ARCHITECTURE
AND DEMOCRACY
CLAUDE
BRAGDON
LIBRARY
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
RIVERSIDE
ARCHITECTURE
AND DEMOCRACY
By CLAUDE BRAGDON
BOOKS BY CLAUDE BRAGDON
THE GOLDEN PERSON IN THE
HEART (Out of print)
THE BEAUTIFUL NECESSITY
(Out of Print)
EPISODES FROM AN UNWRITTEN
HISTORY
A PRIMER OF HIGHER SPACE
PROJECTIVE ORNAMENT
FOUR-DIMENSIONAL VISTAS
PLATE I. THE WOOLWORTH BUILDING, NEW YORK
ARCHITECTURE
AND
DEMOCRACY
X*
BY^
CLAUDE BRAGDON
F. A. I. A.
NEW YORK
ALFRED A. KNOPF
1918
COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY
ALFRED A. KNOPF, Inc.
37
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
PREFACE
This book can lay no claim to unity of theme,
since its subjects range from skyscrapers to sym-
bols and soul states; but the author claims for it
nevertheless a unity of point of view, and one (cor-
rect or not) so comprehensive as to include in one
synthesis every subject dealt with. For accord-
ing to that point of view, a skyscraper is only a sym-
bol — and of what? A condition of consciousness,
that is, a state of the soul. Democracy even, we
are beginning to discover, is a condition of con-
sciousness too.
Our only hope of understanding the welter of
life in which we are immersed, as in a swift and
muddy river, is in ascending as near to its pure
source as we can. That source is in consciousness
and consciousness is in ourselves. This is the
point of view from which each problem dealt with
has been attacked; but lest the author be at once
set down as an impracticable dreamer, dwelling
aloof in an ivory tower, the reader should know
Preface
that his book has been written in the scant inter-
vals afforded by the practice of the profession of
architecture, so broadened as to include the study
of abstract form, the creation of ornament, experi-
ments with color and light, and such occasional
educational activities as from time to time he has
been called upon to perform at one or another
architectural school.
The three essays included under the general
heading of "Democracy and Architecture" were
prepared at the request of the editor of The Archi-
tectural Record, and were published in that jour-
nal. The two following, on "Ornament from
Mathematics," represent a recasting and a rewriting
of articles which have appeared in The Architec-
tural Review, The Architectural Forum, and The
American Architect. "Harnessing the Rainbow"
is an address delivered before the Ad. Club of
Cleveland, and the Rochester Rotary Club, and aft-
erwards made into an essay and published in The
American Architect under a different title. The
appreciation of Louis Sullivan as a writer appears
here for the first time, the author having previously
paid his respects to Mr. Sullivan's strictly archi-
tectural genius in an essay in House and Garden.
"Color and Ceramics" was delivered on the occa-
Prefac e
sion of the dedication of the Ceramic Building of
the University of Illinois, and afterwards published
in The Architectural Forum. "Symbols and Sac-
raments" was printed in the English Quarterly
Orpheus. "Self Education" was delivered before
the Boston Architectural Club, and afterwards pub-
lished in a number of architectural journals.
Acknowledgment is hereby tendered by the
author to the editors of these various magazines for
their consent to republication, together with thanks,
however belated, for their unfailing hospitality to
the children of his brain.
Claude Bragdon.
August 1, 1918.
CONTENTS
PAGE
Architecture and Democracy
I. Before the War
1
II. During the War
31
III. After the War
51
Ornament from Mathematics
I. The World Order
77
II. The Fourth Dimension
104
Harnessing the Rainbow
121
Louis Sullivan, Prophet of Democracy
141
Color and Ceramics
160
Symbols and Sacraments
176
Self-Education
201
LIST OF FULL PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS
Plate I. The Woolworth Building,
New York Frontispiece
Plate II. The New York Public Library 9
Plate III. The Prudential Building, Buffalo,
N. Y. 15
Plate IV. The Erie County Savings Bank, Buf-
falo, N. Y. 21
Plate V. The New York Central Terminal 27
Plate VI. Plan of the Red Cross Community
Club House, Camp Sherman, Ohio 35
Plate VII. Interior View of the Camp Sherman
Community House 43
Imaginative Sketch by Henry P. Kirby 53
Architectural Sketch by Otto Rieth 59
200 West 57th Street, New York 63
Imaginary Composition: The Portal 79
Imaginary Composition: The Bal-
cony 93
Imaginary Composition: The Audi-
ence Chamber 111
Song and Light: An Approach to-
ward "Color Music" 123
Symbol of Resurrection 177
Plate
VIII.
Plate
IX.
Plate
X.
Plate
XI.
Plate
XII.
Plate XIII.
Plate XIV.
Plate
XV.
'
Every form of government, every social institu-
tion, every undertaking, however great, however
small, every symbol of enlightenment or degrada-
tion, each and all have sprung and are still spring-
ing from the life of the people, and have ever
formed and are now as surely forming images of
their thought. Slowly by centuries, generations,
years, days, hours, the thought of the people has
changed; so with precision have their acts respon-
sively changed; thus thoughts and acts have flowed
and are flowing ever onward, unceasingly onward,
involved within the impelling power of Life.
Throughout this stream of human life, and thought,
and activity, men have ever felt the need to build;
and from the need arose the power to build. So,
as they thought, they built; for, strange as it may
seem, they could build in no other way. As they
built, they made, used, and left behind them records
of their thinking. Then, as through the years new
men came with changed thoughts, so arose new
buildings in consonance with the change of
thought — the building always the expression of
the thinking. Whatever the character of the think-
ing, just so was the character of the building.
What is Architecture? A Study in the American Peo-
ple of Today, by Louis Sullivan.
Architecture and Democracy
BEFORE THE WAR
THE world war represents not the triumph, but
the birth of democracy. The true ideal of
democracy — the rule of a people by the de-
mos, or group soul — is a thing unrealized. How
then is it possible to consider or discuss an archi-
tecture of democracy — the shadow of a shade? It
is not possible to do so with any degree of finality,
but by an intention of consciousness upon this jux-
taposition of ideas — architecture and democracy —
signs of the times may yield new meanings, rela-
tions may emerge between things apparently unre-
lated, and the future, always existent in every pres-
ent moment, may be evoked by that strange magic
which resides in the human mind.
Architecture, at its worst as at its best, reflects
[i]
Architecture and Democracy
always a true image of the thing that produced it; a
building is revealing even though it is false, just as
the face of a liar tells the thing his words en-
deavor to conceal. This being so, let us make such
architecture as is ours declare to us our true estate.
The architecture of the United States, from the
period of the Civil War, up to the beginning of the
present crisis, everywhere reflects a struggle to be
free of a vicious and depraved form of feudalism,
grown strong under the very aegis of democracy.
The qualities that made feudalism endeared and
enduring; qualities written in beauty on the cathe-
dral cities of mediaeval Europe — faith, worship,
loyalty, magnanimity — were either vanished or
banished from this pseudo-democratic, aridly scien-
tific feudalism, leaving an inheritance of strife and
tyranny — a strife grown mean, a tyranny grown
prudent, but full of sinister power the weight of
which we have by no means ceased to feel.
Power, strangely mingled with timidity; ingenu-
ity, frequently misdirected; ugliness, the result of
a false ideal of beauty — these in general charac-
terize the architecture of our immediate past; an
architecture "without ancestry or hope of poster-
ity," an architecture devoid of coherence or con-
viction; willing to lie, willing to steal. What im-
[2]
Before the War
pression such a city as Chicago or Pittsburgh might
have made upon some denizen of those cathedral-
crowned feudal cities of the past we do not know.
He would certainly have been amazed at its giant
energy, and probably revolted at its grimy dreari-
ness. We are wont to pity the mediaeval man for
the dirt he lived in, even while smoke greys our
sky and dirt permeates the very air we breathe:
we think of castles as grim and cathedrals as dim,
but they were beautiful and gay with color com-
pared with the grim, dim canyons of our city
streets.
Lafcadio Heam, in A Conservative, has sketched
for us, with a sympathy truly clairvoyant, the im-
pression made by the cities of the West upon the
consciousness of a young Japanese samurai edu-
cated under a feudalism not unlike that of the
Middle Ages, wherein was worship, reverence,
poetry, loyalty — however strangely compounded
with the more sinister products of the feudal state.
Larger than all anticipation the West appeared to
him, — a world of giants; and that which depresses even
the boldest Occidental who finds himself, without means
or friends, alone in a great city, must often have de-
pressed the Oriental exile: that vague uneasiness aroused
by the sense of being invisible to hurrying millions; by
[3]
Architecture and Democracy
the ceaseless roar of traffic drowning voices; by mon-
strosities of architecture without a soul; by the dynamic
display of wealth forcing mind and hand, as mere cheap
machinery, to the uttermost limits of the possible. Per-
haps he saw such cities as Dore saw London: sullen
majesty of arched glooms, and granite deeps opening
into granite deeps beyond range of vision, and moun-
tains of masonry with seas of labor in turmoil at their
base, and monumental spaces displaying the grimness of
ordered power slow-gathering through centuries. Of
beauty there was nothing to make appeal to him between
those endless cliffs of stone which walled out the sunrise
and the sunset, the sky and the wind.
The view of our pre-war architecture thus sketch-
ily presented is sure to be sharply challenged in
certain quarters, but unfortunately for us all this
is no mere matter of opinion, it is a matter of fact.
The buildings are there, open to observation; rooted
to the spot, they cannot run away. Like criminals
"caught with the goods" they stand, self -convicted,
dirty with the soot of a thousand chimneys, heavy
with the spoils of vanished civilizations; graft and
greed stare at us out of their glazed windows — eyes
behind which no soul can be discerned. There are
doubtless extenuating circumstances; they want to
be clean, they want to be honest, these "monsters of
the mere market," but they are nevertheless the un-
[4]
Before the War
conscious victims of evils inherent in our transi-
tional social state.
Let us examine these strange creatures, doomed,
it is hoped, to extinction in favor of more intelli-
gent and gracious forms of life. They are big,
powerful, "necessitous," and have therefore an im-
pressiveness, even an aesthetic appeal, not to be de-
nied. So subtle and sensitive an old-world con-
sciousness as that of M. Paul Bourget was set vi-
brating by them like a violin to the concussion of a
trip-hammer, and to the following tune:
The portals of the basements, usually arched as if
crushed beneath the weight of the mountains which they
support, look like dens of a primitive race, continually
receiving and pouring forth a stream of people. You
lift your eyes, and you feel that up there behind the
perpendicular wall, with its innumerable windows, is a
multitude coming and going, — crowding the offices that
perforate these cliffs of brick and iron, dizzied with the
speed of the elevators. You divine, you feel the hot
breath of speculation quivering behind these windows.
This it is which has fecundated these thousands of square
feet of earth, in order that from them may spring up this
appalling growth of business palaces, that hide the sun
from you and almost shut out the light of day.
"The simple power of necessity is to a certain
degree a principle of beauty," says M. Bourget,
[5]
Architecture and Democracy
and to these structures this order of beauty cannot
be denied, but even this is vitiated by a failure to
press the advantage home: the ornate facades are
notably less impressive than those whose grim and
stark geometry is unmitigated by the grave-clothes
of dead styles. Instances there are of strivings to-
ward a beauty that is fresh and living, but they
are so unsuccessful and infrequent as to be negli-
gible. However impressive these buildings may
be by reason of their ordered geometry, their weight
and magnitude, and as a manifestation of irrepres-
sible power, they have the unloveliness of things
ignoble, being the product neither of praise, nor
joy, nor worship, but enclosures for the transaction
of sharp bargains — gold-bringing jinn of our
modern Aladdins, who love them not but only use
them. That is the reason they are ugly; no one has
loved them for themselves alone.
For beauty is ever the very face of love. From
the architecture of a true democracy, founded on
love and mutual service, beauty would inevitably
shine forth; its absence convicts us of a maladjust-
ment in our social and economic life. A sky-
scraper shouldering itself aloft at the expense of
its more humble neighbors, stealing their air and
their sunlight, is a symbol, written large against
[6]
Before the War
the sky, of the will-to-power of a man or a group of
men — of that ruthless and tireless aggression on
the part of the cunning and the strong so character-
istic of the period which produced the skyscraper.
One of our streets made up of buildings of diverse
styles and shapes and sizes — like a jaw with some
teeth whole, some broken, some rotten, and some
gone — is a symbol of our unkempt individualism,
now happily becoming curbed and chastened by a
common danger, a common devotion.
Some people hold the view that our insensitive-
ness to formal beauty is no disgrace. Such argue
that our accomplishments and our interests are
in other fields, where we more than match the ac-
complishments of older civilizations. They for-
get that every achievement not registered in terms
of beauty has failed of its final and enduring trans-
mutation. It is because the achievements of older
civilizations attained to their apotheoses in art that
they interest us, and unless we are able to effect a
corresponding transmutation we are destined to
perish unhonoured on our rubbish heap. That we
shall effect it, through knowledge and suffering, is
certain, but before attempting the more genial and
rewarding task of tracing, in our life and in our
architecture, those forces and powers which make
[7]
Architecture and Democracy
for righteousness, for beauty, let us look our fail-
ures squarely in the face, and discover if we can
why they are failures.
