay in town planning, Zinzendorf had no independent tradition to call on, other than the 101 the lord’s grove

48 Herrnhut, the first settlement of the restored Moravian Church, offers an appealing vision of orderliness. At the center is the Gemeinhaus, closely flanked by dormitories for single women (Schwesternhaus, marked “c”), single men (Brüderhaus, marked “i”), and widows (Witwenhaus, marked “k”). In the upper left, outside the town, is the cemetery. fig .

refugee settlements of the Huguenots. During their underground years, the Moravians had not the leisure to consider architecture. Spener’s call for small gatherings in private houses—his ecclesiolae—was hardly an architectural program. And so the first idea for Herrnhut was simply to enclose a rectangular square with four rows of houses, with a gate to either side and a fountain in the center.13 Zinzendorf made no effort to give his grid any formal symbolism or to align it with the cardinal directions (which would have been impossible anyway, as the main road running between Bautzen and Zittau ran northwest to southeast). From this conventional square, Herrnhut grew into its present form: a gridded crossroads village, with the Gemeinhaus, or community house, on its central square (fig. 48). All subsequent Moravian settlements derive from this modest first attempt at orderliness and regularity. Even the cemetery would be orderly, with standardized flat stones arranged in a grid,14 and connected to the town by a Lindenallee, an avenue of lime trees (fig. 49). 102 chapter

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49 With its standardized burial lot size, prescribed tombstone dimensions, and lovely flower gardens, the cemetery at Herrnhut was the model for all Moravian cemeteries, and each of their subsequent settlements was required to build one. Families and even married couples were not interred together but rather according to the dormitories in which they lived. fig .

The early construction at Herrnhut was directed by Christian David (1692–1751), that restless carpenter who led the first party of refugees to Zinzendorf.15 As the offspring of a Moravian father and German mother, David moved easily and frequently between Saxony and his native Moravia, where he had renounced his Catholicism and later joined the underground Moravian Church. He honed his carpentry skills in the rebuilding of Görlitz, the Saxon town that was destroyed by fire in 1717. Hundreds of new houses were needed, and David acquired experience in the mass production of frames and roof trusses for half-timber houses, a skill needed in Herrnhut. Besides building its houses, David erected its first public buildings—a school for the children of the nobility, known as the Großes Haus (1724), and the guest house, Gemeinlogis (1726). The Großes Haus shows the ambition and limits of Zinzendorf’s early building (fig. 50). Four stories in height and a good 150 feet in length (74 ells), it contained a library, lecture hall, apothecary, and lodgings for the pupils (both aristocratic and 103 the lord’s grove

bourgeois) and their guardians; had it been built as designed, it would have been a prodigy.16 Yet as a work of architecture it was as stark as a barn. David’s conception of a great public building went no farther than making one very big timber house, or rather three houses together (each with a central corridor). This was one possible expression of Pietist absolute simplicity, but Zinzendorf was evidently disappointed. Never again would the Moravians design so austere a public building, and soon they would have architects of a higher caliber. Zinzendorf continued to rely on David but sent him to those places where simple, solid construction work was needed, especially at remote sites and where conditions were primitive. Of this there was no shortage, for Zinzendorf soon embarked on a program of furious missionary activity. “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature” the Bible commands (Mark 16:15), and Zinzendorf took it literally. As quickly as he received refugees, he flung them back into the world again as missionaries. He dispatched

50 Christian David built the first Moravian building at Herrnhut, the Großes Haus (Great House). His 1724 ink drawing is a house carpenter’s conception of a large public building: three half-timber houses slung together in a row. fig .

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51 Because of Zinzendorf’s ceaseless missionary work, Herrnhut never grew very large and it retains much of its eighteenth-century character. The restrained meetinghouse of 1756–1757 was destroyed in 1945 but sensitively rebuilt afterward. fig .

Christian David to found Moravian missions in Greenland (1733), Holland (1737), Estonia (1742), and Pennsylvania (1749), where his last act was the building of the town of Nazareth.17 Other mission stations were founded in the Caribbean (1732), as well as Siberia, Lapland, and the new English colony at Savannah, Georgia (all three in 1734). Because of this ongoing diaspora, Herrnhut never grew very large and remained a crossroads village, albeit a compact and highly ordered one (fig. 51). This strenuous missionary activity did little to make Zinzendorf popular. On the contrary, he was becoming an embarrassment to August III, the son of August the Strong. August, as the king of Catholic Poland, strove to maintain good relations with his neighboring Catholic rulers, but the flow of Protestant refugees from Catholic Bohemia into Saxony threatened this. In response, he decreed that asylum could no longer be granted. Meanwhile, the nascent phenomenon of Pietism was viewed with growing misgivings by the Lutheran establishment. Today, Moravians consider themselves to be in union with the Lutheran Church, but in the early eighteenth century, when it was still uncertain how far the Pietist movement would advance (would it boil over into a revolution, as with the Anabaptists of sixteenth-century Münster?), there could be no accord. Zinzendorf’s preaching brought about a rare ecumenical consensus: Catholics and Lutherans alike agreed that he was a threat. Under their combined pressure, the Saxon court exiled Zinzendorf from Saxony in 1736, and the great provider of refuge himself became a refugee. 105 the lord’s grove

If August III believed that exile would break Zinzendorf, he was mistaken; persecution simply strengthened his resolve. In 1737, he took the final step and was formally ordained a Moravian bishop (this did not involve any renunciation of Lutheranism; Moravians regard themselves as followers of Luther, dissenting only from the official state church). Zinzendorf was now the spiritual as well as secular leader of the Moravians. His most pressing task was to find another home for his refugees and for himself; that is to say, he needed another Zinzendorf. This he found in Count Ernst Casimir von Ysenburg und Büdingen, the ruler of a small principality in Hessen. A tolerant ruler who was not threatened by Pietism, the count had already admitted Huguenots, Waldensians, and Inspirationalists to his lands. Like the Prussians, who were already benefiting conspicuously from their Huguenot refugees, he believed them to be industrious citizens who would contribute to the economy. The Moravians, for their part, declared their intention to forge iron and produce textiles. Count Casimir made available a tract near Büdingen, a small town with the dubious distinction of having burned more witches (about four hundred) per capita in the previous century than any other city in Germany.18 The tract stood athwart one of Germany’s most historically important roads, the so-called Hohe Straße that connected Frankfurt to Leipzig. Count Casimir imposed one vital condition: “this new town should be completely regular and a plan should be presented by Bishop Nitschmann, without which the name of the town cannot be given princely approbation.”19 The bishop was David Nitschmann (1696–1772), the formidable deputy that Zinzendorf had dispatched to negotiate with Count Casmir. Nitschmann was that strange but characteristically Moravian combination of carpenter and bishop, which made him indispensable in the founding of new towns.20 The grandson of Comenius, Nitschmann had come to Herrnhut from Moravia in 1724. He first learned the trade of carpentry from Christian David and then in 1735 was ordained in Berlin as bishop, the first of the revived Moravian Church. Two years later, he was one of the two bishops who ordained Zinzendorf. The ordination could not have been more freighted with Pietist symbolism: the grandson of Comenius ordaining the godson of Spener. In 1737, Nitschmann had just freshly returned from a missionary trip to the Americas that amounted to a tutorial in town planning and that prepared him to make that “completely regular” plan demanded by Count Casimir. In particular, Nitschmann had seen an example that represented town planning at a high order of complexity and ambition—James Oglethorpe’s new colony at Savannah, Georgia. Moreover, he had spent eight weeks together with Oglethorpe in 1735–36, sailing to the colony in Oglethorpe’s private ship, the Simmonds.21 It was an extraordinarily fateful journey for the history of religion: also on board were John and Charles Wesley, two of the founders of Methodism, who were much affected by the humility of the German Pietists (who performed “those servile offices for the other passengers, which none of the English would undertake”).22

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Oglethorpe knew German-speaking Europe quite well.23 He had spent several years as aide-de-camp to the imperial general Prince Eugene of Savoy in his campaigns against the Turks. When his first proposal for populating Savannah with unemployed debtors was rejected, he immediately thought of supplementing it with German Protestants. (William Penn had done the same half a century earlier in Philadelphia). And so from the founding of Savannah in 1733, Germans played a large role.24 Besides Moravians, Oglethorpe also recruited refugees from the Catholic prince-bishopric of Salzburg, which in 1731 abruptly expelled some twenty thousand Protestant subjects; most found refuge in Prussia, but several hundred were welcomed to Georgia. When Nitschmann arrived in Georgia, the Moravians had not yet built a regular gridded town. Savannah was a revelation. It was not simply a Cartesian grid carried efficiently over so many acres, but a system of interlocking squares, repeated at different scales, so that a complex rhythm is the result.25 It differs from a Cartesian grid as an intricate fugue differs from the beat of a metronome. Its geometry deeply impressed its German settlers—in the case of the Moravians, long after they left. The Moravians abandoned Savannah in 1740 so as not to be forced to perform military duty in the conflict picturesquely known as the War of Jenkins’s Ear. But twenty-five years later, in 1765, they made a careful plan of the town (fig. 52). And those other Protestant refugees, the Salzburgers, showed their appreciation of Oglethorpe’s plan by building a replica for their own nearby town (fig. 53).26 It is unknown if Oglethorpe showed Nitschmann the pamphlet that inspired the plan of Savannah: A Discourse Concerning the Design’d Establishment of a New Colony to the South of Carolina, in the Most Delightful Country in the Universe (1717). This was the brainchild of the Scottish baronet Sir Robert Montgomery of Skelmorlie.27 Sir Robert proposed a stupendous colony in the form of a fortified square measuring twenty miles to a side (fig. 54). Every component was enormous: each of its four quadrants contained a forest that was four miles square, and the town at the center was surrounded by a mile-wide belt of open land, absolutely empty—“a large void Space, which will be useful for a thousand Purposes . . . as being airy, and affording a fine Prospect of the Town in Drawing near it.”28 To this audacious vision—which proposed transforming the earth on a scale not realized until the Tennessee Valley Authority—Sir Robert gave the name Azilia. Although Azilia drew on the square cities of Dürer, Andreae, and Rabbi Leon, there was not a word in the twenty-four-page pamphlet about the Heavenly Jerusalem or religion at all. Perhaps Sir Robert felt that prattle about sacred symbolism would distract from the main thrust of his proposal, which was to interest speculators in Azilia by demonstrating that it would very quickly turn a profit. Thus most of the discussion concerned the advantages of basing the colony’s economy on a single industry (justified by an ornate display of calculations), which was the burning of trees to produce potash.29 The argument was not persuasive, and Montgomery’s proposal

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52 The Moravian settlement in Savannah, Georgia, flourished for only a few years but a quarter of a century later they remembered its innovative layout. In 1765, Christian Gottlieb Reuter redrew its plan, marking each of their former properties with an i. fig .

53 Savannah welcomed not only Moravians but also Protestant refugees from Catholic Salzburg. Their city of refuge, called Neu Ebenezer, was a diminutive tribute to the plan of Savannah. fig .

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54 The most visionary of American ideal cities: Azilia, Sir Robert Montgomery’s 1717 proposal for a twenty-mile square containing four forests, a town, and 116 estates, each measuring one mile square. Here sacred geometry is turned into marketable real estate, the New Jerusalem expressed in the terms of the Monopoly game board. fig .

collapsed under its own weight, but when Oglethorpe founded Savannah sixteen years later, he retained Azilia’s system of interlocking squares, in which each component of the town was centered on an open square. After several months in Savannah, Nitschmann continued north along the coast, seeing in turn Charleston, Philadelphia, and New York. When he returned to Germany a year later, he had a clear idea of what it meant to create an ideal town in the wilderness. An undated drawing in the Moravian archives shows the scheme devised by Nitschmann (fig. 55).30 It depicts a central square, oriented to the cardinal compass points, subdivided into four smaller squares. Around this square are twelve building sites, two to each side, and one in each of the four corners. As at Azilia, even the surrounding fields and orchards were drawn into the geometric order; so too were the utilitarian buildings—the pottery, blacksmith’s forge, and joiner’s workshop—all trimly aligned on the road leading east, where they formed an industrial quarter. Content with this “completely regular” plan, Count Casimir signed his decree on April 24, 1738, granting permission for the Moravians to build.31 Within a month, the cornerstone was 109 the lord’s grove

laid for the first building, the Gemeinhaus.32 Other buildings were soon under way, and on July 6, 1740, the anniversary of Hus’s martyrdom, the town was first occupied.33 Zinzendorf gave the town the name Herrnhaag, or the Lord’s Grove. ++++ For the next twelve years, Herrnhaag was continually under construction. Perhaps hoping that private patrons would build on the more desirable garden-facing lots, Zinzendorf first placed buildings on the less prestigious corner lots. These were the great communal residences to accommodate the steady influx of refugees: a dwelling for single men (Großes Brüderhaus, 1739–40) in the southwest corner and another for single women (Schwesternhaus, 1742–43) in the northwest. This division expressed Zinzendorf’s scheme for organizing the congregation according to age, sex, and marital

55 Before he would let the Moravians establish their settlement at Herrnhaag, Count Casimir insisted on seeing its plan. Bishop Nitschmann, freshly returned from Savannah, was evidently the author. fig .

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status. These groups were called Chöre (choirs).34 The southeast corner was occupied by an inn, or Gemeinlogis (1742–45). The grandest of all building was Zinzendorf’s own residence, built on the north side of the square in 1744. By 1750, the last year of Herrnhaag’s existence, eleven of the twelve lots had been built upon, and its population numbered about one thousand inhabitants.35 Although Nitschmann prepared the plan of Herrnhaag, Zinzendorf had the decisive voice in architectural matters, even when overseas, as he was from 1741 to 1743 when traveling to England and Pennsylvania. While in England, for example, he admired how such residential squares as Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Gray’s Inn were built around public parks and given an architectural unity.36 He later decreed that Herrnhaag’s central square be modified accordingly: “The square in the middle of the Haag should be an inn, like Grace Inn [sic] Garden, planted with trees, with internal paths, and strewn with sand so that one might stroll there.”37 Zinzendorf’s absolute control over architectural decisions continued until his death; not until 1763, three years later, did the Moravians establish a formal building administration. Herrnhaag is a curious artifact of town planning, an expression of Pietist simplicity overlaid with the ceremony and pomp of the Saxon Baroque. For although he was a Pietist, Zinzendorf formed his architectural taste while serving in the Saxon court. He was conversant with architectural matters in Dresden, which during his youth was Germany’s most modern capital and Europe’s most gloriously Baroque Protestant city. Following catastrophic fires in 1685 and 1701, the modern city was formed by a succession of unusually talented and well-traveled architects. But to judge by the buildings he would later create at Herrnhaag, Zinzendorf viewed Dresden’s chief architectural sensation with contempt. This was the great Zwinger, designed by Matthias Daniel Pöppelmann (1662–1736) to serve as the forecourt for a palace that was never realized. Consisting chiefly of rooms for entertainment, it housed an orangery, reception rooms, a ballroom, and a Kunst- und Wunderkabinett in which the royal collections of art and porcelain would be displayed. In fact, the building itself looks like an overexcited work of porcelain, which because it has no structural duties to perform is permitted to be delightfully decorative (fig. 56). Its fitful alternation of concave and convex is ultimately rooted in the Roman Baroque of Bernini and Borromini, but what was athletic wall in Italy gives way here to lather and foam, especially at the roofline. The only flat planes to remain are the windows themselves, as the walls give way to almost continuous figural sculpture. It is astonishing, and even more so that it is the creation of a Protestant capital—there is certainly nothing like it anywhere else in Protestant Europe, not in its sheer extravagant frothiness. The Pietist creed of earnest and unaffected simplicity would have recoiled at the Zwinger’s writhing curvilinearity and the wanton nudity of its sculptures. Yet for all that, something of the Zwinger worked itself into Herrnhaag (fig. 57). There is the same layout of a courtyard enclosed by festively grouped pavilions, the same rhythmic articulation of windows and dormers, even the same profusion of florid mansard roofs 111 the lord’s grove

56 The central architectural event of Zinzendorf’s youth was the building of Dresden’s exuberantly undulating Zwinger, which was under continuous construction from 1711 to 1728. fig .

(knowing the French origin of the roof form, Moravians labeled it accordingly on their drawings as étage à la mansarde).38 Yet while Herrnhaag is Baroque, at the same time it is not Baroque. It is not merely that its curves have been chastened and made straight. It is that it lacks that one essential element of the Baroque experience, a climax. Every great Baroque ensemble, from Versailles to the Piazza of St. Peter’s, aspires to a point of culmination, toward which its orchestrated passages of movement converge. These culminating points were invariably some central locus of power, such as an altar or throne. And yet pure Pietism knows no altars or thrones, and Herrnhaag glorified no place of authority. It ingeniously undercut any sense of hierarchical axiality, either by doubling elements (paired buildings or twin doors) so that neither dominated, or by ensuring that the axes did not lead somewhere important but merely continued on to infinity. For this, Nitschmann’s choice of a sixteen-square grid was shrewd. In a nine-square grid, an important object can always be given pride of place on the central square, as with the main meetinghouse of Puritan New Haven. But the center of a sixteen-square grid is a single point, not a square, leaving no site for a dominant building. None of the adjoining sides is suitable either, for each is bisected by a street, flanked by a pair of matching buildings. At every step the town denies any possibility of an architectural climax. The effect is of an absolute and high-minded egalitarianism, accomplished with a few modest formal devices and the thoughtful manipulation of axes. The geometry has been spatially neutralized, so that the effect is Cartesian rather 112 chapter

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fig . 57 In 1750, just as Herrnhaag was at its height, only one of the twelve building lots unoccupied, the Moravians were ordered to sell their property and leave—delivering to the local prince a completely intact town.

than absolutist. And so Zinzendorf combined two architectural cultures that seem fundamentally irreconcilable, expressing a foursquare egalitarian grid in the sumptuous terms of the Saxon court style to produce a kind of Pietist Zwinger. Until this point, Moravian architecture was a purely improvisational affair. Christian David, for example, was perfectly competent at building half-timbered houses, but his conception of a civic building was either one very large house or a number of small houses joined together. Finally, in 1742, Zinzendorf found an architect who was capable of transposing these subtle town planning ideas into architectural terms. This was Siegmund August von Gersdorff (1702–77), an architect who possessed not only great professional competence but also imagination (fig. 58).39 Gersdorff was a fellow Saxon nobleman and was close in age to Zinzendorf. He may have also been a distant relative—Zinzendorf’s grandmother was a Gersdorff (although the name is common in the region). We do not know enough about his architectural training. As a youth, he served as a page to the Saxon minister Count von Watzdorf, who gave him “instruction in civil and military architecture.”40 After serving as a lieutenant in the cavalry, Gersdorff was discharged in 1724 because of sickness. Between his marriage in 1726 and his first visit to Herrnhut in 1741 (which still flourished, despite Zinzendorf’s absence), he tended to his estates. Still, the high quality of Gersdorff’s subsequent work points to professional architectural activity in this period. (During the 1720s, Count von Watzdorf built himself a vast Baroque palace 113 the lord’s grove

58 Siegmund August von Gersdorff, the principal Moravian architect from 1742 to his death in 1777, gave formal coherence to their buildings and towns. His architectural frame of reference was the High Baroque of the Saxon court, which he muted and adapted to the demands of a Pietist faith, even as he preserved its spatial richness and play of axes. fig .

called Lichtenwalde, which in many points resembles Gersdorff’s work; could he have returned to Watzdorf’s service?) In his spiritual biography, Gersdorff records that a nearly fatal kick from a horse in 1738 prompted him to “think about the condition of his soul”; three years later he arrived at Herrnhut, where he was accepted into the brotherhood a year later. He immediately “dedicated himself to serving the community, especially in agriculture and architecture.”41 From that moment, all Moravian buildings show the stamp of his building style, and were designed directly by him or built under his supervision.42 Gersdorff made his brilliant debut with Count Zinzendorf’s house (fig. 59).43 At first glance, it did not differ appreciably from the other public buildings of Herrnhaag: it presents a massive two-story block crowned with two further stories of mansard roof, bristling with rhythmically grouped dormers. Its Baroque rhythm is reprised in the windows below, which tap out a pattern of 2-1-4-1-2 across the facade, and in the decorative panels between stories (now lost with the removal of the building’s stucco). But this stately exterior does not reveal the intricate plan devised by Gersdorff, who had to accommodate not only the count’s private rooms but Herrnhaag’s public Gemeinhaus—in effect, a church and a palace—a daunting mix of functions. To treat a large private dwelling as a public building was a novelty, and something perhaps only possible in a religious utopian community, where there was in fact no private realm distinct from communal life, not even for its leaders, let alone its common members. Something of the same sort is true of Shaker dormitories, which also 114 chapter

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59 By eliminating the grand central entrance, Moravians made the Baroque acceptable to Pietist sensibility. In Gersdorff’s Gemeinhaus at Herrnhaag (1744–45), the outward facade quite deliberately gives no hint of the capacious hall within nor of Zinzendorf’s courtly residence. fig .

served as public buildings with public meeting rooms (which were distinct from their conventional meetinghouses). Gersdorff resolved the problem with uncommon cleverness. He placed the meetinghouse across the front of the building, a handsome space measuring sixty by fortyeight feet and surmounted by an elliptical arch; it occupies most of the second and third stories, taking up the middle six windows (fig. 60). As in the meetinghouses of the Quakers and Puritans, it was a preaching space, without an altar at the east end but rather a raised ambo in the middle of the long side, to the south (fig. 61).44 But while the meeting room was the single most important space of the building (in fact, of the entire town), no grand spatial procession led to it, but rather two entrances that pass under it and lead to it circuitously from behind. These passages continue through to the rear wings at the back of the building, serving Zinzendorf’s private room. The planning is thoroughly modern, a single-loaded corridor wrapping around the internal courtyard, served by three conveniently located stairwells. As for that traditional device of the Baroque palace, the grand axis, it survives vestigially in the bold enfilade that pierces six rooms across the front of the building, neatly shown in Gersdorff’s plan as open door upon open door, and leading—precisely nowhere. Dürer and Schickhardt had placed their churches in the corners of their towns, but here Gersdorff did them one better, rendering the corner meetinghouse invisible 115 the lord’s grove

60 The plans for the Herrnhaag Gemeinhaus show Baroque movement without axial culmination: the paths of motion lead circuitously to the upper-story meeting room, which places a row of columns on its own principal axis. fig .

to the exterior. This was the ultimate fulfillment of Spener’s censure of sumptuous church buildings. Nor does the building itself convey the sense of a ruler’s palace. Zinzendorf placed his residence alongside the Witwenhaus (widows’ house), which was its architectural twin, giving pride of place on the north side of the square both to the female elders and the male, which he represented. Whether or not this expression of egalitarianism was genuine, the architectural theme of the Zinzendorf house was not hierarchical dominance but companionable fellowship. Moravian architecture achieved formal coherence at Herrnhaag, where Gersdorff gave the Gemeinhaus its definitive form. Having established this new formal type, he repeated it again and again, at Neusaltz (1746–47), Niesky (1755–56), and even Herrnhut itself (1756–57), where the original simple meetinghouse gave way to 116 chapter

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61 Communion in the meeting room of the Zinzendorf House, according to Moravian custom, was divided by sex: women sitting to the left and men to the right.

fig .

a sprightly pavilion, showing Gersdorff at his most Baroque (figs. 62–64).45 Given the care with which his combined residence/meetinghouse was designed, it is distressing to learn that Zinzendorf did not particularly care for it and spent little time there. He did not see it until 1747 and later regretted that it interfered with the building of more urgently needed communal buildings: “I built my House in such a Manner, that, if Occasion had been, the Sovereign might have made it his Residence, and am sorry that this hindered me from finishing the Dwelling for unmarried Brethren; as for myself and Children, I knew it to be no Place for us, our Home being in another Place.”46 ++++ Herrnhaag’s success seems to have brought unwelcome attention, and Count Casimir’s son, Gustavus Friedrich, was distinctly less sympathetic to the Moravians. Of all the reasons for his displeasure that he enumerated, one cannot easily distinguish between pro forma complaints and the real quarrel.47 He surely cannot have been too excised over their “scandalous hymns” or the frequent turnover in population, although he certainly was offended that Moravians were instructed “to pay more observance to their Governor of the Church, than to the Sovereign Prince.” But even this might have been forgiven had the Moravians established the “several Manufactures in Wool, Iron, 117 the lord’s grove

62 Herrnhaag definitively established the formal typology of the Moravian Gemeinhaus: a rectangular space oriented transversely rather than longitudinally, with men’s and women’s entrances at opposite ends. Gersdorff’s Gemeinhaus at Neusaltz (1746–47) was a simplified version of the Herrnhaag example, built in half-timber and without the complication of Zinzendorf’s attached residence. fig .

63 Gersdorff’s Gemeinhaus at Niesky (1755–56) was also scrupulously segregated according to sex, men entering at the left and women at the right. In the top story was a pair of reception rooms for the elder and eldress—Papa Stube and Mutter Stube—and separate waiting rooms. Stube, the German word for a comfortable heated chamber, is a cognate of the English word stove. fig .

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64 Moravian architecture stressed simplicity and humility, but one could not forget in Herrnhut that Zinzendorf was after all a count and that this was his hereditary estate. Gersdorff’s meetinghouse strikes a more formal note there than elsewhere; it projects a restrained courtly pomp, evident in the bulbous crowns above the entrances and the elevated corner loggia in the interior, where Zinzendorf could observe the services from above. But even here a ceremonial central axis was strictly avoided, something made easier by the separation of men’s and women’s entrances. fig .

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Steel, Linen” that they had promised his father.48 Instead, on February 12, 1750, he ordered the expulsion of the “fanatical community,” although he granted them a generous three years to sell their property and depart. By now there were other Moravian settlements to absorb the thousand or so refugees. Roughly a third each went to Neuwied on the Rhine, Zeist in the Netherlands, and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The settlement fell victim to a long slide into neglect and oblivion, which saw Gersdorff’s proud buildings occupied in turn as barracks by Napoleonic troops and as a prison camp by the Nazis. When the Moravian Church reacquired the site in the 1960s, only two of its eleven major buildings still stood. Such was the end of Zinzendorf’s great city of refuge. Even as Herrnhaag folded, a great era of Moravian town building was under way. Zinzendorf deployed his capable builders strategically. Gersdorff was kept close at hand to supervise architectural matters. David Nitschmann, the handy carpenterbishop, was once again sent to America in 1740, where he laid out the town of Bethlehem and built the original Gemeinhaus (1741–42).49 From this nucleus, a series of smaller Moravian towns were established in eastern Pennsylvania, each regular in form: Lititz (1758), Lebanon (1761), Emmaus (1767), and Nazareth (1771).50 A 1753

65 Moravian urban order in its most diminutive form: Lititz was a one-street village (in German, a Straßendorf). Its houses and walls were designed to form a continuous defensible perimeter, with gates at either end, a response to the massacre by Indians of eleven Moravians at Gnadenhutten in 1755.

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66 Niesky in Czech means humble (niedrig in German), and in Christian Gottlieb Reuther’s plan of 1752–56 its humility is expressed by the careful balancing of reciprocal elements, such as the Gemeinhaus on the west side of the square, which is precisely matched by the school (Paedagogium) to the east.

fig .

expedition to North Carolina led to the establishment of several towns, of which the most successful was Salem (1766). There was nothing like this in American urbanism, especially not the way in which Moravian buildings were adjusted in scale and character so that they harmonized with the plan of the town. Even a tiny one-street village such as Lititz shows this exquisite coordination, its one-story houses elegantly proportioned (fig. 65).51 In Germany, Zinzendorf came to rely on a surveyor of abundant energy and versatility, Christian Gottlieb Reuter (1717–77).52 Reuter typically would survey a tract of land, make a handsome plan for a town or village, and then proceed to design and build whatever buildings were necessary. He worked in turn at Neusaltz (1747), Trebus (1748), Barby (1749), Gnadenberg (1749), Herrnhut (1750–51), and Niesky (1752–56). Typical of his work is Niesky, in eastern Saxony near the Polish border, an impeccable paraphrase of Herrnhaag (fig. 66). In 1756, upon finishing his work there, he went to America, where he would lay out the North Carolina towns of Bethania (1759) and Salem (1766).53 121 the lord’s grove

67 Reuter’s Mappa geographica exhibens diasporam Silesiam (1752) shows the new Moravian enclaves, a thin Protestant leaven in overwhelmingly Catholic Silesia. fig .

Much of Reuter’s work was in Silesia, which had been annexed by Prussia in 1742 at the conclusion of the First Silesian War. The Prussians were eager to enlarge their Protestant population in this largely Catholic territory and allowed the Moravians to establish towns and villages at a time when they were unwelcome in Saxony. Such an exodus into inhospitable land was akin to a biblical diaspora, so Reuter labeled his 1752 map of the new foundations Mappa geographica exhibens diasporam Silesiam (fig. 67). The coherence of Moravian town building in America and Europe (and in England, where Moravians established the settlement of Fulneck in 1743) was the product of a centralized and superbly organized building administration. For one thing, Moravians had a remarkably high degree of architectural literacy. Because missionary work inevitably involved building, Moravian youths were routinely trained in architectural drawing.54 If David Nitschmann was able to truss a roof as easily as deliver a sermon, they were not to turn up their noses at practical labor. All this was in the spirit of Comenius. The centralization was another matter. From the beginning, the Moravian architectural arm modeled itself after the bureaucracy of Saxony, which had the most sophisticated and rational architectural administration of any German state. This was the achievement of Wolf Caspar von Klengel (1630–91), whose office supervised building throughout Saxony, with responsibility for design, supervision, and finance 122 chapter

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resting in the capital at Dresden.55 (The much better-known architectural bureaucracy of Prussia, which made Karl Friedrich Schinkel famous, came about later and was itself modeled on the Saxon system.) Like Pöppelmann, the Oberlandbaumeister who directed the Saxon building arm, Gersdorff would be the Moravian Generalbaumeister, and his duties would be analogous: to make plans and send them to distant towns, to inspect and correct drawings submitted for approval, and to supervise the construction of major buildings. None of this would have been possible without the extraordinarily vibrant epistolary life, which made up for their geographic dispersal. Each community diary was regularly transcribed and copies sent to Herrnhut and other settlements. Even in distant missions, the construction process was rationalized, and an architectural committee (Bau-Konferenz) established to discuss any building projects.56 Plans of major buildings were copied and sent for inspection and approval to Herrnhut (where they might be copied again and sent other distant colonies as models). In the care with which drawings were made and archived, the Moravian building operation was ahead of most national governments during the eighteenth century. All this rationalization and standardization suggests that the Moravians might have established the canonical form of a city of refuge. They were, after all, by far the most industrious builders of such cities, and gifted with a high intellectual culture. And indeed there was an attempt to draw up a plan for a model town in Pennsylvania that would have been exemplary in the way that Herrnhaag was. A drawing of a “Plan for New Building on the Nazareth Tract” (Riß zum neuen Bau auf dem Nazarether Land), perhaps by Gersdorff, shows the customary grid with central square and Gemeinhaus (fig. 68).57 Unlike most surviving Moravian plans, which are specific proposals for specific sites, this is manifestly a model plan, abstract in conception, and evidently drawn up at some distance from the site. The plan was evidently of some importance, for a contemporary copy was made, with the accompanying key translated into English.58 The Nazareth plan shows an agricultural town with a regular allocation of gardens and farmland, half a mile in breadth. Placed at the intersection of four roads aligned with the cardinal compass points, it is a study in superimposed squares. At the middle is a square, its four sides lined with a continuous row of houses, facing the Gemeinhaus in the center. Together with their rear yards, these houses form the second square, after which comes the third square of the vegetable gardens, and finally the outermost square of orchards and meadows. There was nothing like the sublimated monumentality of Herrnhaag with its festive public buildings, only the Gemeinhaus and some 110 houses around it. Here was the image of a Moravian town in its purest, most rarefied form—with a schematic quality that places it in the main channel of schematic square towns reaching back through Andreae and Schickhardt to Dürer himself. Yet the model Pennsylvania town was not built, nor was an even more abstract plan for North Carolina that showed a circular town with radiating streets, the only one ever proposed by a Moravian architect (fig. 69), a stray jeu d’esprit by Reuter that 123 the lord’s grove

68 The Moravian plan for an ideal town in Pennsylvania is a study in superimposed squares, with none of the courtly rhythm and movement of Herrnhaag. fig .

he called Salem.59 Evidently, it was never realized because of a practical consideration that he had not considered: to draw the radius of a circular plan, one needs to have the entire site cleared of trees in advance in order to swing the line, whereas a gridded plan can be measured in segments as land is claimed; a chagrined Reuter abandoned the plan.60 124 chapter

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Or so the story goes. The truth is, the creation of a fully realized heroic city of refuge, something on the scale of Christianopolis, went against the grain of the Moravian spirit. It required a certain pride and arrogance that was not in keeping with the humble character of the revived church. Reuter recognized this, and his town plans were invariably modest grids (fig. 70).61 In 1761, he drew up, apparently for his own edification, a notebook in which he drew the plans of seven ideal towns—three in Germany, three in America, and one biblical—along with his commentary.62 We have already seen his careful reconstruction of the biblical cities of the Levites, as related in Numbers 35:1–6 (see fig. 6 in chapter 2). Reuter was then engaged in laying out the Moravian settlements around what is today Salem, North Carolina, and town planning was much on his mind. His commentary is homespun in character, and other than scripture, he cites no other sources. His most original thought concerns the origin of the city. “While many believe that the oldest and most natural way of living was farming or living in huts,” he suggests, “the Bible speaks always of cities, from beginning to end.”63 Here in his naive way, without great display of learning or reference to Andreae or Dürer, Reuter shows his simple faith that the city was a divinely ordained thing. There is a touching example of his simple faith. In his great map of the Silesian diaspora, he drew a whimsical corner cartouche in which he placed the hand of God, resting protectively over three tiny Moravian settlements, to suggest they were not merely a trio of uncommonly tidy German villages but a manifestation of divine order (fig. 71). The interlude during which standardized town plans were attempted coincided with the Moravians’ brief experiment in religious communism. This was the so-called General Economy, which provided for common ownership of property and communal labor in the Moravian colonies of Pennsylvania. It did not last long. It was only in force in the early decades of the Moravian settlements, from 1744 to 1762. Yet it coincided with the group’s most active period of town building and was the largest-scale attempt to institute a fully communal society in eighteenth-century America.64 Such was the first great campaign of separatist town building in America. By the time of the American Revolution, however, the Moravians were no longer quite so separate. The initial period of official persecution had subsided, and nationalism rather than religion was coming to be the principal fault line in Europe. As persecution waned, so did the fervent energy behind the diaspora; Moravian architecture lost the energy of its early experimental phase (fig. 72).65 The tumultuous Pietist awakening was a product of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century. As persecution

69 Reuter seems to have been the designer of what he wryly called his “non-binding proposal for a city in North Carolina” (Ohnmaßgebliches Project zu einer Stadt in North Carolina). Having surveyed countless gridded towns in Silesia, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina, he seems to have taken on the project as a challenge. following spread fig .

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70 Reuter’s circular city was an aberration, and his two projects for a “City with 137 Building Lots” (shown here) and a “City with 156 Building Lots” are more characteristic of his pragmatic approach. Although Reuter made the drawings in America, he sent them to Herrnhut, presumably for approval and criticism, where they survive today. fig .

fig . 71 Reuter’s charming cartouche suggested that the Moravian colonies in Silesia were pleasing to God. Three perfectly square towns— Gnadenfrey, Gnadenbergel, and Neusaltz—bask beneath a mighty floating hand, its fingers outstretched in a gesture of divine blessing.

ebbed, and as religious enthusiasm dulled, Moravians tended to retreat into the same quietism that led American Quakers away from active participation in worldly politics. By the end of the eighteenth century, Pietism was no longer the principal force behind the building of cities of refuge. But if the Moravians’ ferocious missionary energy waned, the organization of their settlements, their communal architecture, and their social institutions remained the most important model for every successive communal society to follow. Of these the most important, by far, were the followers of that strangely charismatic weaver from Württemberg, Johann Georg Rapp. 128 chapter

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72 Gersdorff never traveled to America, but his assistants carried his ideas with them, if in somewhat diluted form. Of these the most accomplished was Andreas Höger, who seems to have drawn this unbuilt project for a “Gemeinhaus zu Bethlehem,” dated February 1, 1758. For all the awkwardness of the cupola, it maintains the central principle of Gersdorff’s architecture: Baroque movement without a hierarchical axis in the center. fig .

