The Brochure Series Of Architectural Illustration, Vol 1, No. 2. February 1895. | Page 3

plenty of examples where the designs have sunk much below this level; no building of dead walls, with holes in it for doors and windows, could cause us such disgust. Let me here say, by way of a parenthesis, that if you candidly consider that your design is more offensive than a dead wall, do not waste money and materials in making the wall more repulsive, but let it alone."
"Any one can be original if he be only impudent enough; any one can be graceful if he is servile enough to copy: but to be both original and graceful requires deep study, much striving, and natural talent."
"I have also to remind you that architecture cannot be brought into vigorous life again, so long as architects insist on using old forms for beauty that are inseparable from a construction that has been abandoned; so long as this practice persists, so long will architecture be a kind of potted art; to be vigorous it must learn how to take the materials, and construction that would be ordinarily used in buildings for purely practical purposes, and give to these materials and this construction forms that will excite the proper emotions. You must not suppose that I mean that if you have a vast hall, or what not, that because you can put an iron trussed roof over it from wall to wall, that this will make it into a hall that will raise emotions. You will only get a rail-way platform or a coal shed. You have got to set your wits to work to see how it can be properly brought within the pale of aesthetics, and not only as to the shapes and proportions of the parts, but the dividing of the whole by supports. It is probable that if you were obliged to vault a cathedral in stone, with no more money than was necessary, and to have a clearstory to it, that you could not do it cheaper, and perhaps not better, than the Gothic architects did it; but to vault such a building in stone when you could do it much cheaper and better with iron ribs and concrete is, in my opinion, dilettante art. Groins are not beautiful things, but, on the contrary, are ugly, and we should wish to obviate their ugliness if we could; but when they were merely unavoidable methods of cheap construction, we admire them for the invention and skill of their architects, and we have to some extent got to love even their ugliness from old association; though perhaps the ribs at Westminster Abbey, as seen from the west end, are not offensive."
[Illustration: XII. A Portion of the Fa?ade of the Basilica at Altamura, Italy.]

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