Balbus; or, the future of architecture

BALBUS
TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW
THE FUTURE OF ARCHITECTURE
CHRISTIAN BARMAN
London: KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO., Ltd. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co.
The same Author has also written :
Printed in Great Britain by MACKAYS LTD., CHATHAM

It is often maintained that there is a similarity between architecture and dress in that both are applied as a covering, the one to the individual human body, the other to the body politic. But there is one thing that those who point to this similarity are not always careful to bear in mind, namely that it is precisely in their relation to this human content that the arts of architecture and dress differ most widely. The bodies of adult men and women are distinguished from one another only by a few small variations of colour and proportion. Of so little consequence are these departures from the universal norm that fashion experts are freely permitted to disregard their effect, and usually content themselves with saying that “trousers are worn narrower” and that “gowns are of pastel shades of mousseline and chiffon.” Having, in such observations as these, momentarily exhausted the subject of sartorial growth, they can do nothing but await the next measurement, the next material, that its guiding spirits may decree. What would they say, however, if they were asked to discuss the toilet of a greyhound, a turkey-cock or a hippopotamus, and compare it with the vesture appropriate to human beings? Would not the historian of clothes become deeply embarrassed at such an enlargement of his field of vision, at the sudden appearance of such a multiplicity of forms? Yet the scope and variety of his subject would still be as nothing beside the scope of architectural history, and the variety of the architectural forms that it is the task of this history to register, and anatomize, and trace back severally to their origin. For while the origin of sartorial form is to be discerned in the fixed and unchanging outline of the human body, the origin of architectural form must be looked for in the infinite diversity of the social organism and in the sweeping and rapid changes into which this organism is for ever being thrown. Of all architectural movements there is none, therefore, so irresistible in its progress or so expansive in its effect as that which owes its existence to a social movement. In the construction of the first circular cathedral window on the one hand, and Sir William Chambers’ experiments in Oriental design on the other, we have two typical events in the history of architectural form whose influence upon the course of this history has been far less profound than that, let us say, of the publication of Rousseau’s Emile or the repeal of the laws forbidding the exportation of machinery. Had not the very fact of Balbus building become an index to the social condition of the commonwealth? Thus any change in the state of society may accelerate building or retard it, and may likewise alter the whole subject or content of a particular province of building; while events of a purely architectural origin and significance most often leave a record that is only skin-deep.