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Harmony We have two images of Johann Georg Rapp, and they look nothing like one another (figs. 73 and 74).1 One shows a round-faced bearded man in a round cap and a rough twill doublet; his raised eyebrows are his most striking feature. He looks oddly cartoonish, and the image may well have been purloined from an older woodcut.2 The other shows a rather disheveled older man, with a beard but no moustache, and distressingly vacant eyes. Neither image suggests the irresistible personal magnetism that we know Rapp possessed, or his famous “prodigious gaze.”3 But charisma is elusive, even to those who have felt its force, as impossible to describe as the flavor of a food. In the end, one can only judge the power of persuasion indirectly, by what it persuades people to do. And what Rapp persuaded his followers to do is almost beyond belief: nearly a thousand of them would leave Germany for America, where they would build three towns in the wilderness, and in the process renounce private property, personal ambition, and even sexual relations. This is persuasion with clout. One wonders what Rapp might have accomplished, for better or worse, with the instruments of mass communication of our age. In the space of a few decades, Rapp pushed his followers to build three successive towns, keeping them constantly at work, as if to hold them in a state of constant purposeful fervor. These towns he named Harmony (1804), New Harmony (1814), and Economy (1824); all remain intact today to an unusual degree (figs. 75, 76, and 77). They reveal Rapp’s ever more imaginative use of architecture as an instrument of religious expression and of social cohesion. There is no richer trove of German-American architecture, with so many different specialized building types and construction techniques, or such a complex balancing of religious and ethnic identity. Rapp’s towns are the most important and influential of all cities of refuge, which would not only shape 131

73 George Rapp, the founder of the Harmony Society, was born in Iptingen, Württemberg, in 1757. He was trained as a linen weaver, that traditional breeding ground of German radicalism. fig .

74 The amateur painter Phineas Staunton, who knew Rapp personally, painted him from memory. Although unconvincing as a likeness, it suggests the disconcerting personal force of the man, who commanded his followers to abandon their comfortable homes and build an entirely new town in the wilderness—three times. fig .

other separatist societies but also—as later reformers looked more at the communism of the Harmonists than their architecture—a substantial portion of the world itself. Rapp came from what is today the southwestern German state of BadenWürttemberg, which overlaps confusingly enough with the cultural region known as Swabia. (Rapp and his followers would refer to themselves interchangeably as Swabians or Württemberger). Swabia had been a hotbed of religious dissent since before the Reformation. It was at the center of the Peasants’ War of 1524–25, Europe’s greatest spontaneous mass uprising before the French Revolution.4 In that uprising, the peasant army, organized in three great bands or Haufen, was brutally vanquished but not before it had looted or burned a thousand or so castles and monasteries, including the monastery at Maulbronn, not far from Iptingen, the birthplace of Rapp. The total number of dead has been estimated at seventy thousand. The violent uprising ensured for centuries to come that all the homespun reformers and mystics that Swabia routinely threw forth would be just as routinely suppressed by its terrified Lutheran rulers.5 George Rapp, as he became known, was born in Iptingen in 1757. After serving an apprenticeship as a linen weaver, he began to be “tormented by religious thoughts.”6 132 chapter

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75 Harmony, Pennsylvania (1805–15), was George Rapp’s first city of refuge. A grid of four blocks, oriented to the compass points, it is a rural Swabian village made orderly and perfect. It was drawn by Wallrath Weingärtner in 1833, a time of schism and uncertainty, when the Harmonist golden age was becoming a historical artifact. fig .

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In 1782, he renounced the Lutheran church. He turned to Pietist literature and German mysticism, and after studying the tracts of Jacob Böhme, Paracelsus, and Georg von Welling, concluded that the millennium was nigh.7 Soon he was holding private assemblies in his house for his enthusiastic followers, who gave him the affectionate Swabian diminutive, “Rapple.” He married successfully enough in 1785 that he could abandon weaving and devote himself exclusively to preaching. In that same year, the state authorities were sufficiently alarmed to launch an investigation into the separatists of Iptingen. The investigators found it difficult to determine exactly what Rapp was preaching, and where he got his ideas. They found him impertinent and uncooperative, and “by temperament a Cholerico-Melancholicus,” the contemporary term for what we would call a bipolar disorder.8 They also found him maddeningly coy about his tenets.9 If he hinted, as seems likely, to his followers that he himself might be the Messiah, he was not foolish enough to say it openly. But the police investigation was able to identify some of his sources. One of them was Christoph Schütz’s Die Güldene Rose (The golden rose, 1727), from which he appropriated the emblem of a rose to represent the coming millennium.10 If the state investigators found Rapp to be coy and evasive, it was because his ideas concerning the sexual nature of God and man were shockingly radical and he hid them carefully from outsiders. Nevertheless, they can be reconstructed. In 1858, Jacob Henrici, Rapp’s successor, was asked by a Shaker correspondent to give a lucid summary of the Harmonist creed. Because he was speaking to a member of another celibate society with similarly radical views about human sexuality, Henrici permitted himself to speak freely. Rapp, he explained, believed that Adam before the Fall was a whole and complete being, his essential nature both male and female. Once Eve was created from out of Adam’s body, as related in Genesis, “the dual nature of Adam” was destroyed, dividing him into “two miserable halves,” who struggled in vain to restore their perfect unity through the animal act of sexual congress. Only Jesus was perfect, which meant that he too was a “dual being,” his nature both male and female.11 One can understand why Rapp was reticent about revealing his views. Rapp’s ideas derived directly from one of most peculiar and rapturous tracts of German mysticism, Das Geheimniß der Göttlichen Sophia oder Weißheit (The secret of

76 New Harmony, Indiana (1814–25), is Rapp’s second city of refuge, and it is now a town rather than a village. Although it rapidly outgrew its original boundaries, the grid of three by three blocks and central square can be seen. Weingärtner also drew it in 1833. facing page fig .

77 Economy, Pennsylvania (begun 1824), was Rapp’s third and final city of refuge. By the time this map was drawn in 1858, the Harmony Society was already in decline, although it would linger on for another half century. fig .

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divine Sophia or wisdom, 1700). The treatise was the work of Gottfried Arnold (1666– 1714), a Wittenberg-trained theologian who was among the most radical followers of Philipp Jakob Spener. Arnold had much to say about the nature of Adam before the Fall. He believed that Adam’s female component was not physical—he did not have physical female attributes—but spiritual, and that “there dwelled within him the divine virgin of wisdom,” his “secret bride.”12 As an integral part of his being, she was able to convey God’s truth to Adam directly. But once Adam was driven by lust to turn away from God, he relinquished his spiritual Sophia within for a physical Eve without, and became incomplete.13 Sexual gender was therefore an artifact of imperfect moral existence; “in Godhood there is no sexual gender” (Daß in der Gottheit kein geschlecht sey).14 It would take some years for Rapp to pledge his followers to celibacy, but it was already implicit in Arnold’s theology. As Rapp’s reputation began to spread throughout Württemberg, political events in Europe were opening up a wider scope of possibility. The beginning of the French Revolution in 1789 led many to hope that a millennial age was at hand, albeit a secular one—a hope that was not dashed until the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo a quarter of a century later. The Revolution itself would be defeated, but its most radical insight would reverberate throughout the world, which was that it was possible to reconsider every aspect of human existence, without sentimental attachment to existing structures or forms. Even the measurement of the universe might be transformed and made perfect, as the metric system, the decimal calendar, and the centigrade thermometer promised to do. And so at its most optimistic, the French Revolution sought to impose order on time and space itself—something that not even Thomas More in his Utopia had dared to dream. These heady ideas raced through Europe ahead of Napoleon (Württemberg was occupied by the French in 1800). By 1794, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey had already conceived the idea of a “pantisocracy,” a utopian state to be created in the wilderness of Pennsylvania. For them, and for such reformers as Joseph Priestley and Robert Owen, the shape and form of an ideal republic was the most urgent question of the day. At this moment of tantalizing possibilities, Rapp lifted his sights from reforming Württemberg society to creating his own. Up until 1797, the state authorities were reluctant to persecute Rapp in a serious way, not wanting to make a martyr of him. But in that year Friedrich II—a less forgiving figure—became Duke of Württemberg, and he immediately tightened the pressure. He made the mistake of threatening Rapp with exile, which only made him more insolent: “then you will have to drive out three to four thousand people.”15 Having made the threat, he decided that it was perhaps not such a bad idea after all. In 1803, he decided to leave Germany and settle his society in the United States. This was the first of those impulsive decisions that would characterize his leadership. President Thomas Jefferson, who looked favorably on German immigration as a way of settling the frontier, quickly gave his consent, and Rapp’s first shipload of 136 chapter

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pilgrims landed that same year in Philadelphia. There they were given aid and relief by the city’s Germans, many of whom were charitable-minded Moravians.16 With his advance party, he forged ahead to what is now Butler County, about thirty miles north of Pittsburgh. There he purchased four thousand acres along the Connoquenessing Creek, where he laid out the plat of Harmony. A second shipload arrived the following year, raising their total to some 839 members. As word of their success reached home, smaller parties continued to straggle in, although even at their peak, the Harmonists were never more than a thousand. On February 15, 1805, the Harmony Society drew up its formal articles of incorporation. For this Rapp found his model, as did the Moravians, in the communism of the early Christian church. The key scriptural passage was Acts 2:44–45, with its bracing call for the renunciation of private property: “And all that believed were together, and had all things in common. And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all, as every man had need.” And in similar fashion, each Harmonist now surrendered all his “cash, land and chattels” to the society, in exchange for which Rapp pledged to provide “all the necessaries of life, and to support them and their widows and children alike in sickness, health and old age.”17 Such were the beginnings of the Harmony Society, and every year it celebrated February 15 as its birthday, right up to its dissolution in 1905. ++++ Architecture and town planning would play a special role in Harmonist society, and not only for reasons of religion. As it happened, Rapp’s adopted son and chief deputy, Friedrich Reichert, was himself an architect, and he tended to find architectural solutions to theological problems. He was invariably sent ahead with an advance party each time a new town was to be laid out, and over the course of the Harmonist odyssey, he would design and erect hundreds of buildings, including houses, factories, meetinghouses, inns, barns, and garden pavilions. In the scope and number of his projects, he must be regarded as one of the most prolific architects of the early American republic. But he also contributed mightily to the economic success of the Harmonists, for he had an insatiable curiosity about new technology, and, as Rapp’s business manager, enjoyed extraordinary financial resources with which to indulge that curiosity. Friedrich Reichert was born in 1775 in Maulbronn, where he apprenticed as a stonemason. The town lay within the preaching circuit of Rapp, who on one occasion ran afoul of the Maulbronn authorities, who were alarmed by the “pantheism” of the separatists.18 This may have been the moment when Reichert and a few of his fellow stonemasons became adherents. Reichert became especially devoted to Rapp, whose own family seems to have been unhappy. Rapp’s wife had died young, leaving him with a daughter and a son who seems to have been a disappointment and who also died young in 1812. Perhaps this is why Rapp adopted Reichert as a second son, naming him Frederick Rapp. 137 harmony

Because he had trained as a mason, not as a professional architect, Frederick had no experience with the formal design of monumental buildings. He was perfectly capable of drawing the plans for vernacular structures such as houses or barns, but when it came to more pretentious buildings he would have to crib from pattern books. A small number of these survive in the Harmonist collections, such as the Lexicon Architectonicum by Johann Friedrich Penther.19 But Penther had died in 1744 and was half a century out of date, although this did not seem to trouble Frederick. There is no indication of awareness of the fashionable court architecture of Berlin or Kassel, where Carl Langhans and Simon Louis du Ry were feeling their way toward a distinctively German variant of Neoclassicism.20 Instead, to judge from the drawings they later carried to America, Frederick Rapp and his comrades had been schooled in a provincial late Baroque mode. One drawing in the collection—a student project that Michael Schanbacher made in 1782 for his master Friedrich Carl Müller—shows a mansard-capped city house with projecting bays (fig. 78).21 The draftsmanship is clean, with every block of stone and every profile meticulously delineated, but Schanbacher’s perspective is a crude orthogonal projection of a builder. And the one freehand passage, the rococo cartouche in the pediment, is touchingly inept. The combination of sober proficiency in practical building and a groping naïveté about formal design would characterize Frederick’s work. (One is tempted to think that he passed through Müller’s workshop a few years after Schanbacher.) When he followed Rapp to America, Frederick Rapp was just twenty-eight, and it seems unlikely that he had designed any buildings of consequence. This now changed: his first order of business upon arriving on the banks of the Connoquenessing was to provide shelter for the hundreds of followers who were shortly to follow. He did this systematically, designing a standardized plan for a log house measuring eighteen by twenty-four feet; he built nine in 1804 and then, in a heroic campaign, another forty-six in 1805.22 These houses were an interim measure, adapted from local building practice, and as soon as the Harmonists could build more durable structures, they shifted to masonry and half-timber construction. The building sequence was eminently pragmatic; after these houses came a barn and gristmill (1805), a tannery and inn (1806), and a sawmill, brewery, and storehouse (1807).23 Rapp’s main concern during these first hardscrabble years was to achieve agricultural and industrial self-sufficiency. Only after these goals were secured did he erect a permanent building for spiritual purposes, a brick meetinghouse of cruciform plan (1808). Having provided for their own immediate needs, the Harmonists now began producing wares for sale, including broadcloth made from the wool of Merino sheep, then a novelty in the United States. In 1810, they built a factory for the purpose, the first of a series of increasingly complex factories that Frederick Rapp would design. As every startled visitor noted, Rapp’s town was a simulacrum of a tidy German agricultural village in his native Württemberg, its public buildings grouped about a 138 chapter

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78 “Meister Stück für Friedrich Carl Müller” (1782). Although the Harmonists had no formally trained architects, they had a crew of skilled stone masons who could build sophisticated stone vaults. Part of their apprenticeship consisted in the making of construction drawings, such as this elevation of a city house that Michael Schanbacher drew for his master Friedrich Carl Müller.

fig .

central square, and barns and workshops arrayed at the periphery (see fig. 75, above).24 By far the most Germanic of the public buildings was the remarkable inn, a half-timber structure on a ground story of cut stone. Half-timber construction is not unknown in German-American architecture; it appears in those parts of Pennsylvania and Maryland settled by Germans, and even farther afield in Missouri and Wisconsin, until the middle of the nineteenth century, although usually in utilitarian or agricultural buildings, and often with some form of cladding. What was unusual at Harmony was to see it in a public building and left exposed; this was remarkable, and travelers frequently commented on it. It was destroyed in the nineteenth century and no photographs survive, but it must have been similar in appearance to a drawing for a half-timbered inn in the Harmonist collection (fig. 79).25 Of special note is the roof, which is nearly as high as the building itself, and has a slope of sixty degrees, a standard medieval form. Whether or not it is a preliminary design for the inn, it shows that the Harmonists were capable of building an object that in conception and construction was thoroughly medieval. Because Frederick Rapp was a mason, with a professional’s appreciation of durable stone construction, the Harmonists were uncommonly profligate in the making 139 harmony

of masonry vaults, and from the beginning most of their significant buildings boasted barrel-vaulted or elliptical-vaulted cellars; the Harmonists’ brick storehouse (1807) and the warehouse (1809) each had one.26 Like the half-timbered inn, this vaulting stood out in the early American republic, where stereotomy—the practice of measuring and cutting stone in three dimensions—was a poorly developed art. Even the Moravians, otherwise so assiduous in the construction arts, built no substantial vaults. This conservatism was natural in a society whose members included a considerable number of trained carpenters and builders, that rarely sought craftsmen outside their own ranks, and that had no experience of sophisticated courtly architecture.27 For the next thirty years, these same builders would be kept occupied continuously, and by the time that Economy was nearing completion in the 1830s, their children would be framing the buildings and setting their stone vaults.28 This second generation of Harmonist builders maintained the German practices their fathers had learned in the late eighteenth century. They continued to insulate their buildings with Lehmwickel, closely packed rolls of clay and straw (sometimes referred to as “Dutch biscuits”), a lingering German practice long since extinct in the rest of Pennsylvania. These Ger-

79 Because of their linguistic isolation and chronic suspicion of outsiders, and because they had an abundance of trained carpenters and masons, the Harmonists continued to build as they had in Württemberg. This undated set of plans and elevations for an inn correspond closely with that at Harmony, which also placed a half-timber upper story on a massive stone base. fig .

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man building practices did not languish over time; if anything, they grew even bolder. The elliptical vault in superbly cut stone under the Mechanics Building in Economy is a triumph of masonry construction, far more ambitious than any at Harmony. Most of the buildings designed by Frederick Rapp required no conscious invention; he had merely to draw from the fixed typology of vernacular forms, doing little more than to determine the precise dimensions. And where German vernacular types suited their purpose, these were used again and again, without modification, in each of the Harmonist towns. Such was the case with that critical safeguard against famine, the granary. Every aspect was dictated by rigid constraints: it was built of half timber (which is drier than a masonry construction), made tall and narrow (to maximize ventilation), oriented north-south (to minimize exposure to the sun’s heat), and relieved with a projecting forebay for loading (placed in the center for ease of hauling). The type was prescribed by tradition and well-codified by eighteenth-century pattern books, such as Georg Heinrich Borheck’s Entwurf einer Anweisung zur Landbaukunst, nach ökonomischen Grundsätzen (fig. 80).29 So perfectly did it function that all three Harmonist towns built identical versions, and although the one at Harmony has been destroyed (it can be seen in the northwest quadrant of the town map), it was indistinguishable from the one surviving example at Economy (fig. 81). When the Harmonists came to think about the image of a building, and not simply its function, they were less bound by convention. The buildings that represented their beliefs to themselves or to the world at large were more self-conscious, and more changeable. The first to show an awareness of American fashion was the pair of brick houses that Rapp and Frederick Rapp built for themselves in 1811. Facing one another at the north side of the central square, they served in a sense as civic buildings, the public face of the Harmony Society, where merchants and visiting dignitaries were received.30 Their expression was correspondingly formal. Frederick Rapp’s was essentially a Federal urban house, with its Flemish bond brick and fan-lit doorway (fig. 82). Clearly he had kept his eyes open as he passed through Philadelphia. It may have been then that he purchased his copy of William Pain’s The Carpenter’s Pocket Dictionary (1797), a book whose Palladian platitudes would have been stodgy to his American contemporaries but might have seemed fresh to him.31 Its forms, if not necessarily fashionable, were solidly respectable, which seems to have suited the Rapps. Such occasional nods to taste distinguished the buildings of the Harmonists from the Shakers, who made it a point to shun current fashions. But the Rapps were cautious about architectural experimentation, and their early buildings were so resolutely traditional as to be deliberately intended as objects of cultural reassurance (fig. 83). Their meetinghouse of 1808 replicated a type found everywhere from Iptingen to Maulbronn: a single-nave vessel, fronted by a central tower, measuring seventy by fifty-five feet.32 The modifications were minor; instead of the stuccoed rubble and ashlar trim of the Württemberg prototypes, it was of exposed brick (like the churches and meetinghouses they had seen in Philadelphia). And 141 harmony

80 Each Harmonist settlement began with the building of a granary, evidently to keep a year’s grain supply on hand for any disruption during what Rapp called the “transition to the new Jerusalem.” This was the one Harmonist building type that indulged in no invention or symbolism but followed well-established precedent. fig .

81 Measuring thirty-eight by ninety feet, and four and a half stories in height, Economy’s half-timbered granary was one of six built by the Harmonists. The narrow southern facades and masonry first story kept the building cool; the frame upper story had louvered apertures to disperse moisture from the stored grain.

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82 Frederick Rapp, besides being an architect, was the Harmonists’ business agent and was one of the few who were truly at home in Anglo-American culture (and one of the few who mastered English). Perhaps this is why his brick house in Harmony, a stately essay in late Georgian architecture, departs from the otherwise strict pattern of retaining German forms. fig .

instead of the canonical orientation to the east, it faced west—a choice that must have been intentional, as the Harmonists were not constrained by any existing buildings on the site.33 George Rapp had not yet reached the point of giving architectural expression to his theological doctrines, and his first artistic experiments were limited to the making of emblems and devices. The oldest adorns the portal to his warehouse in 143 harmony

83 The main square in Harmony, Pennsylvania, retains the intimate village scale of George Rapp’s original settlement. fig .

Harmony (1809), an elaborate keystone bearing the figure of a winged angel, with strange staring eyes and slightly parted lips, as if in speech (figs. 84 and 85).34 Long-standing oral tradition identifies her with Divine Sophia or Wisdom, a favorite image of one of Rapp’s favorite mystics, Gottfried Arnold. The keystone is the only figural sculpture known to be executed by the Harmonists and may well be, as tradition also contends, the creation of Frederick Rapp. It seems odd that the figure was placed on the warehouse, a building devoted to commerce, although the Harmonists of course recognized no division between the sacred and secular. The figure of Divine Wisdom must not have been deemed a success, for it had no successors. The next time the Harmonists ventured to carve a symbolic keystone, it was nothing more than a rose and the inscription “Micah 4:8,” which they placed over the keystone of the church in New Harmony (1822). This was an exercise in emblematics, the practice of conjoining words and image to convey a richer metaphorical meaning than either could alone. In this case, the biblical verse is one traditionally taken to refer to the millennium—“And thou, O tower of the flock, the strong hold of the daughter of Zion, unto thee shall it come, even the first dominion; the kingdom shall come to the daughter of Jerusalem”—while the rose evoked Die Güldene Rose, that millennialist tract by Christoph Schütz, the radical Pietist and mystic admired by Rapp. Taken together, word and mystic symbol prophesied the “thousand year kingdom” of the millennium, while their location on Rapp’s church proclaimed that the prophecy was now coming to pass.35 144 chapter

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The rose and the figure of Divine Wisdom were the literal transcriptions of symbols taken from German mysticism, but George Rapp’s garden was a far more complex and creative synthesis. Here he devised a complex iconographic program that he expressed in terms of architecture and landscape. It would be the principal symbolic feature of Harmony, and for each of his subsequent two towns. Because it vanished soon after the Harmonists sold the town in 1815, Harmony now gives a false impression of visual austerity, suggestive of Mennonite iconoclasm, but at the time it would have been a showpiece of visual mysticism, uniting landscape, architecture, and (evidently) a good deal of theater. Rapp sited his garden just to the northeast of the town grid; it had two components, a botanical garden and “a pleasure garden called the labyrinth.”36 Their appearance can be reconstructed from travelers’ accounts and the three surviving labyrinth plans drafted, presumably, by Frederick Rapp. These gardens varied in their details, but each contained a labyrinth more than 150 feet in diameter and similar in form (fig. 86).37 These labyrinths were highly intricate: there were seven to nine concentric rings, upon which the entrance, central pavilion, and connecting paths were overlaid in cruciform fashion, so that the overall form suggests a cross set within a circle.38 The paths themselves were about three and a half feet wide, while the hedgerows

84 The portal of the Harmonist warehouse is the spirited invention of a stone carver trained according to eighteenth-century German practice, presumably Frederick Rapp. While the execution is crisp and professional, there is the unmistakable sign of the amateur designer in the handling of scale, most apparent in the clever but unhappily squashed frieze of stylized triglyphs and fleurs-de-lis.

fig .

85 The keystone over the entrance to the warehouse in Harmony shows a winged angel with an enigmatic expression and what appears to be a powdered wig. Oral tradition holds it to be an image sculpture of Divine Wisdom.

fig .

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86 Frederick Rapp designed an elaborate labyrinth for each of the Harmonists’ three towns. At the center of the Harmony labyrinth (c. 1807), he fashioned “a little temple, emblematical of Harmony.” fig .

themselves were six and a half feet. At the center was a pavilion or “temple,” which was the prize that the seeker within the labyrinth desired. The central pavilion was striking in appearance. Ostentatiously crude and built either of rough logs or boulders, it gave no hint of its finely finished interior, which seems to have been plastered and painted in the most lavish style. John Melish, who visited Harmony in 1811, gives a succinct description: “From the warehouses we went to the Labyrinth, which is a most elegant flower-garden, with various hedge-rows, disposed in such a manner as to puzzle people to get into the little temple, emblematical of Harmony, in the middle. . . . The temple is rough on the exterior, showing that, at a distance it has no allurements; but it is smooth and beautiful within, to show the beauty of harmony when once attained.”39 Rapp took palpable delight in showing the labyrinth to visitors and giving them a taste of his impish showmanship—which might well have required hidden passageways, to judge by Melish’s testimony: “Mr. Rapp abruptly left us as we entered [the Labyrinth], and we soon observed him over the hedge-rows, taking his seat before the house. I found my way with difficulty; but the doctor, whom I left on purpose, could not find it, and Mr. Rapp had to point it out to 146 chapter

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87 This design for the New Harmony labyrinth (c. 1816) was to be planted with plums, wild cherries, and other fruit trees. Rapp used it to baffle his visitors, darting through a secret passage to emerge in the center while they struggled to find their way. fig .

him. The garden and temple are emblematical. The Labyrinth represents the difficulty of arriving at Harmony.”40 Rapp’s intricate labyrinth must have been a costly and time-consuming enterprise, but he clearly regarded it as a crucial feature of Harmony and a useful instrument of moral instruction. He would build two more such labyrinths. When he moved his society to Indiana in 1815, he made one almost identical to the original, right down to the deceptively crude building at the hub (fig. 87).41 This shared with the Harmony structure the same “emblematical” meaning, a term that must come from Rapp himself, since the word is repeated in the account of Robert Dale Owen, who was present when his father bought New Harmony from Rapp: “The Labyrinth” [was] a pleasure-ground laid out near the village with some taste, and intended—so my father was told—as an emblematic representation of the life these colonists had chosen. It contained small groves and gardens, with numerous circuitous walks enclosed by high beech hedges and bordered with flowering shrubbery, but arranged with such intricacy, 147 harmony

88 The third and final Harmonist labyrinth at Economy was in a park outside the town. It seems to have been Rapp’s own personal plaything, and once he died in 1847, it was neglected and soon vanished.

fig .

that, without some Daedalus to furnish a clue, one might wander for hours and fail to reach a building erected in the centre. This was a temple of rude material, but covered with vines of the grape and convolvulus, and its interior neatly fitted up and prettily furnished. Thus George Rapp had sought to shadow forth to his followers the difficulties of attaining a state of peace and social harmony. The perplexing approach, the rough exterior of the shrine, and the elegance displayed within, were to serve as types of toils and suffering succeeded by happy repose.42 A final Harmonist labyrinth was built in Economy, shortly after the Harmonist return to Pennsylvania in 1825 (fig. 88). This too was “a curious labyrinth, out of which none but those who formed it, or are well acquainted with it, can find their way.”43 It survived Rapp’s death by two decades; when Aaron Williams wrote his history of the 148 chapter

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Harmonists in 1866, its central pavilion was still standing, but it too has vanished without a trace.44 While all three labyrinths have been lost, one of Rapp’s little “temples emblematical of Harmony” does survive. This is the so-called Grotto at Economy, which, though not located at the hub of a labyrinth, otherwise shows the same juxtaposition of a forbidding exterior and delightful interior. This is placed in the garden behind Rapp’s house, in the heavily wooded quadrant in the southwest. Its external materials are as deliberately crude as possible: irregular granite and sandstone boulders laid in mud mortar in seemingly haphazard fashion, with the tiniest of windows; a thickly thatched conical roof; and a door of white oak bark (fig. 89). But within was an exquisite gem of a space, neatly plastered and articulated into panels and a delicate cornice (fig. 90). Inscriptions on the wall set out the founding dates of the Harmony Society. Rapp’s curious thatched pile was hardly original: since the early eighteenth century, rustic garden pavilions had been a commonplace of picturesque garden design.

89 Although universally called a “grotto,” the rustic building at Economy is actually what gardeners at the time called a hermitage, or Einsiedelei, a solitary cabin in the wilderness. fig .

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fig .90 The ravishing interior of Rapp’s rustic hut contrasts intensely with its crude exterior, as was intended. It was meant to astonish the visitor and still does.

Their variety was beguiling—Gothic bowers, fermes ornées, all manner of spurious ruins—but the quirkiest was the hermitage, the crude dwelling of a hermit in the woods. (In the more extreme cases, English estate owners are known to have engaged “ornamental hermits” to occupy them, their principal duty being to look picturesque.) The German word for hermitage is Einsiedelei, which can also mean the settler’s first cabin in the wilderness, a notion that had additional resonance for Germans moving into the American frontier. Such structures were fashionable in contemporary German garden design. Designs for Einsiedeleien appeared regularly in the whimsical Ideenmagazin für Liebhaber von Gärten (1796–1811), the principal German journal for garden design.45 These were usually depicted as round pavilions of unshaped stone or unhewn logs, and topped with a kind of thatched fright wig (figs. 91, 92). Another standard German 150 chapter

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91 Frederick Rapp based the rustic hut at Economy on contemporary ideas about fashionable garden design, which were circulated via the popular Ideenmagazin für Liebhaber von Gärten. fig .

92 The thatched roof hermitage of the European picturesque garden was an affectation of the primitive and rustic, but Rapp saw that it had more pointed meaning on the American frontier.

fig .

text of the era, Christian Ludwig Stieglitz’s Encyklopädie der bürgerlichen Baukunst, codified the formal rules for such buildings: “The Einsiedeley belongs to a lonely and vaguely melancholy region. . . . It can be a simple, crude little hut, round or square, whose windows are small and whose roof is of straw . . . , and on whose walls one can trace the ravages of time and weather. It can variously take the form of a wood pile . . . or be assembled out of roots or the bark of trees can be nailed against it. It can depict a cavern or a mound, made up of earth and stone. Whether of stone or wood, it must demonstrate the greatest simplicity and neglect and no trace of artifice.”46 A thatched Einsiedelei matching this description had recently been built out of boulders in the princely garden at Hohenheim, close to Stuttgart, which was fewer than thirty miles from Iptingen. It was one of the most modern gardens in any German state, and Rapp seems to have known it (fig. 93). Certainly it resembles the one that survives at Economy, which is somewhat misleadingly known as the Grotto rather than Einsiedelei or even hermitage (a fashionable feature of English garden design that never made it to America). If Rapp’s grotto was not original, neither was its didactic labyrinth, the most cryptic and complex of all Harmonist artifacts. Labyrinths, that favorite device of courtly 151 harmony

93 The gardens at Hohenheim were created by Duke Carl Eugen of Württemberg in 1776 and were in the style of an informal English garden, including an “Einsiedeley,” a rustic hermitage. George Rapp would have known it, either through publications or a visit. fig .

gardens, were normally playful in nature, like that of the Governor’s Palace at Williamsburg. But those that Rapp built were quite serious. They recalled the ancient tradition in which the labyrinth had cosmological significance, as it did in medieval cathedrals, which in turn reflected a tradition of the greatest antiquity.47 Because of its association with fervent, purposeful searching, the labyrinth was a favorite Pietist metaphor. It had been placed in the center of Pietist thought by none other than that theorist of pansophy and universal education, Comenius. As we have seen, Comenius was an intimate of Andreae, whose Christianopolis had deeply affected him. Its influence can be glimpsed in the curious devotional tract that Comenius wrote at the outset of his career, titled The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart (Labyrint sveˇta a ráj srdce).48 It was written in 1623, just as he had been driven from his home and lost his family to disease, events that give the book its underlying tone of bleakness and melancholy. It describes the peregrinations of a pilgrim who wanders through the world and seeks enlightenment from members of every occupation, trade, and class. In its account of the various temptations and spiritual dangers he faces along the way, it was a Pietist counterpart to John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, which was written half a century later. (Rapp certainly knew The Pilgrim’s Progress, which had been translated into German in 1703, and which he offered for sale at the Harmony store).49 152 chapter

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The climax of The Labyrinth of the World comes when Comenius’s alter ego arrives inside “the temple called Christianity,” which he finds filled with a tumult of various squabbling sects. Ignoring them, he makes his way to the innermost part of the choir, which is concealed from view by an odd curtain: “The curtain had two parts. The exterior, which could be seen from the outside, was dark-colored and was called contemptus mundi, ‘contempt of the world.’ The interior was brilliant and was called amor Christi, ‘the love of Christ.’ I saw that this place was enclosed and separated from the others by these two curtains. The inner curtain was not visible from the outside. Whoever went behind this veil became immediately different from other people, full of bliss, joy, and peace.”50 Very few of those who were so ardently seeking that joy and peace would achieve it, for most of them, Comenius noted sadly, were unable to recognize it, even when they stood at its very threshold: Still standing outside and observing, I saw something strange and amazing taking place. Although many thousands of people were constantly walking around the enclosure, they did not enter it. I do not know whether they simply did not notice it or whether it seemed unattractive to them from the outside. I saw those learned in the Scriptures, as well as priests, bishops, and many others who pretended to be holy walking around it. Some even stopped to look at it, but they did not enter. This made me sad. I saw that when someone stepped closer, a ray of light flashed through a crevice or a fragrance wafted out and attracted him, so that he wanted to find its source. But even some of these people, while beginning to look for the door, turned back. The brilliance of the world dazzled them once more, and they went away again.51 Not only did Rapp take from Comenius the idea of treating the spiritual journey of life as a bewildering labyrinth—an idea that, after all, was a platitude—but the much more distinctive notion that the ultimate place of “bliss, joy, and peace” at the labyrinth’s heart was concealed within a form of outwardly unprepossessing appearance. But rather than using Comenius’s two-sided veil, a decidedly impractical form for a structure that had to stand outdoors, Rapp instead created a building with radically differing outward and inward aspects. Here he translated Comenius’s allegorical labyrinth into the language of contemporary garden design, so that it presented its didactic lesson in terms of sensory experience. Clearly, the combination of labyrinth and emblematic temple was of inordinate importance to Rapp, who built three of them in three different towns over a span of a quarter century. It was the principal object of public art in a society otherwise poor in visual imagery (if one thinks away the anomalous Virgin Sophia). It was a physical manifestation of their own experience, rendered visible in easily understood didactic symbols, summing up their arduous wanderings, both spiritual and physical, and 153 harmony

acting as a constant exhortation to persist. As the increasingly aged flock uprooted itself for the third time to come to Economy, this was a message that seemed even more necessary.52 ++++ If Rapp desired an enclave where his followers could worship in peace and plenty, Harmony more than fulfilled his expectations. Within short order, his tidy and prosperous village was thriving, and it boasted good relations with its neighbors, who viewed the Harmonists admiringly, without little of the suspicion and animosity they knew from Württemberg (although there were exceptions to the general pattern of good will). The increase in wealth was palpable. In a decade they had built more than 130 buildings, developed a vigorous industrial economy, and were selling woolen goods, grain, and wine; they had three thousand sheep and six hundred head of cattle. Rapp’s peremptory decision to pull up stakes and relocate the society in Indiana, some six hundred miles to the west, must have baffled them. In 1815, Rapp sold his buildings and land, now totaling some seven thousand acres, to a Mennonite entrepreneur named Abraham Ziegler, who sold them off in lots to fellow Mennonites. Fortunately, their quiet and unpretentious way of living has left the Harmonist landscape largely intact into the twenty-first century. With his profits, Rapp bought a tract on the Wabash River in Indiana, close to the Kentucky border. It was a perceptive and farsighted choice for an industrial concern: the Wabash River was part of the system of inland waterways on which the American economy was about to turn. Of course, the Harmonists were not an industrial concern, and religious and social issues seem to have been as much at the forefront of Rapp’s thought. The early days of town building at Harmony, in which the entire community was engaged, must have inculcated a lively sense of mission—stronger than the routine of cultivation and trade into which it had settled. Rapp may have hoped to revive that early sense of mission by removing the society and beginning anew; otherwise his move is inexplicable. The original Harmony was an ideal town, the translation of a German village into Pennsylvania, with all its buildings and industries intact and unchanged. But in making New Harmony, Rapp was now a seasoned town builder, and he profited from his experience. In its general outlines, his new town was similar to Harmony: a grid of rectangular blocks arranged to form a square, oriented to the cardinal compass points, with an open town square at the center (see fig. 76, above). But from the outset it was a much bigger town, consisting of twelve squares rather than four, which still was not enough to contain its growth. It soon lost its crisp geometric coherence as industry gathered along its outer edges. Rapp located the worst-smelling operations beyond the formal square, placing his brewery to the north (labeled on the map as Bierhaus) and his tannery (Gerberey) to the south, while the Harmonist factory was placed in the southeast corner. On Weingärtner’s map, it is touchingly labeled “Factori,” typical of the phonetic English that the Harmonists soon absorbed. 154 chapter

