The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 01, No. 03, January, 1858 / A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics

by Various

There is no lack of endeavor to make the house look well. People will sacrifice almost anything to that. They will strive their chambers into the roof,—they will have windows where they do not want them, or leave them out where they do,—in our tropical summers they will endure the glare and heat of the sun, rather than that blinds should interfere with the moulded window-caps, or with the style generally,—they will break up the outline with useless and expensive irregularity,—they will have brackets that support nothing, and balconies and look-outs upon which no one ever steps after the carpenter leaves them,—all for the sake of pleasing the eye. And all this without any real and lasting success,—with a success, indeed, that seems often in an inverse ratio to the effort. If a man have a pig-stye to build, or a log-house in the woods, he may hit upon an agreeable outline; but let him set out freely and with all deliberation to build something that shall be beautiful, and he fails.

Not that the failure is peculiar at all to us. In Europe there may, perhaps, be less bad taste,—though I am not sure of that; but there, and everywhere, I think, the memorable houses, among those of recent date, are not those carefully elaborated for effect,—the premeditated irregularity of the English Gothic, the trig regularity of the French Pseudo-Classic, or the studied rusticity of Germany,— but such as seem to have grown of themselves out of the place where they stand,—Swiss châlets, Mexican or Manila plantation-houses, Italian farm-houses, built, nobody knows when or by whom, and built without any thought of attracting attention. And here I think we get a hint as to the reason of their success. For a house is not a monument, that it should seek to draw attention to itself,—but the dwelling-place of men upon the earth; and it must show itself to be wholly secondary to its purpose.

We have had a good deal of exhortation lately, now getting rather wearisome, about avoiding pretence in architecture, and that we should let things show for what they are. The avoidance of pretence should begin farther back. If the house is all pretence, we shall not help it by "frankness of treatment" in details.

The house is the sign of man's entering into possession of the earth. A houseless savage, living on wild game and accidental fruits, is an alien in nature, or a minor not yet come to his estate. As soon as he begins to cultivate the soil he builds him a house,—no longer a hut or a cave but the work of his own hands, and as permanent as his tenure of the cultivated field. If that is to descend to his children, the house must be so built as to endure accordingly. It is the material expression of the status of the family,—such people in such a place. Hence the two-fold requirement of fitness for its use and of harmony with its surroundings. A log-house is the appropriate dwelling of the lumberer in the woods; but transplant it to a suburban lawn and it becomes an absurdity, and a double absurdity. It is not in harmony with the place, nor fit for the use of the citizen. Nothing more satisfactory in their place than the old English parish-churches; but transfer one of them from its natural atmosphere and surroundings to the midst of one of our raw villages or bustling cities, exposed to the sudden and violent changes of our climate,—the open timber roof admitting the heat and the cold, and the stone walls bedewed with condensed moisture,—and after the first pleasant impression of the moment is over, there is left only a painful feeling of mimicry, not to be removed by any precision of copying, nor by the feeble attempts at ivy in the corners.

This is all evident enough, and in principle generally admitted; but we dodge the application of the principle, because we are not ready to admit to ourselves, what history, apart from any reasoning, would show us, that those importations are failures, and that not accidentally in these particular cases, leaving the hope of better success for the next trial, but necessarily, and because they are importations.

All good architecture must be the gradual growth of its country and its age,—the accumulation of men's experience, adding and leaving out from generation to generation. The air of permanence and stability that we admire in it must be gained by a slow and solid growth. It is the product, not of any one man's skill, but of a nation's; and its type, accordingly, must be gradually formed.

But in this, as in everything else, there must be an aim, and one persisted in, else no experience is gained. A mere succession of generations will do nothing, if for each of them the whole problem is changed. The man of to-day cannot profit by his father's experience in the building of his house, if his culture, his habits, his associates, are different from his father's,—much less if they have changed since his own youth, and are changing from year to year. He will not imitate, he will not forbear to alter. On such shifting sands no enduring structure is possible, but only a tent for the night.

We talk of the laws of architecture; but the fundamental law of all, and one that is sure to be obeyed, is, that the dwelling shall typify man's appropriation of the earth and its products,—what we call property. A man's house is naturally just as fixed a quantity as the kind and the amount of his possessions, and no more so. The style of it, depending on the inherited ideas of the class to which he belongs, will be as formed and as fixed as that class. Then where there is no fixed class, and where the property of every man is constantly varying, our quantity will be just so variable, and the true type of our architecture will be the tent,—of the frame-and-clapboard variety suited to the climate.

For good architecture, then, we need castes in society, and fixed ways of living. We see the effect in the old parsonages in England, where from year to year have dwelt men of the same class, education, income, tastes, and circumstances generally, and so bringing from generation to generation nearly the same requirements, with the unessential changes brought in from time to time by new wants or individual fancies, here and there putting out a bay-window or adding a wing, but always in the spirit of the original building, and the whole getting each year more weather-stained and ivy-grown, and so toned into more complete harmony with the landscape, yet still living and expansive.

It may be said that the result is here a partly accidental one, and not a matter of art. But domestic architecture is only half-way a fine art. It does not aim at a beauty of the monumental kind, as a statue, a triumphal arch, or even a temple does. Its primary aim is shelter, to house man in nature,—and it forms, as it were, the connecting link between him and the outward world. Its results, therefore, are partly the free artistic production, and partly retain unmodified their material character. In the image carved by the sculptor, the stone or wood used derive little of their effect from the original material; the important character is that imparted to them by his skill. Still more the canvas and pigments of the painter. But in architecture the wood and stone still fulfil the offices of covering, connecting, and supporting, as they did in the tree and the quarry, and their physical properties play an essential part in the work. The house, therefore, is a work of art only half emancipated from nature, and must depend on nature for much of its beauty also. It must not be isolated, as something merely to be looked at, apart from its position and its material use.