Confining this examination to the particular mat-
ter under discussion, the neo-feudal architecture
of our city streets, we find it to lack unity, and
the reason for this lack of unity dwells in a divided
consciousness. The tall office building is the
product of many forces, or perhaps we should say
one force, that of necessity; but its concrete em-
bodiment is the result of two different orders of
talent, that of the structural engineer and of the
architectural designer. These are usually incar-
nate in two different individuals, working more or
less at cross purposes. It is the business of the en-
gineer to preoccupy himself solely with ideas of
efficiency and economy, and over his efficient and
economical structure the designer smears a frost-
ing of beauty in the form of architectural style, in
the archaeological sense. This is a foolish prac-
tice, and cannot but result in failure. In the case
of a Greek temple or a mediaeval cathedral struc-
ture and style were not twain, but one ; the structure
determined the style, the style expressed the struc-
ture; but with us so divorced have the two things
become that in a case known to the author, the
[8]
>
OS
<
P
O
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td
Before the War
structural framework of a great office building was
determined and fabricated and then architects were
invited to "submit designs" for the exterior. This
is of course an extreme example and does not rep-
resent the usual practice, but it brings sharply to
consciousness the well known fact that for these
buildings we have substantially one method of con-
struction — that of the vertical strut, and the hori-
zontal "fill" — while in style they appear as Gre-
cian, Roman, Renaissance, Gothic, Modern French
and what not, according to the whim of the de-
signer.
With the modern tendency toward specialization,
the natural outgrowth of necessity, there is no in-
herent reason why the bones of a building should
not be devised by one man and its fleshly clothing by
another, so long as they understand one another,
and are in ideal agreement, but there is in general
all too little understanding, and a confusion of
ideas and aims. To the average structural engi-
neer the architectural designer is a mere milliner
in stone, informed in those prevailing architectural
fashions of which he himself knows little and cares
less. Preoccupied as he is with the building's
strength, safety, economy ; solving new and stagger-
ingly difficult problems with address and daring, he
[ii]
Architecture and Democracy
has scant sympathy with such inconsequent matters
as the stylistic purity of a fagade, or the profile of a
moulding. To the designer, on the other hand,
the engineer appears in the light of a subordinate
to be used for the promotion of his own ends, or an
evil to be endured as an interference with those
ends.
As a result of this lack of sympathy and co-ordi-
nation, success crowns only those efforts in which,
on the one hand, the stylist has been completely sub-
ordinated to engineering necessity, as in the case
of the East River bridges, where the architect was
called upon only to add a final grace to the strictly
structural towers; or on the other hand, in which the
structure is of the old-fashioned masonry sort, and
faced with a familiar problem the architect has
found it easy to be frank; as in the case of the
Manhattan Storage Warehouse, on 42nd Street,
New York, or in the Bryant Park facade on the
New York Library. The Woolworth building is a
notable example of the complete co-ordination be-
tween the structural framework and its envelope,
and falls short of ideal success only in the em-
ployment of an archaic and alien ornamental lan-
guage, used, however, let it be said, with a fine un-
derstanding of the function of ornament.
[12]
Before the War
For the most part though, there is a difference
of intention between the engineer and the designer;
they look two ways, and the result of their collabor-
ation is a flat and confused image of the thing that
should be, not such as is produced by truly binocu-
lar vision. This difference of aim is largely the
result of a difference of education. Engineering
science of the sort which the use of steel has re-
quired is a thing unprecedented; the engineer can-
not hark back to the past for help, even if he would.
The case is different with the architectural de-
signer; he is taught that all of the best songs have
been sung, all of the true words spoken. The
Glory that was Greece, and the Grandeur that was
Rome, the romantic exuberance of Gothic, and the
ordered restraint of Renaissance are so drummed
into him during his years of training, and exercise
so tyrannical a spell over his imagination that he
loses the power of clear and logical thought, and
never becomes truly creative. Free of this incubus
the engineer has succeeded in being straightforward
and sensible, to say the least; subject to it the man
with a so-called architectural education is too often
tortuous and absurd.
The architect without any training in the essen-
tials of design produces horrors as a matter of
[13]
Architecture and Democracy
course, for the reason that sin is the result of ig-
norance; the architect trained in the false manner
of the current schools becomes a reconstructive
archaeologist, handicapped by conditions with
which he can deal only imperfectly, and imper-
fectly control. Once in a blue moon a man arises
who, with all the advantages inherent in education,
pierces through the past to the present, and is able
to use his brain as the architects of the past used
theirs — to deal simply and directly with his imme-
diate problem.
Such a man is Louis Sullivan, though it must be
admitted that not always has he achieved success.
That success was so marked, however, in his treat-
ment of the problem of the tall building, and exer-
cised subconsciously such a spell upon the minds
even of his critics and detractors, that it resulted in
the emancipation of this type of building from an
absurd and impossible convention- — the practice,
common before his time, of piling order upon or-
der, like a house of cards, or by a succession of
strongly marked string courses emphasizing the
horizontal dimension of a vertical edifice, thus viti-
ating the finest effect of which such a building is
capable.
The problem of the tall building, with which his
[14]
PLATE III. THE PRUDENTIAL BUILDING, BUFFALO, N. Y.
Before the War
predecessors dealt always with trepidation and
equivocation, Mr. Sullivan approached with confi-
dence and joy. "What," he asked himself, "is the
chief characteristic of the tall office building? It
is lofty. This loftiness is to the artist-nature its
thrilling aspect. It must be tall. The force of al-
titude must be in it. It must be every inch a proud
and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation that
from bottom to top it is a unit without a dissenting
line." The Prudential (Guaranty) building in
Buffalo represents the finest concrete embodiment
of his idea achieved by Mr. Sullivan. It marks
his emancipation from what he calls his "masonry"
period, during which he tried, like so many other
architects before and since, to make a steel-framed
structure look as though it were nothing but a ma-
sonry wall perforated with openings — openings too
many and too great not to endanger its stability.
The keen blade of Mr. Sullivan's mind cut through
this contradiction, and in the Prudential building
he carried out the idea of a protective casing so suc-
cessfully that Montgomery Schuyler said of it, "I
know of no steel framed building in which the me-
tallic construction is more palpably felt through the
envelope of baked clay."
The present author can speak with all humble-
[17]
Architecture and Democracy
ness of the general failure, on the part of the ar-
chitectural profession, to appreciate the importance
of this achievement, for he pleads guilty of day
after day having passed the Prudential building,
then fresh in the majesty of its soaring lines, and in
the wonder of its fire-wrought casing, with eyes and
admiration only for the false romanticism of the
Erie County Savings Bank, and the empty bombast
of the gigantic Ellicott Square. He had not at
that period of his life succeeded in living down his
architectural training, and as a result the most
ignorant layman was in a better position to appraise
the relative merits of these three so different in-
carnations of the building impulse than was he.
Since the Prudential building there have been
other tall office buildings, by other hands, truthful
in the main, less rigid, less monotonous, more su-
perficially pleasing, yet they somehow fail to im-
part the feeling of utter sincerity and fresh origi-
nality inspired by this building. One feels that
here democracy has at last found utterance in
beauty; the American spirit speaks, the spirit of
the Long Denied. This rude, rectangular bulk is
uncompromisingly practical and utilitarian; these
rows on rows of windows, regularly spaced, and
all of the same size, suggest the equality and monot-
[18]
Before the War
ony of obscure, laborious lives; the upspringing
shafts of the vertical piers stand for their hopes and
aspirations, and the unobtrusive, delicate ornament
which covers the whole with a garment of fresh
beauty is like the very texture of their dreams.
The building is able to speak thus powerfully to
the imagination because its creator is a poet and
prophet of democracy. In his own chosen lan-
guage he declares, as Whitman did in verse, his
faith in the people of "these states" — "A Nation
announcing itself." Others will doubtless follow
who will make a richer music, commensurate with
the future's richer life, but such democracy as is
ours stands here proclaimed, just as such feudalism
as is still ours stands proclaimed in the Erie County
Bank just across the way. The massive rough
stone walls of this building, its pointed towers and
many dormered chateau-like roof unconsciously
symbolize the attempt to impose upon the living
present a moribund and alien order. Democracy
is thus afflicted, and the fact must needs find archi-
tectural expression.
In the field of domestic architecture these dra-
matic contrasts are less evident, less sharply
marked. Domestic life varies little from age to
age; a cottage is a cottage the world over, and some
[19]
Architecture and Democracy
manorial mansion on the James River, built in Co-
lonial days, remains a fitting habitation (assum-
ing the addition of electric lights and sanitary
plumbing) for one of our Captains of Industry,
however little an ancient tobacco warehouse would
serve him as a place of business. This fact is so
well recognized that the finest type of modern coun-
try house follows, in general, this or some other
equally admirable model, though it is amusing to
note the millionaire's preference for a feudal cas-
tle, a French chateau, or an Italian villa of the de-
cadence.
The "man of moderate means," so called, pro-
vides himself with no difficulty with a comfortable
house, undistinguished but unpretentious, which fits
him like a glove. There is a piazza towards the
street, a bay-window in the living room, a sleeping-
porch for the children, and a box of a garage for
the flivver in the bit of a back yard.
For the wage earner the housing problem is not
so easily nor so successfully solved. He is usually
between the devil of the speculative builder and
the deep sea of the predatory landlord, each intent
upon taking from him the limit that the law allows
and giving him as little as possible for his money.
Going down the scale of indigence we find an itiner-
[20]
PLATE IV. THE ERIE COUNTY SAVINGS BANK, BUFFALO, N. Y.
Before the War
ancy amounting almost to homelessness, or houses
so abject that they are an insult to the very name of
home.
It is an eloquent commentary upon our national
attitude toward a most vital matter that in this
feverish hustle to produce ships, airplanes, cloth-
ing and munitions on a vast scale, the housing of
the workers was either overlooked entirely, or re-'
ceived eleventh-hour consideration, and only now,
after a year of participation in the war, is it begin-
ning to be adequately and officially dealt with —
how efficiently and intelligently remains to be seen.
The housing of the soldiers was another matter:
that necessity was plain and urgent, and the
miracle has been accomplished, but except by in-
direction it has contributed nothing to the perma-
nent housing problem.
Other aspects of our life which have found archi-
tectural expression fall neither in the commercial
nor in the domestic category — the great hotels, for
example, which partake of the nature of both, and
our passenger railway terminals, which partake of
the nature of neither. These latter deserve es-
pecial consideration in this connection, by reason
of their important function. The railway is of the
very essence of the modern, even though (with what
[23]
Architecture and Democracy
sublime unreason) Imperial Rome is written large
over New York's most magnificent portal.
Think not that in an age of unfaith mankind
gives up the building of temples. Temples inevi-
tably arise where the tide of life flows strongest;
for there God manifests, in however strange a guise.
That tide is nowhere stronger than in the railroad,
which is the arterial system of our civilization.
All arteries lead to and from the heart, and thus the
railroad terminus becomes the beating heart at the
center of modern life. It is a true instinct there-
fore which prompts to the making of the terminal
building a very temple, a monument to the con-
quest of space through the harnessing of the giant
horses of electricity and steam. This conquest
must be celebrated on a scale commensurate with
its importance, and in obedience to this necessity
the Pennsylvania station raised its proud head amid
the push-cart architecture of that portion of New
York in which it stands. It is not therefore open
to the criticism often passed upon it, that it is too
grand, but it is the wrong kind of grandeur. If
there be truth in the contention that the living needs
of today cannot be grafted upon the dead stump of
any ancient grandeur, the futility of every attempt
to accomplish this impossible will somehow, some-
[24]
Before the War
where, reveal itself to the discerning eye. Let us
seek out, in this building, the place of this betrayal.
It is not necessarily in the main facade, though
this is not a face, but a mask — and a mask can,
after its kind, always be made beautiful; it is not
in the nobly vaulted corridor, lined with shops —
for all we know the arcades of Imperial Rome were
similarly lined; nor is it in the splendid vestibule,
leading into the magnificent waiting room, in which
a subject of the Caesars would have felt more per-
fectly at home, perhaps, than do we. But beyond
this passenger concourse, where the elevators and
stairways descend to the tracks, necessity demanded
the construction of a great enclosure, supported
only on slender columns and far-flung trusses
roofed with glass. Now latticed columns, steel
trusses, and wire glass are inventions of the modern
world too useful to be dispensed with. Rome
could not help the architect here. The mode to
which he was inexorably self -committed in the rest
of the building demanded massive masonry, cor-
nices, mouldings; a tribute to Caesar which could
be paid everywhere but in this place. The archi-
tect's problem then became to reconcile two diamet-
rically different systems. But between the west
wall of the ancient Roman baths and the modern
[25]
Architecture and Democracy
skeleton construction of the roof of the human
greenhouse there is no attempt at fusion. The
slender latticed columns cut unpleasantly through
the granite cornices and mouldings; the first cen-
tury A. D. and the twentieth are here in incongruous
juxtaposition — a little thing, easily overlooked, yet
how revealing! How reassuring of the fact "God
is not mocked!"
The New York Central terminal speaks to the eye
in a modem tongue, with however French an accent.
Its facade suggests a portal, reminding the be-
holder that a railway station is in a very literal
sense a city gate placed just as appropriately in
the center of the municipality as in ancient times
it was placed in the circuit of the outer walls.
Neither edifice will stand the acid test of Mr.
Sullivan's formula, that a building is an organism
and should follow the law of organisms, which de-
crees that die form must everywhere follow and ex-
press the function, the function determining and
creating its appropriate form. Here are two emi-
nent examples of "arranged" architecture. Before
organic architecture can come into being our incho-
ate national life must itself become organic. Ar-
ranged architecture, of the sort we see everywhere,
[26]
5
s
>
Before the War
despite its falsity, is a true expression of the condi-
tions which gave it birth.
The grandeur of Rome, the splendour of Paris
— what just and adequate expression do they give
of modern American life? Then shall we find in
our great hotels, say, such expression? Truly they
represent, in the phrase of Henry James, "a real-
ized ideal" and a study of them should reveal that
ideal. From such a study we can only conclude
that it is life without effort or responsibility, with
every physical need luxuriously gratified. But
these hotels nevertheless represent democracy, it
may be urged, for the reason that every one may
there buy board and lodging and mercenary service
if he has the price. The exceeding greatness of
that price, however, makes of it a badge of nobility
which converts these democratic hostelries into feu-
dal castles, more inaccessible to the Long Denied
than as though entered by a drawbridge and sur-
rounded by a moat.
