guided by good taste, is to be given without reserve to the French designers of the long years beginning with 1860. Good taste is visible everywhere, not in an exceptional measure in this building; on the contrary, it is to be thought by a careful student of the street fronts of Paris that there is a relative clumsiness which other and less noticeable buildings have escaped: but there is everywhere the visible presence of thought—of matured study of the problem, and that is a thing so rare in the modern architecture of other lands that we are never brought face to face with the French instances of its active presence without a new thrill of admiration.
In the United States, some of the most thoughtful buildings have been those inspired by the semi-Spanish style of the provinces torn from Mexico in 1848; the missions of California and New Mexico. Inspired by those blessings of a temperate region, a steady warmth, a brilliant sun, they are most assuredly: and yet there is originality, so much as to cause the student almost to forget the origin of their design in such work of the not very famous past. Such buildings are the hotels built in Saint Augustine about 1885—the Ponce de Leon, in which the architecture of old Spain has been studied more carefully, the Alcazar, where the simpler appliances of Western America are more in evidence.
One of the best things in modern original design is the building shown in plate LXIV. Its treatment is picturesque rather than severe; and a sufficient reason for that treatment is the recognized difficulty of applying the classically simple method of design to one of the modern high and narrow buildings of many stories and of many, similar, window-openings. The walls of the side, on the by-street and on the court, are diminished by the adoption of a roof of abnormally steep pitch with two stories in it. The two gable-walls are broken, as a result of the same device, by the beginning of the slope or step inward of the gable itself. In this way the use of a great many windows all of the same size is made practicable; the slight differences in design, as where one story has a row of round arches, and the like, are perhaps even more marked than was essential; the monotonous repetition of these openings is prevented from hurting the design by the very picturesqueness of that design, which overcomes their monotony. The treatment of the two gables themselves is a remarkable achievement, securing, as it does, a vivacity which we associate with the Renaissance of the North: while it is still restrained in such a way as not to clash with the extreme refinement of the porch of entrance, which in its general design, as in its sculptured details, has the delicate and subtile quality of the art of Italy a hundred years before.
This is, it appears, the way in which modern men might design; and this is the way in which they might succeed if they were able, more often, to give personal thought to the matter of design. It is obvious, however, that this giving of personal thought is exactly the most difficult thing which can be proposed to a twentieth century architect. He must do everything else first. He must see that the heating apparatus, the ventilating apparatus, the electrical lighting, the ventilating system, the cooking appliances, which will come in somewhere, the plumbing, which will come in everywhere, and the endless modifications of drainage—he must see that all that is faultless. The owner, or owners, really care about those things—they do not care about the design. Then he must see to it that no time is lost. From the moment when the previous tenants move out and tearing down of the old structure has begun there must not elapse too many weeks before the new tenants may move in. Ten months may be allowed; when every consideration demands two years and a half, or thirty months. And throughout the few weeks before and after the beginning of that ten-months’ space, the architect employed will have so very little opportunity to “retire into himself”—to retire at least into his study and lock the door and think out that design, taken in its artistic sense, that the hours so given are hardly to be reckoned with, at all. Uninterrupted thought is not for the busy architect. The altogether likely sequence of things will be this—that the design is sketched in a drawing-room car and turned over next day to a high-paid subordinate to work out according to the well-known office scheme.
Such traditional ways of doing have proved good in the great days of art: but the nineteenth century was not, and the twentieth century is not as yet certain to be a great day of art in the decorative or artistic sense. It becomes the writer on architecture to treat those two adjectives as synonymous, for in architecture they are synonymous; and the decorative, or in other words, the architectural treatment of a building has grown to be so foreign to our habits, and, from the nature of the case, so difficult (as urged in the last paragraph), that nothing but long-continued and enthusiastic thinking over the scheme will conduce to fine designing.