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The map also shows one element lacking in Harmony: Rapp built himself a splendid house—“a handsome brick building, by far the best in Indiana”—and behind it placed a formal landscaped garden.53 He may have railed against the Weltgeist (the worldly spirit) at Iptingen, but now he seem prepared to enjoy it. If his personal lifestyle was growing lavish, he continued “to dress as the meanest labourer;—except when he goes out of town.” Still, the lives his followers led now grew distinctly more rigorous.54 In 1807, during the course of a religious revival, he made three startling proclamations: he abruptly forbade the use of tobacco, which he called “den virginischen Unkraut” (the Virginian weed); he proclaimed a specific date for the Second Coming of Christ (August 1829); and he announced that sexual relations, even among married couples, was now to cease completely. It is unclear which of Rapp’s three declarations most unsettled the Harmonists. Rapp justified the new sexual order on the basis of several biblical passages (Matt. 19:10–12, 22:30; 1 Cor. 7:32–33), although he now gave them a much more extreme interpretation than the traditional Christian emphasis on the virtue of chastity. His timing was not fortuitous: the Shakers, whose insistence on celibacy scandalized contemporaries, were then in the first flush of their notoriety. In 1805, they established a settlement in Pleasant Hill, Kentucky, and Pittsburgh newspapers gave flippant accounts of its doings.55 But Rapp took them quite seriously, especially the theological grounds on which they justified their own celibacy. These were quite close to Rapp’s own views, that “God is a dual person, male and female; that Adam was a dual person, being created in God’s image” and that “the distinction of sex is eternal, inheres in the soul itself; and that no angels or spirits exist who are not male and female.”56 Besides the theological affinity, Rapp may have had practical reasons for admiring the Shaker settlements. As an instrument of social order, nothing was as effective as the dissolution of the family unit, the one alternative power structure that might rival the personal authority of a charismatic leader. Calls to celibacy are rarely greeted with rejoicing. A number of members quickly withdrew from the Society, and those who remained did not find the new dispensation easy: about two dozen children were born after the new policy went into effect.57 Meanwhile, in 1817, an influx of immigrants from Württemberg (the last, as it turned out) swelled the Harmonist ranks by about 130. Unaccustomed to the Harmonist regimen, the new members must have found it unexpectedly bracing. To assist them in their battle against temptation, Rapp and Frederick Rapp turned again to architectural means. They had originally laid out New Harmony in 1814 with single-family houses similar to those in Harmony, hoping that married couples would now live within them celibately. The drawbacks are obvious. Having adopted celibacy from the Shakers, Rapp now looked to see how they enforced it. Near New Harmony were several Shaker settlements, including West Union, Indiana, and Pleasant Hill, Kentucky, the first Shaker settlement in the Midwest (established in 1805). The Harmonists and Shakers were intensely curious about one 155 harmony

94 Frederick Rapp made his first study for a Harmonist community residence around 1819, near the same time that the nearby Shakers were experimenting with their own communal housing. The two communities were then in lively contact, and Rapp sent his granddaughter Gertrude to live for a time with the Shakers.

fig .

another, and in 1816 a delegation of Shakers, two men and two women, spent several days in New Harmony to investigate, or so Rapp surmised, the possibility of a merger of their groups. They soon caviled over theological minutiae (whether darkness was made by the devil or was the residual material of creation), but this did not stop Rapp from sending his granddaughter Gertrude to the “Shaking Quakers” at West Union, in order for her to learn English.58 One of the Shakers’ innovations was to house their members in large communal dwellings, the first of which was begun in 1815.59 This was little more than an oversize frame house, but Rapp and Frederick Rapp thought in more monumental terms. In 1819, they built the first of four large communal dormitories; others followed in 1822, 156 chapter

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1823, and 1824. An 1822 letter from Rapp describes the building of the second one (fig. 94): “52 persons are occupied building a community house, by September it will be ready. In the large brick-and-stone house there are 40 people; these all eat at one table and live together in a brotherly manner, and there are many of our people who want to live in this manner.”60 Or so they told Father Rapp. With these communal residences, the Harmonists now abolished the last vestige of distinction between communal and private life, as had the Shakers (fig. 95). The Shakers, for their part, seem to have learned from Rapp how to give monumental form to these dormitories. In 1824, Micajah Burnett built the first Shaker residence that was institutional rather than domestic in character, the Center Family Dwelling at Pleasant Hill, whose construction in limestone took a decade. It survives, as does the massive Brick Dwelling at Hancock, Massachusetts (1830) (fig. 96) and the Stone Dwelling in Enfield, New Hampshire (1841), a granite prodigy designed by Ammi B. Young. The concept of the community house may have been Shaker, but the architectural form was distinctly Moravian. As he conceived them, the Harmonist dormitories were massive monastic barracks, in which the Harmonist inhabitants ate at a single table. These were large hipped-roofed affairs, with double-loaded corridors in the center, and reminiscent of the dormitories of the Moravians at Bethlehem, whose

95 The Harmonist Community House No. 2 (1822) is one of four dormitories built at New Harmony in George Rapp’s short-lived experiment with communal living. fig .

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96 The Shakers and Harmonists developed their communal dormitories by studying one another. The first Shaker dormitory of 1815 was merely an oversized house, but in 1819, they built their first monumental dormitory. By 1830, when they built their Brick Dwelling at Hancock, Massachusetts, the Shakers had perfected the type: men and women living together yet separately, using separate stairs and sitting on opposite sides of the meeting room. fig .

Single Sisters’ House is similar in form. The connection is not fortuitous, for Rapp was on friendly terms with the Moravian establishment. He had been treated kindly by them in Philadelphia upon his arrival. Moreover, in Württemberg itself there were two important Moravian settlements, Kornthal and Wilhelmsdorf, neither of which was far removed from Rapp’s birthplace. Although they were established around the time of his emigration, his library included a published description of them, showing his continued scrutiny of other separatist societies.61 The new community residences do not seem to have been a success; perhaps they were too costly, or they gave rise to unintended social consequences. The experiment was not repeated. When the Harmonists returned to Pennsylvania, they reverted to 158 chapter

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97 At Economy, George Rapp abandoned his communal dormitories in favor of single-family houses. But the celibate Harmonists no longer had nuclear families, and the houses were used instead as group residences, with three women living above and three men below. fig .

the building of individual houses, and between 1825 and 1830, they built forty-three. But now they were no longer reserved for nuclear families. Instead, Rapp organized his followers into artificial family units, which were assigned a house. The men would live downstairs and the children (of which there were now few) would live upstairs with the women. The houses were again built on a common plan: around a central chimney were grouped a living room, a sleeping room, and a kitchen. The corner stairs were in a separate vestibule (fig. 97). Entry doors faced the kitchen garden rather than the public street. Trellises of grapes were affixed to the exteriors, and it is still a fragrant experience to awaken in one of these rooms in the summer. 159 harmony

++++ The buildings of the Harmonists are distinguished by a certain tension, which is the result of their self-conscious and improvisational way of matching means to ends. The forms they used, the way they assembled them, and the meaning they assigned them each seemed to derive from utterly different worlds—their formal motifs from court architecture, their manner of building from vernacular practice, and their symbolic meaning from German mysticism. The outcome had a strange laminated richness, as if the words of one language were combined according to the grammar of a second in order to express the ideas of a third. But even this simplifies matters, as Harmonist architecture is not a fixed and static affair; from settlement to settlement, their architectural policy changed with their social policy. This is especially true of their three major meetinghouses, each of which was entirely different in conception and form. The first was a creation of the Württemberg vernacular; the second, an utterly original object based on a dream; and the third, a creative amalgam of a Lutheran church and dissenting meetinghouse. None seems to have been entirely satisfactory, and the surviving drawings show Frederick Rapp struggling to reconcile function and image. The first meetinghouse of 1808, like most of the early buildings in Harmony, was a straightforward replication of a Württemberg type: a rectangular nave fronted by a central tower. This early cautious phase did not last long. Eleven years later, when George Rapp built the meetinghouse at New Harmony, its form came to him in a dream—a building of four equal arms and four porticos, arranged to form a cross (fig. 98). At least, this is what he told the English visitor George Flower.62 To turn his rather schematic idea into brick and timber was not easy. For one thing, the converging arms left no satisfactory location for Rapp’s pulpit. The geometric logic of the plan suggested a central position, but that would have put him in the position of presenting his back to half his congregation. If instead the pulpit was placed in one of the corners, everyone could see him, although the arrangement of the pews was cumbersome. Later in the century, the architects of Methodist churches would learn from the example of theaters to curve their seats, but this option did not occur to Frederick Rapp. He struggled with the pews, bending them and leaving one whole block of pews turned perpendicular to the pulpit, forcing its users to look over their left shoulders during services, a very unhappy solution (fig. 99). At last, unable to configure the seating to match the centralizing logic of the space, he settled for a much more conventional longitudinal arrangement, placing the pulpit at the middle of one of the sides and thereby losing most of the spatial drama of the unusual shape (fig. 100). Rapp was hardly the first minister to demand a preaching space where visibility and audibility counted for all. This was the defining characteristic of early Protestant churches, and one sees it everywhere, from the spacious interiors of Christopher Wren’s post-fire London churches to the rather austere temples protestants of the French Huguenots under Henry IV. But these were planned by supremely capable 160 chapter

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98 George Rapp’s cruciform church at New Harmony served for only six years before Robert Owen’s communitarians converted it into a theater. Forlorn and abandoned, it was photographed here shortly before its destruction in the late nineteenth century. fig .

99 George Rapp claimed that his idea for a cruciform church in New Harmony came to him in a dream. The cumbersome seating plan shows Frederick Rapp struggling to turn that symbolic image into a functional building. fig .

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100 Frederick Rapp ultimately placed a longitudinal church within a centralizing plan, solving his spatial conundrum by ignoring it. fig .

designers, and what is intriguing about Rapp’s church are the signs of palpable, visible struggle between the demands of symbolism and of function, something that an empirical builder like Frederick Rapp could resolve only by a process of trial and error. He was on much firmer ground with matters of construction. The vast space dreamt by George Rapp measured seventy feet across, and to span it, a prodigious roof truss was required, larger than anything the Harmonists had yet built. The great bulk of the truss carried the roof upward to form a two-story mansard roof, capped by an odd dome and cupola, making a lively Baroque sequence of alternating convex and concave forms. Neither a provincial survival like the first meetinghouse nor a fashionable affectation like the thatched hermitage, it was an absolutely original creation. It inverted the usual Harmonist practice, which was to conceive buildings in terms of their construction, the image being an afterthought. In this case, the building was conceived as formal image, without thought of construction, and which proved exceptionally difficult to build. (One of the most glaring defects was the purposelessness of the four arms of the church, which had no practical function and only served to fulfill George Rapp’s dream—a rather expensive gesture.) 162 chapter

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The contradiction between plan and image were even more glaring when the meetinghouse at Economy was built six years later. In this instance, the external image was deceptively traditional—a brick nave measuring ninety by sixty feet, oriented to the east and marked by a bold tower to the west (fig. 101)—but the interior was something else again. Normally, such a form was the outward expression of a certain plan type: a processional space that progressed from west to east, culminating in a central communion table and a raised pulpit to one side. Instead, the unprepared visitor would be startled to discover that the interior was oriented to the north, where a raised pulpit was centered, the benches turned to face it (fig. 102). In effect, a Puritan meetinghouse was concealed within the body of a Lutheran church.63 Frederick Rapp worked hard, in his additive way, to make the composition lucid, and he loaded the roof with the double tier of staggered dormers that is a standard

101 St. John’s Lutheran Church (Harmony Society Church) 1828–31, at 1320 Church Street, Economy. Attributed to Frederick Rapp, the building could easily have been a mid-eighteenth-century village church in Württemberg.

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102 One of three designs for the Economy church, this unsigned drawing seems to be the work of Frederick Rapp. The staggered double row of dormers shows that he was still drawing on Baroque sources even as he manipulated Palladian forms across the street in his stepfather’s house. fig .

feature of German Baroque rooflines (and a commonplace in Moravian architecture). Nonetheless, he was evidently unhappy with the results, for he let his senior carpenter, Georg Forstner, prepare an alternative design.64 It seems to have turned into a family project, for Lyans and Michael Forstner (evidently Georg’s sons) each drew his own plans. Together they demonstrate how Harmonists conceived and planned their buildings and how they decorated them, which seem to have been two entirely different operations. 164 chapter

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fig . 103 Lyans Forstner’s study of the Economy church is characteristic of Harmonist design: competently drawn and displaying a real understanding of construction, and yet peculiarly additive in its composition.

Lyans Forstner preserved the dimensions of Fredrick Rapp’s floor plan and the six-story tower, but he wrapped a festive screen of columns around the meetinghouse, creating a covered porch with a second level above. His cleverest idea was to add shallow transepts as entrances and to bring them out to the depth of the porch so that its entablature could wrap around them. In this way, the entire building was belted by a continuous entablature at the height of the first story. For the United States at this date, this was a startlingly free use of the classical orders (fig. 103). And yet for all his imaginativeness, Lyans shows the same naive builder’s conception of architecture: windows, doors, round and oval oculi, and dormers are all so many flat shapes fitted into the plane of the drawing, and he shifts from Baroque to Palladian in the same cheerful way that one might rearrange refrigerator magnets. The elder Forstner, the more seasoned builder, drew the more seasoned design. Georg’s was the only one to show the actual construction of the meetinghouse and the mighty roof truss needed to bridge the sixty-foot span (fig. 104). This was a roof truss 165 harmony

104 Georg Forstner provided the only design for the Economy church that dispensed with internal supports. This required a brawny roof truss—a liegender Dachstuhl of conventional German practice— which he awkwardly displayed at the top of his drawing. fig .

of a German type known as a liegender Dachstuhl—literally, a “reclining roof truss”—a variant of the queen post truss in which the vertical supports are slanted so that they bear on the outer plate and not the chord of the truss. (The verticals shown here in red appear to serve merely to carry the plaster ceiling below.) Forstner’s truss shows how 166 chapter

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absolutely German carpenters clung to traditional solutions, avoiding the ubiquitous kingpost truss (as at St. Peter’s in Philadelphia, a church of nearly the same dimensions), which did not maximize the open space as did the German truss with its angled supports. Presumably, the calculation of such a roof truss went beyond the training of a stonemason like Frederick Rapp; in any event, it shows that Harmonist designs were informed by the advice of builders at the earliest stages. Georg Forstner inadvertently gave us the only image of how Father Rapp liked to preach: not from a raised pulpit but sitting in an armchair in front of a large table. His drawing perfectly matches the description of Rapp by Prince Maximilian of Wied, who heard the seventy-five-year-old man preach in 1832, the year after the meetinghouse was completed: As it was Sunday, the people assembled, at nine in the morning, in the church, which had neither pulpit nor organ. The men sat on the right hand of the preacher, the women on the left; the older persons in front, the young people a little way back. Mr. Rapp’s family had the first place. When the congregation were assembled, old Mr. Rapp entered with a firm step, seated himself at a table which was on a raised platform, and gave out a hymn, which was sung in rather quick time. After a prayer delivered standing, he preached on a text from the bible, in a bold, figurative style, well suited to country people, and with very animated gesticulation. After the sermon some verses were sung, and Mr. Rapp delivered a prayer, which the congregation repeated after him, sitting. The word Amen was always repeated by the whole congregation.65 At the conclusion of the service, the women exited first, followed by the men.66 After the Harmonists had died out, their meetinghouse became at last what its image had falsely proclaimed it to be: a Lutheran church. In the early twentieth century, it was acquired by an actual Lutheran congregation and with minor adjustments became St. John’s Lutheran Church. It is satisfying to discover that its longitudinal exterior belatedly received its longitudinal plan. In all of this is a curious paradox. When Frederick Rapp built himself his first house in Harmony in 1808, he made a replica of the late Georgian urban houses he had admired in Philadelphia and Baltimore. And yet rather than becoming even more American with time, he seems to have grown more nostalgic, and his church at Economy is a kind of wistful, sentimental reverie of an eighteenth-century German village church. Nowhere else is so poignant the discontinuous nature of the Harmonist landscape, and its curious theme park character of fragments, the result of Frederick Rapp’s long act of improvisation, in which traditional building practices contended with imagery plucked from books and prints, and all of it tinged with fading memories of Württemberg. 167 harmony

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Economy We know nothing about the reaction of Rapp’s followers to his surprise decision, announced in the summer of 1824, to uproot them once again to return to Pennsylvania.1 Were they relieved to return to a more settled and familiar landscape? Or dismayed to face another decade of toil, wringing yet a third town out of the wilderness? That there was grumbling we can be certain, given how easily a charlatan like Bernhard Müller would soon pry a third of them away. Perhaps Rapp was already aware of a certain unease, which he thought the move might dispel. By now he knew that the Harmonists were never so unified and committed as when laying out a new town. At any rate, his public explanation for the move—the threat of malaria on the Wabash— can hardly be the whole story. That summer Rapp bought three thousand acres on the Ohio River, twenty-four miles downriver of Pittsburgh, and sent his advance party of builders ahead to erect the first houses. There they would be joined by the rest of the Harmonists in the summer of 1825. In the meantime, Rapp put New Harmony and its thirty thousand acres on the market. For a time, his agent tried to interest Mordecai Noah, the Jewish newspaper publisher who was looking to build a Jewish refuge in America, to be called Ararat.2 But only one buyer was ever seriously considered: Robert Owen (1771–1858), the Welsh industrialist and social reformer, and Rapp’s equal as a utopian visionary. Owen was one of the most complicated and ambitious personalities of the Industrial Revolution who saw no reason why the principles of running a rational and efficient cotton mill could not be applied to all of human society (fig. 105). He was still a young man when he purchased the Scottish mill town of New Lanark and became an international sensation when he insisted on treating his workers humanely, if paternalistically. As a model mill town, New Lanark was widely influential, but nobody thought more deeply about its lessons than Owen himself. There he confronted 169

105 Robert Owen (1771–1858), a Welsh industrialist, bought the entire town of New Harmony from George Rapp to conduct his ambitious experiment in utopian socialism. An international sensation, the community collapsed within a few years. His 1845 portrait was painted by William Henry Brooke. fig .

firsthand the wrenching social dislocations of the Industrial Revolution, which he made it his life’s mission to overcome.3 In 1813, Owen published A New View of Human Society, the first of a series of pamphlets to address the intertwined relationship between morality, education, and economics. These culminated in his “Report to the Committee for the Relief of the Manufacturing and Labouring Poor” (1817), a detailed proposal for an economically self-supporting community of 1,200 inhabitants who would work, live, and dine together in a communal setting. It was at once a comprehensive critique of the Industrial Revolution and a breathtakingly idealistic proposal to alleviate its evils.4 For Owen, the Industrial Revolution had brought about a grave social crisis. The widespread use of “mechanical power” had caused the value of manual labor to fall drastically, to the point where it was now below the subsistence level of an unskilled laborer. Society now faced three alternatives, two of which—mass starvation or the deliberate suppression of mechanical power—were inconceivable. The only viable solution was to give the working poor a place in the new industrial economy and to provide them “advantageous occupation.” But to this there was a great stumbling block: the moral squalor of the poor—the drunkenness, idleness, ignorance, and the host of other vices that afflicted them. Such vices may have been tolerated in a farmhand but not in a factory worker, who required sobriety and dependability. This Owen knew from New Lanark. The consequence was that any program for aiding the poor that did not address the moral dimension of the worker was bound to fail. 170 chapter

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Owen’s notion of morality was quite radical; he viewed it not in terms of individual character and free will—as traditional Christian morality stressed—but as the result of environmental factors, especially those active during the impressionable years of childhood. Most miscreants, he noted, “received their bad and vicious habits from their parents.”5 And until children were protected from malign parental influence, there was no hope of instilling self-discipline and moral behavior in them, and the circle could not be broken. Both the parent and the child needed to be addressed, and simultaneously, something that neither moral nor economic reforms, applied piecemeal, could do on its own. Owen found his solution in the modern mill, which by exploiting specialization and mass production was able to manufacture items far more cheaply than was possible with traditional craftsmanship. This is the greater efficiency that comes into play once a certain threshold of size is crossed, what economists refer to as the economy of scale. The same principle applied, Owen believed, to social units. Reforms that could not work at the scale of a family or group of families suddenly became effective once a certain threshold was crossed. Once there was a sufficient number of families, it would be efficient to build dormitories, dining halls, and schools for their children— who would be removed as soon as possible from their parents, who in turn would be given useful occupation. This was the central insight behind Owen’s visionary town, to which he gave the stirring and poignantly hopeful name Village of Unity and Mutual Co-operation. The village was arranged in the form that was thought to be most rational and orderly, a square. An architectural rendering demonstrated the layout (fig. 106).6 The village was to be laid out as a square of building sufficient to accommodate about 1,200 persons, and be surrounded by a quantity of land from __ to __ acres.7 Within the square are public buildings, which divide it into two parallelograms. The central building contains a public kitchen, mess-rooms, and all the accommodation necessary to œconomical and comfortable cooking and eating. To the right of this is a building of which the ground-floor will form the infant school, and the other a lecture-room and a place of worship. The building to the left contains a school for the elder children, and a committee-room on the ground floor; above, a library and a room for adults. In the vacant space within the squares, are inclosed grounds for exercise and recreation: these inclosures to have trees planted in them.8 The square itself was formed by four rows of dwellings, which in good classical practice emphasized their centers with raised pavilions, which were given special functions. Nothing on the exterior indicated that one of the four rows served as a communal residence for the children removed from their parents: 171 economy

106 Robert Owen’s “Village of Unity and Mutual Co-operation” was a deft essay in architectural propaganda. As far as the eye can see are orderly, prosperous communes and cultivated fields, an alluring vision of an England that had overcome the moral, social, and economic evils of the Industrial Revolution. fig .

It is intended that three sides of each square shall be lodging-houses for the married poor, consisting of four rooms in each. Each room to be sufficiently large to accommodate a man, his wife, and two children. The fourth side is designed for dormitories for all the children exceeding two in a family, or above three years of age. In the centre of this side of the square are apartments for those who superintend the dormitories: at one extremity of it the infirmary; and at the other, a building for the accommodation of strangers who may come from a distance to see their friends and relatives. In the centres of two sides of the squares are apartments for general superintendents, and in the third are store-rooms for all the articles required for the use of the establishment. Even the surrounding landscape was made orderly and rational. To one side of the square were placed “buildings for mechanical and manufacturing purposes, slaughter-house, &c.” while on the other were “offices for washing, bleaching, &c.” At a still greater remove were farms, orchards, and the brewery. It offered an entire economic system in miniature, as self-sufficient as a medieval monastery—or a Moravian town, for that matter, which it resembled in its foursquare order, communal buildings, and cupola-crowned hall at the center. But while Owen would use monastic language to describe the “refectories” and “cloisters” of his village, he had no use for religion, and the surprised traveler learned that the central building was not a chapel but a dining hall.9 Owen intended his Village of Unity and Mutual Co-operation to 172 chapter

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instill a moral sense through education and not religion. To avoid public outrage, he designated a “place of worship” on his drawing while consigning it to a secondary room in a schoolhouse. (And as soon as possible even this perfunctory gesture was dropped, as at New Harmony, where he promptly converted the meetinghouse to an entertainment facility.) When Owen wrote his essay in 1817, he already knew a good deal about the Harmonists. He must have read the original 1812 edition of John Melish’s Travels in the United States of America, even before the London edition of 1818, for his Village of Unity was closely modeled on Harmony. Not only was it comparable in size (1,200 residents, as opposed to the 800 of Harmony) but also in its economic structure.10 This is shown most clearly in his tabular organization of the expenses for building his ideal community, which follows in format and amount Melish’s calculation for the value of the buildings and land at Harmony.11 Village of Unity and Mutual Co-operation 1200 acres, at 30£. an acre Lodging apartments for 1,200 persons Three public buildings within the square Manufactory, slaughter-house, and washing house Furnishing 300 lodging rooms at 8£. each Furnishing kitchen, schools, and dormitories Furnishing two farming establishments, with corn mill, malting and brewing appendages Making the interior of the square and roads Stock for the farm under spade cultivation Contingencies and extras Total Harmony 9,000 acres of land, with improvements Stock of provisions for one year, for 800 persons Mills, machinery and public buildings Dwelling houses Horses, cattle, hogs and poultry 1000 sheep, one third of them merinos . . . Stock of spirits, goods, manufactures, leather, implements of husbandry &c., & c. Total

£ 36,000 £ 17,000 £ 11,000 £ 8,000 £ 2,400 £ 3,000 £ 5,000 £ 3,000 £ 4,000 £ 6,600 +____ £ 96,000

$90,000 $25,000 $21,000 $18,000 $10,000 $ 6,000 $50,000 +____ $220,000

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Owen’s debt to the Harmonists was no secret. John Minter Morgan’s Remarks on the Practicability of Mr. Robert Owen’s Plan to Improve the Condition of the Lower Classes (1819) explicitly connected the two and quoted Melish at length.12 And so, having modeled his Village of Unity on Harmony, Owen must have been startled by the sudden and unexpected opportunity to buy an entire Harmonist town. Nothing else can account for the furious haste with which he made his way to New Harmony. Owen sailed from Liverpool on October 2, 1824, and two months later was in New Harmony. He immediately entered into negotiations with Frederick Rapp (George was in Pennsylvania, laying out the site of Economy). From the outset it was clear that the Rapps were eager to sell, and matters were settled in short order. Owen would pay a purchase price of $95,000 for the entire Harmonist settlement, land and buildings, and would take possession the following summer. That Rapp would sell his celibate Utopia to a celebrated atheist should strike us as more than weird. After all, Owen was notorious for having declared that religion makes man “a weak, imbecile animal; a furious bigot and fanatic; or a miserable hypocrite.”13 Yet there is a certain kinship in their thought. Both had begun in the world of textile manufacture before turning to social reform, which they conducted with an uncompromising paternalistic will. And both, after years of supervising an ordered community, had worked their way around to the exact same conclusion: that the chief obstacle to the creation of a radical new society was the traditional family unit, which must be swept away before a comprehensive new order could be installed. At the same time, the abolition of alternative structures of authority could not help but enhance the power of the central leader. They would not be the last utopian reformers to come to this conclusion. ++++ For all his accomplishments and travel, and for all his voracious reading, Rapp was still a self-taught provincial preacher, with all the consequent weaknesses. Despite decades in the United States, he never learned to speak English, and linguistic and religious separatism reinforced one another. Rapp’s encounter with Owen, which occurred on Owen’s return in December 1825, pried open the lid of his isolation. Through Owen, Rapp was exposed to the most advanced international currents of thought about science, politics, and society. This encounter occurred just as he was determining the form of Economy, and it helps explain, at least in part, why his third essay in town building differs so strongly in texture and sensibility from its predecessors. Economy was laid out as a grid of two by four blocks, each measuring about 350 by 500 feet, aligned with the compass points, the Ohio River forming its western edge. But unlike Harmony and New Harmony, there was no central square. The loss of a central square gave Economy a much more utilitarian and industrial character than its predecessors, as its name suggests. One of the first major buildings on its grid was the brick textile mill, begun as early as the spring of 1825. This was highly functional 1 74 chapter

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107 George Rapp liked to explain the theological meaning of his gardens, pavilions, and labyrinths, but did his factory in Economy have theological significance? With its tiers of entablature upon Corinthian entablature, rising in a vast well of space, it seems to say something about the grave power of the steam engine. But roof and walls show two utterly different systems of thought: below, a neutral utilitarian grid, every opening and every interval identical; above, two tiers of dormers alternate in rhythmic counterpoint, a living fossil of the late Baroque. fig .

in design: it comprised two wings eighty feet long, one devoted to cotton and one to wool, arranged in the form of an L, so that the central steam engine could serve both.14 As Frederick Rapp first envisioned it, it might have even been more monumental, with a vast central gallery carried on tier upon tier of Corinthian columns (fig. 107). But Rapp’s increasing concern for utility does not by itself explain the rigor of the grid or the absence of a town square. Unlike his earlier towns, Economy was not geographically isolated, and a great many more travelers and visitors—and gawkers— would pass through. Harmonist life was not to be held open for the amusement of profane visitors. Instead, civic and market functions of a town square were now served by specialized buildings, with rooms for private assembly, and there was no need for a village square. It may have helped preserve the essential integrity of a city of refuge, even 175 economy

as he removed it from the wilderness back into settled society with all its temptations and distractions. It conveyed a distinct circumspection that acute visitors noticed, like the Moravian botanist Lewis David von Schweinitz, who observed a “peculiarity of the private houses . . . namely, that no doors open into the street, but the entrance is always on the side through the yard.”15 Instead of a central square, a knot of three quite different buildings marked the focal point. The purposeful deliberation over the Economy meetinghouse marks a new era in the architecture of the Harmonists. With the building of their third settlement, their narrow channel of vernacular copyism widened into a delta of experimentation. Where German typologies had previously been replicated or modified, a synthetic spirit now came into play, which married forms from across architectural history—late medieval and Baroque, Palladian and Neoclassical, even a hybrid form of clapboarded half-timber for utilitarian buildings (fig. 108). Beneath this churned a new complexity of iconography and a tenser negotiation of image and function, as new building typologies emerged, such as the Rapps’ palatial house or George’s extraordinary museum, the only American museum of note to be built as an integral part of a religious community. Rapp’s decision to build a museum devoted to natural science is so unexpected and foreign to his experience that it hints at some change in his understanding of the world around 1825. For the first time, he departed from the typology of established buildings to essay a building type in its very infancy. At this date, there was one purpose-built museum in the United States, the Peale Museum in Baltimore; Rapp’s would be the second. Even in Europe, the building type had only begun to achieve definite form.16 It is unimaginable that Rapp could have come up with the idea on his own, but he did not need to, for Robert Owen provided him an unusually intense encounter with the world of modern science. When Owen returned in December 1825 to take possession of New Harmony, he brought along on his private riverboat a coterie of scientists, artists, and educators who would form the intelligentsia of his Village of Unity. He had long been curious about science, and enlisted as many scientists as possible in his utopian undertakings. Among them were William Maclure (1763–1840), the maker of the first geological map of the United States; Thomas Say (1787–1834), the pioneering entomologist; and the French naturalist Charles Alexandre Lesueur (1778–1846). Here were all the sciences that were radically expanding knowledge of the natural world in the early nineteenth century: zoology, botany, and geology. Proud of his cerebral cargo, Owen dubbed them the “Boatload of Knowledge.”17 Owen’s scientists were better at taxonomy than sailing; they could not extract his boat when it became icebound on the Ohio River between Economy and Pittsburgh. Rapp accommodated Owen during the delay, when the two Utopians finally met and compared notes. Rapp, always a prolific borrower of ideas, would have been curious about the Boatload of Knowledge and what it might mean. He certainly suffered from no hostility to science. He had a long-standing interest in alchemy, which loomed large 176 chapter

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in German mysticism, and the notion that secret sources of knowledge in the natural world might be revealed seems to have intrigued him. His haste in enlisting new technologies for his industrial operations shows he hardly viewed the modern world with suspicion. In the end, this may be the legacy of his Wanderschaft—his years as a journeyman linen weaver traveling from town to town—which gave him a lifelong curiosity about what was being said and done elsewhere.

108 A design for a half-timbered storage room with an office component, probably by Frederick Rapp. In buildings such as this, an efficient but lightly built Fachwerk construction, Harmonist architecture achieved a maximum of utility. The draftsmanship is tidy but not impeccable, yet it succeeds in legibility (notice how the longitudinal framing members are shown with a red wash for ease of reading).

fig .

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The Boatload of Knowledge arrived at a fortuitous moment. In the autumn of 1825, the Erie Canal had just opened, connecting the Hudson River to the Great Lakes and ultimately to the Mississippi River system. The wealth of the interior of the continent would now be gathered into a great funnel, the spout of which was New York Harbor. This was a moment of national euphoria, the climax of the age of “internal improvements,” when the organized building of canals put into place for the first time a national system of transportation. Owen was traveling on just that system on his inland water route to New Harmony. Another passenger on the Boatload of Knowledge was the eccentric architect Stedman Whitwell (1784–1840), who had good reason to leave London, where his Brunswick Theater had collapsed shortly after its opening. It was Whitwell who drew the grandiloquent renderings of Owen’s “Design for a Community of 2000 Persons Founded on a Principle Commended by Plato, Lord Bacon and Sir Thomas Moore” (see fig. 2, above). The original Village of Unity and Mutual Co-operation had been completely transformed since Owen’s first visit to New Harmony. His radical economic experiment had now achieved an architectural expression that was equally radical; all of the straggling outbuildings of the original sketch were now drawn into the severe symmetry that is the aesthetic manifestation of Owen’s paternalist control. His two thousand inhabitants were to enjoy central heating, hot and cold running water, and a toilet in every apartment, unheard of luxuries in 1825. The town itself was to be run on modern industrial principles: it was crowned by four lofty ventilation shafts from which “all the smoke and vitiated air of the buildings is discharged into the atmosphere.”18 They were to be surmounted with gas burners and reflecting lenses, lighting the town at night. Owen was not the first to exploit the new science of ventilation that Priestley’s discovery of oxygen made possible, nor was he the first to make imaginative use of gas illumination, but he was certainly the first to base the architectural character of his design explicitly on these scientific innovations. His “illuminators,” as Owen called them, would be visible at night from a great distance—a beacon in the darkness, which is precisely what he wished his Utopia to be. ++++ If Owen did not learn much from the Harmonists, they learned much from him. At a memorable meeting on December 4, 1825, Owen showed Whitwell’s renderings to George Rapp. We know from his subsequent letter to Frederick that George was mightily impressed by Whitwell’s “architectural drawings, which were to embody the proportions of a Harmony” (seine Baurisse . . . die auch äußerlich die proportion einer Harmonie in sich halten sollen). The meeting was high-spirited, we know from several accounts, and it put Rapp into an unusually facetious mood. He joked that he should not look for too long at the drawings or he would be tempted to build a fourth town.