We need not even glance at the churches, for the
tides of our spiritual life flow no longer in full vol-
ume through their portals ; neither may the colleges
long detain us, for architecturally considered they
give forth a confusion of tongues which has its
[29]
Architecture and Democracy
analogue in the confusion of ideas in the collective
academic head.
Is our search for some sign of democracy ended,
and is it vain? No, democracy exists in the secret
heart of the people, all the people, but it is a
thing so new, so strange, so secret and sacred — the
ideal of brotherhood — that it is unmanifest yet in
time and space. It is a thing born not with the
Declaration of Independence, but only yesterday,
with the call to a new crusade. The National
Army is its cradle, and it is nurtured wherever com-
munities unite to serve the sacred cause. Although
menaced by the bloody sword of Imperialism in
Europe, it perhaps stands in no less danger from
the secret poison of graft and greed and treachery
here at home. But it is a spiritual birth, and there-
fore it cannot perish, but will live to write itself on
space in terms of beauty such as the world has
never known.
[30]
II
DURING THE WAR
THE best thing that can be said about our im-
mediate architectural past is that it is past,
for it has contributed little of value to an
architecture of democracy. During that neo-feu-
dal period the architect prospered, having his place
at the baronial table ; but now poor Tom's a-cold on
a war-swept heath, with food only for reflection.
This is but natural; the architect, in so far as he is
an artist, is a purveyor of beauty; and the abnormal
conditions inevitable to a state of war are devastat-
ing to so feminine and tender a thing, even though
war be the very soil from which new beauty springs.
With Mars in mid-heaven how afflicted is the horo-
scope of all artists! The skilled hand of the musi-
cian is put to coarser uses; the eye that learned its
lessons from the sunset must learn the trick of mak-
ing invisible warships and great guns. Let the
architect serve the war-god likewise, in any capacity
that offers, confident that this troubling of the wa-
[31]
Architecture and Democracy
ters will bring about a new precipitation ; that once
the war is over, men will turn from those "old,
unhappy, far-off things" to pastures beautiful and
new.
In whatever way the war may complicate the
architect's personal problem, it should simplify
and clarify his attitude toward his art. With no
matter what seriousness and sincerity he may have
undertaken his personal search for truth and
beauty, he will come to question, as never before,
both its direction and its results. He is bound to
perceive, if he does not perceive already, that the
war's arrestment of architecture (in all but its most
utilitarian and ephemeral phases) is no great loss
to the world for the reason that our architecture
was uninspired, unoriginal, done without joy, with-
out reverence, without conviction: a thing which
any wind of a new spirit was bound to make ap-
pear foolish to a generation with sight rendered
clairvoyant through its dedication to great and re-
generative ends.
He will come to perceive that between the Civil
War and the crusade that is now upon us, we were
under the evil spell of materialism. Now mate-
rialism is the very negation of democracy, which
is a government by the demos, or over-soul; it is
[32]
During the War
equally the negation of joy, the negation of rever-
ence, and it is without conviction because it cannot
believe even in itself. Reflecting thus, he can
scarcely fail to realize that materialism, every-
where entrenched, was entrenched strongest in the
camps of the rich — not the idle rich, for material-
ism is so terrible a taskmaster that it makes its vo-
taries its slaves. These slaves, in turn, made a
slave of the artist, a minister to their pride and
pretence. His art thus lacked that "sad sincerity"
which alone might have saved it in a crisis. When
the storm broke militant democracy turned to the
engineer, who produced buildings at record speed,
by the mile, with only such architectural assistance
as could be first and easiest fished up from the drag-
net of the draft.
In one direction only does there appear to be
open water. Toward the general housing problem
the architectural profession has been spurred into
activity by reason of the war, and to its credit be it
said, it is now thoroughly aroused. The American
Institute of Architects sent a commissioner to Eng-
land to study housing in its latest manifestations,
and some of the ablest and most influential mem-
bers of that organization have placed their services
at the disposal of the government. Moreover,
[33]
Architecture and Democracy
there is a manifest disposition, on the part of archi-
tects everywhere, to help in this matter all they can.
The danger dwells in the possibility that their ad-
vice will not be heeded, their services not be fully
utilized, but through chicanery, ignorance, or inani-
tion, we will relapse into the tentative, "expensively
provisional" methods which have governed the
housing of workers hitherto. Even so, architects
will doubtless recapture, and more than recapture,
their imperiled prestige, but under what changed
conditions, and with what an altered attitude to-
ward their art and their craft!
They will find that they must unlearn certain
things the schools had taught them: preoccupation
with the relative merits of Gothic and Classic —
tweedledum and tweedledee. Furthermore, they
must learn certain neglected lessons from the engi-
neer, lessons that they will be able immeasurably
to better, for although the engineer is a very mon-
ster of competence and efficiency within his limits,
these are sharply marked, and to any detailed
knowledge of that "beautiful necessity" which de-
termines spatial rhythm and counterpoint he is a
stranger. The ideal relation between architect
and engineer is that of a happily wedded pair —
strength married to beauty; in the period just
[34]
LOBBY
NEW
CHEEK
; OFFICE
1 1
PLATE VI.
PLAN OF THE RED CROSS COMMUNITY CLUB HOUSE,
CAMP SHERMAN, OHIO
During the War
passed or passing they have been as disgruntled
divorces.
The author has in mind one child of such a happy
union brought about by the war; the building is
the Red Cross Community Club House at Camp
Sherman, which, in the pursuit of his destiny, and
for the furtherance of his education, he inhabited
for two memorable weeks. He learned there more
lessons than a few, and encountered more tangled
skeins of destiny than he is ever likely to unravel.
The matter has so direct a bearing, both on the
subject of architecture and of democracy, that it is
worth discussing at some length.
This club house stands, surrounded by its tribu-
tary dormitories, on a government reservation, im-
mediately adjacent to the camp itself, the whole
constituting what is known as the Community Cen-
ter. By the payment of a dollar any soldier is
free to entertain his relatives and friends there, and
it is open to all the soldiers at all times. Because
the iron discipline of the army is relaxed as soon
as the limits of the camp are overpassed, the at-
mosphere is favourable to social life.
The building occupies its acre of ground invit-
ingly, though exteriorly of no particular distinction.
It is the interior that entitles it to consideration as
[37]
Architecture and Democracy
a contribution to an architecture of that new-born
democracy of which our army camps have been the
cradle. The plan of this interior is cruciform, two
hundred feet in each dimension. Built by the Red
Cross of the state of Ohio, and dedicated to the
larger uses of that organization, the symbolic ap-
propriateness of this particular geometrical figure
should not pass unremarked. The cross is divided
into side aisles, nave, and crossing, with galleries
and mezzanines so arranged as to shorten the arms
of the cross in its upper stages, leaving the clear-
story surrounding the crossing unimpeded and well
defined. The light comes for the most part from
high windows, filtering down, in tempered bright-
ness to the floor. The bones of the structure are
everywhere in evidence, and an element of its
beauty, by reason of the admirably direct and log-
ical arrangement of posts and trusses. The verti-
cal walls are covered with plaster-board of a light
buff color, converted into good sized panels by
means of wooden strips finished with a thin grey
stain. The structural wood work is stained in
similar fashion, the iron rods, straps, and bolts be-
ing painted black. This color scheme is com-
pleted and a little enlivened by red stripes and
[38]
During the War
crosses placed at appropriate intervals in the gen-
eral design.
The building attained its final synthesis through
the collaboration of a Cleveland architect and a
National Army captain of engineers. It is so sin-
gle in its appeal that one does not care to inquire
too closely into the part of each in the perform-
ance; both are in evidence, for an architect seldom
succeeds in being so direct and simple, while an
engineer seldom succeeds in being so gracious and
altogether suave.
Entirely aside from its aesthetic interest — based
as this is on beauty of organism almost alone —
the building is notable for the success with which
it fulfils and co-ordinates its manifold functions:
those of a dormitory, a restaurant, a ballroom, a
theatre, and a lounge. The arm of the cross con-
taining the principal entrance accommodates the
office, coat room, telephones, news and cigar stand,
while leaving the central nave unimpeded, so that
from the door one gets the unusual effect of an
interior vista two hundred feet long. The restaur-
ant occupies the entire left transept, with a great
brick fireplace at the far end. There is another
fireplace in the centre of the side of the arm be-
[39]
Architecture and Democracy
yond the crossing; that part which would corre-
spond in a cathedral to the choir and apse being
given over to the uses of a reading and writing
room. The right transept forms a theatre, on oc-
casion, terminating as it does with a stage. The
central floor spaces are kept everywhere free except
in the restaurant, the sides and angles being filled
in with leather-covered sofas, wicker and wooden
chairs and tables, arranged in groups favourable
to comfort and conversation. Two stairways, at
the right and left of the restaurant, give access to
the ample balcony and to the bedrooms, which oc-
cupy three of the four ends of the arms of the cross
at this level.
The appearance and atmosphere of this great
interior is inspiring; particularly of an evening,
when it is thronged with soldiers, and civilian
guests. The strains of music, the hum of many
voices, the rhythmic shuffle on the waxed floor of
the feet of the dancers — these eminently social
sounds mingle and lose themselves in the spaces of
the roof, like the voice of many waters. Tobacco
smoke ascends like incense, blue above the prevail-
ing green-brown of the crowd, shot here and there
with brighter colors from the women's hats and
dresses, in the kaleidoscopic shifting of the dance.
[40]
During the War
Long parallel rows of orange lights, grouped low
down on the lofty pillars, reflect themselves on
the polished floor, and like the patina of time on
painted canvas impart to the entire animated pic-
ture an incomparable tone. For the lighting,
either by accident or by inspiration, is an achieve-
ment of the happiest, an example of the friendli-
ness of fate to him who attempts a free solution
of his problem. The brackets consist merely of a
cruciform arrangement of planed pine boards
about each column, with the end grain painted red.
On the under side of each arm of the cross is a
single electric bulb enclosed within an orange-col-
oured shade to kill the glare. The light makes the
bare wood of the fixture appear incandescent, defin-
ing its geometry in rose colour with the most beau-
tiful effect.
The club house is the centre of the social and
ceremonial life of the camp, for balls, dinners, re-
ceptions, conferences, concerts without number;
and it has been the scene of a military wedding —
the daughter of a major-general to the grandson of
an ex-president. To these events the unassuming,
but pervasive beauty of the place lends a dignity
new to our social life. In our army camps social
life is truly democratic, as any one who has experi-
[41]
Architecture and Democracy
enced it does not need to be told. Not alone have
the conditions of conscription conspired to make it
so, but there is a manifest will-to-democracy — the
growing of a new flower of the spirit, sown in a
community of sacrifice, to reach its maturity, per-
haps, only in a community of suffering.
The author may seem to have over-praised this
Community Club House; with the whole country
to draw from for examples it may well appear
fatuous to concentrate the reader's attention, for so
long, on a building in a remote part of the Middle
West: cheap, temporary, and requiring only twenty-
one days for its erection. But of the transvalua-
tion of values brought about by the war, this build-
ing is an eminent example: it stands in symbolic
relation to the times; it represents what may be
called the architecture of Service; it is among the
first of the new temples of the new democracy, ded-
icated to the uses of simple, rational social life.
Notwithstanding that it fills a felt need, common
to every community, there is nothing like it in any
of our towns and cities; there are only such poor
and partial substitutes as the hotel, the saloon,
the dance hall, the lodge room and the club. It is
scarcely conceivable that the men and women who
have experienced its benefits and its beauty should
[42]
PLATE VII. INTERIOR OF THE CAMP SHERMAN COMMUNITY HOUSE
During the War
not demand and have similar buildings in their
own home towns.
Beyond the oasis of the Community Club House
at Camp Sherman stretch the cantonments — a Eu-
clidian nightmare of bare boards, black roofs and
ditches, making grim vistas of straight lines. This
is the architecture of Need in contradistinction to
the architecture of Greed, symbolized in the shop-
window prettiness of those sanitary suburbs of our
cities created by the real estate agent and the spec-
ulative builder. Neither contain any enduring ele-
ment of beauty.
But the love of beauty in one form or another
exists in every human heart, and if too long or
too rigorously denied it finds its own channels of
fulfilment. This desire for self-expression through
beauty is an important, though little remarked
phenomenon of these mid-war times. At the
camps it shows itself in the efforts of men of
specialized tastes and talents to get together and
form dramatic organizations, glee clubs, and or-
chestras; and more generally by the disposition of
the soldiers to sing together at work and play and
on the march. The renascence of poetry can be
interpreted as a revulsion against the prevailing
prosiness; the amateur theatre is equally a protest
[45]
Architecture and Democracy
against the inanity and conventionality of the com-
mercial stage; while the Community Chorus move-
ment is an evidence of a desire to escape a narrow
professionalism in music. A similar situation has
arisen in the field of domestic architecture, in the
form of an unorganized, but wide-spread reaction
against the cheap and ugly commercialism which
has dominated house construction and decoration
of the more unpretentious class. This became
articulate a few years ago in the large number
of books and magazines devoted to house-planning,
construction, decoration, furnishing, and garden-
craft. The success which has attended these pub-
lications, and their marked influence, give some
measure of the magnitude of this revolt.
But now attention must be called to a significant,
and somewhat sinister fact. The professional in
these various fields of aesthetic endeavour, has
shown either indifference or active hostility toward
all manner of amateur efforts at self-expression.
Free verse aroused the ridicule of the professors of
metrics ; the Little Theatre movement was solemnly
banned by such pundits as Belasco and Mrs. Fiske;
the Community Chorus movement has invariably
met with opposition and misunderstanding from
professional musicians; and with few exceptions
[46]
During the War
the more influential architects have remained aloof
from the effort to give skilled architectural assist-
ance to those who cannot afford to pay them ten
per cent.
