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Show LL architecture worthy the name is a growth in accord with natural feeling and indus- A trial means to serve actual needs. It cannot be put on from without. There is little beyond sympathy with the spirit creating it and an understanding of the ideals that shaped it that can legitimately be utilized. Any attempt to use forms borrowed from other times and conditions must end as the Renaissance ends,--with total loss of in- herent relation to the soul life of the people. It can give us only an extraneous thing in the hands of professors that means little more than a mask for circumstance or a mark of tem- poral power to those whose lives are burdened, not expressed, by it: the result is a terrible loss to life for which literature can never compensate. Buildings will always remain the most valuable asset in a people's environment, the one most capable of cultural reaction. But until the people have the joy again in architecture as a living art that one sees recorded in buildings of all the truly great periods, so long will architecture remain a dead thing. It will not live again until we break away entirely from adherence to the false ideals of the Renaissance. In that whole movement art was reduced to the level of an expedient. What future has a people content with that? Only that of parasites, feeding on past greatness, and on the road to extinction by some barbarian race with ideals and hungering for their real- ization in noble concrete form. N America we are more betrayed by this condition than the people of older coun- tries, for we have no traditional forms except the accumulated ones of all peoples that do not without sacrifice fit new conditions, and there is in consequence no true rev- erence for tradition. As some sort of architecture is a necessity, American architects take their pick from the world's stock of `<ready-made """" architecture, and are most successful when transplanting form for form, line for line, enlarging details by means of lantern slides from photographs of the originals. This works well. The people are architecturally clothed and sheltered. The mod- ern comforts are smuggled in cleverly, we must admit. But is this architecture? Is it thus tradition molded great styles 1 In this polyglot tangle of borrowed forms, is there a great spirit that will bring order out of chaos7 vitality, unity and greatness out of emptiness and discord? The ideals of the Renaissance will not, for the Renaissance was inorganic. A conception of what constitutes an organic architecture will lead to better things once it is planted in the hearts and minds of men whose resource and skill, whose real power, are unquestioned, and who are not obsessed by expedients and forms, the nature and origin of which they have not studied in relation to the spirit that produced them. The nature of these forms is not taught in any vital sense in any of the schools in which architects are trained. A revival of the Gothic spirit is needed in the art and architecture of modern life: an interpretation of the best traditions we have in the world made with our own methods, not a stupid attempt to fasten their forms upon a life that has outgrown them. Reviving |