“By evening I was so tired looking at fashionable architecture that my invitation to supper at Aunt Muriel’s was grateful beyond words. We had sugar-cured ham (cured on the place), home-made bread, toasted and buttered, Ceylon tea, brewed at table from an antique Dresden tea-caddie, old-fashioned raised cake, and honey as put up by the bees.”
applied ornament directly overhead. Such modern obtrusion would be relegated to their draughtsman who has set up in business for himself, and to whom they might direct the poorer-class client seeking a low-priced plan. Experience alone has taught these architects that the closer the adaptation up to a certain point, the greater the success. I do not believe that they ever think of expressing history in executing their designs. Certainly, they do not look upon their profession as eleemosynary to make the world a more beautiful world, a kindlier world, a happier world for mankind generally. The chances are they are still figuring very closely with American cunning and expediency for commercial martinets, whose favor means the largest commissions, and whose unwelcome personal influence we so often run across when least expecting in modern architecture, and which is sure to disenchant us with it.
CHAPTER X
ADAPTATION
A representative architect in New York city has declared impressively, “We are no longer architects, but adapters!” To him, looking upon his own achievement and that of his contemporaries as well as the general tendency of the times in which we live, it seemed, indeed, he had framed an unimpeachable aphorism. It is a funny thing about architecture:—nearly as it concerns our every day needs, much as it is criticised about our ears, our knowledge of it, nevertheless, continues to be absurdly inexact and experimental. I am speaking now of architecture as a fine art, not as the science of an engineer. One has only to read the reviews to note how little the authors themselves know to tell us, how they go ’round and ’round the animal, with more or less entanglement, as we have read of picadors doing in a bull fight. And when they have finished can we call
“It seemed they were coming to—to a river—a sombre, swift-flowing river, and a huge gray building resting upon arches spanned its width. Ascending a little elevation in the road, further up, the vision becomes clearer and fascinating to the dreaming horseman. It is the Château of Chenonceau.”—Miss. Polly Fairfax.
to mind a single statement wherein they have committed themselves to anything definite? The whole proposition architectonic is to the average reviewer an egregious bugbear before which he is anything but sure of himself.
He hints at the mysteries of design, half advocating, half condemning, the two salient American traits—namely, originality and enterprise; for he readily sees that if he commends those traits unequivocally, he must acknowledge the architects of our Reign of Terror to have been the greatest of all American architects whose work has passed into history, as they were assuredly the most original and enfranchised. And this, of course, would never do for the Della Cruscan critic of America.