Thus everywhere do we discover a deadening
hand laid upon the self-expression of the demo-
cratic spirit through beauty. Its enemies are of its
own household; those who by nature and training
should be its helpers hinder it instead. Why do
they do this? Because their fastidious, aesthetic
natures are outraged by a crudeness which they
themselves could easily refine away if they chose;
because also they recoil at a lack of conformity to
existing conventions — conventions so hampering to
the inner spirt of the Newness, that in order to
incarnate at all it must of necessity sweep them
aside.
But in every field of aesthetic endeavour appears
here and there a man or a woman with unclouded
vision, who is able to see in the flounderings of
untrained amateurs the stirrings of demos from
his age-long sleep. These, often forsaking paths
more profitable, lend their skilled assistance, not
seeking to impose the ancient outworn forms upon
the Newness, but by a transfusion of consciousness
permitting it to create forms of its own. Such a
[47]
Architecture and Democracy
one, in architecture, Louis Sullivan has proved
himself; in music Harry Barnhart, who evokes the
very spirit of song from any random crowd. The
demos found voice first in the poetry of Walt Whit-
man who has a successor in Vachel Lindsay, the
man who walked through Kansas, trading poetry
for food and lodging, teaching the farmers' sons
and daughters to intone his stirring odes to Poca-
hontas, General Booth, and Old John Brown. Isa-
dora Duncan, Gordon Craig, Maeterlinck, Scriab-
ine are perhaps too remote from the spirit of
democracy, too tinged with old-world aestheticism,
to be included in this particular category, but all
are image-breakers, liberators, and have played
their part in the preparation of the field for an art
of democracy.
To the architect falls the task, in the new dispen-
sation, of providing the appropriate material en-
vironment for its new life. If he holds the old
ideas and cherishes the old convictions current be-
fore the war he can do nothing but reproduce their
forms and fashions; for architecture, in the last
analysis, is only the handwriting of consciousness
on space, and materialism has written there al-
ready all that it has to tell of its failure to satisfy
the mind and heart of man. However beautiful
[48]
During the War
old forms may seem to him they will declare their
inadequacy to generations free of that mist of fa-
miliarity which now makes life obscure. If, on
the other hand, submitting himself to the inspira-
tion of the demos he experiences a change of con-
sciousness, he will become truly and newly crea-
tive.
His problem, in other words, is not to interpret
democracy in terms of existing idioms, be they
classic or romantic, but to experience democracy
in his heart and let it create and determine its new
forms through him. It is not for him to impose,
it is for him to be imposed upon.
"The passive Master lent his hand
To the vast soul that o'er him planned"
says Emerson in The Problem, a poem, which
seems particularly addressed to architects, and
which every one of them would do well to learn by
heart.
If he is at a loss to know where to go and what
to do in order to be played upon by these great
forces let him direct his attention to the army and
the army camps. Here the spirit of democracy is
already incarnate. These soldiers, violently
shaken free from their environment, stripped of
[49]
Architecture and Democracy
all but the elemental necessities of life; facing a
sinister destiny beyond a human-shark-infested
ocean, are today the fortunate of earth by reason of
their realization of brotherhood, not as a beautiful
theory, but as a blessed fact of experience. They
will come back with ideas that they cannot utter,
with memories that they cannot describe; they will
have dreamed dreams and seen visions, and their
hearts will stir to potencies for which materialism
has not even a name.
The future of the country will be in their young
hands. Will they re-create, from its ruins, the
faithless and loveless feudalism from which the
war set them free? No, they will seek only for
self-expression, the expression of that aroused and
indwelling spirit which shall create the new, the
true democracy. And because it is a spiritual
thing it will come clothed in beauty; that is, it will
find its supreme expression through the forms of
art. The architect who assists in the emprise of
weaving this garment will be supremely blessed,
but only he who has kept the vigil with prayer and
fasting will be supremely qualified.
[50]
Ill
AFTER THE WAR
"When the old world is sterile
And the ages are effete,
He will from wrecks and sediment
The fairer world complete."
The World Soul. Emerson.
HE whom the World Soul "forbids to despair"
cannot but hope; and he who hopes tries
ever to imagine that "fairer world" yearn-
ing for birth beyond this interval of blood and tears.
Prophecy, to all but the anointed, is dangerous and
uncertain, but even so, the author cannot forbear
attempting to prevision the architecture likely to
arise from the wrecks and sediment left by the war.
As a basis for this forecast it is necessary first
of all briefly to classify the expression of the build-
ing impulse from what may be called the psycho-
logical point of view.
Broadly speaking, there are not five orders of
[51]
Architecture and Democracy
architecture — nor fifty — but only two: Arranged
and Organic. These correspond to the two terms
of that "inevitable duality" which bisects life.
Talent and genius, reason and intuition, bromide
and sulphite are some of the names we know them
by.
Arranged architecture is reasoned and artificial;
produced by talent, governed by taste. Organic
architecture, on the other hand, is the product of
some obscure inner necessity for self-expression
which is sub-conscious. It is as though Nature
herself, through some human organ of her activity,
had addressed herself to the service of the sons and
daughters of men.
Arranged architecture in its finest manifesta-
tions is the product of a pride, a knowledge, a com-
petence, a confidence staggering to behold. It
seems to say of the works of Nature, "I'll show you
a trick worth two of that." For the subtlety of
Nature's geometry, and for her infinite variety and
unexpectedness, Arranged architecture substitutes a
Euclidian system of straight lines and (for the most
part) circular curves, assembled and arranged ac-
cording to a definite logic of its own. It is created
but not creative; it is imagined but not imaginative.
Organic architecture is both creative and imagina-
[52]
jtJ|f?fe
05
M
w
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After the War
tive. It is non-Euclidian in the sense that it is
higher-dimensional — that is, it suggests extension
in directions and into regions where the spirit finds
itself at home, but of which the senses give no re-
port to the brain.
To make the whole thing clearer it may be said
that Arranged and Organic architecture bear much
the same relation to one another that a piano bears
to a violin. A piano is an instrument that does
not give forth discords if one follows the rules. A
violin requires absolutely an ear — an inner recti-
tude. It has a way of betraying the man of talent
and glorifying the genius, becoming one with his
body and his soul.
Of course it stands to reason that there is not al-
ways a hard and fast differentiation between these
two orders of architecture, but there is one sure way
by which each may be recognized and known. If
the function appears to have created the form, and
if everywhere the form follows the function,
changing as that changes, the building is Organic;
if on the contrary, "the house confines the spirit,"
if the building presents not a face but however
beautiful a mask, it is an example of Arranged
architecture.
The Gothic cathedrals of the "Heart of Europe"
[55]
Architecture and Democracy
— now the place of Armageddon — represent the
most perfect and powerful incarnation of the Or-
ganic spirit in architecture. After the decadence
of mediaeval feudalism — synchronous with that
of monasticism — the Arranged architecture of
the Renaissance acquired the ascendant; this was
coincident with the rise of humanism, when life
became increasingly secular. During the post-
Renaissance, or scientific period, of which the war
probably marks the close, there has been a confu-
sion of tongues; architecture has spoken only alien
or dead languages, learned by rote.
But in so far as it is anything at all, aesthetically,
our architecture is Arranged, so if only by the oper-
ation of the law of opposites, or alternation, we
might reasonably expect the next manifestation to
be Organic. There are other and better reasons,
however, for such expectancy.
Organic architecture is ever a flower of the reli-
gious spirit. When the soul draws near to the
surface of life, as it did in the two mystic centuries
of the Middle Ages, it organizes life; and archi-
tecture, along with the other arts becomes truly
creative. The informing force comes not so much
from man as through him. After the war that
spirit of brotherhood, born in the camps — as Christ
[56]
After the War
was born in a manger — and bred on the battle-
fields and in the trenches of Europe, is likely to
take on all the attributes of a new religion of
humanity, prompting men to such heroisms and re-
nunciations, exciting in them such psychic sublima-
tions, as have characterized the great religious re-
newals of time past.
If this happens it is bound to write itself on
space in an architecture beautiful and new; one
which "takes its shape and sun-color" not from the
niggardly mind, but from the opulent heart. This
architecture will of necessity be organic, the prod-
uct not of self-assertive personalities, but the work
of the "Patient Daemon" organizing the nation into
a spiritual democracy.
The author is aware that in this point of view
there is little of the "scientific spirit"; but science
fails to reckon with the soul. Science advances
facing backward, so what prevision can it have of a
miraculous and divinely inspired future — or for
the matter of that, of any future at all? The old
methods and categories will no longer answer; the
orderly course of evolution has been violently in-
terrupted by the earthquake of the war; igneous
action has superseded aqueous action. The case-
ments of the human mind look out no longer upon
[57]
Architecture and Democracy
familiar hills and valleys, but on a stark, strange,
devastated landscape, the ploughed land of some
future harvest of the years. It is the end of the
Age, the Kali Yuga — the completion of a major
cycle; but all cycles follow the same sequence:
after winter, Spring; and after the Iron Age, the
Golden.
The specific features of this organic, divinely in-
spired architecture of the Golden Age cannot of
course be discerned by any one, any more than
the manner in which the Great Mystery will present
itself anew to consciousness. The most imagina-
tive artist can imagine only in terms of the already-
existent; he can speak only the language he has
learned. If that language has been derived from
mediaevalism, he will let his fancy soar after the
manner of Henry Kirby, in his Imaginative
Sketches; if on the contrary he has learned to think
in terms of the classic vernacular, Otto Rieth's
Architectur-Skizzen will suggest the sort of thing
that he is likely to produce. Both results will be
as remote as possible from future reality, for the
reason that they are so near to present reality.
And yet some germs of the future must be en-
folded even in the present moment. The course
of wisdom is to seek them neither in the old ro-
[58]
PLATE IX. ARCHITECTURAL SKETCH BY OTTO RIETH
After the War
mance nor in the new rationalism, but in the subtle
and ever-changing spirit of the times.
The most modern note yet sounded in business,
in diplomacy, in social life, is expressed by the
phrase, "Live openly!" From every quarter, in
regard to every manner of human activity, has
come the cry, "Let in the light!" By a physical
correspondence not the result of coincidence, but
of the operation of an occult law, we have, in a
very real sense, let in the light. In buildings of
the latest type devoted to large uses, there has been
a general abandonment of that "cellular system" of
many partitions which produced the pepper-box ex-
terior, in favour of great rooms serving diverse
functions lit by vast areas of glass. Although an
increase of efficiency has dictated and determined
these changes, this breaking down of barriers be-
tween human beings and their common sharing of
the light of day in fuller measure, is a symbol of
the growth of brotherhood, and the search, by the
soul, for spiritual light.
Now if this fellowship and this quest gain volume
and intensity, its physical symbols are bound to
multiply and find ever more perfect forms of mani-
festation. So both as a practical necessity and as
a symbol the most pregnant and profound, we are
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Architecture and Democracy
likely to witness in architecture the development
of the House of Light, particularly as human in-
genuity has made this increasingly practicable.
Glass is a product still undergoing development,
as are also those devices of metal for holding it
in position and making the joints weather tight.
The accident and fire hazard has been largely over-
come by protecting the structural parts, by the use
of wire glass, and by other ingenious devices. The
author has been informed on good authority that
shortly before the outbreak of the war a glass had
been invented abroad, and made commercially
practicable, which shut out the heat rays, but ad-
mitted the light. The use of this glass would over-
come the last difficulty — the equalization of tem-
peratures — and might easily result in buildings of
an entirely novel type, the approach to which is
seen in the "pier and grill" style of exterior. This
is being adopted not only for commercial build-
ings, but for others of widely different function,
on account of its manifest advantages. Cass
Gilbert's admirable studio apartment at 200 West
Fifty-Seventh Street, New York, is a building of
this type.
In this seeking for sunlight in our cities, we will
come to live on the roofs more and more — in sum-
[62]
PLATE X. RODIN STUDIOS, 200 WEST 5/TH STREET, NEW YORK
After the War
mer in the free air, in winter under variformed
shelters of glass. This tendency is already mani-
festing itself in those newest hotels whose roofs
are gardens, convertible into skating ponds, with
glazed belvideres for eating in all weathers.
Nothing but ignorance and inanition stand in the
way of utilization of waste roof spaces. People
have lived on the roofs in the past, often enough,
and will again.
By shouldering ever upward for air and light,
we have too often made of the "downtown" dis-
tricts cliff-bound canyons — "granite deeps open-
ing into granite deeps." This has been the result
of no inherent necessity, but of that competitive
greed whose nemesis is ever to miss the very thing
it seeks. By intelligent co-operation, backed by
legislation, the roads and sidewalks might be made
to share the sunlight with the roofs.
This could be achieved in two ways: by stepping
back the facades in successive stages — giving top
lighting, terraces, and wonderful incidental effects
of light and shade — or by adjusting the height of
the buildings to the width of their interspaces,
making rows of tall buildings alternate with rows
of low ones, with occasional fully isolated "sky-
scrapers" giving variety to the sky-line.
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Architecture and Democracy
These and similar problems of city planning
have been worked out theoretically with much
minuteness of detail, and are known to every stu-
dent of the science of cities, but very little of it all
has been realized in a practical way — certainly not
on this side of the water, where individual rights
are held so sacred that a property owner may com-
mit any kind of an architectural nuisance so long
as he confines it to his own front yard. The
strength of IS, the weakness of should be, con-
flicting interests and legislative cowardice are re-
sponsible for the highly irrational manner in which
our cities have grown great.
The search for spiritual light in the midst of
materialism finds unconscious symbolization in a
way other than this seeking for the sun. It is in
the amazing development of artificial illumination.
