121. The Arabs: India: Modern Architecture
In the east, Roman architectural tradition was sustained without rupture and even carried forward in the Byzantine empire. The great church of St. Sophia at Constantinople is a sixth century example of a splendid dome set on four great arches and intersecting with smaller domes at its corners. From the Byzantine Greeks—or Romans as they long continued to call themselves—and perhaps from the neighboring Sassanian Persians, the principle of arch and dome came to the Arabs when these underwent their sudden expansion after the death of Mohammed. In nearly all the countries overrun by the Arabs, Mesopotamia, Syria, Egypt, North Africa, Sicily, and Spain, they encountered innumerable old public buildings or ruins. It was not long before they were emulating these. During the centuries superficial fashion does not stand still in architecture any more than in dress. The trousers of 1850 would seem out of place if worn in 1920, and yet the two garments are identical in basic plan. So with Roman and Arab or Saracenic architecture. The Arab sometimes twisted his columns and bulged his arch to horseshoe shape. He added no essential element.
Among the countries in which the Arabs built is Spain. Hence their architecture, in the form known as Moorish, influenced that of the Spaniards. They in turn carried the style to Mexico; from there it was transported to New Mexico and California, where converted Indians made and laid the adobe bricks of their mission churches according to the plans of the padres. Since the American occupation, the buildings and ruins of the Spanish period have stood out as landmarks, fired the imagination of visitors, and set the model for a type of architecture. Railroad stations and the like are now done in “Mission” style, which in essentials is nothing but Spanish Moorish architecture, as this again is only the Arab modification of the Roman original.
Along with Mohammedanism, the Roman-Saracenic architecture spread eastward also to India. In the sixteenth century Mohammedan conquerors of Mongol origin, known therefore as the Moguls, carved out a great empire in northern India. Prosperity resulted for several generations, and its memory was embellished by the erection of notable buildings. Perhaps the most famous of these is the tomb near Agra known as the Taj Mahal. Set in its sunlit environment, built of white marble, and its surface a maze of inlay in polished stone, this structure seems utterly unrelated to the grim, narrow, upward-stretching cathedrals of northern Europe with stained glass filling the spaces between their buttresses. Yet the central feature of the Taj Mahal is a great dome done on the identical plan as that of St. Sophia or the Pantheon and derived from them. What then one is wont to regard as the triumph of Indian architecture is not Indian at all; no more than Gothic architecture had any connection with the Goths. The one is Mohammedan, the other French. Both represent little else than the working out in new countries and in later centuries of an invention which the Romans had borrowed from the Etruscans and they from the Babylonians. The device diffused from Asia into Europe and Africa and returned after several thousand years, to flourish once more near its source of origin, enormously modified æsthetically and enriched with infinite refinement, but still without radical change.
It is an interesting commentary on the sluggishness of invention that whereas we to-day build in concrete and steel as well as in wood and brick and stone, and erect buildings of greater size as well as for a larger variety of purposes than ever before in history, yet we have so far been unable to add any new type of æsthetic design. Our public buildings, those intended to serve as monuments and therefore summoning the utmost abilities of the architect, still make use of the arch, vault, and dome, or fall back frankly on modifications of the Greek temple with its rows of columns. So far as the outside appearance of modern buildings goes, all our fine architecture is essentially a burrowing in the past to recombine in slightly new proportions, and for new uses, elements taken from the most diverse countries and ages, but forming part of only two lines of development. It may be, when we have built much longer in steel and concrete, and perhaps still newer materials, that the inherent properties of these may gradually force on a future generation of architects and engineers possibilities which indeed are now lying before us, but to which the resistance of the human mind to novelty blinds us.