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Show community, or the grandiloquent planning of Paris in view, has been easily persuaded that the best thing we could do was to adopt some style least foreign to us, stick to it and plant it continually: a parasitic proceeding, and in any case futile. New York is a tribute to the Beaux Arts so far as surface decoration goes, and underneath a tribute to the American engineer. Other cities have followed her lead. Our better-class residences are chiefly tributes to English architecture, cut open inside and embellished to suit ; porches and """"conveniences"""" added : the result in most cases a pitiful mongrel. Painfully conscious of their lack of traditions, our get-rich-quick citi- zens attempt to buy Tradition ready made, and are dragged forward, facing backwards, in attitudes most absurd to those they would emulate, characteristic examples of conspicuous waste. The point in all this is the fact that revival of the ideals of an organic architec- ture will have to contend with this rapidly increasing sweep of imported folly. Even the American with some little culture, going contrary to his usual course in other matters, is be- coming painfully aware of his inferiority in matters of dress and architecture, and goes abroad for both, to be sure they are correct. Thus assured, he is no longer concerned, and forgets both. That is more characteristic of the Eastern than the Western man. The real Ameri- can spirit, capable of judging an issue for itself upon its merits, lies in the West and Middle West, where breadth of view, independent thought and a tendency to take common sense into the realm of art, as in life, are more characteristic. nature that the Gothic spirit in building can be revived, It is alone in an atmosphere of this of this type, I have lived and worked. In this atmosphere, among clients T AKING common sense into the holy realm of art is a shocking thing and most unpopular in academic circles. It is a species of vulgarity: but some of these ques- tions have become so perplexed, so encrusted, by the savants and academies, with layer upon layer of """"good school,"""" that their very nature is hidden; approached with common sense, they become childishly simple. I believe that every matter of artistic import which concerns a building may be put to the common sense of a business man on the right side every time, and thus given a chance at it, he rarely gives a wrong decision. The difficulty found with this man by the Renaissance, when he tries to get inside,--that is, if he does more than merely give the order to""""go ahead,""""-- arises from the fact that the thing has no organic basis to give: there is no good reason for doing anything any particular way rather than another way which can be grasped by him or anybody else: it is all largely a matter of taste. In an organic scheme there are excellent reasons why the thing is as it is, what it is there for, and where it is going, not to go, and as a general thing it doesn't. If not, it ought helpful in producing the organic thing. The people themselves are part and parcel and They can comprehend it and make it theirs, and it is |