From a purely utilitarian standpoint there is al-
most nothing that cannot now be accomplished with
light, short of making the ether itself luminifer-
ous. The aesthetic development of this field, how-
ever, can be said to have scarcely begun. The
so recent San Francisco Exposition witnessed the
first successful effort of any importance to enhance
the effect of architecture by artificial illumination,
and to use colored light with a view to its purely
[66]
After the War
pictorial value. Though certain buildings have
since been illuminated with excellent effect, it re-
mains true that the corset, chewing-gum, beer and
automobile sky signs of our Great White Ways
indicate the height to which our imagination has
risen in utilizing this Promethean gift in any but
necessary ways. Interior lighting, except nega-
tively, has not been dealt with from the standpoint
of beauty, but of efficiency; the engineer has pre-
empted this field to the exclusion of the artist.
All this is the result of the atrophy of that faculty
to worship and wonder which alone induces the
mood from which the creation of beauty springs.
Light we regard only as a convenience "to see
things by" instead of as the power and glory that
it inherently is. Its intense and potent vibrations
and the rainbow glory of its colour beat at the door
of consciousness in vain. When we awaken to
these things we shall organize light into a language
of spontaneous emotion, just as from sound music
was organized.
It is beside the purpose of this essay to attempt
to trace the evolution of this new art form, made
possible by modern invention, to indicate what
phases it is likely to pass through on the way to
what perfections, but that it is bound to add a new
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Architecture and Democracy
glory to architecture is sure. This will come about
in two ways: directly, by giving color, quality,
subtlety to outdoor and indoor lighting, and in-
directly by educating the eye to color values, as
the ear has been educated by music; thus creating
a need for more color everywhere.
As light is the visible symbol of an inner radi-
ance, so is color the sign manual of happiness, of
joy. Our cities are so dun and drab in their out-
ward aspects, by reason of the weight of care that
burdens us down. We decry the happy irresponsi-
bility of the savage, and the patient contentment
of the Oriental with his lot, but both are able to
achieve marvels of color in their environment be-
yond the compass of civilized man. The glory of
mediaeval cathedral windows is a still living con-
futation of the belief that in those far-off times
the human heart was sad. Architecture is the in-
dex of the inner life of those who produced it,
and whenever it is colorful that inner life contains
an inner joy.
In the coming Golden Age life will be joyous,
and if it is joyous, colour will come into architec-
ture again. Our psychological state even now,
alone prevents it, for we are rich in materials and
methods to make such polychromy possible. In an
[68]
After the War
article in a recent number of The Architectural Rec-
ord, Mr. Leon V. Solon, writing from an entirely
different point of view, divines this tendency, and
expresses the opinion that color is again renas-
cent. This tendency is so marked, and this opin-
ion is so shared that we may look with confidence
toward a color-evolution in architectural art.
The question of the character of what may be
called the ornamental mode of the architecture of
the New Age is of all questions the most obscure.
Evolution along the lines of the already existent
does not help us here, for we are utterly without
any ornamental mode from which a new and better
might conceivably evolve. Nothing so betrays the
spiritual bankruptcy of the end of the Iron Age as
this.
The only light on this problem which we shall
find, dwells in the realm of metaphysics rather than
in the world of material reality. Ornament, more
than any other element of architecture, is deeply
psychological, it is an externalization of an inner
life. This is so true that any time-worn fragment
out of the past when art was a language can usually
be assigned to its place and its period, so eloquent
is it of a particular people and a particular time.
Could we therefore detect and understand the ob-
[69]
Architecture and Democracy
scure movement of consciousness in the modern
world, we might gain some clue to the language it
would later find.
It is clear that consciousness is moving away
from its absorption in materiality because it is
losing faith in materialism. Clairvoyance, psy-
chism, the recrudescence of mysticism, of occult-
ism — these signs of the times are straws which
show which way the wind now sets, and indicate
that the modern mind is beginning to find itself at
home in what is called the fourth dimension. The
phrase is used here in a different sense from that
in which the mathematician uses it, but oddly
enough four-dimensional geometry provides the
symbols by which some of these occult and mystical
ideas may be realized by the rational mind. One
of the most engaging and inspiring of these ideas
is that the personal self is a projection on the plane
of materiality of a metaphysical self, or soul, to
which the personal self is related as is the shadow
of an object to the object itself. Now this co-
incides remarkably with the idea implicit in all
higher-space speculation, that the figures of solid
geometry are projections on a space of three
dimensions, of corresponding four-dimensional
forms.
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After the War
All ornament is in its last analysis geometrical
— sometimes directly so, as in the system developed
by the Moors. Will the psychology of the new
dispensation find expression through some adapta-
tion of four-dimensional geometry? The idea is
far from absurd, by reason of the decorative qual-
ity inherent in many of the regular hypersolids of
four-dimensional space when projected upon solid
and plane space.
If this suggestion seems too fanciful, there is still
recourse to the law of analogy in finding the thing
we seek. Every fresh religious impulse has al-
ways developed a symbology through which its
truths are expressed and handed down. These
symbols, woven into the very texture of the life
of the people, are embodied by them in their orna-
mental mode. The sculpture of a Greek temple is
a picture-book of Greek religion; the ornamenta-
tion of a Gothic cathedral is a veritable bible of
the Christian faith. Almost all of the most beauti-
ful and enduring ornaments have first been sacred
symbols; the swastika, the "Eye of Buddha," the
"Shield of David," the wheel, the lotus, and the
cross.
Now that "twilight of the world" following the
war perhaps will witness an Avatar a — the coming
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Architecture and Democracy
of a World-Teacher who will rebuild on the one
broad and ancient foundation that temple of Truth
which the folly and ignorance of man is ever tear-
ing down. A material counterpart of that temple
will in that case afterward arise. Thus will be
born the architecture of the future; and the orna-
ment of that architecture will tell, in a new set of
symbols, the story of the rejuvenation of the world.
In this previsioning of architecture after the war,
the author must not be understood to mean that
these things will be realized directly after. Archi-
tecture, from its very nature, is the most sluggish
of all the arts to respond to the natural magic of
the quick-moving mind — it is Caliban, not Ariel.
Following the war the nation will be for a time
depleted of man-power, burdened with debt, pros-
trate, exhausted. But in that time of reckoning
will come reflection, penitence.
"And I'll be wise hereafter,
And seek for grace. What a thrice-double ass
Was I, to take this drunkard for a god,
And worship this dull fool."
With some such epilogue the curtain will descend
on the great drama now approaching a close. It
will be for the younger generations, the reincar-
[72]
After the War
nate souls of those who fell in battle, to inaugurate
the work of giving expression, in deathless forms
of art, to the vision of that "fairer world" glimpsed
now only as by lightning, in a dream.
[73]
ESSAYS
ORNAMENT FROM MATHEMATICS
THE WORLD ORDER
NO fact is better established than that we live
in an orderly universe. The truth of this
the world-war may for the moment, and to
the near and narrow view appear to contradict,
but the sweep of human history, and the stars in
their courses, show an orderliness which cannot
be gainsaid.
Now of that order, number — that is, mathemat-
ics — is the more than symbol, it is the very thing
itself. Whence this weltering tide of life arose,
and whither it flows, we know not; but that it is
governed by mathematical law all of our knowledge
in every field confirms. Were it not so, knowledge
itself would be impossible. It is because man is
a counting animal that he is master over all the
beasts of the earth.
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Architecture and Democracy
Number is the tune to which all things move, and
as it were make music; it is in the pulses of the
blood no less than in the starred curtain of the sky.
It is a necessary concomitant alike of the sharp
bargain, the chemical experiment, and the fine
frenzy of the poet. Music is number made audi-
ble; architecture is number made visible; nature
geometrizes not alone in her crystals, but in her
most intricate arabesques.
If number be indeed the universal solvent of all
forms, sounds, motions, may we not make of it the
basis of a new aesthetic — a loom on which to weave
patterns the like of which the world has never
seen? To attempt such a thing — to base art on
mathematics — argues (some one is sure to say) an
entire misconception of the nature and function of
art. "Art is a fountain of spontaneous emotion"
— what, therefore, can it have in common with the
proverbially driest, least spontaneous preoccupa-
tion of the human mind? But the above definition
concludes with the assertion that this emotion
reaches the soul "through various channels." The
transit can be effected only through some sensuous
element, some language (in the largest sense),
and into this the element of number and form must
[78]
PLATE XI. IMAGINARY COMPOSITION: THE PORTAL
V
The World Order
inevitably enter — mathematics is "there" and can-
not be thought or argued away.
But to make mathematics, and not the emotion
which it expresses, the important thing, is not this
to fall into the time-worn heresy of art for art's
sake, that is, art for form's sake — art for the sake
of mathematics? To this objection there is an an-
swer, and as this answer contains the crux of the
whole matter, embraces the proposition by which
this thesis must stand or fall, it must be full and
clear.
What is it, in the last analysis, that all art which
is not purely personal and episodical strives to
express? Is it not the world-order? — the very
thing that religion, philosophy, science, strive ac-
cording to their different natures and methods to
express? The perception of the world-order by the
artist arouses an emotion to which he can give vent
only in terms of number; but number is itself the
most abstract expression of the world order. The
form and content of art are therefore not different,
but the same. A deep sense of this probably in-
spired Pater's famous saying that all art aspires
toward the condition of music; for music, from its
very nature, is the world-order uttered in terms of
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Architecture and Democracy
number, in a sense and to a degree not attained by
any other art.
This is not mere verbal juggling. We have suf-
fered so long from an art-phase which exalts the
personal, as opposed to the cosmic, that we have
lost sight of the fact that the great arts of antiquity,
preceding the Renaissance, insisted on the cosmic,
or impersonal aspect, and on this alone, just as
does Oriental art, even today. The secret essence,
die archetypal idea of the subject is the preoccu-
pation of the Oriental artist, as it was of the Egyp-
tian, and of the Greek. We of the West today seek
as eagerly to fix the accidental and ephemeral
aspect — the shadow of a particular cloud upon a
particular landscape; the smile on the face of a spe-
cific person, in a recognizable room, at a particu-
lar moment of time. Of symbolic art, of universal
emotion expressing itself in terms which are uni-
versal, we have veiy little to show.
The reason for this is first, our love for, and
understanding of, the concrete and personal: it is
the world-aspect and not the world-order which in-
terests us; and second, the inadequacies of current
forms of art expression to render our sense of
the eternal secret heart of things as it presents it-
self to our young eyes. Confronted with this dif-
[82]
The World Order
ficulty, we have shirked it, and our ambition has
shrunk to the portrayal of those aspects which shuf-
fle our poverty out of sight. It is not a poverty
of technique — we are dexterous enough; nor is it
a poverty of invention — we are clever enough; it
is the poverty of the spiritual bankrupt trying to
divert attention by a prodigal display of the small-
est of small change.
Reference is made here only to the arts of space ;
the arts of time — music, poetry, and the (written)
drama — employing vehicles more flexible, have
been more fortunate, though they too suffer in
some degree from worshipping, instead of the god
of order, the god of chance.
The corrective of this is a return to first princi-
ples : principles so fundamental that they suffer no
change, however new and various their illustrations.
These principles are embodied in number, and one
might almost say nowhere else in such perfection.
Mathematics is not the dry and deadly thing that
our teaching of it and the uses we put it to have
made it seem. Mathematics is the handwriting on
the human consciousness of the very Spirit of Life
itself. Others before Pythagoras discovered this,
and it is the discovery which awaits us too.
To indicate the way in which mathematics might
[83]
Architecture and Democracy
be made to yield the elements of a new aesthetic
is beyond the province of this essay, being beyond
the compass of its author, but he makes bold to take
a single phase: ornament, and to deal with it from
this point of view.
The ornament now in common use has been
gathered from the dust-bin of the ages. What or-
namental motif of any universality, worth, or im-
portance is less than a hundred years old? We
continue to use the honeysuckle, the acanthus, the
fret, the egg and dart, not because they are appro-
priate to any use we put them to, but because they
are beautiful per se. Why are they beautiful? It
is not because they are highly conventionalized
representations of natural forms which are them-
selves beautiful, but because they express cosmic
truths. The honeysuckle and the acanthus leaf,
for example, express the idea of successive im-
pulses, mounting, attaining a maximum, and de-
scending — expanding from some focus of force in
the manner universal throughout nature. Science
recognizes in the spiral an archetypal form, whether
found in a whirlpool or in a nebula. A fret is a
series of highly conventionalized spirals: trans-
late it from angular to curved and we have the
wave-band; isolate it and we have the volute. Egg
[84]
The World Order
and dart are phallic emblems, female and male ; or,
if you prefer, as ellipse and straight line, they are
symbols of finite existence con-
trasted with infinity. [Fig-
ure 1.]
Suppose that we determine
to divest ourselves of these and
other precious inheritances,
E^M^M^f n ot because they have lost their
beauty and meaning, but rather
yg/S/S/g/S on account of their manifold
associations with a past which
the war makes suddenly more
lUAUJUJUl ™ than «low centuries
nave done ; suppose that we de-
termine to supplant these sym-
bols with others, no less
charged with beauty and mean-
ing, but more directly drawn from the inexhaustible
well of mathematical truth — how shall we set to
work?
We need not set to work, because we have done
that already, we are always doing it, unknowingly,
and without knowing the reason why. All orna-
mentalists are subjective mathematicians — an
amazing statement, perhaps, but one susceptible
j r\ I f\ I /~\ 1 /"M termine to supplant these sym-
[85]
Architecture and Democracy
of confirmation in countless amusing ways, of
which two will be shown.
NUMERICAL, EYTHH5 1 AND THU&
KSUG1QN TO ^AMI^IAR, PATTED
^PTKMKER^
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PAII^ OF 1 NUMBERS' OPPQilTE! ID AND
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Figure 2
Consider first your calendar — your calendar
whose commonplace face, having yielded you in-
formation as to pay day, due day, and holiday,
you obliterate at the end of each month without a
qualm, oblivious to the fact that were your interests
less sordid and personal it would speak to you of
that order which pervades the universe; would
make you realize something of the music of the
[86]
The World Order
spheres. For on that familiar checkerboard of the
days are numerical arrangements which are mys-
terious, "magical"; each separate number is as a
spider at the center of an amazing mathematical
web. That is to say, every number is discovered to
be half of the sum of the pairs of numbers which
surround it, vertically, horizontally, and diagon-
ally: all of the pairs add to the same sum, and the
central number divides this sum by two. A
graphic indication of this fact on the calendar face
by means of a system of intersecting lines yields
that form of classic grille dear to the heart of every
tyro draughtsman. [Figure 2.] Here is an evi-
dent relation between mathematical fact and orna-
mental mode, whether the result of accident, or by
reason of some subconscious connection between
the creative and the reasoning part of the mind.
