Edibility

“ Our present task relates not to the materials, but to the plan of an edifice; and, as we have had sufficient warning not to venture blindly upon a design which may be found to transcend our natural powers, while, at the same time, we cannot give up the intention of erecting a secure abode for the mind, we must proportion our design to the material which is presented to us, and which is, at the same time, sufficient for all our wants. ”

“ These feelings we would endeavour to impress upon all persons likely to have anything to do with embellishing, as it is called, fine natural scenery; as they might, in some degree, convince both the architect and his employer of the danger of giving free play to the imagination in cases involving intricate questions of feeling and composition, and might persuade the designer of the necessity of looking, not to his own acre of land, or to his own peculiar tastes, but to the whole mass of forms and combination of impressions with which he is surrounded. ”

“ In vain does the pedant complain of the architecture here displaying the genius of that munificent founder, and tell us that it marks a decline from the elevation of the decorated period; for who can but see, in what is called decline, something much more like an elaborate adaptation of sacred art to academic purposes, exhibiting high invention, and a sense of the fitting and appropriate, which proves a taste truly refined, and a fancy rich and creative? ”

“ Of composition and invention much has been written, it seems to me vainly, for men cannot be taught to compose or to invent; of these, the highest elements of Power in architecture, I do not, therefore, speak; nor, here, of that peculiar restraint in the imitation of natural forms, which constitutes the dignity of even the most luxuriant work of the great periods. ”

“ And will not such persons be most readily awakened to descry and adore the power, the skill, and the beneficence of the Great Architect who reared the stupendous fabric of the universe, who devised the infinite variety of forms which diversify creation, and whose pencil has so profusely decked every work with myriads of mingling dyes, resulting all from a few parent colors? To an unpracticed eye, the beauties and wonders of creation are all lost. ”

“ IV. A day never passes without our hearing our English architects called upon to be original, and to invent a new style: about as sensible and necessary an exhortation as to ask of a man who has never had rags enough on his back to keep out cold, to invent a new mode of cutting a coat. Give him a whole coat first, and let him concern himself about the fashion of it afterwards. We want no new style of architecture. Who wants a new style of painting or sculpture? But we want some style. ”

“ Thus it is to be seen that, in whatever lines architecture is moving, we shall find good work; that it is not so much the style that it is named, as the resources of the designer: resources which have to do with his education, and his disposition to select that which is fine and beautiful—the sense which leads him to discriminate. ”

“ From about these two groups, more or less harmonized by intermediate examples, but always distinctively marked by features of beauty or of power, there will be swept away, in multitudes, the memories of buildings, perhaps, in their first address to our minds, of no inferior pretension, but owing their impressiveness to characters of less enduring nobility—to value of material, accumulation of ornament, or ingenuity of mechanical construction. ”

“ Our clothes, our homes, our public buildings, our cities, our landscapes are made beautiful by the use of line and color in patterns and masses—in harmonious composition. It is only here and there that we come in contact with either line or color used imitatively.
We all know how distressingly tiresome a wall-paper becomes if it is made up of imitative scenes—that is, a series of pictures, and the better the pictures the sooner we tire of the paper. ”

“ With the sense of vision, the human mind having come to a knowledge of its power in transforming the environment by minute increments, gradually so transforms it for the pleasures of decoration. Exercising activities in making artificial transformations, human beings develop the sense of the beautiful and the ugly in qualities of art and transfer them to the properties of nature. In the evolution of decoration everywhere we find that it proceeds by degree of organization, that is, by the differentiation and integration of its elements. ”

“ We must if we desire to form a fair judgment, never forget that the design proposed was to communicate in a correct and precise but familiar and attractive form the results at which others had arrived, not to expound new conceptions — to present a sharp and striking outline of the majestic structures reared by the labours of successive schools, not to claim distinction as the architect of a new edifice. ”

“ The designer may learn what different means are at his disposal for the expression of line and form; for the colour and beauty of nature, recreated in the translucent glass or precious enamel, or speaking through the graphic printed line or colour of the wood-block—eloquent in a thousand ways by means of following the laws of certain materials in as many different arts. ”

“ Old associations cling to the mind with astonishing tenacity. Daily custom grows up about us like a stone wall, and consolidates itself into almost as material an entity as mankind's strongest architecture. ”

“ Convinced that such is the case, let us devote ourselves, heart and hand, to the task; let us bring all our energies to rendering the style we select as our groundwork really and absolutely subservient to the wants and to the spirit (so far as it is a healthful and a truthful spirit) of our age; let us apply to the work all our reasoning powers, and ground all we do upon common sense. ”

“ While much early ornament, as we have seen, is traceable to a constructive origin, another kind, or another branch of the tree of design is traceable to a symbolic origin, and springs from the endeavour to express thought—to find a succinct language in which to express some sense of the great powers of nature, and their influence upon the daily life of man—to embody even in a pictorial emblem, symbol, or allegory his primitive conceptions of the order of the universe itself. ”

“ The entire body of ornamental design, connected with writing, in the Middle Ages seems as if it were a sensible symbol, to the eye and brain, of the methods of error and recovery, the minglings of crooked with straight, and perverse with progressive, which constitute the great problem of human morals and fate ”

“ If these conditions are just when they allude only to buildings in the abstract, how much more when referring to them as materials of composition, materials of infinite power, to adorn or destroy the loveliness of the earth. ”

“ The perfection of form is in Edfu, impossible to describe, impossible not to feel. The tremendous effect it has—an effect upon the soul—is created by a combination of shapes, of proportions, of different levels, of different heights, by consummate graduation. ”