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He also said that he had once intended “to build in a very similar manner, but that he had yielded to Frederick Rapp’s advice, he being a more experienced architect.”19 The importance assigned to culture in the “Design for a Community of 2000 Persons” caught Rapp’s attention. The seed of a library and meeting rooms in the Village of Unity had grown into a bouquet of culture: a ballroom, music rooms, printing offices, even a bookbindery. And one of the four central pavilions was entirely devoted to a “Museum, with Library of Description and Reference, Rooms for preparing Specimens, &c.” The proposed museum was more than fantasy: Owen’s “Boatload of Knowledge” encapsulated the world of modern science in miniature form and would have made his museum a center of American science. Here was surely the inspiration for Rapp’s own museum: shortly after this second meeting, he paid $4,000 for “a natural history museum of curiosities.”20 And while this is only circumstantial evidence, it is worth nothing that when the Harmony Society was roiled by crisis during the mid1830s, Rapp’s impulse was to sell his museum to Owen. The modern designation of “feast hall” is a misnomer for a building that was always referred to as the “museum” in early travelers’ accounts and on the Harmonists’ architectural drawings.21 (After its collection of artifacts was dispersed, the building came to be identified by its most remarkable space.) The building was designed and built in 1827, and it is quite straightforward in plan: a central corridor runs its length and gives access to a range of four large rooms to either side, and to a stair hall at either end that gave access to a grand assembly hall above, a vast open space measuring ninety-six by fifty feet and taking up the entire second story (fig. 109). Its external form was decidedly old-fashioned, given the late date. The boxy massing, two-story mansard roof, and rhythmic grouping of windows are all characteristics of the German Baroque, although not the Baroque of the great palaces and churches (fig. 110). No one who knew Moravian architecture could fail to miss the connection. Zinzendorf’s own grandson, Lewis von Schweinitz, instantly spotted the source when he passed through Economy: the museum, he observed, was “a great building with a broken roofline, which looks very similar to the community house in Herrnhut.”22 Even closer was the meetinghouse at Herrnhaag, which likewise lifted a vaulted communal hall over an array of utilitarian rooms, served by corridors and stair halls, and crowned it with a florid mansard.23 The museum may have been retrograde in plan and elevation, but it was radical in function. An informed account in the Journal of the Senate, surely based on materials provided by Frederick Rapp, noted a bewildering array of functions: it described “a large and commodious house, built for a concert hall, of 120 feet by 54, arched underneath, in which they have a museum of natural curiosities, a collection of minerals, a mathematical school, a library and a drawing school.”24 It was as if all the far-ranging activities of Owen’s community were compressed into a single structure. It makes for an odd juxtaposition: a museum of modern science encased in the spartan Baroque of a century-old Moravian meetinghouse. 179 economy

109 Frederick Rapp’s beautifully rendered drawing for the Harmonist Museum shows the framing plan for the floor and the ambitious scissors truss that supports the elliptical ceiling. Although the exterior of the building looks back to eighteenth-century models, the interior spatial logic is modern: science and natural history below, communal fellowship above. fig .

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For all his protestations that he could not look too long at Owen’s drawings, Rapp had indeed looked carefully. Inspired by Owen, he brought together a first-rate collection. Although long dispersed, the inventory can be reconstructed from travelers’ descriptions (fig. 111). When Prince Maximilian visited in 1832, he noted that in “the lower story of this building, a cabinet of natural history [ein Naturalien-Kabinett] has been commenced, in three rooms, which already contains some very interesting specimens.”25 Eight years later, when James Silk Buckingham visited, it was already brimming over with specimens of natural history and works of art: We accordingly visited the Museum in company with Dr. Feight. The building in which this is placed is the largest in the town, being in its external dimensions about 130 feet long, by 80 feet broad [sic], and 70 feet high.26 The lower story is divided into two series of apartments, with a central passage dividing them, running down the whole length of the building; and in one of these series the present collection is placed, the other being reserved for future accumulations. In natural history there are many specimens of native quadrupeds, from the elk to the wild cat, well preserved; of birds, native and foreign, a still greater number, from the eagle to the bird of paradise; reptiles in abundance, from the alligator to the rattlesnake; fishes in great variety, and butterflies and insects in full proportion. Among the minerals are to be found almost every kind furnished by this continent; and a large piece of native gold, from the gold-region of North Carolina.27 Buckingham’s description recalls the Peale Museum, which before its move to Baltimore in 1814 had taken up the entire second story of Independence Hall in Philadelphia. George and Frederick Rapp would certainly have seen it. Just as Peale’s Wunderkabinett gathered together taxidermy, minerals, curios, and his own portraits of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, Father Rapp drew no line between natural history and art. He displayed an eclectic hodgepodge of prints and paintings, and Buckingham noted that among the religious paintings were interspersed portraits of American historical figures from Christopher Columbus to Martin van Buren (“very badly executed”), John Trumbull’s prints of the American Revolution, and “an extensive series of Chinese drawings of costume.” To his disgust, several salacious French prints were hung nearby. Rounding out the collection were a few curios of dubious authenticity, like the “antique iron-bound chest” in which William Penn allegedly stored his treaty with the Delaware Indians, and “an electrical machine.”

110 The Baroque roof of the Harmonist museum reminded German visitors of Moravian architecture, but its actual function—a compendium of knowledge and science—also reflected the emphasis placed on universal education by the great Moravian pedagogue Comenius. following spread fig .

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111 George Rapp paid $4,000 to acquire a collection for his museum at Economy, a grab bag of miscellany that included a great deal of taxidermy, “reptiles in abundance,” minerals, prints, and a “very badly executed” portrait of Martin van Buren.

fig .

Buckingham dryly noted that the whole mishmash “would be greatly improved by weeding and pruning.” In one respect, Rapp’s cultural center did not live up to expectations: the acoustical performance of the “concert hall.” Although its curvature was identical to that of the stone vaults that Frederick Rapp placed under his warehouse buildings, its elliptical vault is of plaster and lath, just like its Moravian prototype in Herrnhaag (figs. 112, 113). Low-slung and tunnel-like, it cannot have been an agreeable place to hear music (as a visit will easily verify), and within a short time the Harmonists were using it only three or four times a year for community feasts. Perhaps this explains the doors at either end that open into mid-air, suggesting galleries that were never built. The Harmonist museum is an unlikely cross-pollination of modern science and millennial religion, all the more unlikely for its anachronistic late Baroque expression. It clarifies the peculiar freedom with which Harmonists dealt with the modern world. Paradoxically, their very religious and cultural isolation, buttressed by language and social structure, along with their utter disinterest in winning converts, ensured that the outside world posed no great threat.28 On the contrary, George and Frederick Rapp sifted its innovations and ideas discerningly for anything that might help the Harmony Society prosper. Far from being a provincial backwater, the Harmonists were as sophisticated and cosmopolitan as anyone on the American frontier. The same distinctive blend of cultural conservatism and receptiveness to new impulses that makes the museum a tense and rich object is equally apparent in Rapp’s 184 chapter

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112 The vaulted feast hall above the Economy museum takes its form and layout from the Moravian meetinghouse at Herrnhaag, which was known from print sources. The iron tie rods are a later insertion. fig .

113 Nowhere in early-nineteenth-century America was there stone vaulting as exquisite and sophisticated as that of the Harmonists, and yet few visitors would ever see it. The vaulted wine cellar under the Economy storehouse is a triumph of stereotomy.

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114 George Rapp believed in the imminence of the millennium, yet his final house, a peculiar statement of the palatial and the prim, looks anything but a temporary structure.

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house and garden, just across the street. Neither traditionally German nor fashionably Neoclassical, it was a stately Palladian essay of a brick urban house with flanking dependencies (fig. 114). Like the museum, it might have been built in the middle of the preceding century. In composition and conception there was nothing that was not already present at the Harwood-Hammond House in Annapolis (1773–74), or Carter’s Grove in Virginia (1750–55), for that matter. But the result was not so much backwardness as a sense of settled respectability and ease; it was no house of a parvenu. Clearly, the fashionable villas and city houses in Philadelphia and Baltimore that greeted the Harmonists on their arrival had made a lasting impression. But Rapp’s Palladianism was essentially cosmetic. It is not so much the choice of six bays, when five would have permitted a central entrance, that is unusual; this was merely an accommodation that would give him additional space for a grand salon. It is rather the profusion of Baroque elements that were thoroughly un-Palladian. Had the house been built according to Frederick Rapp’s first study, these Baroque vestiges would have been even more dominant (fig. 115). This shows the house capped by what Germans called a French roof (französisches Dach), a roof rising in two sections, the lower one steep and the upper one shallow, and forming a jerkinhead at the ends.29 Above this was a spirited play of dormers and chimneys: the dormers perched between the axes of the windows below while the chimneys angled through the attic to emerge at the peaks of the jerkinheads. 186 chapter

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115 Frederick Rapp’s early study for the Rapp House in Economy shows a curious hybrid, English Palladian in composition but German Baroque in its details. He took special care to tuck the staircase to the side so as to keep open the passage through the hall. fig .

Such acrobatic shunting of chimney shafts was a hallmark of German workmanship in the eighteenth century, and it served the Baroque appreciation for the animated rhythm of a roofline. This was emphatically not a Palladian roof, but it was the sort of roof that the Harmonist carpenters knew how to build and that they regularly placed on their monumental structures. In fact, other than the composition of a central block and dependencies, Frederick Rapp’s study scarcely differed from the eighteenth-century palace that he had drawn in a careful perspective study (fig. 116). There were the same deep-splayed jambs within and simple window surrounds without, and the same absence of a classical frontispiece around the entrance. Oddest of all was the planning. Although the house was ostensibly organized around its central hall, its most dramatic vista was its cross axis, the monumental passage that ran without interruption through the precisely aligned doors of all six front rooms and the three halls between them (fig. 117). This was that cardinal feature of Baroque planning, the enfilade. Such an alignment of rooms on an axis served the processional hierarchy of a palace, which in a sense the Rapp House was. But it also suggested that Frederick Rapp, even after two decades of study and practice in the United States, still could not shake off his Baroque habits of mind. All these inconsistencies testify to his intensive, gregarious, and yet utterly unsystematic experience of 187 economy

fig . 116 A rare perspective study among the Harmonist drawings, likely by Frederick Rapp.

architecture. He may have been the chief Harmonist architect, but his primary responsibilities were administrative; he designed only intermittently and as a sideline. And so we do not see the sequential ripening and exploration of ideas over time that we would expect from a man who devoted himself wholeheartedly to architecture. Instead, we see haphazard borrowing and mixing of motifs, a design method of trial and error, and the recurrence of a few favorite forms—all habits of the amateur. The house was considerably modified in execution. The upper story was lopped off, and pedimented temple fronts were added to the entrances. A quasi-independent house for Frederick Rapp was attached at its northwest corner, at the rear, giving him immediate access to the museum and Harmonist stores (fig. 118). In its ultimate form, the house evoked the affluence and ease of a merchant-banker, not the self-denying austerity of a pilgrim. This was not lost on visitors: even before its completion, the German Duke Bernhard of Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach noted that it “speaks rather freely against the equality he preaches to his people.”30 It was as if Rapp had now decided to enjoy the pleasures of the Weltgeist, the worldly spirit, that he had condemned in Germany. One of those worldly pleasures was a courtly garden, and he built one behind his house in the most lavish style (fig. 119). The garden must have been crucial to Rapp’s vision of Economy, for he began it immediately after arriving in the new town. It was already well under way when he wrote to Frederick on December 1, 1824: “I am letting the earth be brought into my garden for two hills, one for a vineyard and the other for a pile of stones in the midst 188 chapter

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117 The Baroque enfilade at the heart of the Rapp House, door upon door in axial sequence, evokes the pomp of processional movement, although in this instance it leads to no great room of state. fig .

of a small forest, the other two quarters are reserved for fruit bearing trees and flower beds, and the middle point is measured off for a fountain and lake.”31 This terse account is Rapp’s only recorded statement about his garden, and it says nothing, alas, about its meaning or symbolism. It merely confirms that he established its basic organization as soon as he arrived in Economy. It would consist of four quadrants 150 feet square and of radically different character, placed according to practical rather than cosmological considerations (fig. 120).32 The heartier elements were at the west, fronting the Ohio 189 economy

fig . 118 George Rapp’s house was strategically located: stepson Frederick’s house was connected to the rear, his church was across the street, and close by to the left was the Harmonist museum and feast hall. And behind the house, extending all the way down to the banks of the Ohio River, was his private courtly garden.

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119 The four quadrants of the garden at Economy restate the foursquare rectilinearity of the Harmonist town. Whether or not Rapp intended them to represent the four continents is unclear, but he certainly envisioned the hermitage in the wilderness as an emblem of his society. fig .

120 Rapp organized his garden into four quadrants: a flower garden, a vineyard, an orchard, and a forest. His rustic hermitage was in the forest, placed so as to form a contrasting pendant to the elegant pavilion in the center. fig .

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River, the vineyard in the northwest and the “small forest” in the southwest. The more refined features were placed to the east, abutting Rapp’s house: the flower garden to the southeast and orchard to the northeast (fig. 121). Here he could enjoy its “peaches, plums, apples on trellises, numerous varieties of pears, figs, and cherries, with raspberries in the greatest profusion.”33 As in almost everything that the Harmonists built, several different ideas contended in Rapp’s garden.34 On one hand, it was a formally landscaped garden of the sort that befitted a princely estate. At the center and forming the focal point was a pond and fountain, fed by underground pipes that connected to springs half a mile beyond the town. Here, beneath a stone tempietto designed by Frederick Rapp (fig. 122), was placed a wooden statue of Harmony, carved by the Philadelphia sculptor William Rush. Rapp’s account mentions only one structure—the “pile of stones” that would become a thatched hermitage—but others followed; within two years there was a stately array of pavilions, greenhouses, and a bandstand. In every respect, it was a princely garden, not unlike that at Hohenheim, a connection that was not lost on an informed visitor such as Friedrich List.35 It must have been flattering to Rapp when an even more distinguished visitor, Duke Bernhard of Sachsen-WeimarEisenach, expressed his admiration during his visit in the spring of 1826.36 On the other hand, the garden was no diminutive Versailles. It was an allegorical object, which took the elements of a formal princely garden and configured them into a statement of Harmonist belief. The schematic division into four quadrants is the same foursquare rectilinear logic that governs all cities of refuge. And Rapp could have effortlessly read it in iconographic terms; four apostles, four elements, four continents, the four beasts of the Apocalypse of the book of Revelation—all would have been instantly accessible to the self-taught preacher whose mind swirled with these symbols, even when sleeping, as when he dreamt the motif of the four portals of the New Harmony meetinghouse. Only in one of the four quadrants does the allegorical meaning seem evident. The “small forest” and thatched hermitage reprises the same sequence noted by Robert Dale Owen at the New Harmony labyrinth: “the perplexing approach, the rough exterior of the shrine, and the elegance displayed within.” And the Grotto (as the hermitage is generally known) is certainly elegant within, a lustrous performance of pilasters, a delicate cornice, and a low dome, painted in soft blues and whites. Visitors who enter the thatched heap of unshaped boulders and find this Neoclassical gem are still amazed, as Rapp intended them to be, and he called attention to their amazement by inscribing on its walls “The Traveller’s Disappointment.” Here his shaky command of the English language betrayed him. The word “disappointment” is only an imperfect synonym for the German word Entäuschung, which literally means to be freed from deception.37 Once more, Rapp showed that the Harmonist way of self-denial and submission was deceptive, and that it contained joys inexpressible to those who could not see beyond its forbidding cloak. 193 economy

121 At the center of the Economy garden was the statue Harmony, carved by William Rush, Philadelphia’s celebrated sculptor. The Neoclassical tempietto was the most modern object in Economy’s eclectic array of Baroque, Palladian, and late medieval forms.

fig .

++++ Lewis David von Schweinitz visited Economy in 1831 and found it prosperous and complete, its eight hundred inhabitants dwelling companionably in 150 neat, twostory houses, all “exactly alike.” This was the zenith of the Harmonist experiment, and the unraveling began almost immediately. For three decades George Rapp had cloistered his congregation behind the barriers of language and faith, but now he himself would admit its most destructive visitor. For all his suspicion and wariness, he seems to have had no natural defenses against his own alter ego, a fellow mystic whose charisma rivaled his own. On September 24, 1829, there arrived in Economy an “apostolic epistle” from Johann Georg Göntgen, the chief librarian of the library in Frankfurt-am-Main.38 Göntgen was the agent of one Count Leon, a German mystic who held ideas astonishingly similar to Rapp’s. He believed that the millennium was at hand, that Europe was ruled by the Antichrist, and that Christ would return in North America. He seemed to know a good deal about the Harmonists and how to flatter Rapp; the epistle spoke of Rapp’s dream of a cruciform church being “an omen from God”; likewise his choice of 194 chapter

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122 Frederick Rapp’s drawing of the central pavilion of the Economy garden shows a six-sided temple with a dome (omitted in construction). Note the separate scales for plan and elevation, an artifact of his training as a stone mason: he is thinking in terms of the templates to cut each block rather than the unified scale of the composition.

fig .

a “golden rose” as his symbol, “according to the prophet Micah.”39 All this was congenial to Rapp, who took the letter as a miraculous sign, promptly reading it to his congregation. He charged Frederick with writing to Göntgen in order to establish contact with the mysterious Count Leon. For two years, no response came. Rapp could not have known that Count Leon had been sending similar letters to all the ruling houses of Europe—and to the pope, for good measure—or that he had been stirring up trouble since at least 1810, when he wrote to Napoleon to prophesy the end of French rule (Napoleon immediately put a price on his head). Count Leon was not his real name, of course: he was born Bernhard Müller in 1788, although throughout his life he flaunted a picturesque array of pseudonyms—Archduke Maximilian von Este, the Duke of Jerusalem, and then, simply Proli. Whether he was delusional or merely a charlatan remains unclear, but he had an uncommon gift for acquiring followers, 195 economy

In October 1831, Rapp finally received his reply. Count Leon, now calling himself the “Lion of Judah,” had just arrived in New York City, along with forty-six followers, and intended to come directly to Economy. In fact, he had nowhere else to go, having at last been exiled from Germany. Rapp welcomed the count on October 18 with elaborate courtesy, but he hedged his bets, waiting to see what sort of man the visitor would prove to be. But he hesitated too long, and although by the end of the year he and Frederick decided that the count was a fraud, the damage was done; a good many Harmonists had been won over by the count’s promise of a more comfortable life, more fashionable clothing, and above all an end to celibacy. In January 1832, one-third of Rapp’s followers formally pledged themselves to the count, including some who were irreplaceable, such as their physician, Johann Christian Müller. Rapp realized he had to make the best of a bad situation, and bribe the dissidents to leave, which meant returning to them their share of common Harmonist property. The agreement was signed on March 6, awarding Count Leon and his 176 seceding members a total of $105,000. They immediately removed themselves and bought eight hundred acres of farmland some ten miles from Economy, near the modern town of Monaca, where they established the “New Philadelphia Society.” It did not flourish. Count Leon soon ran through his cash, squandering it on alchemical experiments and the building of an oven to transmute rock into gold. A year later, his settlement disintegrated, and his followers dispersed. Some made their way to Louisiana, others to Missouri, and in 1834, Leon himself, in the contemptuous epitaph of Friedrich Engels, “died in Texas as a tramp.”40 But the Harmonists themselves were also wounded, and with the departure of Count Leon’s followers, their decline commenced. Frederick Rapp also died in 1834, depriving the Harmonists of their principal executive in all worldly matters. At once, the vitality of the Harmonists was sapped, and although George Rapp would live another thirteen years, the subsequent history of the society is that of a prolonged holding action. Just one year after Frederick’s death, Rapp tried to sell the Harmonist museum to Robert Owen, a sign of his shrinking horizons. When George Rapp died in 1847, only 288 adult members were left. The childless Harmonists, their population steadily diminishing, hung on for another half century. They were now led by a board of nine elders, presided over by Romelius Baker, Rapp’s former business executive (fig. 123). A gifted administrator, Baker was no charismatic leader. All he could do was to brake the slow-motion liquidation. One by one he shut down the Harmonist industries, first the silk mill (1852), then the cotton factory (1858) and distillery (1862). The aging membership, too old for work, turned to hired labor; by 1873, the cutlery factory employed two hundred Chinese workers. Their profits were invested in railway stock and coal mines, as the Harmony Society collectively moved into the retirement phase of its existence. Baker was responsible for the last physical monument of the Harmonists, their poignant cemetery at Harmony, where some one hundred of George Rapp’s followers 196 chapter

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123 The house of Romelius Baker at Economy. Baker was the last of the highly cultured Harmonists, and after his death in 1868, the society lost much of its remaining vitality. fig .

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124 The sandstone wall of the Harmonists’ cemetery at Harmony is a feat of stereotomy, the art of complex three-dimensional stone cutting. fig .

were buried in unmarked graves, including Rapp’s son Johannes. Unlike the Moravians, whom he otherwise admired, Rapp did not believe in tombstones, which he considered a waste of effort with the millennium at hand. But when Baker realized that the Harmonists faced extinction and that these graves would soon be forgotten, he saw that they were surrounded with a monumental wall of finely cut sandstone, precisely fitted to the sloping hillside site (fig. 124). Yet Baker clearly did not want the cemetery to suggest that the Harmonists had given up their belief in an imminent millennium. At the center of the wall, he placed a round-arched portal with a massive double-leaf stone door, a single slab of sandstone rotating about an iron pintle (fig. 125). There is nothing like it in all of millennialist architecture, a portal facing due east, toward the rising sun, for the future use of its inhabitants, a turnstile to the resurrection. Even today, 150 years later, the door can be swung about by the touch of hand—a final tribute to Frederick Rapp and the Harmonist tradition of exquisite stone cutting. The cemetery was the last original creation of Harmonist architecture. Baker died in 1868, just as it was being built, and he was succeeded by Jacob Henrici, a caretaker who worked to hold the dwindling ranks together. The society was a geriatric shipwreck—a handful of elderly Harmonists guiding a small population of converts, either adopted orphans or relatives of the original Harmonists. It was obvious to all that the Harmony Society would end as a tontine and that its fortune would fall to the last living survivor. That survivor was John Duss (1860–1951), and out of all the operators the Harmonists had ever encountered he was by far the nimblest (fig. 126). Duss was a curious 198 chapter

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125 The curious portal of the Harmonist cemetery, a revolving door made of a monolithic sandstone block—an east-facing turnstile for the bodily resurrection, in the form of the two stone tablets of Moses. fig .

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126 By 1900, the last living member of the Harmony Society was John S. Duss, dressed here in the festive bandleader’s uniform he affected. fig .

figure. His parents had emigrated from Württemberg to join the separatist community in Zoar, Ohio. His father died of wounds received at Gettysburg, and his mother came to Economy to work as a housekeeper. Duss was raised and educated by the Harmonists, and he became perfectly bilingual. He left in 1879 for a brief try at college and a stint at teaching music in Kansas. He spent another five years in Nebraska, where he raised “fancy cattle.” In 1888, he returned to Economy, ostensibly to serve as music teacher, although surely with other goals in sight. Two years later, he formally joined the Harmony Society and soon became Henrici’s most influential adviser on business affairs. Duss was just thirty-three when he succeeded Henrici as senior trustee, and in order to inherit the entirety of the Harmonist holdings, all he had to do was to wait. But he preferred not to wait. He mortgaged valuable Harmonist land to give himself a stock of ready cash. Shortly after Henrici’s death in 1892, Duss had begun quietly to pay Harmonists to leave the society if they agreed to renounce all future claims. For this, each received $2,500 to $5,000, figures that shocked the board of elders (in its

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heyday, the society gave only $50 to members who resigned).41 In all, seventeen members were bought out in this way. Duss’s feelings toward the Harmony Society were like those of a “fancy cattle” dealer for a beloved piece of livestock: fondness and gratitude, but no sentimentality whatsoever when it was time to march it to the shambles. In April 1894, he sold the town of Economy and other land held by the society to the Union Company—a newly formed corporation of which he was the principal shareholder.42 In this way, he protected himself against litigation from former society members or their heirs. His next move was to take the town of Economy itself and monetize it—to use modern business slang—replacing the quaint settlement with a new modern town, with generous building lots, a modern water supply, and streets sixty feet wide (“the brag feature,” as Duss termed it).43 These highhanded acts convinced the last remaining eight members that Duss had for all intents and purposes dissolved the Harmony Society; if so, they wanted their fair share. They brought suit in a protracted case that in 1902 wended its way to the United States Supreme Court. There Duss’s attorneys argued disingenuously that no such dissolution had taken place, that the Harmony Society had not abandoned the purpose for which it was founded, that the organization still continued as it had. The Court sided with Duss, despite a poignant dissent by the chief justice.44 Given a free hand, Duss sold the remaining holdings and set about waiting for his ancient opponents to die. It did not take long. In 1905, with virtually no one left to protest, he quietly dissolved the society. The coda to the story is comical. Duss lost interest in developing Economy as a modern real estate venture, a fortunate turn of events that permitted the state of Pennsylvania to acquire the historic core of the town.45 Instead, he set about making himself America’s most famous bandleader, who would rival John Philip Sousa. He celebrated his Supreme Court victory by leasing Madison Square Garden in the spring of 1903, transforming its great hall into a tableau of Venice, complete with canals, moving gondolas, and “a pillared platform supporting the busts of world-famous musicians and composers.”46 Such was the ignominious fulfillment of Rapp’s millennial vision—not angelic trumpets but Duss conducting Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” in front of pasteboard scenery, exactly one century after the Harmonists first landed in America.47

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Conclusion But Rapp is the reverse of zealous matrons, Who favour, malgré Malthus, generation Professors of that genial art, and patrons Of all the modest part of propagation; Which after all at such a desperate rate runs, That half its produce tends to emigration, That sad result of passions and potatoes Two weeds which pose our economic Catos. lord byron, don juan

George Rapp guaranteed the extinction of the Harmony Society the moment he pledged it to celibacy. And yet half a century after his death, his strict tenets still acted to hold his society together, long after the force of his personal charisma was forgotten. Societies that demand much from their members seem to flourish more than those that demand little. So the experience of Robert Owen’s New Harmony suggests. His open, tolerant, undemanding society inherited a well-built and fully intact town, equipped with factories and situated on profitable agricultural land, and within a decade it sputtered to a halt. Owen’s New Harmony was the very opposite of the Harmonists: rich in intellect but starved in workers and craftsmen. It was as if a prosperous farm village had been turned over to the inhabitants of a college town to manage. In short order, Owen had 203

become a figure of national ridicule. He took his elaborate, six-foot model of New Harmony on a national tour from New York to Washington, where he presented it to John Quincy Adams, but he seemed to have encountered as many scoffers as admirers. In Philadelphia, crowds pressed too tightly around the model for anyone to see it, and Owen tried in vain to control the crowd, to the amusement of the Philadelphia Gazette: “The great man who is going to control ‘circumstances’ so as to produce an entire new state of society, and even a new state of human nature, could not disperse a paltry crowd of some fifty or sixty persons.”1 By the spring of 1827, the town’s managers were backpedaling almost comically: New Harmony was never intended as “the scite [sic] of a future community; but only a place of preparation . . . a ‘Half way house’ ” out of which other communities would emerge.2 Emigrants were asked to stay away, as “our Houses are much too crowded.” When Prince Maximilian of Wied visited in 1832, having just seen thriving Economy, he observed drily that New Harmony had “fallen into decay” (fig. 127).3 Others were more sarcastic, and one wag proposed an epitaph for the hapless dreamer: “Robert Owen, the Prince of Parallelograms, the Architect of Aerial Castles, and the Hero of Good Intentions.”4 Owen seems to have learned nothing from the failure of New Harmony, other than to suspect that he had not sufficiently appealed to wealthy philanthropists. When he republished his gorgeous vision of New Harmony in 1838 (fig. 128), he removed

127 When Prince Maximilian zu Wied visited New Harmony in 1832, it had been in the possession of Robert Owen for only seven years. But already the landscape was parched and untended, as Karl Bodmer’s watercolor shows, and George Rapp’s proud church now sat in the midst of a cow pen. fig .

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the caption mentioning Plato, Lord Bacon, and Sir Thomas More. It was now dedicated to the social elite of England—landowners, capitalists, and other “industrious Wealth Producers”—with the ominous hint that his form of community represented “the only means whereby their Estates can be rendered permanently productive, and their Rents secure.”5 He shifted his focus to England, where he founded another Harmony in rural Hampshire in 1839. Like its prototype, it too foundered; all that could be built was a rather barnlike community residence, a far cry from the promise of the stunning aerial perspective. In a final indignity, much of the funding for this second Harmony was borrowed from the engraver who made the print, Frederick Bate, who was never repaid and who would die in poverty.6 And throughout it all, George Rapp’s Economy blossomed. Why one town should falter and the other prosper when their conditions were virtually identical perplexed James Silk Buckingham, who visited both New Harmony and Economy in 1840. Buckingham was the most cosmopolitan of travelers—he had been a prisoner of the French in Spain, traveled among Arab tribes, and published a newspaper in India—and he had an eye for the forces that bind and motivate a culture. Or, in the case of Owen’s New Harmony, did not. For Buckingham, the community’s failure was unavoidable, since Owen gave them no reason to prefer work to idleness. Because Owen thought a very small amount of labour was sufficient to produce all that could be necessary for a Co-operative community, he considered that those only needed to work, who chose so to do, and those who preferred being idle, might be allowed to follow the bent of their own inclinations. It was accordingly soon found that the idlers were very many, while the workers were very few; there was neither production nor accumulation to be expected under such a state of things. As amusement, however, had its full share of attention though labour received so little and as religion had no share at all the fine church built by the community of Mr. Rapp, was speedily converted into a temple of entertainment; and concerts, balls, lectures, and debates, succeeded each other, almost every day. Magnificent plans were formed for buildings and improvements; but the sources of wealth being entirely neglected, the means of executing these plans could not be provided. The authority of the Founder was no greater than that of any other man; and diversities of opinions led to disunion, so that the community gradually dispersed, the property became less and less valuable, and the Society was ultimately broken up entirely when Mr. Owen returned to Europe.7 In other words, the “prince of parallelograms” had learned everything about the working of the Harmonist communities—their agriculture, their industry, their architecture—except the religious sense of mission that held them together. And without 205 conclusion

that indispensable core, he was only building a paper Utopia, scarcely more real than Thomas More’s. Because he understood so clearly why Owen’s ideal community failed, Buckingham ought to have been permanently inoculated against Utopianism. On the contrary, the encounter with a failed Utopia often inspires the viewer to draft a new and improved model. No sooner did Buckingham publish his description of New Harmony than he set about designing his own ideal society, which appeared in 1849 as National Evils and Practical Remedies, with the Plan of a Model Town. His “practical remedy” was to build a town for ten thousand residents on an obsessively square plan, consisting of tier upon tier of concentric rows of houses, progressing up the social ladder from workers’ houses at the periphery to twenty-four stately mansions at the center, reserved—as he quaintly put it—for “members of the Government and the more opulent capitalists.” Moralizing street names, like his Avenue of Justice or Avenue of Fortitude, would underscore the seriousness of the whole enterprise. His was an extremely learned Utopia, a painstaking synthesis of every proposal from those of Owen and Fourier back to Thomas More and Campanella’s Civitas solis.8 In most respects it was derivative, except for the curious way in which the city of refuge was adapted to the Industrial Revolution. Buckingham blithely explains that the aims of his architectural program are to unite the greatest degree of order, symmetry, space, and healthfulness, in the largest supply of air and light, and in the most perfect system of drainage, with the comfort and convenience of all classes; the due proportion of accommodation to the probable numbers and circumstances of various ranks; ready accessibility to all parts of the town, under continuous shelter from sun and rain, when necessary; with the disposition of the public buildings in such localities as to make them easy of approach from all quarters, and surrounded with space for numerous avenues of entrance and exit. And, in addition to all these, a large intermixture of grass lawn, garden ground, and flowers, and an abundant supply of water—the whole to be united with as much elegance and economy as may be found practicable.9

128 In 1838, Robert Owen republished his visionary rendering of New Harmony, although he was careful to eliminate any mention of that failed town, calling it merely A Bird’s Eye View of a Community, as Proposed by Robert Owen Esq. He made one other change: he eliminated any hint of the monasticism that marked the original 1825 perspective, with its play of gables and buttresses, in favor of a decidedly Moorish character, drawn from the contemporary Brighton Pavilion. Perhaps, in this second go-round, he thought to temper morality with fashionability. previous spread fig .

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fig . 129 Two centuries after Christianopolis, James Silk Buckingham borrowed its geometry but imbued it with a mixture of prudishness and progress appropriate to the Victorian era. Every building in the squaremile town was to be built of iron, and the arcades were to be roofed in glass; at the same time, Buckingham banished all “beer-shops, gin-palaces, dram-shops, cigar divans, pawnbrokers, gambling-houses, or brothels.”

Although he nowhere mentions Johann Valentin Andreae, Buckingham’s model town is almost indistinguishable from Christianopolis, aside from the absence of polygonal bastions (fig. 129). There is the same arrangement of concentric squares, representing rows of houses that grow in size as they approach the center; the same cruciform arrangement of avenues converging at a central square; even the same tower at the epicenter, likewise one hundred feet in diameter, although Buckingham’s tower culminated in “an Electric Light for lighting the whole Town” (fig. 130).10 Also reminiscent of Christianopolis is the same receptivity to science and the modern world: just as Andreae celebrated the discoveries of Tycho Brahe, Buckingham welcomed the fruits of the Industrial Revolution. He placed atop his tower that newly invented marvel, the electric light (the pre-Edison version). And he insisted that that every building in his town be made of iron, an idea of spectacular modernity in 1849— the same year that James Bogardus would build the first all-iron building in New York. He even proposed that the buildings be given modern flat roofs, something he had come to admire during his travels in the East.11 There is even the overweening tone of moralism so typical of Andreae, as in Buckingham’s insistence that every feature of his town be given a didactic name and that no taverns and brothels would be tolerated. 209 conclusion

130 Buckingham apologized for “omitting some portions” of his ideal town in his fanciful bird’s-eye view. He compressed its architecture, he explained, in order to show as much as possible of its surrounding landscape, including the nearby river and somewhat alarming array of suburban amenities: “the Cemetery, a Manufactory, Abbatoirs, Public Gardens.” fig .

