Architecture and Democracy | Page 6

towers
and many dormered chateau-like roof unconsciously symbolize the
attempt to impose upon the living present a moribund and alien order.
Democracy is thus afflicted, and the fact must needs find architectural
expression.
In the field of domestic architecture these dramatic contrasts are less
evident, less sharply marked. Domestic life varies little from age to age;
a cottage is a cottage the world over, and some manorial mansion on
the James River, built in Colonial days, remains a fitting habitation
(assuming the addition of electric lights and sanitary plumbing) for one
of our Captains of Industry, however little an ancient tobacco
warehouse would serve him as a place of business. This fact is so well
recognized that the finest type of modern country house follows, in
general, this or some other equally admirable model, though it is
amusing to note the millionaire's preference for a feudal castle, a
French chateau, or an Italian villa of the decadence.
The "man of moderate means," so called, provides himself with no
difficulty with a comfortable house, undistinguished but unpretentious,
which fits him like a glove. There is a piazza towards the street, a
bay-window in the living room, a sleeping-porch for the children, and a
box of a garage for the flivver in the bit of a back yard.
For the wage earner the housing problem is not so easily nor so
successfully solved. He is usually between the devil of the speculative
builder and the deep sea of the predatory landlord, each intent upon
taking from him the limit that the law allows and giving him as little as
possible for his money. Going down the scale of indigence we find an
itinerancy amounting almost to homelessness, or houses so abject that
they are an insult to the very name of home.
[Illustration: PLATE IV: THE ERIE COUNTY SAVINGS BANK,
BUFFALO, N.Y.]
It is an eloquent commentary upon our national attitude toward a most
vital matter that in this feverish hustle to produce ships, airplanes,
clothing and munitions on a vast scale, the housing of the workers was
either overlooked entirely, or received eleventh-hour consideration, and
only now, after a year of participation in the war, is it beginning to be
adequately and officially dealt with--how efficiently and intelligently
remains to be seen. The housing of the soldiers was another matter: that

necessity was plain and urgent, and the miracle has been accomplished,
but except by indirection it has contributed nothing to the permanent
housing problem.
Other aspects of our life which have found architectural expression fall
neither in the commercial nor in the domestic category--the great hotels,
for example, which partake of the nature of both, and our passenger
railway terminals, which partake of the nature of neither. These latter
deserve especial consideration in this connection, by reason of their
important function. The railway is of the very essence of the modern,
even though (with what sublime unreason) Imperial Rome is written
large over New York's most magnificent portal.
Think not that in an age of unfaith mankind gives up the building of
temples. Temples inevitably arise where the tide of life flows strongest;
for there God manifests, in however strange a guise. That tide is
nowhere stronger than in the railroad, which is the arterial system of
our civilization. All arteries lead to and from the heart, and thus the
railroad terminus becomes the beating heart at the center of modern life.
It is a true instinct therefore which prompts to the making of the
terminal building a very temple, a monument to the conquest of space
through the harnessing of the giant horses of electricity and steam. This
conquest must be celebrated on a scale commensurate with its
importance, and in obedience to this necessity the Pennsylvania station
raised its proud head amid the push-cart architecture of that portion of
New York in which it stands. It is not therefore open to the criticism
often passed upon it, that it is too grand, but it is the wrong kind of
grandeur. If there be truth in the contention that the living needs of
today cannot be grafted upon the dead stump of any ancient grandeur,
the futility of every attempt to accomplish this impossible will
somehow, somewhere, reveal itself to the discerning eye. Let us seek
out, in this building, the place of this betrayal.
It is not necessarily in the main façade, though this is not a face, but a
mask--and a mask can, after its kind, always be made beautiful; it is not
in the nobly vaulted corridor, lined with shops--for all we know the
arcades of Imperial Rome were similarly lined; nor is it in the splendid
vestibule, leading into the magnificent waiting room, in which a subject
of the Cæsars would have felt more perfectly at