AMERICAN ROMANESQUE DWELLING, BY AN IMITATOR OF RICHARDSON.
Date about 1890.
“New Art” movement. They invented an exaggerated architectural grammar, without doubt derived from the old mediæval cathedrals in the south of France, but so vulgarized as to establish a clear case of libel for those eminently respectable prototypes. This grammar the rabid reformers proceeded to apply to every kind of secular building in America, finally to American dwelling-houses themselves. They did not reckon with their grandparents for an instant, not they. They apparently took the keenest delight in walking rough-shod over every sacred home memory. They openly insulted the very ancestors to whom they owed existence. But the balance of good and evil there is in the world cannot be disturbed so suddenly or arbitrarily. Outraged history was not slow to assert itself, and after a while would have no more of the dwelling-house Romanesque. I regret to say that Richardson’s imitators were not the last of their race, and that there have been other and as rabid architectural reformers, of whom I shall speak in the next chapter.
CHAPTER II
ART AND COMMERCIALISM
Not very long ago two enterprising architects in a Western State succeeded in inventing a characteristic style of architecture of some merit. I do not know its name. I am not sure that it has any. But as it is likely to be somewhat in vogue for several years to come, I may as well print herewith a simple recipe for combining its essential elements:
Recipe: First, you must endeavor to find some valuable fragment of ancient Greece or Rome, preferably a pedestal for a statue, base of a column, or even the shaft itself and capital, which should not be too attenuated, however, and is to be translated, if necessary, from a cylindrical form into a rectangular one. Now, here is the scheme:
Punch your elevations full of rectangular holes in seemly rows, divide them into latitudinal sections by
