The MONUMENTS of the Classic Revival have been referred to in the foregoing text at sufficient length to preclude the necessity of further enumeration here.
[CHAPTER XXVI.]
RECENT ARCHITECTURE IN EUROPE.
Books Recommended: As before, Chateau, Fergusson. Also Barqui, L’Architecture moderne en France.—Berlin und seine Bauten (and a series of similar works on the modern buildings of other German cities). Daly, Architecture privée du XIXe siècle. Garnier, Le nouvel Opéra. Gourlier, Choix d’édifices publics. Licht, Architektur Deutschlands. Lübke, Denkmäler der Kunst. Lützow und Tischler, Wiener Neubauten. Narjoux, Monuments élevés par la ville de Paris, 1850–1880. Rückwardt, Façaden und Details modernen Bauten.—Sammelmappe hervorragenden Concurrenz-Entwurfen. Sédille, L’Architecture moderne. Selfridge, Modern French Architecture. Statham, Modern Architecture. Villars, England, Scotland, and Ireland (tr. Henry Frith). Consult also Transactions of the Royal Institute of British Architects, and the leading architectural journals of recent years.
MODERN CONDITIONS.
The nineteenth century has been pre-eminently an age of industrial progress. Its most striking advances have been along mechanical, scientific, and commercial lines. As a result of this material progress the general conditions of mankind in civilized countries have undoubtedly been greatly bettered. Popular education and the printing-press have also raised the intellectual level of society, making learning the privilege of even the poorest. Intellectual, scientific, and commercial pursuits have thus largely absorbed those energies which in other ages found exercise in the creation of artistic forms and objects. The critical and sceptical spirit, the spirit of utilitarianism and realism, has checked the free and general development of the creative imagination, at least in the plastic arts. While in poetry and music there have been great and noble achievements, the plastic arts, including architecture, have only of late years attained a position at all worthy of the intellectual advancement of the times.
Nevertheless the artistic spirit has never been wholly crushed out by the untoward pressure of realism and commercialism. Unfortunately it has repeatedly been directed in wrong channels. Modern archæology and the publication of the forms of historic art by books and photographs have too exclusively fastened attention upon the details of extinct styles as a source of inspiration in design. The whole range of historic art is brought within our survey, and while this has on the one hand tended toward the confusion and multiplication of styles in modern work, it has on the other led to a slavish adherence to historic precedent or a literal copying of historic forms. Modern architecture has thus oscillated between the extremes of archæological servitude and of an unreasoning eclecticism. In the hands of men of inferior training the results have been deplorable travesties of all styles, or meaningless aggregations of ill-assorted forms.
An important factor in this demoralization of architectural design has been the development of new constructive methods, especially in the use of iron and steel. It has been impossible for modern designers, in their treatment of style, to keep pace with the rapid changes in the structural use of metal in architecture. The roofs of vast span, largely composed of glass, which modern methods of trussing have made possible for railway stations, armories, and exhibition buildings; the immense unencumbered spaces which may be covered by them; the introduction and development, especially in the United States, of the post-and-girder system of construction for high buildings, in which the external walls are a mere screen or filling-in; these have revolutionized architecture so rapidly and completely that architects are still struggling and groping to find the solution of many of the problems of style, scale, and composition which they have brought forward.
Within the last thirty years, however, architecture has, despite these new conditions, made notable advances. The artistic emulation of repeated international exhibitions, the multiplication of museums and schools of art, the general advance in intelligence and enlightenment, have all contributed to this artistic progress. There appears to be more of the artistic and intellectual quality in the average architecture of the present time, on both sides of the Atlantic, than at any previous period in this century. The futility of the archæological revival of extinct styles is generally recognized. New conditions are gradually procuring the solution of the very problems they raise. Historic precedent sits more lightly on the architect than formerly, and the essential unity of principle underlying all good design is coming to be better understood.[26]