“ How many of the objects in those rooms help at all to give a unifying and a harmonious effect, or are in themselves in any way beautiful—things, that is to say, which (if not of actual use) we love to set our eyes on, and feel what fineness of skill in handling, what clean human thought in design went to their production? ”

“ CHAPTER X.—OF THE COLLECTIVE INFLUENCE IN my last chapter I compared tradition in art to a golden chain, and the striking individualities which arise from time to time as the jewels upon such a chain. The history of art and the evolution of design may be regarded either from the point of view of the jewels or from the point of view of the ordinary links ”

“ How much, or how little, he will take of actual nature must depend largely upon his resources, his object, and the limitations of his material—the conditions of his work in short; but his range may be as wide as from the flat silhouetted forms of stencils or simple inlays to the highly-wrought mural painting.
Design motive, individual conception and sentiment, apart from material, must, of course, always affect the question of the choice and degree of representation of nature. ”

“ It will have the look of a place, not where a revered system of instruction{139} is established, but where an unadvised experiment is being disadvantageously attempted. It is yet in your power to avoid this, and to make the edifice as noble in aspect as in function. Whatever chance there may be of failure in interior work, rich ornamentation may be given, without any chance of failure, to just that portion of the exterior which will give pleasure to every passer-by, and express the meaning of the building best to the eyes of strangers. ”

“ It is as the centralization and protectress of this sacred influence, that Architecture is to be regarded by us with the most serious thought. We may live without her, and worship without her, but we cannot remember without her. How cold is all history, how lifeless all imagery, compared to that which the living nation writes, and the uncorrupted marble bears!—how many pages of doubtful record might we not often spare, for a few stones left one upon another! ”

“ We shall find, in short, the original and controlling bases of design in architecture, the queen and mother of all the arts.
In asserting this one does not lose sight of the view that all art is, primarily, the projection or precipitation in material form of man's emotional and intellectual nature ”

“ But alas! these sciences, arts and languages, are almost always mistaken for the edifice itself—an edifice whose external decorations are much more valued and regarded than the great purposes for which it should be constructed: in other words, it is prepared more for show than use—more to attract the admiration of others, than really to benefit for all time the vain possessor who is to live in it, and to derive lasting security, comfort and true enjoyment from the skilful adaptation of all its various parts to the complete attainment of these inestimable blessings. ”

“ Let us then understand at once that change or variety is as much a necessity to the human heart and brain in buildings as in books; that there is no merit, though there is some occasional use, in monotony; and that we must no more expect to derive either pleasure or profit from an architecture whose ornaments are of one pattern, and whose pillars are of one proportion, than we should out of a universe in which the clouds were all of one shape, and the trees all of one size. ”

“ We have, perhaps half unconsciously, applied fundamental principles to our decoration, and this may be as much owing to natural good sense as to cultivation. We have a habit of reasoning about things, and acting upon our conclusions, instead of allowing the rest of the world to do the reasoning while we adopt the result. It is owing to this conjunction of love for and cultivation of art, and the habit of materializing what we wish, that we have so many thoroughly successful interiors, which have been accomplished almost without aid from professional artists. ”

“ Nothing can exceed the richness of invention which, in this series of halls, corridors, and courts, never repeats the same ornaments, but, from the simplest primitive forms and colors, produces a thousand combinations, not one of which is in discord with the grand design. ”

“ Certainly we can think of pictures in which the general architecture of the design is in no way striking or remarkable which yet please us by the perfection of the texture, that is to say, the ease with which we apprehend the necessary relationship of one shape, tone or colour with its immediately surrounding shapes, tones or colours; our æsthetic sense is continually aroused and satisfied by the succession of inevitable relationships. ”

“ So then while Nature is at all times pleasant to us, and while the sight and sense of her work may mingle happily with all our thoughts, and labours, and times of existence, that image of her which the architect carries away represents what we can only perceive in her by direct intellectual exertion, and demands from us, wherever it appears, an intellectual exertion of a similar kind in order to understand it and feel it. ”

“ If our architect succeeded in rearing a noble edifice, using the rough wedge-shaped fragments for the arches, the longer stones for the lintels, and so forth, we should admire his skill even in a higher degree than if he had used stones shaped for the purpose. ”

“ For the most part the works of the last twenty years show a more or less judicious eclecticism, the choice of style being determined partly by the person and training of the designer, partly by the nature of the building. ”

“ Novelty apart, form must possess proportion, balance and grace. A chair must invite the sitter, a vase must stand securely, a carpet must lie flat. The absence of these things may evidence an individuality on the part of the designer but it is art at the expense of truth. ”

“ But the same law of simplicity which invariably marks the works of nature gives strength and beauty also to the works of man. Thus, in discussing the various problems that developed as the designing of the house progressed, it was found—as of course it should have been—that the solution which met the test of simplicity, while satisfying the law of adaptation to purpose, was the true one. ”

“ Complete within itself, the harmonious edifice is thus also to the mind and eye of the beholder; they are filled, and desire no more—they even feel that more would be but incumbrance upon the fine adjustment of the well-ordered parts constituting the graceful whole. ”

“ Unfortunately these generally included the works of an old clock, a few superfluous telephones, the quicksilver from a broken barometer, and other oddments which happened not to be forthcoming in my lumber room. I will try not to let you down like that. I cannot make the world out of nothing, but I will demand as little specialised material as possible. Success in the game of World Building consists in the greatness of the contrast between the specialised properties of the completed structure and the unspecialised nature of the basal material. ”