How to Study Architecture

by Charles H. Caffin

For example: by simple sense-perception we discover that one tree is taller than another, or that one tree is an elm, another a silver birch. Our perception may stop there; but not if we are in a mood to contemplate. Then the perception that one tree is taller than the other may be followed by the feeling that the taller tree gives us more satisfaction. It may seem to us to be a better proportioned tree: its parts are more pleasingly related to the whole mass; or it may seem to be in a fitter relation to the spot it occupies and to the other “objects” near it. Again, having ascertained by pure sense-impression that one tree is an elm and the other a silver birch, we may find ourselves thinking about the qualities of difference presented by the two trees. With what splendid assurance the elm trunk rears up! How majestically the branches radiate from it and bear their glorious masses of abundant foliage! On the other hand, how dainty are the stems and branches of the silver birch, how delicately graceful the sprays of tiny leaves! “How sensitive!” perhaps we say. For to our imagination the slender tree may seem to be endowed with senses that respond to every movement of the air, to every glancing of the sunlight.

In all these cases we have gone beyond mere sense-perception. We are no longer interested only in the “object.” Our interest has become subjective. We are interested in the subject not the object of the verb, to perceive—the subject who perceives, in this case, ourself; how the thing affects oneself; how it stirs in one a sense of beauty. By this time our thoughts may have been withdrawn from the concrete object and have passed on to “abstract” ideas, suggested by the object. It is grandeur of growth, as embodied in the elm, fragile tenderness, as expressed in the birch, that absorb our thought; and the wonder also how qualities so different can survive the rude shocks of nature, and find, each its special function in the scheme of nature’s beauty.

In thus feeling external objects through our own experience of life and our own sense of beauty, we are employing the sense-perception that is specially called æsthetic. And it is in the degree to which objects of architecture, sculpture, or painting have the capacity of stimulating this æsthetic appreciation that they properly belong in the company of the Fine Arts.

Architecture is the science and art of building structures that, while in most cases they serve a useful purpose, are in all cases designed and built with a view to beauty. Their motive is beauty as well as utility.

In certain instances, as, for example, the triumphal arch, the motive may seem to have been solely one of beauty. On the other hand, when we recall that the arch was erected as a memorial to some great man or some great exploit—the Arch of Titus, for example, commemorating this general’s capture of Jerusalem—the imposing dignity of the structure, by compelling attention and exciting admiration, would actually serve the purpose for which it was erected.

Indeed, the distinction which people are apt to draw between the useful and the beautiful is not necessarily so sharp as is supposed and is largely founded upon ignorance or a mistaken attitude toward life. The tendency to be satisfied with the utility of a thing and to regard beauty as a fad, impractical and wasteful, shows that, although our civilisation may have progressed in some respects, it has fallen back in others. For there is nothing more surely certain in the history of human progress, than that, while primitive man had to exercise his ingenuity in providing for the necessities of life and in the making of tools, implements, utensils, and so forth to achieve his needs, he was not satisfied that his work should be merely useful. He had a mind to make it pleasing in shape and by means of ornament. And this attention to beauty grew as men grew in civilisation, becoming most conspicuous as their civilisation reached its highest point; and continued through the ages, until machinery began to replace the individual craftsman.

For the individual craftsman, responsible for making a thing from start to finish, must, if he is worth a hill of beans, take a personal pride in making it as well as he can. As the Bible relates of the Supreme Creator, “And God saw everything that he had made and, behold, it was very good.” And the craftsman, so long as he is free to create out of his own knowledge and his own feeling, must be able to feel this, because there is an instinct in him, an imperative need of his own nature, that he shall be proud of his work. It is a wonderful fact of human nature that when it works freely, putting forth all its capacities, it is prompted by this instinct, not only to make useful things but also to make them well and as beautiful as may be.

But gradually machinery took away the workman’s control of his work. He ceased to design, lay out, and carry through all the details of his work to a finish. He has come to be intrusted with only a part of the operation, and that is performed under the control of a machine that turns out the work with soulless uniformity. The craftsman has degenerated into a repeater of partial processes; he has become the servant of a machine; a cog in a vast mechanical system. And, with the development of high power machines the output of production has been increased, until quantity rather than quality has tended to become the ambition of the system.

It has followed as a logical result of this taking away from millions of men and women the privilege of being individual craftsmen, creators of their own handiwork, that they have grown indifferent to the quality of the work turned out; taste, which means the ability to discriminate between qualities, has diminished and a general indifference to the element of beauty has ensued.

Of all the Fine Arts, Architecture is closest to the life of man. It has been developed out of the primitive necessity of providing shelter from the elements and protection against the assaults of all kinds of aggressors. And chief among the aggressors against which primitive man sought to defend himself were the mysterious forces of nature which his imagination pictured as evil spirits. To ward off these and to enlist the support of kindly spirits represented a necessity of life that developed through fetish worship into some positive conception of religion. This need was embodied in structures, which, originating in the selection or erection of a single stone, gradually became composed of an aggregation of stones variously disposed, in heaps, in geometric groups of single stones, or in the placing of stones horizontally upon two or more vertical supporting stones.