The Bases of Design

by Walter Crane

Such distinctions as exist, for instance, in the feeling, the plan and construction of those patterns intended to be laid upon the floors (as in carpets or tiles), and such as are intended to cover ceilings and walls (as in plaster-work, textile hangings or wall papers), obviously arise from the relative positions of floor, walls, and ceilings, and the differences between horizontal and vertical positions; and these conditions are necessarily part and parcel of the constructional conditions of the dwelling itself.

The first shelter may be said to have been the shelter of nature without art—the Tree and the Cave, the first homes of man; although he was probably not by any means the first animal to hide among the woods and the rocks, since he had many and formidable foes to dispute with or disturb him in possession. It is noticeable that such art as is associated with this strange and remote chapter of man's existence on the earth—the art-instinct which impelled the primitive hunter to incise the bone and stone implements he used with the images of the animals he hunted—is purely graphic, and does not show any feeling of that adaptive ornamental quality characteristic of what we call decorative design, which would seem to belong to a more highly organized condition of society. "Among the primitive Greeks," remarks Messrs. Guhl and Köner in their Life of the Greeks and Romans, "fountains and trees, caves and mountains, were considered as seats of the gods, and revered accordingly, even without being changed into divine habitations by the art of man." But, as proving literally that art springs out of nature, the cave itself led to a development of architecture, as in some early Greek tombs where the cave, or cleft in the rocks, is utilized and added to by masonry; or where the rock itself was carved and hollowed, as in the rock-cut temples of Egypt and India. To which some trace the origin of columnar architecture.

The Tent of the Asiatic wandering tribes, and the wattled and wooden Hut of the western and northern, come next in the order of human dwellings, and not only may we trace certain types of pattern design to both sources, but it would seem as if both the tent and the hut, and perhaps the wagon of the Aryans, had had their influence upon the more substantial stone structures which succeeded them. When tribes became communities, townships were founded, and more fixed and settled habits of life prevailed.

DIAGRAM TO SHOW THE THREE TYPICAL FORMS OF ARCHITECTURE:

Now we may broadly group the principal types of architectural form and construction in three principal divisions, following Professor Ruskin, namely:

1. The architecture of the Lintel (or column and pediment).

2. The architecture of the Round Arch (or vault and dome).

3. The architecture of the Pointed Arch[1] (or vault, gable, and buttress).

Of the first we may find the simplest type in Stonehenge; we may find it in equally massive, and almost as primitive form at Mycenæ, in the famous Gate of the Lions, remarkable as being the earliest known example of Greek sculpture: we may find it more developed in the Greek temples of ancient Egypt, at Karnac, Thebes and Philæ, and we may see it in its purest form in the Parthenon at Athens.