To show, by means of an example other than this
acrostic of the days, how the pattern-making in-
stinct follows unconsciously in the groove traced
out for it by mathematics, the attention of the
reader is directed to the design of the old Colonial
bed-spread shown in Figure 3. Adjacent to this, in
the upper right hand corner, is a magic square of
four. That is, all of the columns of figures of
which it is composed : vertical, horizontal and diag-
[87]
Architecture and Democracy
onal add to the same sum: 34. An analysis of this
square reveals the fact that it is made up of the
figures of two different orders of counting: the or-
dinary order, beginning at the left hand upper cor-
ner and reading across and down in the usual way,
and the reverse-ordinary, beginning at the lower
right hand corner and reading across and up. The
figures in the four central cells and in the four out-
side corner cells are discovered to belong in the
first category, and the remaining figures in the sec-
ond. Now if the ordinary order cells be repre-
sented by white, and the reverse ordinary by black,
just such a pattern has been created as forms the
decorative motif of the quilt.
It may be claimed that these two examples of a
relation between ornament and mathematics are
accidental and therefore prove nothing, but they at
least furnish a clue which the artist would be fool-
ish not to follow up. Let him attack his problem
this time directly, and see if number may not be
made to yield the thing he seeks: namely, space-
rhythms which are beautiful and new.
We know that there is a beauty inherent in order,
that necessity of one sort or another is the parent
of beauty. Beauty in architecture is largely the
result of structural necessity; beauty in ornament
[88]
The World Order
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Figure 3
may spring from a necessity which is numerical.
It is clear that the arrangement of numbers in a
magic square is necessitous — they must be placed
[89]
Architecture and Democracy
in a certain way in order that the summation of
every column shall be the same. The problem then
becomes to make that necessity reveal itself to the
eye. Now most magic squares contain a magic
path, discovered by following the numbers from
cell to cell in their natural order. Because this
is a necessitous line it should not surprise us that
it is frequently beautiful as well.
The left hand drawing in Figure 4 represents
the smallest aggregation of numbers that is ca-
pable of magic square arrangement. Each vertical,
horizontal, and corner diagonal column adds up to
15, and the sum of any two opposite numbers is 10,
which is twice the center number. The magic
path is the endless line developed by following,
free hand, the numbers in their natural order, from
1 to 9 and back to 1 again. The drawing at the
right of Figure 4 is this same line translated into
ornament by making an interlace of it, and filling
in the larger interstices with simple floral forms.
This has been executed in white plaster and made
to perform the function of a ventilating grille.
Now the number of magic squares is practically
limitless, and while all of them do not yield magic
lines of the beauty of this one, some contain even
richer decorative possibilities. But there are also
[90]
The World Order
=ir
other ways of deriv-
ing ornament from
magic squares, al-
ready hinted at in
the discussion of the
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an even number of
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and the reverse
ordinary orders
of counting, but
involving two oth-
ers as well: the
reverse of the or-
dinary (beginning
at the upper right
hand, across, and
down) and the
reversed inverse,
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across, and up). Figures
[91]
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Architecture and Democracy
If, in such a magic square, a simple graphic sym-
bol be substituted for the numbers belonging to each
order, pattern spontaneously springs to life. Fig-
ures 5 and 6 exemplify the method, and Figures
7 and 8 the translation of some of these squares
into richer patterns by elaborating the symbols
while respecting their arrangement. By only a
slight stretch of the imagination the beautiful
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Figure 6
The World Order
pierced stone screen from Ravenna shown in Fig-
ure 9 might be conceived of as having been devel-
oped according to this method, although of course
it was not so in fact. Some of the arrangements
shown in Figure 6 are closely paralleled in the
acoustic figures made by means of musical tones
with sand, on a sheet of metal or glass.
COMPARE ^sHTH
doMPAR£\«m H HKi : 'ic}6 compare! ■
'M: FIGURE 6
compare;
THE TRANSLATION Of MAC^C SQUARE^ INTO PATTfftJS
Figure 7
The celebrated Franklin square of 16 cells can
be made to yield a beautiful pattern by designat-
ing some of the lines which give the summation of
2056 by different symbols, as shown in Figure 10.
A free translation of this design into pattern brick-
work is indicated in Figure 11.
If these processes seem unduly involved and
[93]
Architecture and Democracy
elaborate for the achievement of a simple result
— like burning the house down in order to get roast
pig — there are other more simple ways of deriv-
ing ornament from mathematics, for the truths of
number find direct and perfect expression in the
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Figure 8
figures of geometry. The squaring of a number
— the raising of it to its second power — finds
graphic expression in the plane figure of the square;
and the cubing of a number — the raising of it to
its third power — in the solid figure of the cube.
Now squares and cubes have been recognized from
[94]
PLATE XII. IMAGINARY COMPOSITION : THE BALCONY
The World Order
time immemorial as useful ornamental motifs.
Other elementary geometrical figures, making con-
crete to the eye the truths of abstract number, may
be dealt with by the designer in such a manner
as to produce ornament the
most varied and profuse.
Moorish ceilings, Gothic
window tracery, Grolier
bindings, all indicate the
richness of the field.
Suppose, for example,
that we attempt to deal deco-
ratively with such simple
figures as the three lowest
Platonic solids — the tetra-
hedron, the hexahedron, and
the octahedron. [Figure
12.] Their projection on a plane yields a rhyth-
mical division of space, because of their inherent
symmetry. These projections would correspond to
the network of lines seen in looking through a glass
paperweight of the given shape, the lines being
formed by the joining of the several faces. Figure
13 represents ornamental bands developed in this
manner. The dodecahedron and icosahedron,
having more faces, yield more intricate patterns,
[97]
PIECED l HONS SCREEN
FftQM RAVENNA
$U0(gSTlVE CF MAQIC
$QJA££ ARRANGEMENT^
Figure 9
Architecture and Democracy
and there is no limit to the variety of interesting de-
signs obtainable by these direct and simple
means.
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Figure 10
If the author has been successful thus far in his
exposition, it should be sufficiently plain that from
the inexhaustible well of mathematics fresh beauty
may be drawn. But what of its significance?
Ornament must mean something; it must have some
relation to the dominant ideation of the day; it must
express the psychological mood.
What is the psychological mood? Ours is an
age of transition; we live in a changing world.
On the one hand we witness the breaking up of
many an old thought crystal, on the other we feel
the pressure of those forces which shall create the
[98]
The World Order
new. What is nature's first visible creative act?
The formation of a geometrical crystal. The ar-
tist should take this hint, and organize geometry
into a new ornamental mode; by so doing he will
prove himself to be in relation to the anima mundi.
It is only by the establishment of such a relation
that new beauty comes to birth in the world.
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DRiCWORK PATTEW tfJtfqEtfTB>bY MA^ &&&&$
Figure 11
Ornament in its primitive manifestations is geo-
metrical rather than naturalistic. This is in a
manner strange, that the abstract and metaphysical
thing should precede the concrete and sensuous.
It would be natural to suppose that man would first
imitate the things which surround him, but the most
[99]
Architecture and Democracy
TH£ PLATONIC SGL[D$
■^TCTRAHECRCK
cursory acquaintance with
primitive art shows that he is
much more apt to crudely ge-
ometrize. Now it is not neces-
sary to assume that we are to
revert to the conditions of sav-
agery in order to believe that
in this matter of a sound aes-
thetic we must begin where art has always begun —
with number and geometry. Nevertheless there is
HEXAHEESCN
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DCXKAHgDRON,
IdCVAHEOTOW
Figure 12
ORNAMENT DE$JVE£>
FROM PLATONIC tfCHJDf
Figure 13
a subtly ironic view which one is justified in hold-
ing in regard to quite obvious aspects of American
[100]
The World Order
life, in the light of which that life appears to have
rather more in common with savagery than with
culture.
The submersion of scholarship by athletics in
our colleges is a case in point, the contest of muscles
exciting much more interest and enthusiasm than
any contest of wits. We persist in the savage
habit of devouring the corpses of slain animals long
after the necessity for it is past, and some even
murder innocent wild creatures, giving to their
ferocity the name of sport. Our women bedeck
themselves with furs and feathers, the fruit of
mercenary and systematic slaughter; we perform
orgiastic dances to the music of horns and drums
and cymbals — in short, we have the savage psychol-
ogy without its vital religious instinct and its sure
decorative sense for color and form.
But this is of course true only of the surface and
sunlit shadows of the great democratic tide. Its
depths conceal every kind of subtlety and sophisti-
cation, high endeavour, and a response to beauty
and wisdom of a sort far removed from the amoeba
stage of development above sketched. Of this lat-
ter stage the simple figures of Euclidian plane and
solid geometry — figures which any child can un-
derstand — are the appropriate symbols, but for
[101]
Architecture and Democracy
that other more developed state of consciousness —
less apparent but more important — these will not
do. Something more sophisticated and recondite
must be sought for if we are to have an ornamental
mode capable of expressing not only the simplicity
but the complexity of present-day psychology.
This need not be sought for outside the field of
geometry, but within it, and by an extension of the
methods already described. There is an altogether
modern development of the science of mathematics:
the geometry of four dimensions. This repre-
sents the emancipation of the mind from the tyr-
anny of mere appearances; the turning of con-
sciousness in a new direction. It has therefore a
high symbolical significance as typifying that
movement away from materialism which is so
marked a phenomenon of the times.
Of course to those whose notion of the fourth
dimension is akin to that of a friend of the author
who described it as "a wagon-load of bung-holes,"
the idea of getting from it any practical advantage
cannot seem anything but absurd. There is some-
thing about this form of words "the fourth dimen-
sion" which seems to produce a sort of mental-
phobia in certain minds, rendering them incapable
of perception or reason. Such people, because
[102]
The World Order
they cannot stick their cane into it contend that the
fourth dimension has no mathematical or philoso-
phical validity. As ignorance on this subject is
very general, the following essay will be devoted
to a consideration of the fourth dimension and its
relation to a new ornamental mode.
f^
[103]
II
THE FOURTH DIMENSION
THE subject of the fourth dimension is not an
easy one to understand. Fortunately the ar-
tist in design does not need to penetrate far
into these fascinating halls of thought in order to
reap the advantage which he seeks. Nevertheless
an intention of mind upon this "fairy-tale of mathe-
matics" cannot fail to enlarge his intellectual and
spiritual horizons, and develop his imagination —
that finest instrument in all his chest of tools.
By way of introduction to the subject Prof.
James Byrnie Shaw, in an article in the Scientific
Monthly, has this to say:
Up to the period of the Reformation algebraic equa-
tions of more than the third degree were frowned upon
as having no real meaning, since there is no fourth
power or dimension. But about one hundred years ago
this chimera became an actual existence, and today it
is furnishing a new world to physics, in which mechanics
may become geometry, time be co-ordinated with space,
[104]
The Fourth Dimension
and every geometric theorem in the world is a physical
theorem in the experimental world in study in the labora-
tory. Startling indeed it is to the scientist to be told
that an artificial dream-world of the mathematician is
more real than that he sees with his galvanometers, ultra-
microscopes, and spectroscopes. It matters little that
he replies, "Your four-dimensional world is only an
analytic explanation of my phenomena," for the fact re-
mains a fact, that in the mathematician's four-dimen-
sional space there is a space not derived in any sense of
the term as a residue of experience, however powerful a
distillation of sensations or perceptions be resorted to,
for it is not contained at all in the fluid that experi-
ence furnishes. It is a product of the creative power of
the mathematical mind, and its objects are real in exactly
the same way that the cube, the square, the circle, the
sphere or the straight line. We are enabled to see with
the penetrating vision of the mathematical insight that no
less real and no more real are these fantastic forms of
the world of relativity than those supposed to be unbeat-
able or indestructible in the play of the forces of na-
ture.
These "fantastic forms" alone need concern the
artist. If by some potent magic he can precipitate
them into the world of sensuous images so that they
make music to the eye, he need not even enter into
the question of their reality, but in order to achieve
this transmutation he should know something, at
[105]
Architecture and Democracy
least, of the strange laws of their being, should lend
ear to a fairy-tale in which each theorem is a para-
dox, and each paradox a mathematical fact.
He must conceive of a space of four mutually in-
dependent directions; a space, that is, having a
direction at right angles to every direction that we
know. We cannot point to this, we cannot picture
it, but we can reason about it with a precision that is
all but absolute. In such a space it would of
course be possible to establish four axial lines, all
intersecting at a point, and all mutually at right
angles with one another. Every hyper-solid of
four-dimensional space has these four axes.
The regular hyper-solids (analogous to the
Platonic solids of three-dimensional space) are
the "fantastic forms" which will prove useful to
the artist. He should leani to lure them forth
along their axis lines. That is, let him build up
his figures, space by space, developing them from
lower spaces to higher. But since he cannot enter
the fourth dimension, and build them there, nor
even the third — if he confines himself to a sheet
of paper — he must seek out some form of repre-
sentation of the higher in the lower. This is a
process with which he is already acquainted, for he
employs it every time he makes a perspective
[106]
The Fourth Dimension
drawing, which is the representation of a solid on
a plane. All that is required is an extension of the
method: a hyper-solid can be represented in a fig-
ure of three dimensions, and this in turn can be
projected on a plane. The achieved result will
constitute a perspective of a perspective — the rep-
resentation of a representation.