Besides Christianopolis, Buckingham also seems to have been conversant with Dürer’s ideal city. Like Dürer, he intended his town for ten thousand inhabitants. And he too provided the same encyclopedic inventory of building types: three tiers of houses (for the working classes, superintendents, and professionals), workshops, stores, restaurants, grammar schools, infant schools “for children of both sexes, from three to five years of age,” public baths with reading rooms above, a museum and gallery of fine arts, a combined lecture/music hall, a university, and an array of civic buildings including the post office, courts, and five churches. Buckingham hardly needed direct knowledge of these German sources, which were in the air, so speak. Through Rapp and others they were now part and parcel of utopian thought, such as the sense that reassuringly round numbers indicated rationality (Buckingham’s town measured a mile to a side; there were exactly one thousand houses for laborers, and so forth). Similar was the conviction that logical abstract geometry would improve moral conduct: “From the entire absence of all wynds, courts, and blind alleys, or culs-de-sac, there would be no secret and obscure haunts for the retirement of the filthy and the immoral from the public eye, and for the indulgence of that morose defiance of public decency which such secret haunts generate in their inhabitants.”12 Here was the same utilitarian approach to planning that char210 chapter

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acterizes the panopticon prisons and workhouses pioneered by Jeremy Bentham, the essential utilitarian. This was no longer the ideal of the New Jerusalem and the belief in the godliness of the right angle, but was the residue of that fascination with perfect geometry once it had been leached of all theological significance and had become a mere system of crowd control. Without the religious impulse to bind them together, the various components of the city of refuge dispersed; Buckingham seized on its geometry, while the French reformer Charles Fourier saw the possibilities of its social engineering. He took the radical equality of Pietism, removed its religious content, and rephrased the sanctuary town as one vast building—the Phalanstère, perhaps the world’s first megastructure (fig. 131). Fourier seems to have believed that the task of reordering society was much like the planning of an intelligently designed house: each function and activity was to be given its own space. The outer wings were reserved for noisy activities, with nurseries and workshops at one end and a “caravansary” for visitors at the other (so that they would not intrude on the private lives of the families).13 At the center were the functions requiring dignified silence, such as the library and public lecture rooms, which were crowned by a tower serving as observatory and telegraph station. The oddest feature of the Phalanstère was the building on which Fourier modeled his socialist Utopia: the royal palace at Versailles. With it he made the radical architectural statement that the only palaces to be built in the future were palaces for the people—in this case, some four hundred families. So the city of refuge was reconfigured for a secular age.14 ++++ The cities of refuge examined in this book were sanctuaries from the modern world, but, in one of those odd turns that are the tendons of history, they now pivoted to become a source and stimulus for that world. Because of their compact nature, physical isolation, and their social homogeneity, they had the purity of a control group in a laboratory experiment. And those variables that they were testing were precisely the ones that concerned the emerging modern world, such as the nature of labor, the ownership of property and the means of production, and the housing of industrial workers. The lessons of these societies of five hundred to a thousand members could be applied to much larger communities, or to countries themselves. And in this way these frail and marginal experiments, although they struggled at the fringe of the Western world, were at the very hub of modernity. One keen observer perceived this. In 1825, there arrived in the United States a thirty-six-year-old German economist named Friedrich List, a reluctant immigrant who had chosen exile over prison. List had been a professor in Tübingen and a member of the Landtag in Württemberg and had been forced to relinquish each in turn because of his agitation for liberal causes. Finally, after publishing a pamphlet criticizing Württemberg’s oppressive bureaucracy, List was sentenced to ten months in prison. He 211 conclusion

131 Charles Fourier expressed the city of refuge in terms of a single vast and intricate building. This was the Phalanstère, which combined the French words for “phalanx” (the Greek term for a compact fighting unit) and “monastery,” and which was to house exactly 1,620 members (two of each of the 810 personality types he claimed to have identified). Fourier’s central idea was “passional attraction,” the web of desires and affections that bind human society, much as gravity draws physical objects together. He believed in the radical equality of the sexes and was an early, and hopeful, proponent of free love. It marks the final emancipation of the city of refuge from its biblical origins.

fig .

fled, taking refuge in France and then England. He returned to serve his sentence but after five months was released on the provision that he emigrate to the United States. List naturally made his way to Pennsylvania, the center of German immigration to America. He was already knowledgeable about that exodus: one of his duties as a civil servant in Württemberg had been to survey would-be émigrés to the United States in order to understand their motives for leaving (and if possible to discourage them). In the fall of 1825, in the course of investigating possible sites for a family farm, he visited both Harmony and Economy. Like all travelers, he noted the speed of Harmonist construction, which he observed in fledgling Economy: “Although the colony began but a year ago, the people already live quite well and neatly. Just fifteen months ago, this was still a forest; today, happy and contented faces. There stand about one hundred houses, a large factory building with two wings, a church, an inn, a splendid garden several acres in size with a vineyard, all kinds of flowers, oranges, lemons, figs, cotton, tobacco; one walks under grape arbors.”15 Such inventories were part of conventional travel literature, but List was no conventional traveler. Unlike Melish, Buckingham, Owen, Martineau, and virtually every other learned visitor to the Harmonists, Friedrich List was a fellow Swabian. His native Reutlingen was only forty miles from Rapp’s Iptingen, and they would have spoken the 212 chapter

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exact same dialect. He could speak directly with Rapp, and indeed with every Harmonist he met, rather than having his information restricted to what Frederick Rapp chose to tell him. And indeed, from the moment of his arrival, List was struck by the strange sense of being in a facsimile of Swabia, where even the evening bell rang according to Swabian practice (“Es läutet Abend, wie im heimlichen Schwabenland”).16 He also heard and understood the Swabian barnyard expletives that Rapp hurled at his trembling followers—“ox, ass, bull, sheep”—during his daily inspection tour.17 But it was not merely that List could understand what the Harmonists told him: he knew what questions to ask. He was already an economist of uncommon subtlety and one of Europe’s leading thinkers on the question of free trade and industrial development. An ardent follower of Adam Smith, whose book The Wealth of Nations (1776) remains the most brilliant analysis of the free enterprise system, List was critical of Smith in one crucial respect. Smith thought abstractly in terms of individuals and markets, not so much in terms of countries. This was only natural in a politically unified country like Great Britain that was dependent on international trade for its prosperity. But List had grown up in a politically fragmented and industrially backward Germany. For him, the demands of free trade needed to be weighed against those of national self-interest, something that had not concerned Smith.18 Before he was sent into exile, he had become convinced that Germany could only compete against industrialized Britain if its embryonic industries were given time to grow behind the wall of a protective tariff. He proposed the abolition of all internal tariffs between the German-speaking states and a comprehensive external tariff. This was a subversive idea at a time when each of the German states was jealously guarding its own prerogatives, and it was for this reason that List lost his Tübingen professorship.19 Upon his arrival, he met the American politician most congenial to his views, Henry Clay, the visionary politician responsible for the so-called American System. This was the policy of instituting protective tariffs that would shield America’s newly founded industries until they were vigorous enough to compete directly with Britain. The two men would have agreed that, as List later wrote, “the result of a general free trade would not be a universal republic, but, on the contrary, a universal subjection of the less advanced nations to the predominant manufacturing, commercial and naval power.”20 Of course, Economy did not have a protective tariff, but its economic selfsufficiency and industrial acumen made it a kind of nation in miniature, unified by language and culture, in which industrial and economic policies could be tested in something like laboratory conditions. To List, Economy seemed a metaphor for Germany, a community that had prospered behind its geographic and cultural barriers (rather than the barrier of a protective tariff), to achieve economic self-sufficiency. There was no more vivid example of the compressed pace of economic development that he found instructive in developing his mature economic theory: “Here before one’s eyes wildernesses become rich and powerful states. Here it first became clear 213 conclusion

to me that nations pass through different stages of economic development. A process, which in Europe would require many centuries, takes place here under our very eyes. I mean the transition from a state of nature to pastoral cultivation, from that to agriculture, and from that to manufacture and commerce.”21 Another issue beside free trade divided List and Adam Smith. Smith concentrated on the laws that governed production and exchange but had little to say about the social and political factors that determined the productivity of workers. List, however, had seen firsthand the economic and political systems of several countries, and at varying stages of industrial development. Any policy of economic development needed to take into account these particular national conditions and circumstances. By effectively ignoring nations as actors, and by only considering the quantities of tangible goods produced, Smith’s theory promoted a crass materialism. For List, the capacity to create goods was far more important than those goods themselves. An individual acting out of pure self-interest may have had no great motivation to educate the young, but a nation concerned for its collective prosperity had powerful motive indeed. As he pungently put it, in Smith’s utilitarian system “those who raise swine are productive members of society, but those who teach are unproductive.”22 Economy offered a striking alternative to Smith’s laissez-faire policy. Here Rapp’s economic policy was directed toward the success of the community as a whole, so that considerations of short-term gain were balanced against concerns for the future prosperity of the community. Impressed by Rapp’s model, List was inspired to design his own model industrial colony, with the dual purpose of providing prosperity for its members and industrial education for the young (who would be apprenticed until the age of twenty-one in a trade). As in Economy, the members of the society would conduct all their domestic affairs while also producing for themselves all the necessities of life, food as well as clothing. I would seek out some major branch of industry, such as the manufacture of cloth or shoes, etc., in which the young colonists might use their free time, through which at least enough could be earned as was required for the wages of teachers and for the procurement of whatever necessities the colony did not itself make. I would allocate seven hours for work and five for study. The apprentices I would classify according to their abilities, into those for whom science or art, or a trade or agriculture, would be their preferred subject. The ones would receive sufficient knowledge and practice in handwork, such that they would never come in a situation where they be embarrassed by a lack of opportunity for displaying their expertise. The others would acquire as much of science as is required to be deemed an educated mechanic. Should such a society [Anstalt] succeed, the foundation is laid for its propagation; the model is established. And from it teachers might emerge for other institutions, transferring its spirit to them.23 214 chapter

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This was not to be. After a brief and unsuccessful stint as a farmer, List relocated in Reading, where in 1826 he became the editor of the Readinger Adler (Reading Eagle), one of America’s leading German-language newspapers, with some 2,500 readers in the most prosperous and thickly settled German-speaking region of Pennsylvania. Here he served for four years, writing a torrent of articles (most of them unsigned) that proved him a perceptive and searching critic of American society.24 List continued to follow the affairs of the Harmonists and to brood about the significance. When he finally returned to Germany in 1832, they would be one of the case studies on which he based his influential National System of Political Economy (1841). List was the only influential German thinker to encounter the great Harmonist experiment firsthand, but others studied it from afar. It was of particular interest to the communist circle around Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx. These men had no use for List, who thought in terms of nations rather than internationally, and in terms of class. Where he looked at Rapp’s Economy as a model for industrial development, Engels saw it in rather different terms, as a test case for the viability of the communal ownership of property. In a groundbreaking 1845 essay—“Description of Recently Founded and Still Existing Communistic Settlements”—he looked at the Harmonists and other experimental communities to see what social and economic lessons they might offer the rest of the world.25 Himself the son of a Pietist, Engels may have had a deeper personal understanding of the ethos of Economy and the Shaker communities. At any rate, he regarded their conspicuous prosperity as a standing rebuke to those who claimed that communism was impractical: When one speaks with people about socialism or communism, it often happens that they concede one’s point and declare communism to be something very beautiful; “however,” they then say, “it is an impossibility to ever bring such a thing into reality.” So frequently does one hear this objection that the author has deemed it useful and necessary to answer it with facts that are still too little known in Germany, and through which this objection will be utterly and completely refuted. Communism—social life and activity with communal ownership of property—is not only possible but has already been put into practice in many communities in America, and in one town in England, with the greatest success, as we shall see.26 There followed a meticulous account of the settlements of the Harmonists and Shakers, tracing their history, economic conditions, and system of government. Engels included some smaller separatist societies such as the Zoarites.27 Although he had not visited America, he was extremely well-informed, and he drew freely from the accounts of Harriet Martineau, John Melish, James Silk Buckingham, and others. His most up-to-date data came from John Finch, an English traveler who had published 215 conclusion

an account in Robert Owen’s New Moral Order of both Economy and the Shaker community in Pleasant Hill, Kentucky.28 Engels strove to show that communism was not merely theoretically possible but was stupendously successful in practice, and superior to capitalism. All of the Harmonists, he pointed out, were guaranteed the necessities of life, care when sick, lodging when elderly, and, in the event of their death or departure from the society, the guarantee of education for their children.29 How violently this contrasted with the plight of the modern worker, who “possessed nothing, whose wages are earned today and consumed tomorrow, and who at any moment through unforeseen and inescapable circumstances might starve.”30 Engels concluded with the astonishing claim that members of communal societies worked less but lived better, and therefore had more leisure to cultivate their intellects, which made them better and more ethical people than their neighbors who retained their private property.31 So persuasive and overwhelming was the case in favor of communal living that only one conceivable objection stood in its way: the odd, peculiar religious beliefs of the Harmonists and Shakers. These Engels freely conceded were “absurdities” (Verrücktheiten), but rather than disqualifying these sects as models, they did the opposite. After all, if these societies flourished, even when burdened by such irrational and insipid beliefs, “how much more might be achieved by others who are free of such follies?”32 In later years, Engels’s enthusiastic curiosity for the Shakers and Harmonists waned. When he published his Socialism: Utopian and Scientific in 1880, he omitted all reference to these religious societies to concentrate on three secular Utopians: Henri de Saint-Simon, Robert Owen, and Charles Fourier.33 This trio of reformers had evidently digested all that was to be learned from these religious communes, which were already shedding their numbers and influence. But this is to assume that the economic organization of the Harmonists and Shakers could be imitated without reference to their spiritual beliefs. In dismissing their theology, Engels never stopped to consider if it might in some fundamental way be essential to their worldly prosperity. Or if communal ownership of property was even viable without some sort of millennial belief system. Every human culture proposes elaborate machinery of laws, institutions, and customs to balance the conflicting demands of personal self-interest and collective solidarity. Along this line there arise the most important social and political questions, ones that touch on matters of freedom, rights, and obligations. The cities of refuge discussed in this book achieved great success—at least in the short term—because they devised highly distinctive and specialized cultures of their own to reconcile those conflicting demands. They did not do so instantly, and each community was a kind of controlled improvisation in which different means of achieving social cohesion were experimented with, one after the other. Millennial theology was only one of those means. Other essential elements included intense charismatic leadership; abolition of marriage and 216 chapter

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dissolution of the family unit; communal living arrangements; and restriction of community size, usually to about one thousand members.34 Each of these factors interacted with the others in a complex organic fashion that made possible the success of these communities. To adopt some of these factors while ignoring others, and to expect the same results, is to misunderstand the dynamic complexity of these societies. So Robert Owen learned at New Harmony, the one large-scale, purely secular version of Rapp’s society. Engels quietly ignored New Harmony in his account, although it challenged his central assumption that those who were free of religious “insipidities” would achieve far more than those who were burdened by them. As if to make up for the glaring absence of New Harmony, he breathlessly declaimed a long roster of communal societies that were secular in origin or at least not explicitly millenarian: among others, John Collins’s town of Skaneateles in New York; George Ripley’s Brook Farm in Massachusetts; Thomas Hunt’s Equality in Wisconsin; and Adam Heinrich Ginal’s Teutonia in Pennsylvania. All were negligible, and within the decade all were defunct. ++++ Such were the arguments with which Friedrich Engels brought the cities of refuge into the mainstream of socialist thought, and through which they became one of the historical sources for international socialism, surely the single most influential force in the past two centuries. Of course, the cities of refuge were never intended as a model for changing the world. They were always seen as way stations. Like the encampments of the ancient Israelites on their peregrinations, the settlements of the Harmonists and Shakers had always been provisional sanctuaries in a corrupt world, and they never aspired to transform that world. But Engels proposed to do just that, and to make the entire planet into a fraternal city of refuge. Much of the history of the past two centuries, and of our own day, is the record of that effort.

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Notes Chapter 1 1 The considerable literature on utopian communities can only be summarized here. Central works include Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936); Hanno-Walter Kruft, Städte in Utopia: Die Idealstadt vom 15. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert zwischen Staatsutopie und Wirklichkeit (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1989); Lewis Mumford, The Story of Utopias (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922); and Helen Rosenau, The Ideal City: Its Architectural Evolution in Europe, 3rd ed. (London: Methuen, 1983). For American Utopias, see Dolores D. Hayden, Seven American Utopias: The Architecture of Communitarian Socialism, 1790–1975 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976); Donald E. Pitzer, ed., America’s Communal Utopias (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); and Robert P. Sutton’s two-volume series, Communal Utopias and the American Experience: Religious Communities, 1732–2000 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003) and Communal Utopias and the American Experience: Secular Communities, 1824–2000 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003). 2 Of these, only Hebron has been continuously occupied and remains a significant city, although Nablus is the Roman new town (Neapolis) built near biblical Shechem. 3 See Robert Parker, Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983). 4 Of course the tragic history of the past century has changed the meaning of “asylum,” which now refers to entire populations and countries, and not just to individuals and single buildings. 5 For example, in the thought of Thomas Aquinas. See John Y. B. Hood, ed., The Essential Aquinas: Writings on Philosophy, Religion, and Society (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), 149–50. Also see Joseph McClatchy, “City,” in A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature, ed. David L. Jeffrey (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1992), 143–45. 6 Carl J. Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 81. 7 Mumford, The Story of Utopias, 113. In recent years, it has become fashionable to discuss Utopia in terms of Michel Foucault’s notion of Heterotopia, that is, those

real or notional spaces in which the prevailing social norms are suspended or where other norms prevail, and that such spaces are perhaps necessary for the enforcement of social norms (for example, a brothel). It would be fascinating to hear Foucault’s observations on Shaker or Harmonist towns, but he was no more interested in separatist Utopias than Mumford. See Foucault, “Different Spaces,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: New Press, 2000), 2:175–85. 8 E. G. Alderfer, The Ephrata Commune: An Early American Counterculture (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985); also see J. Max Hark’s translation of the Ephrata chronicle, first published in 1786: Chronicon Ephratense (Lancaster, PA: S. H. Zahm, 1889). 9 Unfortunately, most of the literature on Shaker architecture is of the coffee-table sort. The indispensable exception is Julie Nicoletta’s The Architecture of the Shakers (Woodstock, VT: Countryman Press, 2000). 10 For a contemporary overview of the origin of settlement patterns, see Tony Atkin and Joseph Rykwert, eds., Structure and Meaning in Human Settlements (Philadelphia: University Museum, University of Pennsylvania, 2005); also see Mark Jarzombek, The Architecture of First Societies: A Global Perspective (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2014). 11 In English, it is known as touching “goal” or “gool”; in Italian rialzo; in German, frei.

Chapter 2 1 For the origins of classical and Middle Eastern urbanism, see Joseph Rykwert, The Idea of a Town: The Anthropology of Urban Form in Rome, Italy and the Ancient World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988). 2 The symbol can be seen in a relief in Assurbanipal’s throne room at Nimrud, from c. 900 bc. See Rykwert, The Idea of a Town, 203. 3 It is just possible to interpret this passage to allow a cruciform arrangement of the tribes, with three tribes forming each of the four arms of a Greek cross. But this would have bunched the tribes unnecessarily and made

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for an extended (and less defensible) perimeter, and it has not been seriously considered. 4 Helen Rosenau, “Jacob Judah Leon Templo’s Contribution to Architectural Imagery,” Journal of Jewish Studies 23, no. 1 (1972): 72–81. 5 Rabbi Leon was not the first to make an archaeologically plausible reconstruction of Solomon’s Temple, for this had already been accomplished with the celebrated treatise by Juan Bautista Villalpando, In Ezechielem explanationes . . . (1596–1604). But Rabbi Leon was evidently the first to present the building in palpable three-dimensional form, at the lavish scale of 1:300. His model is generally acknowledged as having influenced the design of the Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam (1671–75), Europe’s first monumental synagogue building since the Middles Ages. Rabbi Leon’s model was still intact during the 1670s when it was shipped to England, where it was viewed by Charles II and subsequently disappeared. See Jacob Judah Leon, Retrato del templo de Selomoh (Middelburg, 1642); also see Alberto Pérez-Gómez, “Juan Bautista Villalpando’s Divine Model in Architectural Theory,” in Chora 3: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture, ed. Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Stephen Parcell (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press, 1999), 125–56. 6 Retrato del tabernaculo de Moséh, en que se descrive la hechura del S. Tabernaculo que Moséh hizo antiguamente en el desiérto, y todas las dependencías de los diferentes vasos y instrumentos con que era administrado (Amsterdam: Gillis Joosten, 5414 [1654]). Leon’s works were translated into English as A Relation of the Most Memorable Thinges in the Tabernacle of Moses and the Temple of Salomon, according to Text of Scripture (Amsterdam: Peter Messchaert, 1675). 7 One wonders if the modern architect Louis I. Kahn ever saw this print. The idea of squares meeting on their diagonals is crucial to two of his formative works, the Trenton Bath Houses and the Erdman Dormitory at Bryn Mawr College. 8 Gerhard Johannes Botterweck, Helmer Ringgren, and Heinz-Josef Fabry, eds., Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1995), 7:494–95. 9 The figure is an estimate. Ezekiel 48:35 gives the dimensions as “eighteen thousand measures,” which would be about thirty-six miles if the measure was a cubit, which is by no means certain. 10 Flavius Josephus, The Jewish War, bk. 5. Josephus gives the figure in Roman stadia, which is historically equivalent to the English furlong, or one-eighth of a mile.

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11 Rykwert, The Idea of a Town, 41–71. 12 This is a faithful rendering of the Latin: “hic est enim qui dictus est per Esaiam prophetam dicentem vox clamantis in deserto parate viam Domini rectas facite semitas eius.” 13 Millennial Laws: Or Gospel Statutes and Ordinances Adapted to the Day of Christ’s Second Appearing; Given and Established in the Church for the Protection Thereof by Father Joseph Meacham and Mother Lucy Wright, the Presiding Ministry, and by Their Successors, the Ministry & Elders; recorded at New Lebanon, August 7, 1821, revised and reestablished by the ministry and elders, October 1845. Edward Deming Andrews Memorial Shaker Collection, Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, Winterthur, DE. 14 For Shaker music and dance, see Daniel W. Patterson, The Shaker Spiritual (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2000).

Chapter 3 1 Martin Luther to Johann Lang, Wittenberg, February 19, 1518, in Martin Luther, Briefwechsel (Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt; Weimar: Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1969), 1:145n60. 2 Augustine, The City of God, 4.4. 3 See Rosenau, The Ideal City, 3rd ed. 4 Filarete’s ideal city was not created ex nihilo but identified trends in Florentine urbanism and carried them to their logical (or illogical) extreme. For example, his all-important central square is an elaboration of the development in Florence, beginning at the end of the thirteenth century, of civic piazzas serving as “a charismatic focal point for communal government.” See Stephen J. Milner, “The Florentine Piazza Della Signoria as Practiced Place,” in Renaissance Florence: A Social History, ed. Roger J. Crum and John T. Paoletti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 88. Crum and Paoletti’s book is indispensable for examining the social and processional considerations that went into the shaping of urban space in late medieval and early modern Europe. Also see Wolfgang Braunfels, Urban Design in Western Europe: Regime and Architecture, 900–1900, trans. Kenneth J. Northcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 5 Francesco di Giorgio Martini, Trattato di architettura civile e militare, ed. Corrado Maltese (Milan: Il Polifilo, 1967). 6 Erasmus quoted in T. E. Bridgett, Life and Writings of Sir Thomas More, 2nd ed. (London: Burns and Gates, 1892), 169.

7 Thomas More, Utopia, trans. Gilbert Burnet (London: printed for R. Chiswell, 1684), 15. This was the standard translation until the nineteenth century. For the definitive modern translation, see More, Utopia, trans. Clarence H. Miller (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014). 8 Utopia, trans. Burnet, 57–58. I change Burnet’s “mony” to “money,” as subsequent editions did. 9 Cabot’s accounts are now lost but were presumably known to More as a member of the English court. 10 Utopia, trans. Burnet, 64. 11 More, the pragmatic jurist, was practical enough to dispense with absolute regularity when needed. Thus Amaurot was “almost square,” except where it embraced the river on one side and made room for a hill on the other. 12 Utopia, trans. Burnet, 91–98. 13 Ibid., 79. 14 Ibid., 89. 15 Ibid., 173–77. 16 Ibid., 143–44. 17 Ibid., 139–40. 18 Ibid., 141–42. 19 Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 117–18, 196. 20 The passage is Vitruvius, I.5.2. See Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, trans. Morris Hicky Morgan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914), 22. 21 Ibid., 74–75. 22 Here I use Miller’s translation, 58, in preference to Burnet, who garbles his description of the architecture (e.g., using “rubbish” for “rubble”; see Burnet, 75). 23 Utopia, trans. Burnet, 92. 24 Among Filarete’s other architectural follies was a tower that was 365 braccia in height (about 840 feet, twice the height of the highest Gothic cathedral) and boasted 365 windows—simply “because there are that many days in a year” (Trattato d’architettura, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Fondo Nazionale, Florence, bk. 6). There was also a foursquare prison whose wings contained cells for debtors, while each of the corner towers was reserved for a particular class of the

condemned—those to be hanged, beheaded, burned, or quartered (bk. 10). 25 This would have happened between 1487, when Wolgemut first began making illustrations for the project, and about 1490, when Dürer completed his apprenticeship and began his Wanderjahre. 26 Nuremberg’s medieval fortifications would not be modernized until a decade after Dürer’s death. HeinzJoachim Neubauer, “Der Bau der großen Bastei hinter der Veste 1538–1546,” Mitteilungen des Vereins für die Geschichte der Stadt Nürnberg 69 (1982): 196–263. 27 The principal source is Juan Luis González García, “Alberto Durero, tratadista de arquitectura y urbanismo militar,” in Alberto Durero, tratado de arquitectura y urbanismo militar (Madrid: Ediciones Akal, 2004). Also see Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1943); Giulia Bartrum, Albrecht Dürer and His Legacy: The Graphic Work of a Renaissance Artist (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); and Giovanni Maria Fara, Albrecht Dürer teorico dell’architettura (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1999). 28 Giorgio continuously revised his treatise from about 1475 until shortly before his death in 1501. The most celebrated copy is that in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenzina, ms 282, which was owned by Leonardo da Vinci, who annotated it. For the most recent study, see Elizabeth M. Merrill, “The Trattato as Textbook: Francesco di Giorgio’s Vision for the Renaissance Architect,” Architectural Histories 1, no. 1 (October 29, 2013): http://doi .org/10.5334/ah.at. 29 Dürer’s gridded city shows a working method akin to Gothic quadrature, or design ad quadratum, in which a square was subdivided by inscribing a second smaller square, placed diagonally, within. Within this a third square could be inscribed in turn, exactly one-fourth the size of the first. Here was the source of Dürer’s grid of sixteen squares, the central four reserved for the fortified citadel. And this central citadel was likewise subdivided through quadrature, so that the central palace forms a square that again takes up one-fourth the space of its surrounding walls. At a time when the chief drafting instruments were compass and straight edge, this was a logical and efficient method for the swift division and subdivision of a form. This was codified in the illustrated treatise of 1486, the Büchlein von der Fialen Gerechtigkeit [Booklet on the correct design of finials] by the Nuremberg architect Matthäus Roritzer, a book that Dürer quite likely owned. Gothic quadrature seems to produce the same rectilinearity as a design made on

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gridded graph paper, but they are in fact quite distinct. A gridded sheet can offer precise guidelines at any point, and identical units of measurement, but quadrature ensures that the proportions of small details are derived from quarters, eighths, sixteenths, and so forth, of the generating square. The one method of design is additive, whereas quadrature is divisive. (In a sense, the interlocking proportions that quadrature produces are like the geometry of a clock, with its interrelated scales of seconds, minutes, and hours, all superimposed on a single form). 30 Dürer’s unit of measurement was the Nuremberg Schuh, which is just slightly longer than the English foot (by less than three millimeters). 31 González García, “Alberto Durero,” 45. There was an earlier, and cruder, reconstruction of a Roman castrum in Fra Gioncondo’s 1511 edition of Vitruvius, the first illustrated edition. More famous than Machiavelli’s reconstruction was that of Sebastiano Serlio, although he does not seem to have made it until about 1537. It would have appeared in the never published eighth volume of his I sette libri dell’architettura; see Sebastiano Serlio, “Della castrametatio di Polibio,” Cod. Icon. 190, fol. 1, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich. The principal study is Myra Nan Rosenfeld, “Sebastiano Serlio’s Drawings in the Nationalbibliothek in Vienna for His Seventh Book on Architecture,” Art Bulletin 56, no. 3 (September 1974): 400–409. 32 For a thorough if dated account, see William Ramsay, “Castra,” in A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, ed. William Smith (London: John Murray, 1875), 244–56. 33 Niccolò Machiavelli, The Art of War, trans. and ed. Christopher Lynch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 122. 34 Ibid., 125. 35 “So nun des Künigs Hausz nach der leer Vitruvii oder ander verstendiger werckleut gemacht ist.” At another point he states, “Wie aber ein solich Küniglich Hausz gepaut sol werden/schreybt Vitruvius der alt Römer klar.” 36 Don Fernando [Hernán] Cortés, Praeclara Ferdinadi Cortesii de Noua maris Oceani Hyspania narratio . . . Carolo Romanor u imperatori. . . . (Nuremburg: F. Peypus, 1524). 37 Barbara E. Mundy, “Mapping the Aztec Capital: The 1524 Nuremberg Map of Tenochtitlan, Its Sources and Meanings,” Imago Mundi 50 (1998): 11–33.

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38 Hernán Cortés, Letters from Mexico, trans. and ed. A. Pagden (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 102.

Chapter 4 1 Richard Schade, “Court Festival Culture during the Reign of Friedrich of Württemberg,” in “Pomp, Power, and Politics: Essays on German and Scandinavian Court Culture and Their Contexts,” ed. Mara R. Wade, special issue, Zeitschrift für Mittlere Deutsche Literatur und Kultur der Frühen Neuzeit (1400–1750) 32, nos. 1–2 (2003): 91–94. 2 Christian Friedrich Sattler, Topographische Geschiche des Herzogthums Würtemberg (Stuttgart: Johann Christof Betulius, 1784), 466. 3 Sönke Lorenz and Wilfried Setzler, eds., Heinrich Schickhardt: Baumeister der Renaissance; Leben und Werk des Architekten, Ingenieurs und Städteplaners (Karlsruhe: Leinfelder-Echterdingen, 1999). 4 Heinrich Schickhardt, Beschreibung einer Reiß, welche Friderich Hertzog zu Würtemberg vnnd Teck, im Jahr 1599 selb neundt, auß dem Landt zu Würtemberg, in Italiam gethan (Mömpelgard, 1602). Reprinted in Schickhart, [sic] Heinrich: Rayß in Italien (Herrenberg: Kulturkreis, 1986). 5 For a useful overview of the mixture of military and representational considerations affecting the design and fortification of cities at this time, see Martha Pollak, Cities at War in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Also see Wolfgang Braunfels, Urban Design in Western Europe: Regime and Architecture, 900–1900, trans. Kenneth J. Northcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 6 Hanno-Walter Kruft, Städte in Utopia: Die Idealstadt vom 15. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert zwischen Staatsutopie und Wirklichkeit (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1989); also see the exhibition catalogue, Die Renaissance im deutschen Südwesten zwischen Reformation und Dreißigjährigem Krieg: Eine Ausstellung des Landes Baden-Württemberg, Heidelberger Schloss, June 21–October 19, 1986. 7 The Württemberg foot, at 0.286 meters, is slightly smaller than the English foot. Freudenstadt measures roughly 1,420 feet to a side in English measurement. 8 Sattler, Topographische Geschiche des Herzogthums Würtemberg, 466–67. This separation of men and women during worship would become important for Pietist architecture.

9 Elias Gunzenhäuser, active 1583–1606, is described as “an architect from Stuttgart . . . with expertise in buildings with roof trusses,” certainly a desideratum for the broad span of the Freudenstadt church. See Julius Hartmann and Eduard Paulus, Beschreibung des Oberamts Mergentheim (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1880), 788. 10 Sattler, Topographische Geschiche des Herzogthums Würtemberg, 466. 11 Ibid., 467–68. The fire of 1632 would destroy 139 houses. 12 There are two English translations: Johann Valentin Andreae, Christianopolis: An Ideal State of the Seventeenth Century, trans. Felix Emil Held (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1916); and Johann Valentin Andreae, Christianopolis, trans. and ed. Edgar H. Thompson (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999). Also see Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1979). 13 Hans Aarsleff, “Andreae, Johann Valentin,” in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. Charles C. Gillispie and Frederic L. Holmes, 18 vols. (New York: Scribner’s, 1970–90), 1:158–60. 14 The plays were Esther and Hyazinthus, both written by 1605. 15 This was the Chymische Hochzeit Christiani Rosencreutz anno 1459, which was written by 1605 but not published until 1616 when it was brought out anonymously in Strasburg. Andreae regarded it as juvenilia and later recanted it. 16 Johann Valentin Andreae, Collectaneorum mathematicorum (Tübingen: J. A. Cellius, 1614). 17 Tessa Morrison, “The Architecture of Andreae’s Christianopolis and Campanella’s City of the Sun,” Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand: 30, Open, ed. Alexandra Brown and Andrew Leach (Gold Coast, Qld: SAHANZ, 2013), 1:259–71. 18 Friedrich Seck, “Wilhelm Schickard,” Neue Deutsche Biographie (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 2005), 22:727. 19 See Margery Purver, The Royal Society: Concept and Creation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967), 223–32; but also see the critical review by Charles Webster, “The Origins of the Royal Society,” History of Science 6 (1967): 106–28. 20 “Adami, Tobias Emmanuel,” in Herbert Jaumann, Handbuch Gelehrtenkultur der Frühen Neuzeit (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2004), 1:8–9.

21 Quoted in Henry Kamen, Early Modern European Society (London: Routledge, 2000), 225. 22 Tommaso Campanella, The City of the Sun: A Poetic Dialogue, trans. Daniel J. Donno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 20, 53–59. 23 “Idcirco poena capitali puniretur si qua faciem fucaret, ut formosa fiat, aut altis scandaliis uteretur, ut appareret magna, aut vestibus caudatis, ad tegendos ligneos pedes.” This chapter on breeding, which is central to Campanella’s argument, was omitted by his prudish English translator, Henry Morley, in 1885. And yet because it is in the public domain, and available on Project Gutenberg, it is consulted far more frequently than Donno’s unexpurgated translation of 1981. It is one instance of the computer age setting scholarship backward. 24 Christianopolis, trans. Thompson, 53. 25 Ibid., 156. 26 This is the translation of Felix Emil Held, which is rather more forceful than Thompson’s: “In a sense, no one is this community has any parents. For there is no one in this republic who has only individual parents. Rather, everyone has the community itself as his parents.” See Christianopolis, trans. Held, 153. 27 Ibid., 141. 28 Although Campanella’s monastic conception of life kept intruding itself into his fantasy, as in his rules for communal dining, where men and women sit in silence at separate tables, and are read to from a lectern as they eat. 29 Christianopolis, trans. Held, 144. 30 Ibid., 145. 31 Ibid., 149. 32 In other words, the difference between Renaissance and Baroque town planning. 33 Christianopolis, trans. Held, 160. 34 Ibid., 54. 35 Christianopolis, trans. Held, 170. 36 Christianopolis, trans. Thompson, 35. 37 Ibid., pp. 65–68. Thompson, who provides the best discussion of the population of Christianopolis, takes the figure to be symbolic and does not consider the possibility of a misprint. 38 Christianopolis, trans. Held, 173.

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39 Crimes against property were punished lightly, for example. The goal was not to destroy, which was easy for anyone to do, but to reform (corrigere). Christianopolis, trans. Thompson, 54–56. 40 The crucial texts are Prodomus pansophiae (1637) and the Schola pansophiae (1670). 41 The actual phrase in the Didactica magna (1657) is “omnes omnia omnino excoli,” which rather means that everything must be taught completely, and with respect to the complete whole. See Daniel A. Neval, Comenius’ Pansophie: Die dreifache Offenbarung Gottes in Schrift, Natur und Vernunft (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 2007), 289. 42 This is from a 1656 letter from Comenius to his friend Magnus Hesenthaler, quoted in Christianopolis, trans. Held, 103–4. For the Andreae-Comenius relationship, see Michael Widmann, Wege aus der Krise: Frühneuzeitliche Reformvision bei Johann Valentin Andreae und Johann Amos Comenius (Epfendorf: Bibliotheca-AcademicaVerlag, 2001). 43 Tom Webster, “Early Stuart Puritanism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism, ed. John Coffey and Paul C. H. Lim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 56. 44 For a recent account of this “invisible college” of correspondents, see Paul Trolander, Literary Sociability in Early Modern England: The Epistolary Record (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2014). For an older but vivid account of Hartlib’s London world, see Henry Dircks, A Biographical Memoir of Samuel Hartlib (London: John Russell Smith, 1865). Hartlib’s papers are kept at the University of Sheffield, which has made them available online through HRI Online Publications, Sheffield, http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/hartlib. There is no comprehensive modern biography of Hartlib. 45 Charles Webster, ed., Samuel Hartlib and the Advancement of Learning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 30–31. 46 Francis J. Bremer, Building a New Jerusalem: John Davenport, a Puritan in Three Worlds (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), 87, 90–91.

49 John Archer, “Puritan Town Planning in New England,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 34, no. 2 (May 1975): 140–49. 50 Bremer, Building a New Jerusalem, 175–80; Erik Vogt, “A New Heaven and a New Earth: The Origin and Meaning of the Nine-Square Plan,” in Yale in New Haven: Architecture and Urbanism, ed. Vincent Scully, Catherine Lynn, Erik Vogt, and Paul Goldberger (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 37–51. 51 “Moreover, when ye shall divide by lot the land for inheritance, ye shall offer an oblation unto the LORD, an holy portion of the land: the length shall be the length of five and twenty thousand reeds, and the breadth shall be ten thousand. This shall be holy in all the borders thereof round about. Of this there shall be for the sanctuary five hundred in length, with five hundred in breadth, square round about; and fifty cubits round about for the suburbs thereof” (Ezek. 45:1–2). 52 Bremer’s proposal assumes a twenty-inch cubit, which would contradict the eighteen-inch cubit from which the dimensions of the town are derived. But contemporaries understood that the cubit was a flexible measure, being based on the distance from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger, and that it could vary between eighteen and twenty-four inches. One can imagine Davenport varying his multiplier in order to yield the most pleasingly round number in feet. 53 “But those that encamp before the tabernacle toward the east, even before the tabernacle of the congregation eastward, shall be Moses, and Aaron and his sons, keeping the charge of the sanctuary for the charge of the children of Israel; and the stranger that cometh nigh shall be put to death” (Num. 3:38). 54 Such is the persuasive hypothesis of Bremer. Davenport wrote to Hartlib in 1643, asking what Comenius planned to do, suggesting that Comenius was the intended first professor for the proposed New Haven College. But plans for the college languished, and Yale University would not be established until 1701 (see Building a New Jerusalem, 202–4).

