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

with the whole, that they will
produce an effect which will raise their buildings to the dignity of
humanity, and out of the range of the dog-kennel and rabbit-hutch type,
and will not exhibit ugliness, disproportion, or vulgarity. We see 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 Façade of the Basilica at Altamura,
Italy.]

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