This may sound obscure to the uninitiated, and it
is true that the plane projection of some of the reg-
ular hyper-solids are staggeringly intricate affairs,
but the author is so sure that this matter lies so
well within the compass of the average non-mathe-
matical mind that he is willing to put his confidence
to a practical test.
It is proposed to develop a representation of the
tesseract or hyper-cube on the paper of this page,
that is, on a space of two dimensions. Let us start
as far back as we can: with a point. This point,
a, [Figure 14] is conceived to move in a direc-
tion w, developing the line a b. This line next
moves in a direction at right angles to w, namely, x,
a distance equal to its length, forming the square
abed. Now for the square to develop into a
cube by a movement into the third dimension it
would have to move in a direction at right angles to
both w and x, that is, out of the plane of the paper
[107]
Architecture and Democracy
— away from it altogether, either up or down.
This is not possible, of course, but the third direc-
tion can be represented on the plane of the paper.
TWO PROJECTION^ QFTHI? HYPIft
OJb£ ORTE^RACT. AND THE^R.
TRANSLATION INTO ORNAMENT.
~$m
>w
\
/s >
\ y ■'
/
s
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\
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b
Figure 14
D
Let us represent it as diagonally downward toward
the right, namely, y. In the y direction, then, and
at a distance equal to the length of one of the sides
of the square, another square is drawn, a'bVd',
[108]
The Fourth Dimension
representing the original square at the end of its
movement into the third dimension; and because
in that movement the bounding points of the square
have traced out lines (edges), it is necessary to con-
nect the corresponding corners of the two squares
by means of lines. This completes the figure and
achieves the representation of a cube on a plane by
a perfectly simple and familiar process. Its six
faces are easily identified by the eye, though only
two of them appear as squares owing to the exigen-
cies of representation.
Now for a leap into the abyss, which won't be so
terrifying, since it involves no change of method.
The cube must move into the fourth dimension, de-
veloping there a hyper-cube. This is impossible,
for the reason the cube would have to move out of
our space altogether — three-dimensional space will
not contain a hyper-cube. But neither is the cube
itself contained within the plane of the paper; it is
only there represented. The y direction had to
be imagined and then arbitrarily established; we
can arbitrarily establish the fourth direction in the
same way. As this is at right angles to y, its indi-
cation may be diagonally downward and to the left
— the direction z. As y is known to be at right
angles both to w and to x, z is at right angles to all
[109]
Architecture and Democracy
three, and we have thus established the four mu-
tually perpendicular axes necessary to complete
the figure.
The cube must now move in the z direction (the
fourth dimension) a distance equal to the length
of one of its sides. Just' as we did previously in
the case of the square, we draw the cube in its new
position (ABB'D'C'C) and also as before we
connect each apex of the first cube with the corre-
sponding apex of the other, because each of these
points generates a line (an edge), each line a plane,
and each plane a solid. This is the tesseract or
hyper-cube in plane projection. It has the 16
points, 32 lines, and 8 cubes known to compose
the figure. These cubes occur in pairs, and may
be readily identified. 1
The tesseract as portrayed in A, Figure 14, is
shown according to the conventions of oblique, or
two-point perspective; it can equally be represented
in a manner correspondent to parallel perspective.
The parallel perspective of a cube appears as a
square inside another square, with lines connecting
the four vertices of the one with those of the other.
1 The eight cubes in A, Figure 14, are as follows: abb'd'c'c;
ABB'D'C'C; abdDCA; a'b'd'D'C'A' ; abb'B'A'A; cdd'D'C'C;
bb'd'D'DB; aa'c'C'CA.
[110]
PLATE XIII. IMAGINARY COMPOSITION: THE AUDIENCE CHAMBER
The Fourth Dimension
The third dimension (the one beyond the plane of
the paper) is here conceived of as being not be-
yond the boundaries of the first square, but within
them. We may with equal propriety conceive of
the fourth dimension as a "beyond which is
within." In that case we would have a rendering
of the tesseract as shown in B, Figure 14: a cube
within a cube, the space between the two being
occupied by six truncated pyramids, each repre-
senting a cube. The large outside cube represents
the original generating cube at the beginning of
its motion into the fourth dimension, and the small
inside cube represents it at the end of that motion.
These two projections of the tesseract upon plane
space are not the only ones possible, but they are
typical. Some idea of the variety of aspects may
be gained by imagining how a nest of inter-related
cubes (made of wire, so as to interpenetrate), com-
bined into a single symmetrical figure of three-
dimensional space, would appear from several dif-
ferent directions. Each view would yield new
space-subdivisions, and all would be rhythmical —
susceptible, therefore, of translation into ornament.
C and D represent such translations of A and B.
In order to fix these unfamiliar ideas more firmly
in the reader's mind, let him submit himself to
[113]
Architecture and Democracy
one more exercise of the creative imagination, and
construct, hy a slightly different method, a repre-
sentation of a hexadecahedroid, or 16-hedroid, on
a plane. This regular solid of four-dimensional
space consists of sixteen cells, each a regular tetra-
hedron, thirty-two triangular faces, twenty-four
edges and eight vertices. It is the correlative of
the octahedron of three-dimensional space.
First it is necessary to estahlish our four axes, all
mutually at right angles. If we draw three lines
intersecting at a point, subtending angles of 60 de-
grees each, it is not difficult to conceive of these
lines as being at right angles with one another in
three-dimensional space. The fourth axis we will
assume to pass vertically through the point of inter-
section of the three lines, so that we see it only in
cross-section, that is, as a point. It is important
to remember that all of the angles made by the four
axes are right angles — a thing possible only in a
space of four dimensions. Because the 16-hedroid
is a symmetrical hyper-solid all of its eight apexes
will be equidistant from the centre of a containing
hyper-sphere, whose "surface" these will intersect
at symmetrically disposed points. These apexes
are established in our representation by describing
a circle — the plane projection of the hyper-sphere
[114]
The Fourth Dimension
— about the central point of intersection of the axes.
(Figure 15, left.) Where each of these intersects
the circle an apex of the 16-hedroid will be estab-
lished. From each apex it is now necessary to
draw straight lines to every other, each line repre-
senting one edge of the sixteen tetrahedral cells.
But because the two ends of the fourth axis are
AXL3
MOWN E>Y HEAVY W (SHOWN W (3K±E|F
THE? 16 -HEpEOID IN P1AHE? PKOOEjCTON
Figure 15
directly opposite one another, and opposite the
point of sight, all of these lines fail to appear in the
left hand diagram. It therefore becomes neces-
sary to tilt the figure slightly, bringing into view
the fourth axis, much foreshortened, and with it, all
of the lines which make up the figure. The result
is that projection of the 16-hedroid shown at the
[115]
Architecture and Democracy
right of Figure 15. 1 Here is no fortuitous ar-
rangement of lines and areas, but the "shadow"
cast by an archetypal figure of higher space upon
the plane of our materiality. It is a wonder, a
mystery, staggering to the imagination, contradic-
tory to experience, but as well entitled to a place at
the high court of reason as are any of the more
familiar figures with which geometry deals.
Translated into ornament it produces such an all-
over pattern as is shown in Figure 16 and the de-
sign which adorns the curtains at right and left of
pi. XIII. There are also other interesting projec-
tions of the 16-hedroid which need not be gone
into here.
For if the author has been successful in his expo-
sition up to this point, it should be sufficiently plain
that the geometry of four-dimensions is capable of
yielding fresh and interesting ornamental motifs.
In carrying his demonstration farther, and in mul-
tiplying illustrations, he would only be going over
ground already covered in his book Projective Or-
nament and in his second Scammon lecture.
Of course this elaborate mechanism for produc-
1 The sixteen cells of the hexadehahedroid are as follows: ABCD
A'B'C'D': AB'C'D': A'BCD: AB'CD: A'BC'D: ABCD: A'B'CD'
ABCD': A'B'C'D: ABCD': A'B'CD: A'BC'D: AB'CD': A'BCD'
AB'C'D.
[116]
The Fourth Dimension
ing quite obvious and even ordinary decorative
motifs may appear to some readers like Goldberg's
nightmare mechanics, wherein the most absurd and
intricate devices are made to accomplish the most
simple ends. The author is undisturbed by such
criticisms. If the designs dealt with in this chap-
ter are "obvious and even ordinary" they are so for
the reason that they were chosen less with an eye
to their interest and beauty than as lending them-
selves to development and demonstration by an or-
derly process which should not put too great a
tax upon the patience and intelligence of the
reader. Four-dimensional geometry yields num-
Figure 16
[117]
Architecture and Democracy
berless other patterns whose beauty and interest
could not possibly be impeached — patterns beyond
the compass of the cleverest designer unacquainted
with projective -geometry.
The great need of the ornamentalist is this or
some other solid foundation. Lacking it, he has
been forced to build either on the shifting sands
of his own fancy, or on the wrecks and sediment of
the past. Geometry provides this sure foundation.
We may have to work hard and dig deep, but the
results will be worth the effort, for only on such a
foundation can arise a temple which is beautiful
and strong.
In confirmation of his general contention that
the basis of all effective decoration is geometry and
number, the author, in closing, desires to direct the
reader's attention to Figure 17 a slightly modified
rendering of the famous zodiacal ceiling of the
Temple of Denderah, in Egypt. A sun and its
corona have been substituted for the zodiacal signs
and symbols which fill the centre of the original,
for except to an Egyptologist these are meaningless.
In all essentials the drawing faithfully follows the
original — was traced, indeed, from a measured
drawing.
Here is one of the most magnificent decorative
[118]
The Fourth Dimension
C£HJN0 DEjdCRAHON TT3QM TH£ TEMPl£ OP D^ND^BAH-
Figure 17
schemes in the whole world, arranged with a feeling
for balance and rhythm exceeding the power of the
modern artist, and executed with a mastery beyond
the compass of a modern craftsman. The fact that
first forces itself upon the beholder is that the thing
is so obviously mathematical in its rhythms, that to
reduce it to terms of geometry and number is a mat-
[119]
Architecture and Democracy
ter of small difficulty. Compare the frozen music
of these rhymed and linked figures with the herded,
confused, and cluttered compositions of even our
best decorative artists, and argument becomes un-
necessary — the fact stands forth that we have lost
something precious and vital out of art of which
the ancients possessed the secret.
It is for the restoration of these ancient verities
and the discovery of new spatial rhythms — made
possible by the advance of mathematical science
— that the author pleads. Artists, architects, de-
signers, instead of chewing the cud of current fash-
ion, come into these pastures new!
[120]
HARNESSING THE RAINBOW
REFERENCE was made in an antecedent es-
say to an art of light — of mobile color —
an abstract language of thought and emotion
which should speak to consciousness through the
eye, as music speaks through the ear. This is an
art unborn, though quickening in the womb of
the future. The things that reflect light have been
organized aesthetically into the arts of architecture,
painting, and sculpture, but light itself has never
been thus organized.
And yet the scientific development and control
of light has reached a stage which makes this new
art possible. It awaits only the advent of the crea-
tive artist. The manipulation of light is now in
the hands of the illuminating engineers and its ex-
ploitation (in other than necessary ways) in the
hands of the advertisers.
Some results of their collaboration are seen in
the sky signs of upper Broadway, in New York,
and of the lake front, in Chicago. A carnival of
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contending vulgarities, showing no artistry other
than the most puerile, these displays nevertheless
yield an effect of amazing beauty. This is on ac-
count of an occult property inherent in the nature
of light — it cannot be vulgarized. If the manipu-
lation of light were delivered into the hands of the
artist, and dedicated to noble ends, it is impossible
to overestimate the augmentation of beauty that
would ensue.
For light is a far more potent medium than
sound. The sphere of sound is the earth-sphere;
the little limits of our atmosphere mark the utter-
most boundaries to which sound, even the most
strident can possibly prevail. But the medium of
light is die ether, which links us with the most dis-
tant stars. May not this serve as a symbol of the
potency of light to usher the human spirit into
realms of being at the doors of which music itself
shall beat in vain? Or if we compare the universe
accessible to sight with that accessible to sound —
the plight of the blind in contrast to that of the
deaf — there is the same discrepancy; the field of
the eye is immensely richer, more various and more
interesting than that of the ear.
The difficulty appears to consist in the inferior
impressionability of the eye to its particular order
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of beauty. To the average man color — as color
— has nothing significant to say: to him grass is
green, snow is white, the sky blue; and to have
his attention drawn to the fact that sometimes grass
is yellow, snow blue, and the sky green, is discon-
certing rather than illuminating. It is only when
his retina is assaulted by some splendid sunset or
sky-encircling rainbow that he is able to disasso-
ciate the idea of color from that of form and sub-
stance. Even the artist is at a disadvantage in this
respect, when compared with the musician. Noth-
ing in color knowledge and analysis analogous to
the established laws of musical harmony is part of
the equipment of the average artist; he plays, as it
were, by ear. The scientist, on the other hand,
though he may know the spectrum from end to end,
and its innumerable modifications, values this
"rainbow promise of the Lord" not for its own
beautiful sake but as a means to other ends than
those of beauty. But just as the art of music has
developed the ear into a fine and sensitive instru-
ment of appreciation, so an analogous art of light
would educate the eye to nuances of color to which
it is now blind.
It is interesting to speculate as to the particular
form in which this new art will manifest itself.
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The question is perhaps already answered in the
"color organ," the earliest of which was Bam-
bridge Bishop's, exhibited at the old Barnum's
Museum — before the days of electric light — and
the latest A. W. Rimington's. Both of these instru-
ments were built upon a supposed correspondence
between a given scale of colors, and the musical
chromatic scale; they were played from a musical
score upon an organ keyboard. This is sufficiently
easy and sufficiently obvious, and has been done,
with varying success in one way or another, time
and again, but its very ease and obviousness should
give us pause.
