PRINCESSGATE (MODERN) DEVELOPED FROM DUTCH AND ENGLISH FARM-HOUSE MOTIVES.
Try to Have the Rear of Your House as Attractive as the Front.
upon business principles, used merely as a means to an end, and that end financial success—a state of things which has retarded the development of American Renaissance more than any other one factor—but this leads me back again to art and commercialism, to which I have already consecrated a chapter of this review. Let us consider for the present only the different kinds of architects we have in America, so differently equipped as to cause positive amazement while cataloguing them. What diversity of talent confronts us! talent, in some cases, one would say, that scarcely concerned architecture. I can think of no other profession which has quite so many branch specialists. Incredible as it may seem, there are prominent and successful architects—trained architects of ability—who are able to draw plans but who cannot draw elevations, and others who can draw elevations but cannot plan. There are architects who are skilful draughtsmen who cannot design, architects who can design but cannot draw at all, architects who can only write specifications and superintend—two very important branches of the profession, however, that usually go together—while stranger still, there are practising architects who can neither design nor draw nor write specifications nor even superintend, but who possess a wonderful business aptitude and personal magnetism by which they command clients for their partners or draughtsmen who actually prepare the drawings and the other instruments of service.
This class of architects is, by no means, confined to America or to the epoch.[8] As long ago as the reign of Louis XIV in France, Jules Hardouin Mansart was a shining example of the financier-architect. The description of him given in Miss Wormeley’s admirable translation of the memoirs of Saint-Simon[9] is so intensely interesting that I believe I cannot do better than to quote the fragments which succeed:
BILTMORE IN NORTH CAROLINA.