47 Ibid., 111–12.

55 For a particularly insightful and lively account of the Great Migration, see David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

48 David D. Hall, A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 117.

56 The most recent account is Elizabeth Milroy, The Grid and the River: Philadelphia’s Green Places, 1682–1876 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,

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2016). Also see Walter Klinefelter, “Surveyor General Thomas Holme’s ‘Map of the Improved Part of the Province of Pennsilvania,’ ” Winterthur Portfolio 6 (1970): 41–74; and Anthony N. B. Garvan, “Proprietary Philadelphia as Artifact,” in The Historian and the City, ed. Oscar Handlin and John E. Burchard (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1963), 177–201. 57 Holme was an officer in Cromwell’s army who later met Penn in Ireland and became a Quaker. He was not Penn’s first choice for surveyor; this was William Crispin, who died en route to Pennsylvania, and whose reference materials presumably passed into Holme’s hand. See Irma Corcoran, Thomas Holme, 1624–1695: Surveyor General of Pennsylvania, Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 200 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1992). 58 Richard Newcourt was hardly naive about topography: in 1658, he made the last important map of London before the great fire. See “Newcourt, Richard,” Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Sidney Lee (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1894), 40:329. 59 Hooke’s authorship is based on conjectural evidence. See Michael Cooper, A More Beautiful City: Robert Hooke and the Rebuilding of London after the Great Fire (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2003). But also see the critical review by John E. Moore in Reviews in History, http://www .history.ac.uk/reviews/review/440, accessed June 29, 2015. 60 Penn quoted in William E. Lingelbach, “William Penn and City Planning,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, October 1944, 403. 61 Ibid.

Dilich: Peribologia, oder, Bericht Wilhelmi Dilichy . . . von Vestungsgebewen vieler Orter, vermehrett wie auch mit Gebuhrenden Grundt vnd Auffrissen versehn vnd publicirett durch Johannem Wilhelmum Dilichium (Frankfurt, 1640). Many of the plates are reversed images of the drawings in the Kurtzer und grundlicher Berichtt. 65 See Matthew Glozier and David Onnekink, eds., War, Religion and Service: Huguenot Soldiering, 1685–1713 (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2007). 66 Ingrid Mittenzwei, ed., Hugenotten in Brandenburg-Preußen, Studien zur Geschichte, vol. 8 (Berlin: Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR, 1987). 67 “Gestalt Wir ihnen denn auch Holz/Kalck und andere materialien, deren sie zu reparirung der gleichen wüsten Häuser benöthiget/unentgeltlich anschaffen lassen” (“No. LXV. Edict, betreffend diejenige Rechte, Privilegia und andere Wohlthaten, welche . . . denen Evangelisch-Reformirten Franszösicher Nation . . . gnädigst entschlossen seyn, den 29. Octobr. 1685,” Des Corporis Constitutionum Marchicarum: Anderer Theil von Der Iustiz so wol in Civil- als Criminal- und Fiscal-Sachen, part 2, no. 2 [Berlin: Waysenhaus, 1737], 185–86). Huguenots were also offered a six-year moratorium on the duty to quarter soldiers. 68 Gerda Nehring, Johann Arnold Nering: Ein Preußischer Baumeister (Böblingen: Nehring, 2002). 69 Georg Andreas Böckler, Die Baumeisterin Pallas oder Der in Teutschland erstandene Palladius (Nuremberg: J. A. E. Seel, 1698). For Böckler, see Bernd Vollmar, “Der deutsche Palladio Ausgabe des Georg Andreas Böckler, Nürnberg 1698” (PhD diss., University of ErlangenNuremberg, 1983).

62 The full title is Kurtzer und grundlicher Berichtt wie alle undt jede, sowohl regular als irregular festungen, auf geometrische Arth nach gegebenen Proportzen auffzureissen und zu verzeichnen . . . beschrieben und gelehret wirdt [Short and comprehensive treatise on how any and all regular and irregular fortress can be designed and drawn according to given proportions and can also be described and taught]. See Michael J. Lewis, “Utopia and the Well-Ordered Fortress: J. M. Schwalbach’s Town Plans of 1635,” Architectural History 37 (1994): 24–36.

70 Friedrich Schmidt, “Die Entstehung der Neustadt Erlangen und die Erbauung des markgräflichen Schlosses” (PhD diss., University of Erlangen, 1912).

63 Schwalbach sometimes uses the term Stadtobrist, the German equivalent of Gubernator. See Kurtzer und grundlicher Berichtt, 186.

1 The modern German word for “congregation” is Gemeinde, but the Moravians use the older variant Gemeine.

64 Schwalbach’s gorgeous bound volume would not have circulated, but his ideas were adapted in the fortification treatise published by his friend Wilhelm

2 In particular, the Moravian role in the education of and preaching to the Indians won them great prestige (the hero of James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the

71 Ibid., 50–51. In the end, neither the textile works nor the customhouse were built, and the place of the great houses on the main square was instead claimed by the margrave’s palace.

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Mohicans series, Natty Bumppo, is brought up among Moravian-educated Indians). William J. Murtagh, Moravian Architecture and Town Planning (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967); Elisabeth W. Sommer, Serving Two Masters: Moravian Brethren in Germany and North Carolina, 1727–1801 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000). 3 Craig D. Atwood, The Theology of the Czech Brethren from Hus to Comenius (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009); Howard Kaminsky, A History of the Hussite Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967); Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); also see the dated but still highly readable account in E. H. Gillett, The Life and Times of John Huss, or, the Bohemian Reformation of the Fifteenth Century, 2 vols. (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1864); Norman Cohn, Das Ringen um das Tausendjährige Reich: Revolutionärer Messianismus im Mittelalter und sein Fortleben in den modernen totalitären Bewegungen (Bern: Francke, 1961). 4 Kaminsky, A History of the Hussite Revolution, 343. 5 Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936), 191. 6 Kaminsky, A History of the Hussite Revolution, 311–12; Gillett, The Life and Times of John Huss, 2:396. 7 This is from the Historia Hussitica, the eyewitness account of Laurence of Brˇezová (known in Czech as Vavrˇinec). Quoted in Kaminsky, A History of the Hussite Revolution, 311–12. 8 Three of Spener’s other tenets were an emphasis on the practice as opposed to the knowledge of Christianity; a more sympathetic and tolerant treatment of unbelievers or those who held different beliefs; and a change in theological training to stress private devotion. 9 Johannes Wallmann, “Comenius der Vater des Pietismus? Notwendige Präzisierungen zu Speners Begriff der ecclesiolae in ecclesia,” in Pietismus und Neuzeit: Ein Jahrbuch zur Geschichte des neueren Protestantismus 37 (2011): 257–68. 10 Jan Harasimowicz, “Architektur und Kunst,” in Glaubenswelt und Lebenswelten: Geschichte des Pietismus, ed. Hartmut Lehmann and Ruth Albrecht (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2004), 4:456–85.

of the United Brethren, or, “Unitas Fratrum,” in the Remoter Ages and Particularly in the Present Century (London, 1780), 96–101. This is a translation of the original edition published in 1757 in Halle: Kurze, Zuverlässige Nachricht, von der, unter den Namen der Böhmisch-Mährischen Brüder Bekannt, Kirche Unitas fratrum. Also see Eugène Victor Félix Bovet, The Banished Count; or, The Life of Nicholas Louis Zinzendorf (London: James Nisbett, 1865), 67–76. 13 This was the suggestion of Johann Georg Heitz, Zinzendorf’s steward, who wrote to Zinzendorf on June 17, 1722. This was also the day when Christian David began felling trees for the first house, making it the beginning of Moravian architecture—and architectural thought. See Ulrike Carstensen, Stadplanung im Pietismus: Herrnhaag in der Wetterau und die frühe Architektur der Herrnhuter Brudergemeine (Herrnhut: Herrnhuter Verlag, 2009), 29–30. 14 These were the “choirs” into which the members were divided; see the discussion below. See Christian Rietschel, “Das Herrnhuter Modell eines Gemeinschaftsfriedhofes: Der Gottesacker der Brüdergemeine,” in Vom Kirchhof zum Friedhof: Wandlungsprozesse zwischen 1750 und 1850, ed. Hans-Kurt Boehlke, vol. 2 of Kasseler Studien zur Sepulkralkultur (Kassel: Arbeitsgemeinschaft Friedhof und Denkmal, 1984), 75–88. 15 Carstensen, Stadplanung im Pietismus, 271–78. 16 Ibid., 41–44. 17 By his own admission, David was a man of remarkable restlessness: “I do not think that it is my destiny to remain long at one place. All that matters for me is to evangelize. . . . But to wait for something, to have patience and in the process see nothing [happen], that is not my gift. Once something has been set into motion, I am happy to turn it over to others.” (Ich denke nicht, daß es meine Führung ist, lang an einem Ort zu bleiben. Mir liegt nur das Evangelisieren. . . . Aber eine Sache abzuwarten, Geduld zu haben und dabei nichts sehen, das ist nicht meine Gabe. Ist eine Sache in Gang gekommen, überlasse ich sie gern andern.) Quoted in Carstensen, Stadplanung im Pietismus, 373; also see Otto Uttendörfer and Walther Schmidt, Die Brüder: Aus Vergangenheit und Gegenwart der Brüdergemeine (Gnadau: Universitätsbuchhandlung, 1914), 16.

11 Konsistorialrat of St. Nicholas Church (where he was buried).

18 Rolf Schulte, Hexenmeister: Die Verfolgung von Männern im Rahmen der Hexenverfolgung von 1530–1730 im Alten Reich (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2000), 72.

12 David Cranz, The Ancient and Modern History of the Brethren: Or, a Succinct Narrative of the Protestant Church

19 “Es solle dieser neue Ort ganz regulär und von dem Seniore Nitschmann nächstens ein Riss präsentieret

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werden, wie weniger nicht der Name dieses Ortes mit Herrschaftlicher Approbation gegeben werde.” Casimir quoted in Hans Merian, “Einführung in die Baugeschichte der evangelischen Brudergemeinen ausgehend vom Modell der Gemeine Herrnhaag,” in Unitas Fratrum: Herrnhuter Studien, ed. Mari P. van Buijtenen, Cornelius Dekker, and Huib Leeuwenberg (Utrecht: Rijksarchief, 1975), 465. 20 See the Papers of David Nitschmann, Moravian Archives, Bethlehem, PA. 21 The diaries of the participants are translated and reproduced in Adelaide Lisetta Fries, The Moravians in Georgia, 1735–1740 (Raleigh, NC: Privately printed, 1905). 22 Ibid., 116. 23 For all his time serving with officers of the Imperial army, Oglethorpe did not acquire German, for he and Nitschmann needed to speak through an interpreter. Evidently, he spoke French with Prince Eugene, who was born in Paris and brought up in the court of Louis XIV. 24 Some of the most vivid accounts of Savannah in its early years are from Moravian letters. See George Fenwick Jones and Paul Martin Peucker, “ ‘We Have Come to Georgia with Pure Intentions’: Moravian Bishop August Gottlieb Spangenberg’s Letters from Savannah, 1735,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 82, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 84–120. 25 Thomas D. Wilson, The Oglethorpe Plan: Enlightenment Design in Savannah and Beyond (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012). 26 John W. Reps, The Making of Urban America: A History of City Planning in the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), 192. 27 Ibid., 183–84. 28 Sir Robert Montgomery, A Discourse Concerning the Design’d Establishment of a New Colony to the South of Carolina, in the Most Delightful Country in the Universe (London, 1717), 11. 29 Montgomery’s calculations are a model of a salesmanship: in one year’s time, three men normally can clear twelve acres of land. If those felled trees are burned and the ashes subsequently boiled, that would yield at least twenty-four tons of potash, worth £480. Deducting for shipping, custom duties, and the original investment in the land would yield an annual profit of £100. Ibid., 12–13, 21–22. The proposal may well have been ghostwritten by Aaron Hill, a minor Georgian poet, theatrical impresario, and commercial speculator who is known to

have been involved financially in the Azilia enterprise. See Christine Gerrard, Aaron Hill: The Muses’ Projector, 1685–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 49–52. 30 Grundriß von Herrnhaag, Unitäts-Archiv Herrnhut, AI 60a. The older tradition that Herrnhaag was laid out by Siegmund August von Gersdorff should be ruled out. According to his own biographical statement, he first became a member of the Moravian Church in 1742, following several visits in 1741. See Carstensen, Stadplanung im Pietismus, 241. Also involved in the early building of Herrnhaag were Christian David and Johann Töltschig, who was trained as a gardener and who had lived in Savannah. 31 Cranz, The Ancient and Modern History of the Brethren, 222. 32 Hans Merian, “Einführung in die Baugeschichte der evangelischen Brudergemeinen ausgehend vom Modell der Gemeine Herrnhaag,” in Unitas Fratrum: Herrnhuter Studien, ed. van Buijtenen, Dekker, and Leeuwenberg, 465–82. 33 Cranz, The Ancient and Modern History of the Brethren, 223. 34 There were eleven choirs in all, six for adults (single men, single women, widows, widowers, married men, and married women) and five for children (older boys, younger boys, older girls, younger girls, and toddlers/ infants). As a rule, communal dwellings were built for unmarried men, unmarried women, and widows, while the other cohorts were accommodated varyingly. Unmarried young women were typically housed with widows, who acted as chaperones. 35 For the chronology of construction, see Ulrike Carstensen, “Herrnhaag—eine barocke Planstadt: Die Baugeschichte Herrnhaags von1738 bis 1753,” Unitas Fratrum: Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Gegenwartsfragen der Brüdergemeine 51/52 (2003): 9–20. 36 Paul Peucker, “Wer war der Architekt der Brüdergemeine Zeist?,” Unitas Fratrum: Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Gegenwartsfragen der Brüdergemeine 51/52 (2003): 21–38. 37 “Der Plaz auf dem Haag in der Mitte aber soll ein Inn werden, wie Grace-Inn-Garden [Gray’s Inn] mit Bäumen besetzt und mit Alleen inwendig und mit Sand bestreut, daß man drinnen spazieren kan” (Zinzendorf quoted in ibid., 32). 38 For example, the drawing for “Das Collegii in Barby,” no. 75b, Unitäts-Archiv Herrnhut.

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39 There exist at least two versions of Gersdorff’s biography. See “Lebenslauf von Siegmund August von Gersdorff,” Unitäts-Archiv Herrnhut, R.22.15, 20. Also see “Beylage zur 36ten Woche 1778,” (Mem, GN 1778, BEI IX), Moravian Archives, Bethlehem, PA. 40 “Unterricht in der Zivil- u. Militär-Baukunst.” “Lebenslauf von Siegmund August von Gersdorff,” UnitätsArchiv Herrnhut, R.22.15, 20. This would have been Christoph Heinrich Graf von Watzdorf. 41 “über den Zustand seiner Seele zu denken . . . dem Dienst der Gemeine, bes. In Landwirtschaft u. Bauwesen.” “Lebenslauf von Siegmund August von Gersdorff,” Unitäts-Archiv Herrnhut, R.22.15, 20. 42 Gersdorff’s important works include the Gemeinhaus at Neusaltz (1747), the Single Sisters’ Choir at Niesky (1750), and the Gemeinhaus at Herrnhut (1756–57). 43 F.-M. Saltenberger, “Das Herrnhaager Gemeinhaus: Ein Architekturanalyse,” Büdinger Geschichtsblätter 13 (1988): 15–23. 44 The two columns are an afterthought, added during the construction process. See ibid., 21, and Carstensen, Stadplanung im Pietismus, 104. For an examination of Moravian meeting rooms, see Wolf Marx, “Die Saalkirchen der deutschen Brüdergemeine im 18. Jahrhundert,” Studien über christliche Denkmäler, N. F., no. 22 (Leipzig: Dieterich, 1931); this is a volume of a journal published separately as a book. 45 Also in the series is the well-preserved Gemeinhaus of Neuwied on the Rhine, which like that of Herrnhut also has a princely loggia in the corner of the meeting space. “Plan et élévation de la maison de la commune a Neuwied, 1758,” Unitäts-Archiv Herrnhut, TS Bd. 1.64. 46 Zinzendorf quoted in Heinrich Rimius, The History of the Moravians: From Their First Settlement at Herrnhaag in the County of Budingen, down to the Present Time (London: John Robinson, 1754), 186. 47 For a vivid statement of the case against the Moravians, see Christoph Friedrich Brauer, Historische Nachricht von den Mährischen Brüdern zu Herrnhaag, in der Graffschaft Büdingen (Frankfurt: Brönner, 1751). The issue of money particularly outraged the critics of Herrnhaag. Moravians who joined the town deposited their funds, for which they were to receive 4 percent annual interest as well as being provided for from the common store of goods. But this complicated matters for those who later settled in Holland, England, or America, who discovered they could not easily extract their money or pass it on to their heirs. See Brauer, 395–96.

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48 For a contemporary English translation of the expulsion edict, see Rimius, The History of the Moravians, 179–83. 49 Murtagh, Moravian Architecture and Town Planning, 23–26. 50 Ibid., 16–21. 51 Ibid., 101–2. Although unsigned, this drawing seems to be one of a number made by Andreas Höger in early 1758. 52 Reuter was born in Steinbach in the duchy of Erbach; he served an apprenticeship as a surveyor (Feldmesser) from 1732 to 1737 in Buchsweiler; following visits to Herrnhaag in 1741 and 1744, he moved there in 1746 and formally joined the church two years later. For the next eight years, he was constantly engaged in surveying and architectural projects, including a stint as Bauinspektor in Niesky. In 1756, he moved to Bethlehem, PA, intending to travel further to Bethabara, NC, where there was a small Moravian settlement. Because of the French and Indian Wars (“wegen des Indianer Krieges”), he did not make the journey until 1758. The following year, he laid out the new Moravian town of Bethania (1759), and between 1760 and 1762 he surveyed the whole colony, which was named Wachau, or the Wachovia Tract, after the Austrian valley. When not surveying, he was occupied in the making of maps and architectural drawings (“Anfertigung von Rissen”). He remained in North Carolina until his death. See “Personalia des am 30ten. Dec. 1777 . . . heimgegangen verheyratheten Br. Christian Gottlieb Reuters,” Unitäts-Archiv Herrnhut. 53 Murtagh, Moravian Architecture and Town Planning, 114–15. Murtagh attributed the plan of Salem to Frederic William Marshall, who was the town’s chief executive; it is now clear that Reuter was the principal designer and the draftsman of the town plat. 54 Nazareth Hall, the Moravian academy at Nazareth, PA, taught architectural drawing well into the nineteenth century. See the trove of student drawings from 1793 to 1828 at the Winterthur Library, Delaware. Also see H. H. Hacker, Nazareth Hall: An Historical Sketch and Roster of Principals, Teachers and Pupils (Bethlehem, PA: Times Publishing Co., 1910); and Rev. Levin T. Reichel, A History of Nazareth Hall from 1755 to 1855 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1855). 55 As established by Klengel, the Saxon bureaucracy was stratified into five levels of civil servants, beginning at Kondukteur and rising in the fashion of military ranks (Klengel was a military officer) through Unterland-

baumeister, Landbaumeister, Vizeoberlandbaumeister to the chief superintendent, the Oberlandbaumeister. See Hermann Heckmann, Matthäus Daniel Pöppelmann und die Barockbaukunst in Dresden (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1986), 11; also see Günther Passavant, Wolf Caspar von Klengel (Dresden 1630–1691): Reisen— Skizzen—Baukünstlerische Tätigkeit (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2001). 56 From 1741 to 1762, Bethlehem operated under the cooperative and communal system known as the General Economy. Four executive committees or “conferences” administered Moravian affairs: one each for farming, trades, and business, plus a Bau-Konferenz for architecture. Its minutes are our principal source for Moravian architecture. 57 Unitäts-Archiv Herrnhut, TS Mp. 204.1. The date is not certain; the archive dates it to 1745. 58 Unitäts-Archiv Herrnhut, TS Mp. 100.1 is identical with the Nazareth plan except for its lack of a title, its English-language key, and its north arrow. 59 Sommer, Serving Two Masters, 36. 60 Typically, it was the supervising architect, Christian Gottlieb Reuter, who made the decision. Ibid. 61 See his two projects for “communal villages of regular form” (“Project eines regulairen Gemeindörflein”), Unitäts-Archiv Herrnhut, TS Mp. 100.4.a and TS Mp. 100.4.b. 62 Reuter began his book by December 10, 1760, and completed it by February 22, 1761. Unitäts-Archiv Herrnhut, TS Bd. 13. For a thorough discussion and a facsimile of the book, see Carstensen, Stadplanung im Pietismus, 371–421. 63 “Aber die Bibel redet von Anfang bis ans Ende immer von Städten.” Reuter, Unitäts-Archiv Herrnhut, p. 8a. 64 Jacob John Sessler, Communal Pietism among Early American Moravians (New York: Henry Holt, 1933). 65 The closest the American buildings approach to the court Baroque of Gersdorff are in the works of Andreas Höger. Born in Nuremberg and presumably a Lutheran, he was twenty-eight years old in 1742 when he joined the community in Herrnhaag, then at the peak of its building activity. He took part in its construction, and reminiscences of its forms rebound through his subsequent work. Between 1750, when the Moravians were driven from Herrnhaag, and 1754, when he arrived in Bethlehem, it is not clear where he was; likely he spent at least some time in Herrnhut. There he devoted himself to architectural design and town planning, including

the laying out of Gnadenhütten, until he drops from the record after about 1764. A series of handsome, unsigned architectural designs in the Moravian archives in Bethlehem, all dated around 1758, seem to be his work.

Chapter 6 1 The chief source is Karl J. R. Arndt, George Rapp’s Harmony Society, 1785–1847 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972). Also see Paul Douglas, Architecture, Artifacts, and Arts in the Harmony Society of George Rapp: The Material Culture of a Nineteenth-Century American Utopian Community (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008). 2 The image is the frontispiece to Ernst Ludwig Brauns, Amerika und die moderne Völkerwanderung (Potsdam: Vogler, 1833), and the lithograph was made by Heinrich J. Willing. 3 “prodigiöse[r] Blick”; see Theodor Schott, “Rapp, Johann Georg,” Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie 27 (1888): 286–90. 4 Peter Blickle, Der Bauernkrieg: Die Revolution des Gemeinen Mannes (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2012). 5 The Peasants’ War was the yardstick against which subsequent German revolutions would be measured. Friedrich Engels saw the same cause behind the failures of the revolutions of 1525 and 1848: the inability of Germany’s various classes to make common cause and work together; see Engels, “Der deutsche Bauernkrieg,” Neue Rheinische Zeitung: Politisch-ökonomische Revue 5 and 6 (May–October 1850). 6 Schott, “Rapp, Johann Georg,” 286. 7 All are represented in his library at Economy: Paracelsus, Opera (Strasburg, 1603); Jacob Böhme, Questiones Theosophica, oder Betrachtung Göttlicher Offenbarung (Amsterdam, 1718); and Georg von Welling’s Opus Mago-Cabbalisticum et Theosophicum (Frankfurt, 1760). The last is heavily annotated by Rapp, as Arthur Versluis has recently discovered. 8 “dem Temperament nach ein CholericoMelancholicus”; quoted in Karl J. R. Arndt, George Rapp’s Separatists (Worcester, MA: Harmony Society Press, 1980), 75. 9 Rapp never wrote a comprehensive statement of his beliefs. His one lengthy treatise, Gedanken über die Bestimmung des Menschen (New Harmony, IN: Privately printed, 1824) and printed in English as Thoughts on the Destiny of Man, Particularly with Reference to the Present Times (New Harmony, IN: Privately printed, 1824), is

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largely free of controversial material, and it may be that it was written to give the outside world as uncontroversial summary of Harmonist beliefs as possible. 10 Schütz (1689–1750) was a radical Pietist who published an influential compendium of Pietist and orthodox hymns. The full title is Die Güldene Rose, oder ein Zeugnüs der Warheit von der uns nun so nahe bevorstehenden Güldenen Zeit des tausendjährigen und ewigen Reichs [The golden rose, or a witness to the truth of the now so imminent golden age of the thousand-year and eternal kingdom . . .] (Giessen, 1727). See Arndt, George Rapp’s Separatists, 84. 11 See John Archibald Bole, The Harmony Society: A Chapter in German American Culture History (Philadelphia: Americana Germanica Press, 1904), 52–53. 12 “ . . . in ihm wohnenden heiligen jungfrau/der weißheit . . . seine geheime braut.” Gottfried Arnold, Das Geheimniß der Göttlichen Sophia oder Weißheit (Leipzig: Thomas Fritsch, 1700), 43. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., 39–43. 15 Rapp quoted in Theodor Schott, “Rapp, Johann Georg,” Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie 27 (1888): 286; Arndt, George Rapp’s Separatists, 67ff. 16 Gottfried Haga and John Heckewälder were the principal Moravian supporters of the Harmonists, and they frequently served as their agents in Philadelphia. See the references throughout Karl J. Arndt, Harmony on the Connoquenessing: George Rapp’s First American Harmony, 1803–1815 (Worcester, MA: Harmony Society Press, 1980). 17 Arndt, George Rapp’s Harmony Society, 72–76. 18 Justinus Kerner, Das Bilderbuch aus meiner Knabenzeit (Braunschweig, 1849), 249–50. 19 The Lexicon Architectonicum (Augsburg, 1775) is a later edition of one volume of Johann Friedrich Penther’s Ausführliche Anleitung zur bürgerlichen Bau-Kunst. It is possible that all four volumes were originally contained in the Harmonist library, which at one point in its history was radically culled. For Penther, see Architekt und Ingenieur: Baumeister in Krieg und Frieden, exh. cat. (Wolfenbüttel: Herzog August Bibliothek, 1984). 20 David Watkin and Tilman Mellinghoff, German Architecture and the Classical Ideal (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987). 21 This is one of a group of four student drawings that seem to have been made by Schanbacher (c. 1765–1820)

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during his apprenticeship with Friedrich Carl Müller, whose name appears on most of the drawings: Pennsylvania State Archives, Harrisburg, PA, 06.72.17.4; 06.72.17.5; and 06.72.17.38. Schanbacher’s signature appears only on the first of these, a design for a vaulted stone basement, which is marked as having been probirt (examined) by Müller and another master named G. F. Jordan. Dated between 1782 and 1784, they are too early to be associated with Frederick Rapp. 22 One of these log house survives: the Waldmann House at 516 Main Street was recently stripped of several subsequent additions and returned to its 1804 state. 23 A slightly different sequence is given in Arndt, George Rapp’s Harmony Society, 1785–1847, 105–6; and Aaron Williams, The Harmony Society at Economy, Penn’a (Pittsburgh: W. S. Haven, 1866), 53. 24 The most important of the early accounts is John Melish, Travels to America in the Years 1806 & 1807, and 1809, 1810 & 1811, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Privately printed, 1812). 25 The inn at Harmony is known to have measured thirty-two by forty-two feet, which would have made it somewhat shorter and squatter that the building shown in the drawing in the Pennsylvania State Archives (06.72.17.6). 26 Both buildings survive. The store building, which stands at 534 Main Street, recently had its wooden casement windows restored. The warehouse, which also functioned as a granary, now serves as the Harmony Museum; it is at 218 Mercer Street. 27 A partial list of the early craftsmen can be compiled from the Rapp correspondence. By 1814, the work was directed by two carpenters known only as Schürtner and Benzenhöfer. The names of other carpenters are Dürr, Forstner, Ulrich Hos, Jacob Langerbacher, A. Nachtrieb, Lorenz Scheel, J. Schreiber, and Tramb. The stonemasons includes Engelhard Autenrieth, Michael Friz, Jacob Schanbacher, Michael Schanbacher, and A. Trautwein. Karl J. R. Arndt, ed., A Documentary History of the Indiana Decade of the Harmony Society, vol. 1, 1814–1819 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1975), 34ff., 45, 68. 28 The census of 1830 lists seven carpenters (John Bessan, Jacob Diem, Jacob Durr, Jonathan Enz, Georg Forstner, Friedrich Schwarz, and Clemens Weingärtner) and six stonemasons (Frederic Autrieth, John Jacob Bauer, Jacob Bitzer, George Fleckhammer, Christian Lenz, and John Stahl). The names of many familiar builders appear there and in subsequent censuses, although their identification is complicated by Rapp’s notoriously erratic

phonetic spelling. A full list of Harmonist craftsmen can be found in the Old Economy archives, drawn in part also from tax rolls and Harmonist lists of members and their occupations. 29 Georg Heinrich Borheck, Entwurf einer Anweisung zur Landbaukunst, nach ökonomischen Grundsätzen, 2nd ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1792). Also see Architekt und Ingenieur: Baumeister in Krieg und Frieden. 30 Frederick Rapp’s house is at 523 Main Street, and George Rapp’s house is at 528 Main Street. It is notable that the former is somewhat larger, but then Frederick, as the Harmonists’ business agent, may have conducted more business from home. It is the same size as the large house at 233 Mercer Street that was built in 1810 for Dr. Christoph Müller, who also worked at home. 31 William Pain, The Carpenter’s Pocket Dictionary (Philadelphia: Dobelbower and Thackara, 1797). 32 Lutheran churches of similar configuration in the vicinity of Iptingen can be found at Großglattbach, Pinache, Wiernsheim, Knittlingen, and Lienzingen. Most are late medieval in date, but even in a church as late as that in Zaiserweiher (1769), the basic plan type survives. For the history of Protestant church architecture in Germany, the best overview remains K. E. O. Fritsch, Der Kirchenbau des Protestantismus (Berlin: Toeche, 1893). 33 Perhaps the orientation to the west reflects the Harmonists’ millennial preoccupation, because the Last Judgment, according to Christian tradition, is to come from the west. The nearby Harmonist cemetery is likewise oriented to the west, its extraordinary portal consisting of a slab of sandstone, swinging from a single pivot, so that the resurrected dead can file out efficiently to the west. 34 Clearly, the Harmonists were not iconoclasts. In this way they differed from the Amish and Mennonites, who were rigorously consistent in their injunctions against representational art or anything that might be construed as a graven image.

in their dimensions. See “The Harmonist Labyrinths,” Caerdroia 32 (2001): 8–20. 38 The motif of the seven-ringed labyrinth derives from the greatest antiquity, although Rapp was obviously drawing on much later images; see Rykwert, The Idea of a Town, 148–52. 39 Melish, Travels to America (1812), 2:72. 40 Ibid. 41 The labyrinth at New Harmony was recreated in 1941 on the basis of one of the surviving architectural drawings, while the reconstructed grotto at its center was based on that at Economy. 42 Robert Dale Owen, Threading My Way: An Autobiography (1874; reprint, New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1967), 242–43. 43 W. [William] Faux, Memorable Days in America: Being a Journal of a Tour Principally Undertaken to Ascertain, by Positive Evidence, the Condition and Probable Prospects of British Emigrants . . . (London: W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 1823), 267. This is the least-known of the three Harmonist labyrinths, for it was overshadowed by Rapp’s private garden. 44 “ . . . the mazes of the mysterious labyrinth, composed of a curiously constructed hedge which then grew around and almost concealed from view the round-house that still stands on the outskirts of the village.” Williams, The Harmony Society at Economy, Penn’a, 67. 45 The full title is Ideenmagazin für Liebhaber von Gärten, englischen Anlagen und für Besitzer von Landgütern [Idea magazine for lovers of gardens and English layouts, and for owners of country estates], ed. Gottfried Grohmann (Leipzig: Baumgärtner, 1796–1811). It is not to be found in the Harmonist library today, which is only a tiny remnant of the original collection. For a recent study of the Ideenmagazin, see Klaus Jan Philipp, Um 1800: Architekturtheorie und Architekturkritik in Deutschland zwischen 1790 und 1810 (Stuttgart: Axel Menges, 1997).

35 When the church was demolished, the portal was installed on the New Harmony school, which has also been demolished; it is now in the collection of the New Harmony Working Men’s Institute.

46 Christian Ludwig Stieglitz, Encyklopädie der bürgerlichen Baukunst (Leipzig, 1792–98), 361.

36 John Melish, Travels to America in the Years 1806 & 1807, and 1809, 1810 & 1811, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Privately printed, 1818), 326.

48 John Amos Comenius, The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart, trans. Howard Louthan (New York: Paulist Press, 1998). The book’s first German edition was published in Amsterdam in 1631.

37 Lilan Laishley has tentatively assigned each of the three labyrinth drawings to one of the Harmonist towns, basing his case on the inscriptions and certain variations

47 Rykwert, The Idea of a Town, 148–52.

49 See John Archibald Bole, The Harmony Society: A Chapter in German American Culture History (Philadel-

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phia: Americana Germanica Press, 1904), 89. Also see John Bunyan, Eines Christen Reise nach der seligen Ewigkeit (Amsterdam, 1703; London, 1751). Subsequent German editions have translated the title as Die Pilgerreise zur seligen Ewigkeit. 50 Comenius, The Labyrinth of the World, 197. 51 Ibid. 52 In fact, there were two such temples at Economy— one in the labyrinth and one in Rapp’s private garden. 53 Elias Pym Fordham, Personal Narrative of Travels in Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky; and of a Residence in the Illinois Territory: 1817–1818, Frederic Austin, ed. (Cleveland, OH: Arthur H. Clark, 1906), 207. 54 Ibid. 55 For example, “Not Common,” Pittsburgh Gazette, September 16, 1806. 56 Charles Nordhoff, The Communistic Societies of the United States (New York: Harper, 1875), 132. 57 William E. Wilson, The Angel and the Serpent (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 24; Williams, The Harmony Society at Economy, Penn’a, 56–59. 58 Arndt, Documentary History of the Indiana Decade of the Harmony Society, vol. 1, 1814–1819, 228–30. 59 Julie Nicoletta, “The Architecture of Control: Shaker Dwelling Houses and the Reform Movement in EarlyNineteenth-Century America,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 62, no. 3 (September 2003): 352–87. 60 George Rapp to John Frederick Rapp and Romelius Baker, May 11, 1822. Translated in Arndt, A Documentary History of the Indiana Decade of the Harmony Society, vol. 2, 1820–1824 (Worcester, MA: Harmony Society Press, 1975), 396. 61 Such as S. C. Kapff, Die Württembergischen Brüdergemeinden Kornthal und Wilhelmsdorf: Ihre Geschichte, Einrichtung und Erziehungs-Anstalten (Stuttgart: S. G. Liesching, 1839). 62 George Browning Lockwood, The New Harmony Communities (Marion, IN: Chronicle Co., 1902), 32–33; George Flower, History of the English Settlement in Edwards County, Illinois (Chicago: Fergus Printing Co., 1882), 280. The New Harmony church was built in 1822 and stood alongside the first provisional meetinghouse of 1817, “a neat frame-church, painted white, with a large clock.” See John Woods, Two Years’ Residence in the

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Settlement on the English Prairie in the Illinois Country, United States (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1822), 237. 63 Such curious hybrids are not unknown in eighteenthcentury America. The Congregational meetinghouses of Wethersfield and Farmington, both in Connecticut, are stubbornly traditional in plan and construction, yet attached a Georgian spire at one end to evoke an Anglican church. This is that persistent American impulse to be at once moral and fashionable (like the modern owner of a Prius). 64 Georg Forstner (occasionally Förstner), who is listed as a carpenter in the censuses of 1830, 1840, and 1850, was apparently the same Forstner who worked on the first buildings in New Harmony in 1814. See Arndt, Documentary History of the Indiana Decade of the Harmony Society, vol. 1, 1814–1819, 34–68. 65 Maximilian, Prince of Wied, Travels in the Interior of North America (London: Ackerman and Co., 1843), 62. Other travelers gave the same picture. In 1818, Elias Pym Fordham attended a service in the wooden church at New Harmony, where Rapp preached “in a chair placed on a stage, about one yard high, with a table before him.” Fordham, Personal Narrative of Travels in Virginia . . ., 208. 66 “ . . . dann gingen zuerst die Frauen hinaus und die Männer folgten zuletzt.” This sentence was accidentally omitted from the 1843 English translation.

