A. H. Stem, Architect.
obsolete as it seems, even the practice of making Latin verses has its great benefits in imparting to the pupil the command of literary form and of beauty of diction. There are many examples to sustain this contention, as well as the analogous contention that a faithful study and reproduction of antique or of mediæval architecture are highly useful, if not altogether indispensable, to cultivate an architect’s power of design. Only it may be pointed out that the use of these studies is to enable the student to express himself with more power and grace in the vernacular, and that one no longer reverts to Latin verse when he has really something to say. The monuments that are accepted as models by the modern world are themselves the results of the labors of successive generations. It was by a secular process that the same structural elements employed at Thebes and Karnac were developed to the perfection of the Parthenon. In proportion to the newness of their problems it is to be expected that the efforts of our architects will be crude; but there is a vast difference between the crudity of a serious and matured attempt to do a new thing and the crudity of mere ignorance and self-sufficiency. Evidently the progress of American architecture will not be promoted by the labors of designers, whether they be “Western” or “Eastern,” who have merely “lived in the alms basket” of architectural forms, and whose notion of architecture consists in multiplying “features,” as who should think to enhance the expressiveness of the human countenance by adorning it with two noses.
One cannot neologize with any promise of success unless he knows what is already in the dictionary; and a professional equipment that puts its owner really in possession of the best that has been done in the world is indispensable to successful eclecticism in architecture. On the other hand, it is equally true that no progress can result from the labors of architects whose training has made them so fastidious that they are more revolted by the crudity of the forms that result from the attempt to express a new meaning than by the failure to make the attempt, and so conceal what they are really doing behind a mask of historical architecture, of which the elegance is quite irrelevant. This latter fault is that of modern architecture in general. The history of that architecture indicates that it is a fault even more unpromising of progress than the crudities of an emancipated architecture, in which the discipline of the designer fails to supply the place of the artificial check of an historical style. It is more feasible to tame exuberances than to create a soul under the ribs of death. The emancipation of American architecture is thus ultimately more hopeful than if it were put under academic bonds to keep the peace. It may freely be admitted that many of its manifestations are not for the present joyous, but grievous, and that to throw upon the individual designer the responsibility withheld from a designer with whom fidelity to style is the first duty is a process that fails when his work, as has been wittily said, “shows no more self-restraint than a bunch of fire-crackers.” But these papers have also borne witness that there are among the emancipated practitioners of architecture in the West men who have shown that they can use their liberty wisely, and whose work can be hailed as among the hopeful beginnings of a national architecture.
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Valuable and Interesting Works
FOR
Students of Ancient and Modern Art.