Chapter 7 1 In February 1824, Frederick Rapp led a party to reconnoiter a site for Economy; the purchase was concluded by May. See Arndt, A Documentary History of the Indiana Decade of the Harmony Society, vol. 2, 1820–1824, 802–4. 2 Karl J. R. Arndt, Harmony on the Wabash in Transition to Rapp’s Divine Economy on the Ohio and Owen’s New Moral World at New Harmony on the Wabash 1824–1826 (Worcester, MA: Harmony Society Press, 1982), 57–58, 665–66. 3 See A. L. Morton, The Life and Ideas of Robert Owen (New York: International Publishers, 1962); and J. F. C. Harrison, Quest for the New Moral World: Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America (New York: Scribner, 1969). 4 Although Owen’s plan was rejected by Parliament, it was widely published and studied. The most widely disseminated version is probably “Mr. Robert Owen’s Plan for Abolishing Pauperism,” published in the journal

The Philanthropist, or, Repository for Hints and Suggestions Calculated to Promote the Comfort and Happiness of Man (London) 7 (1819): 66–78. A slightly different edition is found in the “Report to the Committee for the Relief of the Manufacturing Poor,” The Life of Robert Owen Written by Himself, 2 vols. (London: Effingham Wilson, 1857–58). 5 “Robert Owen’s Plan,” 69. 6 It is unclear who Owen’s draftsman was. Could he already have been in contact with Stedman Whitwell (1784–1840), who would accompany him to New Harmony in 1825 and serve as his architectural arm? 7 Owen left the space for acreage blank, but he seems to have calculated on an acre per inhabitant (the estimates in his report are based on 1,200 acres for the village’s 1,200 inhabitants). 8 “Robert Owen’s Plan,” 71–72. All subsequent quotations about Owen’s village in this and the next two paragraphs are from this source. 9 At least this is the terminology that Owen’s architect Stedman Whitwell used when developing the Village of Unity and Mutual Co-operation into a full-fledged working model. Stedman Whitwell, Description of an Architectural Model from a Design by Stedman Whitwell, Esq. for a Community upon a Principle of United Interests, as Advocated by Robert Owen, Esq. (London: Hurst Chance & Co., 1830). 10 By comparison, the population of Owen’s New Lanark was about 2,500.

among others, proving Chesterton’s dictum that if you do not believe in God, you are liable to believe in anything.) 14 Arndt, Harmony on the Wabash in Transition to Rapp’s Divine Economy on the Ohio, 559. 15 Journey of Lewis David von Schweinitz, trans. Adolph Gerber, Indiana Historical Society Publications, vol. 8, no. 5 (Indianapolis: Privately printed, 1927), 277–80. 16 Although the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1806) had exhibition galleries, there was no purpose-built American museum until Charles Willson Peale built his Peale Museum in Baltimore (1813–14). In Europe, the first true museum may be said to be the Fridericianum in Kassel (1769–79). Still, it was not until the Napoleonic Wars that cultural patrimony came to be thought of as a collective public possession; it was then that Germany built the first museums that can be called modern: the Glypothek in Munich (1816–30) and the Altes Museum in Berlin (1824–30). 17 By 1821, Owen was already well known in Philadelphia, where Marie Louise Duclos Fretageot was applying his educational ideas in her school, run on the lines of the educational reformer Pestalozzi. It was the presence of this cohort of Owenites in Philadelphia that led Owen to believe he could quickly populate New Harmony with followers. See Donald E. Pitzer, “The Original Boatload of Knowledge down the Ohio River: William Maclure’s and Robert Owen’s Transfer of Science and Education to the Western Frontier, 1825–1826,” Ohio Journal of Science 89, no. 5 (1989): 128–42.

11 Cf. “Robert Owen’s Plan,” 73; and Melish, Travels to America in the Years 1806 & 1807, and 1809, 1810 & 1811, 2nd ed. (1818), 332. Owen’s table had a polemical purpose. He showed that the £96,000 needed to buy and build his village was actually not a large sum. If borrowed at 5 percent interest, this worked out to only £4 per inhabitant per year, far cheaper than any other system of providing for the indigent poor. And since the point was to make them productive workers, the debt would be paid off quickly once the village began supporting itself.

18 Whitwell, Description of an Architectural Model. . . . Also see Donald E. Pitzer, ed., America’s Communal Utopias (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 96–97.

12 [John Minter Morgan], Remarks on the Practicability of Mr. Robert Owen’s Plan to Improve the Condition of the Lower Classes (London: Samuel Leigh, 1819), 67–72.

20 The collection was sold by J. W. Sturm of Philadelphia. Karl J. R. Arndt, Economy on the Ohio, 1826–1834: The Harmony Society during the Period of Its Greatest Power and Influence and Its Messianic Crisis (Worcester, MA: Harmony Society Press, 1984), 15, 71, 74.

13 Robert Owen, “Second Address, August 21, 1817,” Supplementary Appendix to the First Volume of the Life of Robert Owen . . . 1803–1820, vol. 1A (London: Effingham Wilson, 1858), 115. (In late life, Owen became a convert to spiritualism and wrote of his communication with the spirits of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin,

19 We are fortunate to have two different accounts of this meeting: George Rapp’s letter to Frederick (December 6, 1824) and the diary account of William Owen, which reprise the same anecdote. See Arndt, Harmony on the Wabash in Transition to Rapp’s Divine Economy on the Ohio, 317, 328ff.

21 Although the drawing is unsigned and undated, the design labeled Museums-Haus is almost certainly by Frederick Rapp and dates from 1827 (Pennsylvania State Archives 06.72.17.77).

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22 Quoted in Arndt, Economy on the Ohio, 1826–1834: The Harmony Society during the Period of Its Greatest Power, 579. The full account can be found in The Journey of Lewis David von Schweinitz to Goshen, Bartholomew County in 1831, trans. Adolf Gerber, Indiana Historical Society Publications 8, no. 5 (1927): 277–80. 23 Gemeinhaus von Herrnhaag, plan 61, Unitäts-Archiv Herrnhut. 24 Journal of the Senate, December 17, 1827, cited in Arndt, Economy on the Ohio, 1826–1834: The Harmony Society during the Period of Its Greatest Power, 257. 25 Maximilian, Prince of Wied, Travels in the Interior of North America, in Early Western Travels, 1748–1846, ed. Reuben Gold Thwaites (Cleveland, OH: Arthur H. Clark, 1906), 22:141. 26 In fact, as the Journal of the Senate correctly noted, it measures about 120 by 54 feet. 27 James Silk Buckingham, The Eastern and Western States of America (London: Fisher Son & Co., 1842), 2:224–26. 28 There is one account of a conversion: “An American widower, with ten children, joined them some time ago, in distress for his children; all are well off now.” W. [William] Faux, Memorable Days in America: Being a Journal of a Tour Principally Undertaken to Ascertain, by Positive Evidence, the Condition and Probable Prospects of British Emigrants . . . (London: W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 1823), 267. 29 “Dachstuhl,” in Christian Ludwig Stieglitz, Encyclopädie der bürgerlichen Baukunst, 5 vols. (Leipzig: Fristch, 1792–98). Also see Hans-Joachim Sachse, Barocke Dachwerke, Decken und Gewölbe: Zur Baugeschichte und Baukonstruktion in Süddeutschland (Berlin: Mann, 1975); and Paul Schüler, “Die Entstehung und die praktische Bedeutung des Mansart-Daches” (PhD diss., Berlin, Technische Hochschule, 1939). 30 Bernhard, Duke of Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach, Reise . . . durch Nord-Amerika (Weimar, 1828), cited in Arndt, Harmony on the Wabash in Transition to Rapp’s Divine Economy on the Ohio, 1833–34. 31 Arndt, Harmony on the Wabash in Transition to Rapp’s Divine Economy on the Ohio, 301. 32 Subsequent adjustments for roads and outbuildings have slightly altered the original proportions. See the Historic American Buildings Survey, PA 1176, for a detailed survey. 33 This is from the account of George W. Featherstonaugh’s 1835 visit to Harmony; see his A Canoe

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Voyage up the Minnay Sotor, vol. 1 (reprint of undated ed., St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1970). 34 Lu Ann De Cunzo, Therese O’Malley, Michael J. Lewis, George E. Thomas, and Christa Wilmanns-Wells, “Father Rapp’s Garden at Economy,” in Landscape Archaeology: Studies in Reading and Interpreting the American Historical Landscape, ed. Rebecca Yamin and Karen Bescherer Metheny (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996), 91–117. 35 For example, Friedrich List. See Karl J. R. Arndt, George Rapp’s Years of Glory: Economy on the Ohio, 1834–1847 (New York: Peter Lang, 1987), 58. 36 Arndt, Harmony on the Wabash in Transition to Rapp’s Divine Economy on the Ohio, 834. 37 The interior became even more surprising once Rush’s statue of Harmony was taken from the central fountain and moved inside, sometime before 1840, when the English traveler J. S. Buckingham saw it there. Evidently the wood statue had already begun to decay. 38 Claus Bernet, “Müller, Bernhard,” in BiographischBibliographisches Kirchenlexikon, comp. Traugott Bautz (Nordhausen: Traugott Bautz Verlag, 2004), 23:978–84. 39 Williams, The Harmony Society at Economy, Penn’a, 134. 40 Engels’s word was Landstreicher. Friedrich Engels, “Beschreibung der in neuerer Zeit entstandenen und noch bestehenden kommunistischen Ansiedlungen,” Deutsches Bürgerbuch für 1845 (Darmstadt, 1845), reprinted in Karl Marx—Friedrich Engels—Werke (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1972), 2:526. 41 “Leaving the Harmonist Society,” Lebanon Daily News, April 8, 1893, 3. 42 “Harmony Society Sells Out,” Inter Ocean, April 25, 1894, 3. 43 “New Ways at Old Economy,” Philadelphia Times, June 30, 1895, 26. 44 Schwartz v. Duss, United States Reports: Cases Adjudged in the Supreme Court at October Term, 1902, vol. 187 (1903): 8–41. The legendary Oliver Wendell Holmes was appointed a few weeks too late to weigh in on this extraordinary case. 45 This happened in 1916. For a lively account of the tragicomic Harmonist endgame, see Yaacov Oved, Two Hundred Years of American Communes (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1993), 75–81. To be fair, one should also read self-aggrandizing Duss’s account (e.g.,

“my short but brilliant professional musical career”): John S. Duss, The Harmonists: A Personal History (Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Book Service, 1943). 46 “Notes of the Theatres,” New York Times, May 30, 1903, 3. 47 “Mr. Duss’s Venice in New York,” New York Times, June 7, 1903, 25.

Chapter 8 1 “The Owen Meeting on Friday,” reprinted in the Gettysburg Compiler, January 4, 1827, 1. 2 Hagerstown Torch and Advertiser, April 27, 1827, 4. 3 Maximilian, Prince of Wied, Travels in the Interior of North America (London: Ackerman and Co., 1843), 163. 4 “A Visit to the Grand National Cemetery in the Year 2000,” Museum of Foreign Literature and Science 17 (August 1830): 125; the satire originally appeared in the British Magazine. 5 The caption represents Owen’s last desperate bid to win official patronage for his model communities and is worth quoting in full: “A Bird’s Eye View of a Community, as proposed by Robert Owen Esq.re is respectfully dedicated to the following classes of society: To the Landowners, as being the only means whereby their Estates can be rendered permanently productive, and their Rents secure. To the Capitalists, as offering the safest speculation, and most gratifying ways of investing their surplus Capital, without risk of failure. To the Clergy, and Instructors of Mankind, as the only and speedy means of bringing about that great desideratum they have so much at heart, namely, the suppression of Vice & Error, by the removal of the causes of Crime (Ignorance & Poverty), the dissemination of Truth, & the establishment of Virtue. To the industrious Wealth Producers, as affording the only arrangements, whereby they can secure their true and rightful position in Society, and the just & honest participation in the Wealth created by their talents and industry. And lastly, to the Government of the British Empire, shewing the arrangements, whereby the duties of Government may be rendered safe, easy, and delightful, instead of as heretofore, being one of danger, difficulty, error, confusion and disatisfaction [sic].” 6 Edward Royle, Robert Owen and the Commencement of the Millennium: A Study of the Harmony Community (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 126, 188.

7 James Silk Buckingham, The Eastern and Western States of America (London: Fisher Son & Co., 1842), 2:210. 8 James Silk Buckingham, National Evils and Practical Remedies, with the Plan of a Model Town (London: Peter Jackson, 1849), 234–57. 9 Ibid., 183–96. 10 Ibid., 191. 11 Buckingham speaks of “the roofs of all the colonnades, and of all the terraces, or rows of dwellings, and other buildings, being made flat, instead of angular or pent-roofed (the former being invariably the custom in every part of the Oriental world, and found to be as perfect a protection against rain or snow, as the steep sloping roofs of the European countries).” Ibid., pp. 194–95. 12 Ibid., 193. 13 Victor Considérant, Description du phalanstère et considérations sociales sur l’architectonique, 2nd ed. (Paris: Librairie Sociétaire, 1848), 59–70. 14 Charles Fourier hinted at free love in his theoretical writings, but at Oneida, John Humphrey Noyes (1811– 86) put it into practice, preaching a doctrine variously known as Perfectionism, Stirpiculture, or Complex Marriage. To see what that looked like in practice, one should consult the diaries of Tirzah Miller, Noyes’s niece, perhaps the only truly uncensored voice to speak out from all the communal societies considered here. 15 “Ungeachtet die Colonie erst ein Jahr angefangen, wohnen die Leute alle schon sehr gut und reinlich; vor 15 Monaten war hier noch Wald; jetzt frohe und vergnügte Gesichter. Es stehen ungefähr 100 Häuser, ein großes Fabrikgebäude mit zwei Flügeln, eine Kirche, ein Wirthshaus, ein herrlicher Garten, mehrere Morgen groß mit Weinberg, alle Arten Blumen, Orangen, Citronen, Feigenbäume, Baumwolle, Tabake; man geht durch Traubenlauben.” Friedrich List, Gesammelte Schriften, pt. 1 (Stuttgart: J. E. Cotta, 1850), 149–51; also see Arndt, George Rapp’s Harmony Society, 1785–1847, 321. 16 List, Gesammelte Schriften, 150–51. 17 Arndt, George Rapp’s Years of Glory, 60. 18 List, Gesammelte Schriften, 156–62. Also see Friedrich List, Outlines of American Political Economy: In Twelve Letters to Charles J. Ingersoll, with commentary by Michael Liebig (Wiesbaden: Böttiger, 1996). For a recent overview of the Industrial Revolution in Germany, see HansWerner Hahn, Die industrielle Revolution in Deutschland,

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Enzyklopädie Deutscher Geschichte, vol. 49 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2011). 19 Just such a tariff agreement (Zollverein) would later come into being, but in the post-Napoleonic era this was precisely the sort of pan-Germanic agitation that alarmed rulers. 20 Friedrich List, The National System of Political Economy (1841), trans. Sampson S. Lloyd (London: Longman, Greens, and Co., 1885), 102. 21 Quoted by Margaret E. Hirst, Life of Friedrich List: And Selections from His Writings (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1909), 37. For a more recent edition, see List, Outlines of American Political Economy. 22 The phrase is even more pointed in German because of the pun between “raise” and “teach”: “Wer Schweine erzieht, ist ein produktives, wer Menschen erzieht, ein unproduktives Mitglied der Gesellschaft.” See Werner Abelshauser, “Der Wert der Klassiker,” Capital: Das Wirtschaftsmagazin 23 (2005): 22–26. 23 “Ich stelle wie in jener Anstalt den Grundsatz fest, dass die Colonisten alle häusslichen Geschäfte selbst verrichten und dass sie alle gewöhnlichen Bedürfnisse des Lebens sowohl als Victualien als an Kleidungsstoffen selbst produciren. Ich suchte irgend einen Hauptindustriezweig auf (etwa Fabrikation von Tuch, Schuhe &c.), auf welchen die jungen Colonisten ihre übrige Zeit verwenden, und woraus wengistens so viel gewonnen werden könnte, als zur Besoldung der Lehrer und zur Anschaffung derjenigen Bedürfnisse, welche die Colonie nicht selbst erzeugt, erförderlich wäre. Ich verwende sieben Stunden auf die Arbeit und fünf auf den Unterricht. Die Zöglinge theile ich nach ihren Fähigkeiten, in solche welche eine Wissenschaft oder Kunst, und in solche, welche ein Gewerbe oder den Landbau zu ihrem vorzüglichen Fach machen. Jene werden, sie mögen dereinst in Lagen kommen, in welche sie wollen, nie in Verlegenheit gerathen, da sie in Ermangelung einer Gelegenheit ihre Kenntnisse geltend zu machen, hinlängliche Kenntnis und Uebung in Handarbeiten erlangt haben, um sich damit fortzubringen; dies werden so viel aus den Wissenschaften sich aneignen als nöthig ist, um für gebildeten Mechaniker zu gelten. Ist eine einzige solche Anstalt gelungen, so ist damit der Grund zu einer Propaganda gelegt; das Vorbild ist gegeben. Daraus gehen Lehrer für andere ähnliche Anstalten hervor, die den Geist der Anstalt auf jene übertragen.” List, Gesammelte Schriften, 150–51.

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24 See Friedrich List, Mittheilungen aus Nord-Amerika (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1829). The principal compendium is Friedrich List: Schriften, Reden, Briefe, vol. 2 of Grundlinien einer politischen Ökonomie und andere Beiträge der amerikanischen Zeit, 1825–1832, ed. William Notz (Berlin: Reimer Hobbing, 1931). 25 Friedrich Engels, “Beschreibung der in neuerer Zeit entstandenen und noch bestehenden kommunistischen Ansiedlungen,” 326–40. 26 Ibid., 521. 27 Zoar was the town established in Ohio by another group of Württemberg separatists who arrived in 1817. Doubtless inspired by the example of the Harmonists, they instituted communal ownership of property two years later and experimented also with celibacy. (Unlike the Harmonists, members who left the society were not given back the funds they contributed when they joined.) Their leader was Joseph Bäumler (1778–1853), a pipemaker-turned-preacher who seems to have modeled himself on George Rapp. 28 Finch was not an altogether reliable witness: he claimed that the Harmonists had abandoned celibacy in order to increase their numbers, that they had no distinctive theology other than the New Testament, and that they practiced religious freedom. Quoted in Engels, “Beschreibung der in neuerer Zeit entstandenen und noch bestehenden kommunistischen Ansiedlungen,” 526. 29 So Engels summarized article five of the Harmonist articles of incorporation. Ibid., 525. 30 “Wenn diese Sache für alle wichtig ist, so ist sie es ganz besonders für die armen Arbeiter, die nichts besitzen, die ihren Lohn, den sie heute verdienen, morgen wieder verzehren und jeden Augenblick durch unvorhergesehene und unvermeidliche Zufälle brotlos werden können.” Ibid., 535. 31 “Wir sehen auch, daß die Leute, welche in Gemeinschaft leben, bei weniger Arbeit besser leben, mehr Muße zur Ausbildung ihres Geistes haben, und daß sie bessere und sittlichere Menschen sind als ihre Nachbarn, die das Eigentum beibehalten haben.” Ibid., 534. 32 “ . . . wenn sie eine unvernünftige Religion haben, so ist das ein Hindernis, das der Gemeinschaft im Wege steht, und wenn sich trotzdem die Gemeinschaft hier im Leben bewährt, wieviel eher muß sie bei andern möglich sein, die von solchen Verrücktheiten frei sind.” Ibid., 522.

33 Frederick Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, trans. Edward Aveling (New York: International Publishers, 1945), 7. 34 And perhaps Rapp and Owen were right. This seems to be the number at which an individual can feel intimate membership in a community. A personal anecdote: my college expanded from about seven hundred to one thousand students during my four years there. A longtime member of the campus security force told me that he first encountered student-caused vandalism— unheard of in my proudly socially conscious Quaker college—when the numbers reached about one thousand. His theory: this was the threshold at which a student could for the first time feel like an anonymous member of an impersonal community.

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Selected Bibliography There is an immense and ever-expanding literature on utopian and communal societies, and it impossible to do it justice in the scope of this short book. This bibliography summarizes the most useful sources for those communities inspired by the concept of the city of refuge. Those wishing for a more detailed listing should consult the website of the Communal Studies Association, which is the center of ongoing research in American communitarianism and which has valuable bibliographies for the chief communal and separatist socities. General Sources Alberti, Leon Battista. On the Art of Building in Ten Books. Translated by Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988. Andreae, Johann Valentin. Reipublicae Christianopolitanae descriptio. Strasburg, 1619. Reprint of 1741 German translation, Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, 1981. Archer, John. “Puritan Town Planning in New England.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 34, no. 2 (May 1975): 140–49. Atkin, Tony, and Joseph Rykwert, eds. Structure and Meaning in Human Settlements. Philadelphia: University Museum, University of Pennsylvania, 2005. Baier, Christof. “Bürgerhäuser in Templin und Zehdenick: Die Theorie vom bürgerlichen Wohnhaus und die Praxis des provinzialstädtischen Bürgerhausbaus in Brandenburg-Preußen im 18. Jahrhundert.” PhD diss., Humboldt-Universität, 2006. Bartrum, Giulia. Albrecht Dürer and His Legacy: The Graphic Work of a Renaissance Artist. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. Benevolo, Leonardo. The Origins of Modern Town Planning. Translated by Judith Landry. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967. Bernet, Claus. Gebaute Apokalypse: Die Utopie des Himmlischen Jerusalem in der Frühen Neuzeit. Mainz: Zabern, 2007. Braunfels, Wolfgang. Urban Design in Western Europe: Regime and Architecture, 900–1900. Translated by Kenneth J. Northcott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Comenius, John Amos. The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart. Translated by Howard Louthan and Andrea Sterk. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1998.

Cortés, Hernán. Letters from Mexico. Translated and edited by A. Pagden. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986. Dilich, Wilhelm. Peribologia, oder, Bericht Wilhelmi Dilichy . . . von Vestungsgebewen vieler Orter, vermehrett wie auch mit Gebuhrenden Grundt vnd Auffrissen versehn vnd publicirett durch Johannem Wilhelmum Dilichium. Frankfurt, 1640. Dürer, Albrecht. Etliche underricht zu befestigung der Stett, Schlosz, und flecken. Nuremberg, 1527. Engels, Frederick. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Translated by Edward Aveling. New York: International Publishers, 1945. Fara, Giovanni Maria. Albrecht Dürer teorico dell’architettura. Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1999. Feuer, Lewis S. “The Influence of the American Communist Colonies on Engels and Marx.” Western Political Quarterly 19, no. 3 (1966): 456–74. Fishman, Robert. Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things. New York: Vintage Books, 1971. García, Juan Luis González. “Alberto Durero, tratadista de arquitectura y urbanismo militar.” In Alberto Durero,tratado de arquitectura y urbanismo militar. Madrid: Ediciones Akal, 2004. Goldschmidt, Friedrich. Friedrich List, Deutschlands grosser Volkswirth: Betrachtungen über die heimischen und auswärtigen Erwerbsverhältnisse. Berlin: Julius Springer, 1878. Guarneri, Carl J. The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991. Hayden, Dolores D. Seven American Utopias: The Architecture of Communitarian Socialism, 1790–1975. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976. Held, Felix Emil. “Johann Valentin Andreae’s Christianopolis: An Ideal State of the Seventeenth Century.” PhD diss., University of Illinois, 1914. Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House, 1961. Jarzombek, Mark. The Architecture of First Societies: A Global Perspective. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2014. Jentsch, Carl. Friedrich List. Berlin: Ernst Hoffman, 1901.

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Kruft, Hanno-Walter. Städte in Utopia: Die Idealstadt vom 15. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert zwischen Staatsutopie und Wirklichkeit. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1989. Kühnel, Bianca, ed. The Real and Ideal Jerusalem in Jewish, Christian and Islamic Art: Studies in Honor of Bezalel Narkiss on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday. Jerusalem: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1998. Lancaster, Clay. Pleasant Hill—Shaker Canaan in Kentucky: An Architectural and Social Study. Salvisa, KY: Warwick Publications, 2001. Lang, S. “The Ideal City from Plato to Howard.” Architectural Review 92 (1952): 91–104. ———. “Sforzinda, Filarete and Filelfo.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 35 (1972): 391–97. Lewis, Michael J. “Utopia and the Well-Ordered Fortress: J. M. Schwalbach’s Town Plans of 1635.” Architectural History 37 (1994): 24–36. Lombaerde, Piet, and Charles van den Heuvel, eds. Early Modernism Urbanism and the Grid: Town Planning in the Low Countries in International Context; Exchanges in Theory and Practice 1550–1800. Turnhout, BE: Brepols, 2011. Machor, James. Pastoral Cities: Urban Ideals and the Symbolic Landscape of America. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. Mannheim, Karl. Ideology and Utopia. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1936. McClung, William Alexander. The Architecture of Paradise. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Milroy, Elizabeth. The Grid and the River: Philadelphia’s Green Places, 1682–1876. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2016. [Morgan, John Minter]. Remarks on the Practicability of Mr. Robert Owen’s Plan to Improve the Condition of the Lower Classes. London: Samuel Leigh, 1819. Mumford, Lewis. The Story of Utopias. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922. Panofsky, Erwin. The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1943. Pitzer, Donald E., ed. America’s Communal Utopias. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Reps, John W. The Making of Urban America: A History of City Planning in the United States. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965. Rosenau, Helen. The Ideal City: Its Architectural Evolution in Europe. 3rd ed. London: Methuen, 1983. Rosenfeld, Myra Nan. “Sebastiano Serlio’s Drawings in the Nationalbibliothek in Vienna for His Seventh Book on Architecture.” Art Bulletin 56, no. 3 (September 1974): 400–409. Rykwert, Joseph. The Idea of a Town: The Anthropology of Urban Form in Rome, Italy and the Ancient World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988.

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Semler, Heinrich. Geschichte des Socialismus und Communismus in Nordamerika. Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1880. Specklin, Daniel. Architetura von Vestungen. Strasburg, 1589. Sutton, Robert P. Communal Utopias and the American Experience: Religious Communities, 1732–2000. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003. Vasari, Giorgio. Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. Translated by Gaston De Vere. 10. vols. London: Philip Lee Warner, 1912–15. Vidler, Anthony. “The Scenes of the Street: Transformations in Ideal and Reality, 1750–1871.” In On Streets, edited by Stanford Anderson, 28–111. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978. Vogt, Erik. “A New Heaven and a New Earth: The Origin and Meaning of the Nine-Square Plan.” In Yale in New Haven, Architecture and Urbanism, edited by Vincent Scully, Catherine Lynn, Erik Vogt, and Paul Goldberger, 37–51. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Moravian Architecture Atwood, Craig D. The Theology of the Czech Brethren from Hus to Comenius. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2009. Bovet, Eugène Victor Félix. The Banished Count; or, The Life of Nicholas Louis Zinzendorf. London: James Nisbett, 1865. Carstensen, Ulrike. “Herrnhaag—eine barocke Planstadt: Die Baugeschichte Herrnhaags von 1738 bis 1753.” Unitas Fratrum: Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Gegenwartsfragen der Brüdergemeine 51/52 (2003): 9–20. Cohn, Norman. The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970. Cranz, David. The Ancient and Modern History of the Brethren: or, A Succinct Narrative of the Protestant Church of the United Brethren; or, “Unitas Fratrum,” in the Remoter Ages and Particularly in the Present Century. London, 1780. Darley, Gillian. “The Moravians: Building for a Higher Purpose.” Architectural Review, 177, no. 1058 (April 1985): 45–49. Erbe, Hans-Walter. Herrnhaag: Eine religiöse Kommunität im 18. Jahrhundert. Hamburg: Wittig, 1988. Fries, Adelaide L. The Road to Salem. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944. Gillett, E. H. The Life and Times of John Huss, or, The Bohemian Reformation of the Fifteenth Century. 2 vols. Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1864. Graf, Matthias. Herrnhuter in Hessen: Der Herrnhaag in der Grafschaft Büdingen. Mainzer Studien zur Neueren

Geschichte, no. 18. Frankfurt-am-Main: Peter Lang, 2006. Heckmann, Hermann. Matthäus Daniel Pöppelmann und die Barockbaukunst in Dresden. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1986. Herrnhut & Herrnhuter Siedlungen, Deutscher Historischer Städteatlas, no. 3. Münster: Institut für Vergleichende Städtebau, 2009. Holmes, John Beck. History of the Protestant Church of the United Brethren. 2 vols. London, 1825. Jordan, William H. Reminiscences of the Old First Moravian Church of Philadelphia, 1742–1901. Philadelphia: Moravian Historical Society, 1901. Kaminsky, Howard. A History of the Hussite Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. Marx, Wolf. “Die Saalkirchen der deutschen Brüdergemeine im 18. Jahrhundert.” Studien über christliche Denkmäler, n.s., 22 (Leipzig, 1931): 8–15. May, Walter. “Das sächsische Bauwesen unter August II. und August III. in Polen.” Dresdner Hefte 50, no. 2 (1997): 17–26. Merian, Hans. “Einführung in die Baugeschichte der evangelischen Brudergemeinen ausgehend vom Modell der Gemeine Herrngaag.” In Unitas Fratrum: Herrnhuter Studien, edited by Mari P. van Buijtenen, Cornelius Dekker, and Huib Leeuwenberg, 465–82. Utrecht: Rijksarchief, 1975. ———. “Herrnhaag: Zur Geschichte der ehemaligen Herrnhuter Siedlung.” Büdinger Geschichtsblätter 8 (1974/75): S. 39–48. Murtagh, William J. Moravian Architecture and Town Planning. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967. Schübler, Johann Jacob. Synopsis architecturae civilis eclecticae. . . . Nuremberg: Weigel, 1732–33. Schulte, Birgit A. Die schlesischen Niederlassungen der Herrnhuter Brüdergemeine Gnadenberg, Gnadenfrei und Gnadenfeld—Beispiele einer religiös geprägten Siedlungsform. Sources and Documents for Silesian History, vol. 31. Insingen bei Rothenburg o.d.T.: Verlag Degener and Co., 2005. Sessler, Jacob John. Communal Pietism among Early American Moravians. New York: Henry Holt, 1933. Sommer, Elisabeth W. Serving Two Masters: Moravian Brethren in Germany and North Carolina, 1727–1801. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000. Verbeek, Jacob Wilhelm. A Concise History of the Unitas Fratrum, or, Church of the United Brethren, Commonly Called Moravian. London: Mallalieu and Co., 1862.

Harmonist Architecture Arndt, Karl J. R., ed. A Documentary History of the Indiana Decade of the Harmony Society. Vol. 1, 1814–1819. Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1975. ———. A Documentary History of the Indiana Decade of the Harmony Society. Vol. 2, 1820–1824. Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1975. ———. Economy on the Ohio, 1826–1834: The Harmony Society during the Period of Its Greatest Power and Influence and Its Messianic Crisis. Worcester, MA: Harmony Society Press, 1984. ———. George Rapp’s Harmony Society 1785–1847. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972. ———. George Rapp’s Separatists. Worcester, MA: Harmony Society Press, 1980. ———. George Rapp’s Years of Glory: Economy on the Ohio, 1834–1847. New York: Peter Lang, 1987. ———. Harmony on the Connoquenessing, 1803–1815: George Rapp’s First American Harmony. Worcester, MA: Harmony Society Press, 1980. ———. Harmony on the Wabash in Transition, 1824–1826. Worcester, MA: Harmony Society Press, 1980. ———. Harmony on the Wabash in Transition to Rapp’s Divine Economy on the Ohio and Owen’s New Moral World at New Harmony on the Wabash 1824–1826. Worcester, MA: Harmony Society Press, 1982. Blair, Don. “Harmonist Construction.” Indiana Historical Society Publications 23, no. 2 (1964): 45–82. Bole, John Archibald. The Harmony Society: A Chapter in German American Culture History. Philadelphia: Americana Germanica Press, 1904. Brauns, Ernst Ludwig. Amerika und die moderne Völkerwanderung. Potsdam: Vogler, 1833. Buckingham, James Silk. The Eastern and Western States of America. 2 vols. London: Fisher Son and Co., 1842. De Cunzo, Lu Ann, Therese O’Malley, Michael J. Lewis, George E. Thomas, and Christa Wilmanns-Wells. “Father Rapp’s Garden at Economy.” In Landscape Archaeology: Studies in Reading and Interpreting the American Historical Landscape, edited by Rebecca Yamin and Karen Bescherer Metheny, 91–117. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996. Douglas, Paul H. “The Material Culture of the Harmonist Society.” Pennsylvania Folklife 24, no. 3 (1975): 2–14 Duss, John. The Harmonists: A Personal History. Ambridge, PA: Harmonie Associates, 1970. Fritz, Eberhard. Radikaler Pietismus in Württemberg: Religiöse Ideale im Konflikt mit gesellschaftlichen Realitäten; Quellen und Forschungen zur württembergischen Kirchengeschichte, vol. 18. Epfendorf: Bibliotheca Academica Verlag, 2003.

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Grohmann, Gottfried, ed. Ideenmagazin für Liebhaber von Gärten, englischen Anlagen und für Besitzer von Landgütern. Leipzig: Baumgärtner, 1796–1811. Harrison, J. F. C. Quest for the New Moral World: Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America. New York: Scribner, 1969. Hebert, William. A Visit to the Colony of Harmony, in Indiana. London, 1825. Laishley, Lilan. “The Harmonist Labyrinths.” Caerdroia 32 (2001): 8–20. List, Friedrich. The National System of Political Economy. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1909. List, Friedrich, and Josef von Baader. Mitteilungen aus Amerika. Hamburg: Weber und Arnoldi, 1828–29. Maximilian, Prince of Wied. Travels in the Interior of North America. London: Ackerman and Co., 1843. Melish, John. Travels in the United States of America in the Years 1806 & 1807, and 1809, 1810 & 1811. 2 vols. Philadelphia: privately published, 1812. Morton, A. L. The Life and Ideas of Robert Owen. New York: International Publishers, 1962. Pitzer, Donald E. New Harmony Then and Now. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2011. Rapp, George. Thoughts on the Destiny of Man, Particularly with Reference to the Present Times. New Harmony, IN: Harmony Society, 1824. Rauscher, Julian. “Des Separatisten G. Rapp Leben und Treiben.” Theologische Studien aus Württemberg 6 (1885): 253–313. Royle, Edward. Robert Owen and the Commencement of the Millennium: A Study of the Harmony Community. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1998.

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Stotz, Charles Morse. “Threshold of the Golden Kingdom: The Village of Economy and Its Restoration,” Winterthur Portfolio 8 (1973): 122–69. Whitwell, [Thomas] Stedman. Description of an Architectural Model from a Design by Stedman Whitwell, Esq. for a Community upon a Principle of United Interests, as Advocated by Robert Owen, Esq. London: Hurst Chance & Co., 1830. Williams, Aaron. The Harmony Society at Economy, Penn’a. Pittsburgh: W. S. Haven, 1866. Wilson, William E. The Angel and the Serpent. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1984. Shakers Andrew, Edward Deming. The People Called Shakers. New York: Dover, 1963. Lassiter, William L. Shaker Architecture. New York: Bonanza Books, 1966. Nicoletta, Julie, “The Architecture of Control: Shaker Dwelling Houses and the Reform Movement in Early-Nineteenth-Century America.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 62, no. 3 (September 2003): 352–87. ———. The Architecture of the Shakers. Woodstock, VT: Countryman Press, 2000. Poppeliers, John, ed. Shaker Built: A Catalog of Shaker Architectural Records from the Historic American Buildings Survey. Washington, DC: Historic American Buildings Survey, 1974.

Index A Aaron, 20, 80 Adami, Tobias, 67, 69 Adams, John Quincy, 204 Alberti, Leon Battista, 40 alchemy, 64, 74, 176, 196 Amsterdam, 22, 23, 79, 80 Andreae, Johann Valentin, 16, 64, 91, 107, 125, 209 and Christianopolis, 64, 69–77, 80, 92, 125, 152 Arnold, Gottfried, 136, 144 asylum, right of, 12 August I (king of Poland), 105, 106 August the Strong, 99, 105 Azilia, 107, 109, 227n29 B Baker, Romelius, 196–198 Baroque architecture, 83, 111–112, 113–114, 115, 116, 117, 129, 164, 165, 179, 184, 186–187, 194 Bate, Frederick, 205, 206–207 Beissel, Conrad, 16 Bentham, Jeremy, 211 Berlin, 88, 89, 101 Bernhard, Duke of Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach, 188, 193 Bethania, North Carolina, 121 Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, 96, 129, 157 biblical models for ideal towns, 79, 84, 98 Acts, 137 Corinthians, 155 Exodus, 21, 80 Ezekiel, 19, 26, 80, 224n51 John, 28 Joshua, 11 Matthew, 29, 30, 155 Micah, 144, 195 Numbers, 11, 19–23, 79–80, 224n53 Revelation, 14, 26–28, 193 Böckler, Georg Andreas, 88–91 Bodmer, Karl, 204 Bogardus, James, 209 Bohemian Brethren, 99 Böhme, Jacob, 135 Borheck, Georg Heinrich, 141, 142 Bosch, Hieronymus, 34 Boyle, Richard, 77 Brahe, Tycho, 66–67, 209 Brook Farm, 12–13, 217

Buckingham, James Silk, 13, 181, 184, 205, 208–211, 215 building types bathhouses, 46, 210 brothels, 41–42, 209 churches and meeting houses, 55, 62–63, 74, 84, 88, 91, 163–164, 165–167 cultural buildings, 42, 73–74, 76, 103, 179–184, 210 dormitories, 15, 16, 38, 41, 71, 73, 84, 110–111, 114–115, 117, 156–158, 171, 172 factories, 72, 89, 91, 138, 154, 172, 174–75 garden structures, 146–152, 192, 193–195 granaries, 47, 72, 141–142 inns, 111, 138, 139–140, 172, 211 Bunyan, John, 152 Burnett, Micajah, 157 Byron, Lord, 203 C Calvinism, 64, 74, 77 Campanella, Tommaso, 67, 71 Civitas solis of, 67–69, 71, 73, 75, 208 Canaan. See Israelites: cities of Carl Eugen, Duke of Württemberg, 152 Casimir von Ysenburg und Büdingen, Count Ernst, 106, 109, 117 castrum. See Roman town planning cemeteries, 75, 103, 106, 108–109, 231n33 Charles I (king of England), 77, 79 Charles II (king of England), 80 child rearing, provisions for, 71, 74, 76, 172–173, 210–211 chiliasm, 17, 97 Christian Ernst, Margrave of Brandenburg-Bayreuth, 91 Christianopolis. See Andreae, Johann Valentin City of God, 26 City of Refuge biblical origins of, 11 and Hussites, 97–98 Civitas solis. See Campanella, Tommaso Clay, Henry, 213 clothing, 39, 74, 155 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 136 Collins, John, 217 Comenius, Johann Amos, 76–77, 80, 99, 101, 106, 122, 181, 224n54 and The Labyrinth of the World, 152–153 communal ownership of property, 38–40, 68–69, 73, 74, 99, 125, 131, 137, 216–217 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 66

243

Cortés, Hernán, 54 crime and punishment, 37, 39, 69, 74, 79 D Davenport, John, 77, 79–80 David, Christian, 101, 103–105, 106, 113, 226n17 Dilich, Wilhelm, 85 divorce, 40 Dresden, 101, 111–112, 123 Dürer, Albrecht, 16, 42–44, 91, 92, 115, 125 Etliche Underricht of, 44–55, 59, 61, 73, 210 Duss, John, 198, 200–201 E Eaton, Theophilus, 80 Economy, Pennsylvania church at, 163–167 garden at, 148–151, 188–193, 194, 195 grotto at, 149–151, 192, 193 houses at, 158–159, 19 museum (Feast Hall) at, 179–184 plan of, 134, 174–176 Rapp house at, 184, 186–188 visitors to, 188, 193, 213 Edict of Nantes, 58, 85 Elizabeth I (queen of England), 57 enfilade, 115, 187, 189 Engels, Friedrich, 13, 14, 196, 215–216 Ephrata Cloister, 16 Erasmus, 37, 44, 54 Erlangen, 91, 92, 95 euthanasia, 40 Evelyn, John, 77 Ezekiel. See biblical models for ideal towns F family structure and Utopian societies, 38–40, 41–42, 68–69, 71, 73, 74, 75, 155, 159, 171, 174 Filarete [Antonio Averlino], 34–35, 41–42, 54, 59 Flower, George, 160 Forstner, Georg, 164, 165–167 Forstner, Lyans, 164–165 Forstner, Michael, 164 fortification design, 44–46, 50–51, 58–59, 60–61, 65, 85 Fourier, Charles, 13, 208, 211, 212 Fra Carnevale, 37 Francesco di Giorgio Martini, 35, 36, 41, 45–46 Francke, August Hermann, 101 freedom of conscience, 40, 58, 85, 226n8 Freudenstadt, 10, 57–64, 65, 67, 72, 88, 95 church at, 62–63 Friedrich I, Duke of Württemberg, 57–58

244 index

Friedrich I of Prussia, 88 Friedrich II, Duke of Württemberg, 136 Friedrich Wilhelm, Elector of Brandenburg-Prussia, 88 G Gersdorff, Siegmund August von, 118–119, 120, 123, 129 architecture of, 114–117, 227n30 early life of, 113–114 Ginal, Adam Heinrich, 217 Göntgen, Johann Georg, 194–195 Gunzenhäuser, Elias, 62 H Harmony, Pennsylvania, 137–147, 196, 198–199 Harmony Society, 10, 13, 14, 203–205 architecture of, 137–144, 160, 177, 185, 186–187, 198, 230n25 celibacy and, 155, 203 emigration to America of, 136–137, 139–141 extinction of, 196–201 half-timbered construction of, 138, 139, 140, 142, 177 Moravian influence on, 137, 157, 158, 179, 184–185, 230n16 population of, 137, 194, 196 Shaker connections to, 141, 155–158 visitors to, 146, 156, 167, 181, 184, 204, 205, 212, 215 Hartlib, Samuel, 77, 79, 80, 83 Henrici, Jacob, 135, 200 Henry IV (king of France), 58 Herrnhaag, 95, 123, 184, 185 creation of, 106 design of, 109–118, 227n30 expulsion of Moravians from, 117, 120, 228n47 Herrnhut, Saxony, 101–105, 113, 119 Heterotopia, 219n6 Höger, Andreas, 120, 129, 229n65 Hohenheim, princely garden at, 151, 152, 193 Holbein, Hans, 34, 44 Holme, Thomas, 82, 225n57 Hooke, Robert, 77, 83, 84 Huguenots, 10, 85, 88–91, 102, 106, 160 Hunt, Thomas, 217 Hus, Jan, 12, 96, 110 Húska, Martin, 97–98 Hussites, 12, 19, 96–99 I illness and Utopian societies, 38, 40 Inspirationalists, 106 Israelites cities of, 11, 23, 26–27 encampment of, 20–25

J Jefferson, Thomas, 136 Jerusalem, 26, 42 Jewish City of Refuge, 169 Johann Friedrich, Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach, 88, 91 John of Patmos, 19 John the Baptist, 28–29 Josephus, 26 K Kepler, Johannes, 67 Klengel, Wolf Caspar von, 122–123 Koberger, Anton, 43 L labor and Utopian societies, 14, 39, 68, 71, 72–73, 74, 170, 210–211 Leon, Count (Bernhard Müller), 169, 194–196 Leon, Rabbi Jacob Judah, 22, 23–25, 79, 220n5 Leonardo da Vinci, 44 Lesueur, Charles Alexandre, 176 Levites, 11, 23 List, Friedrich, 193, 211–215 Lititz, Pennsylvania, 120, 121 London, rebuilding of, 82–84 Lorini, Buonaiuto, 58 Louis XIV (king of France), 85 Luther, Martin, 26, 29–30, 31, 33, 55, 106 M Machiavelli, 50–51, 54 Maclure, William, 176 Martineau, Harriet, 212, 215 Marx, Karl, 13 Maximilian, Prinz zu Wied, 167, 181, 204 Melanchthon, Philip, 54 Melish, John, 146, 173, 174, 212, 215 Methodism, 106, 160 Michelangelo, 67 millenarianism. See chiliasm Montgomery of Skermorley, Sir Robert. See Azilia Moravian Church, 15, 17, 93 centralized architecture of, 122 choirs of, 96, 110–111, 116, 227n34 General Economy of, 125, 229n56 historical origins of, 96–99 meeting houses of, 102, 114–119, 129, 179 missionary activities of, 104–106 odern revival of, 99–105 town planning of, 15, 26, 27, 101–102, 109–110, 120–128

More, Sir Thomas, 33–34, 205. See also Utopia life of, 37 Morris, William, 17 Moses, 20, 21, 23, 54, 79, 80 Müller, Friedrich Carl, 138, 139 Müller, Johann Christian, 196 Mumford, Lewis, 14 mysticism, 64, 135–136, 144–145, 160, 176–177, 194–195 N Napoleon, 120, 136, 195 Nazareth, Pennsylvania, 105, 120, 123 Nering, Johann Arnold, 88 Neu-Ebenezer, Georgia, 108 Neusaltz (Nowa Sol, Poland), 116, 121, 128 New Harmony, Indiana, 13 church at, 160–162 communal dwellings at, 156–158 Owen’s purchase of, 169, 174, 203–205 plan of, 131, 134, 154–155 New Haven, Connecticut, 77–80, 81, 112 New Jerusalem, 19, 26, 28, 107 New Lanark, Scotland, 169–171 Newcourt, Richard, 82, 83 Niesky, Saxony, 116, 118, 121 Nitschmann, David, 106–107, 109–110, 111, 122 Noah, Mordecai, 169 Noyes, John Humphrey, 235n14 Numbers, book of. See biblical models for ideal towns Nuremberg Chronicle, 42–43 O Oglethorpe, James, 106–107, 109 Oneida, 235n14 Onoltzbach, 88–91, 95 Orei Miklat, 11 Owen, Robert New Harmony and, 13, 17, 174, 176, 178–179, 196, 203–208, 235n5 New Lanark and, 169 reformist views of, 136, 170–171 “Village of Unity and Mutual Co-operation” of, 171–174, 233n11 Owen, Robert Dale, 147–148, 193 P Pain, William, 141 Palladio, Andrea, and Palladian architecture, 88, 165, 186–187, 194 Palmanova, 58–59 panopticon, 211 pantisocracy, 136

245

Paracelsus, 135 Peasants’ War (1524–1525), 132, 229n5 Penn, William, 80–82, 107 Penther, Johann Friedrich, 138, 230n19 Pepys, Samuel, 77 Peypus, Friedrich, 54 Philadelphia, 80–84, 89, 109 Pietism, 17, 100–102, 104, 105, 106, 111, 113, 114, 125, 135, 144, 152, 211, 215 Pirckheimer, Willibald, 51 Plato, 9, 33, 42, 205 Polybius, 50, 51 Pöppelmann, Matthias Daniel, 111–112, 123 Priestley, Joseph, 136, 178 Protestant town planning, 33, 54–55, 57–59 Puritanism, 77, 80, 84, 93, 163 Q quadrature, 47, 221–222n29 Quakers, 80–82, 83, 84, 93, 100–101, 115 R Rapp (Reichert), Frederick, 137, 155, 156, 181, 190–191, 196 architecture of, 138–144, 145, 146, 160–167, 174–175, 177, 179, 180, 184, 186–89, 193 business activities of, 137, 174, 213 death of, 196 early life and education of, 137–138 Rapp, George, 128, 203. See also Harmony Society appearance of, 131–132, 167 architectural ideas of, 141, 143–145, 160–163 Count Leon and, 194–196 death of, 196 early life of, 132–135, 137 garden designs of, 145–154, 188–193 mysticism of, 143–145, 176–177 Owen and, 169–170, 173–174, 176–181 theology of, 132, 135–136, 137, 229–230n9 Rapp, Gertrude, 156 Rapp, Johannes, 137, 198 Rappite. See Harmony Society Reichert, Friedrich. See Rapp (Reichert), Frederick Reuter, Christian Gottlieb biography of, 228n52 and reconstruction of cities in Canaan, 26, 27 town plans of, 15, 121–124, 125–128 Ripley, George, 217 Roman town planning, 28, 81 castrum and, 41, 50–51, 54, 222n31

246 index

Rosicrucianism, 64, 71, 223n15 Rush, William, 193–194 S Salem, North Carolina, 96, 121, 125 Salzburgers, 107, 108 Savannah, Georgia, 105, 106–109 Saxony, 85, 99–101, 105, 113 Say, Thomas, 176 Schanbacher, Michael, 138, 139, 230n21 Schedel, Hartmann, 42–43 Schickard, Wilhelm, 67 Schickhardt, Heinrich, 10, 58–64, 65, 67, 69, 77, 115 Schinkel, Karl Friedrich, 123 Schütz, Christoph, 135, 144 Schwalbach, Johann Melchior, 84–85, 86–87 Schweinitz, Lewis von, 176, 179, 194 science and Utopian societies, 64, 66–67, 68, 69, 71, 74, 76, 176, 178–177, 179–181, 184, 209 sexuality Adam and, 135–136, 155 celibacy and, 14, 16, 136, 155–156, 196, 203 eugenic aspect of, 39, 40, 69, 223n23 fertility, 40 family and, 216–217 free love and, 212, 235n14 temptation and, 75, 210 Sforzinda. See Filarete Shakers architecture of, 114, 141, 158 celibacy of, 14, 155–156 Engels critique of, 215, 216 influence of, 13 rectilinearity and, 19, 29–31 Shakespeare, William, 57–58 Silesia, 122, 125 Smith, Adam, 213, 214 Southey, Robert, 136 Spener, Philip Jacob, 101, 102, 116, 136 squareness, 19–20, 23, 28–31, 40–41, 45, 55, 102, 103, 124 Stieglitz, Christian Ludwig, 151 suicide, 40 Swabia. See Württemberg T Taborites, 97–99 Tenochtitlán, plan of, 51–54 Thirty Years’ War, 67, 71, 77, 85, 88, 99 Trumbull, John, 181

U Unitas Fratrum. See Moravian Church Utopia (More), 9, 44, 68, 69, 71, 136 architecture of, 41, 42, 50 economics basis of, 37–38 geography of, 38 labor in, 39 legal system of, 38, 39, 40 marriage in, 40 towns of, 40–41

Williams, Aaron, 148 witches, 106 Wolgemut, Michael, 43 women, status of, 39, 64, 69, 75, 110–111, 117, 118, 119, 212, 223n23, 227n34, 235n14 Wren, Christopher, 77, 160 Württemberg, 64, 77, 92, 132, 133, 136, 138, 140, 152, 154, 158, 160, 211, 212 Wycliffe, John, 97 Y Young, Ammi B., 157

V Vasari, Giorgio, 42 Villalpando, Juan Bautista, 219–220, n. 5 Vitruvius, 40, 51 W Wagner, Richard, 201 Waldensian, 106 Watzdorf, Count von, 113–114 Weingärtner, Wallrath, 133, 135, 154 Welling, Georg von, 135 Wesley, John and Charles, 106 Whitwell, Stedman, 178

Z Zinzendorf, Count Nicholas, 15, 99, 110, 179 early life of, 99–101 establishment of modern Moravian church and, 101 exile of, 105–106 Herrnhaag and, 106, 110–116 Herrnhut and, 102–104 missionary activities of, 104–106, 111 Pietism of, 100–101 Zoarites, 215, 236n27 Zwinger. See Pöppelmann, Matthias Daniel Zwingli, Huldrych, 54

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Illustration Credits 1 Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart, N 220 B 14, 1 Bl 2 Stedman Whitwell, “Design for a Community of 2000 Persons Founded on a Principle Commended by Plato, Lord Bacon and Sir Thomas More,” c. 1825, Kress Collection of Business and Economics, Baker Library, Harvard Business School, Cambridge, MA fig . 3 C. G. Reuter, Project eines regulairen Gemeindörfleins, Unitäts-Archiv Herrnhut, TS Mp. 100.4.a fig . 4 Photograph by Ralph Lieberman fig . 5 Jacob Judah Leon, Retrato del tabernaculo de Moséh, en que se descrive la hechura del S. Tabernaculo que Moséh hizo antiguamente en el desiérto, y todas las dependencías de los diferentes vasos y instrumentos con que era administrado (Amsterdam: Gillis Joosten, 5414 [1654]), Collection Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam fig . 6 C. G. Reuter, “A City like the Levite Cities in Canaan,” Notizbuch (1761), Unitäts-Archiv Herrnhut, TS Bd. 13, p. 8 fig . 7 Das neue Jerusalem, c. 1830, The Library Company of Philadelphia fig . 8 “Shakers near Lebanon, State of N. York. Their Mode of Worship,” c. 1830, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division LC-USZ62-13659 fig . 9 Polly Ann (Jane) Reed, The Holy City, 1843, ink, graphite, and watercolor on paper, Philadelphia Museum of Art, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Julius Zieget, 1963-160-5 fig . 10 Copyright The Frick Collection, New York City fig . 11 Magliabechiano MS: Treatise on Architecture II-I— Folio 43 v. Plan of the “Sforzinda”; Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze; Scala / Art Resource, NY fig . 12 Francesco di Giorgio, Trattato di architettura, version 2 (1497–1500), Codex Magliabechiana II.I.141, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence, fol. 29r; pen and ink on paper, 43.6 × 29.2 cm fig . 13 Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, MD fig . 14 Thomas More, Utopia (1516), Chapin Library, Williams College, Williamstown, MA fig . 15 Section of “House of Vice and Virtue, Sforzinda,” Antonio [Filarete] Averlino, Trattato d’architettura, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Fondo Nazionale, Florence, fol. 144r fig . 16 Hartmann Schedel, Weltchronik (Nuremberg, 1493), Chapin Library, Williams College, Williamstown, MA fig . 17 Foto Marburg / Art Resource, NY fig . 18 Albrecht Dürer, Etliche Underricht zu Befestigung der Stett Schloss und Flecken (1527), Chapin Library, Williams College, Williamstown, MA fig . 19 Trattato di architettura (1497–1500), Codex Magliabechiana II.I.141, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence; pen and ink on paper, 43.6 × 29.2 cm fig . fig .

fig . 20 Albrecht Dürer, Etliche Underricht zu Befestigung der Stett Schloss und Flecken (Nuremberg, 1527), Chapin Library, Williams College, Williamstown, MA fig . 21 Albrecht Dürer, Etliche Underricht zu Befestigung der Stett Schloss und Flecken (Nuremberg, 1527) Chapin Library, Williams College, Williamstown, MA fig . 22 Niccolò Machiavelli, The Arte of Warre (London: Niclas Inglande, 1560), Chapin Library, Williams College, Williamstown, MA fig . 23 Don Fernando [Hernán] Cortés, Praeclara Ferdinadi Cortesii de Noua maris Oceani Hyspania narratio . . . Carolo Romanor u imperatori. . . (Nuremberg: F. Peypus, 1524); photo courtesy of The Newberry Library, Chicago fig . 24 Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg, Civitates orbis terrarum, vol. 5, Urbium praecipuarum mundi theatrum quintum (Cologne, 1599?), p. 68A, Biblioteca Marciana, Venice; © DeA Picture Library / Art Resource, NY fig . 25 Heinrich Schickhardt, “Freudenstadt,” first plan (1599), Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart, Inv. Nr. N220/A21 no. 2 fig . 26 Heinrich Schickhardt, “Freudenstadt,” second plan, Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart, N 220 A 21 01, 1 Bl fig . 27 Heinrich Schickhardt, “Freudenstadt,” third plan, Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart, N 220 B 2, 1 Bl fig . 28 Photograph by Lothar Schwark, Freudenstadt fig . 29 Photograph by Marlis Gaiser, Freudenstadt fig . 30 Historic postcard, Stadtarchiv Freudenstadt fig . 31 Freudenstadt, plan and elevation, c. 1600, Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart, N 220 A 177 fig . 32 Andreae, Kupferstich von Wolfgang Kilian, Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, Inv. Nr. A 372 fig . 33 Tycho Brahe, Astronomiae instauratae mechanica (1598), Chapin Library, Williams College, Williamstown, MA fig . 34 Johann Valentin Andreae, Collectaneorum mathematicorum (Tübingen: J. A. Cellius, 1614), plate 77, Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel fig . 35 Johann Valentin Andreae, Reipublicae Christianopolitanae descriptio (Strasburg: Zetzner, 1619); MendelssohnArchiv, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin, Germany / Art Resource, NY fig . 36 Johann Valentin Andreae, Reipublicae Christianopolitanae descriptio (Strasburg: Zetzner, 1619), courtesy of Martayan Lan Rare Books & Maps fig . 37 Chapin Library, Williams College, Williamstown, MA fig . 38 Historic Urban Plans fig . 39 Library Company of Philadelphia fig . 40 London Metropolitan Archives, City of London fig . 41 Nieuw Moodel om de afgebrande Stadt London te herbouwen (Amsterdam, 1666?); courtesy of Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps, www.RareMaps.com

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fig . 42 Johann Melchior von Schwalbach, Kurtzer und grundlicher Berichtt wie alle undt jede, sowohl regular als irregular festungen, auf geometrische Arth nach gegebenen Proportzen auffzureissen und zu verzeichnen . . . beschrieben und gelehret wirdt (1636), plate 144, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, CCA-DR1986:0761 fig . 43 Berlin die Praechtigst. u. maechtigste Hauptstatt dess Churfürstenthums Brandenburg, auch Residenz dess Königes in Preussen und florisanter Handels-Plaz, 1738; Biblioteka Cyfrowa Uniwersytetu Wroclawskiego fig . 44 Staatsarchiv Nürnberg, Regierungsplansammlung, Inv. Nr. Mappe XVI, Nr. 1 fig . 45 Erlangen, Staatsarchiv Bamberg fig . 46 Courtesy of Peter Bausch fig . 47 Unitäts-Archiv Herrnhut fig . 48 Detail of Michael Keyl nach J. G. Krause, Karte der Oberlausitz mit ihren Landesgrenzen und wichtigen Städten sowie den drei Brüdergemeinorten Herrnhut, Niesky und Kleinwelka (Kupferstich, 1782); Unitäts-Archiv Herrnhut, TS Mp.3.14 fig . 49 Unitäts-Archiv Herrnhut, TS Mp. 373.16 fig . 50 Unitäts-Archiv Herrnhut, TS Mp. 4.1 fig . 51 Unitäts-Archiv Herrnhut, TS Mp. 4.1 fig . 52 Moravian Archives, Bethlehem, PA fig . 53 “Plan von Neu Ebenezer. From Samuel Urlsperger, Ausfürhliche Nachrichten von den Saltzburgischen Emigranten,” published by Matthaeus Seutter, 1747; J. Kyle Spencer Map Collection (MC 136), Columbus State University Archives, Columbus State University, Columbus, GA fig . 54 Sir Robert Montgomery, A Discourse Concerning the Design’d Establishment of a New Colony to the South of Carolina, in the Most Delightful Country in the Universe (London, 1717), Chapin Library, Williams College, Williamstown, MA fig . 55 Grundriß von Herrnhaag, Unitäts-Archiv Herrnhut, AI 60a fig . 56 Victor Kozlenko / Shutterstock fig . 57 Unitäts-Archiv Herrnhut, TS Mp. 88.7.b fig . 58 Unitäts-Archiv Herrnhut, GS 112 fig . 59 Courtesy of Peter Bausch fig . 60 “Gemeinhaus in Herrnhaag,” Unitäts-Archiv Herrnhut, TS Bd. 1.61 fig . 61 Unitäts-Archiv Herrnhut, TS Mp. 372.2 fig . 62 Unitäts-Archiv Herrnhut, TS Bd. 1.66 fig . 63 “Project zum neuen Gemeinhauße in Niesky,” Unitäts-Archiv Herrnhut, TS Bd. 3.8 fig . 64 Unitäts-Archiv Herrnhut, TS Bd. 3.5a fig . 65 Andreas Höger [?], Grundriss von Lititz (c. 1758), Moravian Archives, Bethlehem, PA fig . 66 Unitäts-Archiv Herrnhut, TS Mp. 38.01 fig . 67 C. G. Reuter, Mappa geographica exhibens diasporam Silesiam (1752), Unitäts-Archiv Herrnhut, plan 29 fig . 68 Riß zum neuen Bau auf dem Nazarether Land, Unitäts-Archiv Herrnhut, TS Mp. 204.1 fig . 69 Ohnmaßgebliches Project zu einer Stadt in North Carolina, Unitäts-Archiv Herrnhut, TS Mp. 100.6

250 illustration credits

fig . 70 C. G. Reuter, Versuch eines Projects zu einer Stadt von 136 Baustellen, Unitäts-Archiv Herrnhut, TS Mp. 100.3.a fig . 71 Detail of C. G. Reuter, Mappa geographica exhibens diasporam Silesiam (1752), Unitäts-Archiv Herrnhut, plan 29 fig . 72 Moravian Archives, Bethlehem, PA fig . 73 Frontispiece to Ernst Ludwig Brauns, Amerika und die moderne Völkerwanderung (Potsdam: Vogler, 1833); courtesy of The Rare Book & Manuscript Library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign fig . 74 Manuscript Group 185, Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission: Old Economy Village Archives, 06.69.15.1 fig . 75 Manuscript Group 185, Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission: Old Economy Village Archives, 06.72.17.79 fig . 76 Manuscript Group 185, Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission: Old Economy Village Archives, 06.72.17.84 fig . 77 OE80.2.62. Collections of Old Economy Village, Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission fig . 78 Manuscript Group 185, Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission: Old Economy Village Archives, 06.72.17.21 fig . 79 Manuscript Group 185, Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission: Old Economy Village Archives, 06.72.17.6 fig . 80 “Kornmagazin und Fruchtboden,” in Georg Heinrich Borheck, Entwurf einer Anweisung zur Landbaukunst, nach ökonomischen Grundsätzen . . . , 2nd ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1792), pt. 2, plate 7, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich fig . 81 Photograph by Ralph Lieberman fig . 82 Photograph by Ralph Lieberman fig . 83 Photograph by Ralph Lieberman fig . 84 Photograph by Ralph Lieberman fig . 85 Photograph by Ralph Lieberman fig . 86 Manuscript Group 185, Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission: Old Economy Village Archives, 06.72.17.52 fig . 87 Manuscript Group 185, Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission: Old Economy Village Archives, 06.72.17.51 fig . 88 Manuscript Group 185, Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission: Old Economy Village Archives, 06.72.17.24 fig . 89 Photograph by Ralph Lieberman fig . 90 Photograph by Ralph Lieberman fig . 91 “Vier kleine Häuschen,” Ideenmagazin für Liebhaber von Gärten, englischen Anlagen und für Besitzer von Landgütern, ed. Gottfried Grohmann, vol. 1, cahier 4, no. 3 (Leipzig: Baumgärtner, 1796), University of Pennsylvania Library, Philadelphia fig . 92 “Waldholzhaus,” Ideenmagazin für Liebhaber von Gärten, englischen Anlagen und für Besitzer von Landgütern, ed., vol. 1, cahier 2, no. 4 Gottfried Grohmann (Leipzig:

Baumgärtner, 1796), University of Pennsylvania Library, Philadelphia fig . 93 Courtesy of Royal Library, National Library of Denmark and Copenhagen University Library fig . 94 Manuscript Group 185, Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission: Old Economy Village Archives, 06.72.17.47 fig . 95 Historic New Harmony fig . 96 Photograph by Ralph Lieberman fig . 97 Manuscript Group 185, Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission: Old Economy Village Archives, OE2000.1.23 fig . 98 Historic New Harmony fig . 99 Manuscript Group 185, Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission: Old Economy Village Archives, 06.72.17.19 fig . 100 Manuscript Group 185, Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission: Old Economy Village Archives, 06.72.17.45 fig . 101 Photograph by Ralph Lieberman fig . 102 Manuscript Group 185, Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission: Old Economy Village Archives, 06.72.17.48 fig . 103 Manuscript Group 185, Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission: Old Economy Village Archives, 06.72.17.18 fig . 104 Manuscript Group 185, Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission: Old Economy Village Archives, 06.72.17.20 fig . 105 National Portrait Gallery, London fig . 106 “Report to the Committee for the Relief of the Manufacturing Poor” (1817), Archives and Special Collections Library, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY fig . 107 Manuscript Group 185, Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission: Old Economy Village Archives, 06.72.17.67 fig . 108 Manuscript Group 185, Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission: Old Economy Village Archives,06.72.17.1 fig . 109 Manuscript Group 185, Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission: Old Economy Village Archives, 06.72.17.17

110 Photograph by Ralph Lieberman 111 Photograph by Ralph Lieberman fig . 112 Photograph by Ralph Lieberman fig . 113 Photograph by Ralph Lieberman fig . 114 Photograph by Ralph Lieberman fig . 115 Manuscript Group 185, Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission: Old Economy Village Archives, 06.72.17.25 fig . 116 Manuscript Group 185, Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission: Old Economy Village Archives, 06.72.17.43 fig . 117 Photograph by Ralph Lieberman fig . 118 Photograph by Ralph Lieberman fig . 119 OE80.2.62; collection of Old Economy Village, Pennsylvania State Historical and Museum Commission fig . 120 Photograph by Ralph Lieberman fig . 121 Photograph by Ralph Lieberman fig . 122 Manuscript Group 185, Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission: Old Economy Village Archives, OE-83-4-5 fig . 123 Photograph by Ralph Lieberman fig . 124 Photograph by Ralph Lieberman fig . 125 Photograph by Ralph Lieberman fig . 126 Collection of Old Economy Village, Pennsylvania State Historical and Museum Commission fig . 127 Karl Bodmer (Swiss, 1809–1893), View of New Harmony, 1832, watercolor on paper, Joslyn Museum, Omaha, Nebraska, gift of the Enron Art Foundation, 1986.49.368 fig . 128 Mary Evans Picture Library, London fig . 129 James Silk Buckingham, “Sketch of the Plan of a Model Town” in National Evils and Practical Remedies, with the Plan of a Model Town (1849), Trinity College Library, Hartford, CT fig . 130 James Silk Buckingham, “Proposed Model Town” in National Evils and Practical Remedies, with the Plan of a Model Town (1849), Trinity College Library, Hartford, CT fig . 131 Victor Considérant, Description du phalanstère et considérations sociales sur l’architectonique, 2nd ed. (Paris: Librairie Sociétaire, 1848); photo courtesy of The Newberry Library, Chicago fig . fig .

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Acknowledgments City of Refuge began with a coincidence. In 1986, while living in Germany, I worked as a volunteer on the restoration of the Moravian town of Herrnhaag. When I became a researcher for the restoration of the Harmonist town of Economy, Pennsylvania, one year later, I discovered that the Harmonists had quite deliberately based their architecture on the prototype of Herrnhaag. In 1994, Barry Bergdoll kindly accepted my paper on the subject for a session at the annual meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians. I decided at the time to write a synthetic history of the subject but realized, because of the sweep of the topic, that it would require a long process of maturation. I did not think it would take thirty years. Over this time, I have been helped in Germany by a long roster of friends, teachers, and colleagues, especially Hans-Joseph Böker, Günther Kokkelink, Helmut Knocke, Stefan Amt, and Gertrud Röder and Hans Merian. Rudi Kröger and the Moravian Archives in Herrnhut have amply demonstrated that it is not impossible to combine efficiency and kindness. Particularly generous was Ulrike Carstensen, author of the indispensable study of Herrnhaag. I am especially grateful to the Vollprecht family of Quakenbrück, who long ago introduced me to Moravian life, its kindness and hospitality, and inadvertently planted the seed of this book. In the United States, I also want to thank the scholars of the Harmony Society, especially Ray Shepherd, Mary Ann Landis, and Sarah Buffington, and to acknowledge the generous assistance of Donald B. Kraybill, Lu Ann De Cunzo, John Ruch and the Harmony Museum, Matt Grow, George E. Thomas, Phyllis Lambert, Barbara Miller Lane, Julie Nicoletta, Michelangelo Sabatini, Jeffrey A. Cohen, Andrew Shanken, and Sandy Isenstadt. Above all, I thank my wife, Susan Glassman, whose terse comments and silent pauses did as much to improve this book as many pages of comments by outside readers. According to the cruel old joke, librarians work to make their materials available to users, and archivists work to guard them. I found this was not the case and am indebted to a great many kindly spirits—archivists, librarians, collectors—who helped with research and in securing photographs: Matthew Bailey, National Portrait Gallery, London; Peter Bausch; Hannah Bennett, Fisher Fine Arts Library, University of Pennsylvania; Robin Bischof, Historic New Harmony; Anne Blecksmith, Huntingdon Library; Judith Bolsinger, Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart; Ruth Bowler, Walters Art Museum; Amanda Bryden, New Harmony State Historic Site; Caroline Dagbert, Canadian Centre for Architecture; M. Diller, Staatsarchiv Bamberg; J. M. Duffin, Archives, University of Pennsylvania; Kathleen Foster, Philadelphia Museum of Art; Marlis Gaiser, Freudenstadt; Francesca Gallori, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze; Renata Guttman, Canadian Centre for Architecture; Wayne Hammond, Chapin Library, Williams College; Lesley Herzberg, Hancock Shaker Village; Julee Johnson, 253

Historic Urban Plans; Anton Kras, Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam; Liz Kurtulik, Art Resource; Richard Lan, Martayan Lan Rare Books & Maps; Felix Kommnick, Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel; Jennifer Lemak, New York State Museum; Kristin Meier, Staatsarchiv Nürnberg; Tom McCullough, Moravian Archives, Bethlehem; Christine Menard, Williams College; Melissa Murphy, Baker Library, Harvard Business School; Olaf Nippe, Moravian Archives, Herrnhut; David Owings, Columbus State University; Ronald Patkus, Vassar; Erika Piola and Nicole Joniec, Library Company of Philadelphia; Jürgen Ritter, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek; Barry Ruderman, Barry Lawrence Ruderman Antique Maps Inc.; Reinhold Schäffer, Staatsarchiv Bamberg; Pfr. Hans-Jürgen Schlue, Evangelische Kirchengemeinde Freudenstadt; Dennis Sears, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Jeremy Smith, London Metropolitan Archives; Anja Staubitz, Stadtverwaltung Freudenstadt; and Sara Toso, Mary Evans Library. Grateful thanks to all. A roster of colleagues graciously gave research advice and otherwise supported this project: Nicholas Adams, Vassar; John Archer, University of Minnesota; Craig D. Atwood Moravian Theological Seminary; David B. Brownlee, University of Pennsylvania; Keith Eggener, University of Oregon; Berthold Hub, Universität Wien; Robert Jackall, Williams College; Dietrich Neumann, Brown University; Martha Pollak, University of Illinois at Chicago; John Reps, Cornell University; Andrew Saint, Survey of London; and John Schofield, City of London Archaeological Trust. I am especially beholden to Ralph E. Lieberman—historian, colleague, friend— who took the splendid photographs of the Harmonist settlements in Pennsylvania. It is a privilege to collaborate with a photographer on site, particularly one who knows how to make a case in visual terms. Research for this book was supported by the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and by a Guggenheim Fellowship. I want to acknowledge the encouragement and support of Irving Lavin, who urged me to come to the Institute in Princeton because of a stray reference in a Thomas Mann novel to the vocal music of the Ephrata Cloisterites. Finally, I thank Neal Kozodoy, my lieber Meister of an editor, who proposed the title of the book and immeasurably sharpened its argument. Were it not for Neal, it still might bear its facetious working title, “Dull Towns for Celibate People.”

254 acknowledgments