It may well be questioned whether any arbitrary
and literal translation, even though practicable, of
a highly complex, intensely mobile art, unfolding
in time, as does music, into a correspondent light
and color expression, is the best approaph to a new
art of mobile color. There is a deep and abiding
conviction, justified by the history of aesthetics, that
each art-form must progress from its own begin-
nings and unfold in its own unique and character-
istic way. Correspondences between the arts —
such a correspondence, for example, as inspired the
famous saying that architecture is frozen music —
reveal themselves usually only after the sister arts
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have attained an independent maturity. They owe
their origin to that underlying unity upon which
our various modes of sensuous perception act as
a refracting medium, and must therefore be taken
for granted. Each art, like each individual, is
unique and singular; in this singularity dwells its
most thrilling appeal. We are likely to • miss
light's crowning glory, and the rainbow's most mov-
ing message to the soul if we preoccupy ourselves
too exclusively with the identities existing between
music and color; it is rather their points of dif-
ference which should first be dwelt upon.
Let us accordingly consider the characteristic
differences between the two sense-categories to
which sound and light — music and color — respec-
tively belong. This resolves itself into a com-
parison between time and space. The characteris-
tic thing about time is succession — hence the very
idea of music, which is in time, involves perpetual
change. The characteristic of space, on the other
hand, is simultaneousness — in space alone perpet-
ual immobility would reign. That is why archi-
tecture, which is pre-eminently the art of space, is
of all the arts the most static. Light and color
are essentially of space, and therefore an art of mo-
bile colour should never lack a certain serenity and
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repose. A "tune" played on a color organ is only
distressing. If there is a workable correspondence
between the musical art and an art of mobile
color, it will be found in the domain of harmony
which involves the idea of simultaneity, rather than
in melody, which is pure succession. This funda-
mental difference between time and space cannot
be over-emphasized. A musical note prolonged,
becomes at last scarcely tolerable; while a beauti-
ful color, like the blue of the sky, we can enjoy all
day and every day. The changing hues of a sun-
set, are andante if referred to a musical standard,
but to the eye they are allegretto — we would have
them pass less swiftly than they do. The winking,
chasing, changing lights of illuminated sky-signs
are only annoying, and for the same reason. The
eye longs for repose in some serene radiance or
stately sequence, while the ear delights in contrast
and continual change. It may be that as the eye
becomes more educated it will demand more move-
ment and complexity, but a certain stillness and
serenity are of the very nature of light, as move-
ment and passion are of the very nature of sound.
Music is a seeking — "love in search of a word";
light is a finding — a "divine covenant."
With attention still focussed on the differences
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rather than the similarities between the musical art
and a new art of mobile color, we come next to
the consideration of the matter of form. Now
form is essentially of space: we speak about the
"form" of a musical composition, but it is in a
more or less figurative and metaphysical sense, not
as a thing concrete and palpable, like the forms of
space. It would be foolish to forego the advantage
of linking up form with colour, as there is oppor-
tunity to do. Here is another golden ball to juggle
with, one which no art purely in time affords. Of
course it is known that musical sounds weave in-
visible patterns in the air, and to render these pat-
terns perceptible to the eye may be one of the more
remote and recondite achievements of our uncre-
ated art. Meantime, though we have the whole
treasury of natural forms to draw from, of these we
can only properly employ such as are abstract.
The reason for this is clear to any one who con-
ceives of an art of mobile color, not as a moving
picture show — a thing of quick-passing concrete
images, to shock, to startle, or to charm — but as a
rich and various language in which light, prover-
bially the symbol of the spirit, is made to speak,
through the senses, some healing message to the
soul. For such a consummation, "devoutly to be
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wished," natural forms — forms abounding in every
kind of association with that world of materiality
from which we would escape — are out of place; re-
course must be had rather to abstract forms, that is,
geometrical figures. And because the more remote
these are from the things of sense, from knowledge
and experience, the projected figures of four-di-
mensional geometry would lend themselves to these
uses with an especial grace. Color without form
is as a soul without a body; yet the body of light
must be without any taint of materiality. Four-di-
mensional forms are as immaterial as anything that
could be imagined and they could be made to serve
the useful purpose of separating colors one from
another, as lead lines do in old cathedral windows,
than which nothing more beautiful has ever been
devised.
Coming now to the consideration, not of differ-
ences, but similarities, it is clear that a correspond-
ence can be established between the colors of the
spectrum and the notes of a musical scale. That
is, the spectrum, considered as the analogue of a
musical octave can be subdivided into twelve col-
ors which may be representative of the musical
chromatic scale of twelve semi-tones: the very word,
chromatic, being suggestive of such a correspond-
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ence between sound and light. The red end of the
spectrum would naturally relate to the low notes of
the musical scale, and the violet end to the high,
by reason of the relative rapidity of vibration in
each case; for the octave of a musical note sets the
air vibrating twice as rapidly as does the note itself,
and roughly speaking, the same is true of the end
colors of the spectrum with relation to the ether.
But assuming that a color scale can be estab-
lished which would yield a color correlative to
any musical note or chord, there still remains the
matter of values to be dealt with. In the musical
scale there is a practical equality of values: one
note is as potent as another. In a color scale, on
the other hand, each note (taken at its greatest in-
tensity) has a positive value of its own, and they
are all different. These values have no musical
correlatives, they belong to color per se. Every
colorist knows that the whole secret of beauty and
brilliance dwells in a proper understanding and
adjustment of values, and music is powerless to
help him here. Let us therefore defer the discus-
sion of this musical parallel, which is full of pit-
falls, until we have made some examination into
such simple emotional reactions as color can be
discovered to yield. The musical art began from
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the emotional response to certain simple tones and
combinations, and the delight of the ear in their
repetition and variation.
On account of our undeveloped sensitivity, the
emotional reactions to color are found to be
largely personal and whimsical: one person "loves"
pink, another purple, or green. Color therapeu-
tics is too new a thing to be relied upon for data,
for even though colors are susceptible of classifica-
tion as sedative, recuperative and stimulating, no
two classifications arrived at independently would
be likely to correspond. Most people appear to
prefer bright, pure colors when presented to them
in small areas, red and blue being the favourites.
Certain data have been accumulated regarding the
physiological effect and psychological value of dif-
ferent colors, but this order of research is in its
infancy, and we shall have recourse, therefore, to
theory, in the absence of any safer guide.
One of the theories which may be said to have
justified itself in practice in a different field is that
upon which is based Delsarte's famous art of ex-
pression. It has schooled some of the finest actors
in the world, and raised others from mediocrity to
distinction. The Delsarte system is founded upon
the idea that man is a triplicity of physical, emo-
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tional, and intellectual qualities or attributes, and
that the entire body and every part thereof con-
forms to, and expresses this triplicity. The gen-
erative and digestive region corresponds with the
physical nature, the breast with the emotional, and
the head with the intellectual; "below" represents
the nadir of ignorance and dejection, "above" the
zenith of wisdom and spiritual power. This seems
a natural, and not an arbitrary classification, hav-
ing interesting confirmations and correspondencies,
both in the outer world of form, and in the inner
world of consciousness. Moreover, it is in accord
with that theosophic scheme derived from the an-
cient and august wisdom of the East, which longer
and better than any other has withstood the obliter-
ating action of slow time, and is even now renascent.
Let us therefore attempt to classify the colors of
the spectrum according to this theory, and discover
if we can how nearly such a classification is con-
formable to reason and experience.
The red end of the spectrum, being lowest in
vibratory rate, would correspond to the physical
nature, proverbially more sluggish than the emo-
tional and mental. The phrase "like a red rag to
a bull," suggests a relation between the color red
and the animal consciousness established by obser-
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vation. The "low-brow" is the dear lover of the
red necktie; the "high-brow" is he who sees violet
shadows on the snow. We "see red" when we are
dominated by ignoble passion. Though the color
green is associated with the idea of jealousy, it is
associated also with the idea of sympathy, and
jealousy in the last analysis is the fear of the loss
of sympathy; it belongs, at all events to the mediant,
or emotional group of colors; while blue and vio-
let are proverbially intellectual and spiritual col-
ors, and their place in the spectrum therefore con-
forms to the demands of our theoretical division.
Here, then, is something reasonably certain, cer-
tainly reasonable, and may serve as an hypothesis
to be confirmed or confuted by subsequent research.
Coming now finally to the consideration of the
musical parallel, let us divide a color scale of
twelve steps or semi-tones into three groups; each
group, graphically portrayed, subtending one-third
of the arc of a circle. The first or red group will
be related to the physical nature, and will consist of
purple-red, red, red-orange, and orange. The sec-
ond, or green group will be related to the emotional
nature, and will consist of yellow, yellow-green,
green, and green-blue. The third, or blue group
will be related to the intellectual and spiritual na-
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tare, and will consist of blue, blue-violet, violet and
purple. The merging of purple into purple-red
will then correspond to the meeting place of the
highest with the lowest, "spirit" and "matter." We
conceive of this meeting-place symbolically as the
"heart" — the vital centre. Now "sanguine" is the
appropriate name associated with the color of the
blood — a color between purple and purple-red.
It is logical, therefore, to regard this point in our
color-scale as its tonic — "middle C" — though each
color, just as in music each note, is itself the tonic
of a scale of its own.
Mr. Louis Wilson — the author of the above "oph-
thalmic color scale" makes the same affiliation be-
tween sanguine, or blood color, and middle C, led
thereto by scientific reasons entirely unassociated
with symbolism. He has omitted orange-yellow
and violet-purple; this makes the scale conform
more exactly with the diatonic scale of two tetra-
chords; it also gives a greater range of purples,
a color indispensable to the artist. Moreover, in
the scale as it stands, each color is exactly opposite
its true spectral complementary.
The color scale being thus established and
broadly divided, the next step is to find how well
it justifies itself in practice. The most direct way
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would be to translate the musical chords recognized
and dealt with in the science of harmony into their
corresponding color combinations.
For the benefit of such readers as have no knowl-
edge of musical harmony it should be said that the
entire science of harmony is based upon the triad,
or chord of three notes, and that there are various
kinds of triads: the major, the minor, the aug-
mented, the diminished, and the altered. The
major triad consists of the first note of the diatonic
scale, or tonic; its third, and its fifth. The minor
triad differs from the major only in that the second
member is lowered a semi-tone. The augmented
triad differs from the major only in that the third
member is raised a semi-tone. The diminished
triad differs from the minor only in that the third
member is lowered a semi-tone. The altered triad
is a chord different by a semi-tone from any of
the above.
The major triad in color is formed by taking
any one of the twelve color-centers of the ophthal-
mic color scale as the first member of the triad;
and, reading up the scale, the fifth step (each step
representing a semi-tone) determines the second
member, while the third member is found in the
eighth step. The minor triad in color is formed
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Harnessing the Rainbow
by lowering the second member of the major triad
one step; the augmented triad by raising the third
member of the major triad one step, and the dimin-
ished triad by lowering the third member of the
minor triad one step.
YSOi£T
MAJOR- TRIAD
MINOI^YRJAD
au<3M3nte;d "TRIAD dimini^h^d teiad
Figure 18
These various triads are shown graphically in
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Figure 18 as triangles within a circle divided into
twelve equal parts, each part representing a semi-
tone of the chromatic scale. It is seen at a glance
that in every case each triad has one of its notes
(an apex) in or immediately adjacent to a dif-
ferent one of the grand divisions of the colour scale
hereinbefore established and described, and that
the same thing would be true in any "key" : that is,
by any variation of the point of departure.
This certainly satisfies the mind in that it sug-
gests variety in unity, balance, completeness, and in
the actual portrayal, in color, of these chords in
any "key" this judgment is confirmed by the eye,
provided that the colors have been thrown into
proper harmonic suppression. By this is meant
such an adjustment of relative values, or such an
establishment of relative proportions as will pro-
duce the maximum of beauty of which any given
combination is capable. This matter imperatively
demands an aesthetic sense the most sensitive.
So this "musical parallel,' interesting and rea-
sonable as it is, will not carry the color harmonist
very far, and if followed too literally it is even
likely to hamper him in the higher reaches of his
art, for some of the musical dissonances are of
great beauty in color translation. All that can
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safely be said in regard to the musical parallel in
its present stage of development is that it simplifies
and systematizes color knowledge and experiment
and to a beginner it is highly educational.
If we are to have color symphonies, the best
are not likely to be those based on a literal trans-
lation of some musical masterpiece into color
according to this or any theory, but those created by
persons who are emotionally reactive to this
medium, able to imagine in color, and to treat it
imaginatively. The most beautiful mobile color
effects yet witnessed by the author were produced
on a field only five inches square, by an eminent
painter quite ignorant of music; while some of the
most unimpressive have been the result of a rigid
adherence to the musical parallel by persons intent
on cutting, with this sword, this Gordian knot.
Into the subject of means and methods it is not
proposed to enter, nor to attempt to answer such
questions as to whether the light shall be direct or
projected; whether the spectator, wrapped in dark-
ness, shall watch the music unfold at the end of
some mysterious vista, or whether his whole organ-
ism shall be played upon by powerful waves of
multi-coloured light. These coupled alternatives
are not mutually exclusive, any more than the idea
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of an orchestra is exclusive of that of a single hu-
man voice.
In imagining an art of mobile color uncondi-
tioned by considerations of mechanical difficulty or
of expense, ideas multiply in truly bewildering pro-
fusion. Sunsets, solar coronas, star spectra, au-
roras such as were never seen on sea or land; rain-
bows, bubbles, rippling water; flaming volcanoes,
lava streams of living light — these and a hundred
other enthralling and perfectly realizable effects
suggest themselves. What Israfil of the future will
pour on mortals this new "music of the spheres"?
[140]
LOUIS SULLIVAN
PROPHET OF DEMOCRACY
DUE tribute has been paid to Mr. Louis Sulli-
van as an architect in the first essay of this
volume. That aspect of his genius has
been critically dealt with by many, but as an author
he is scarcely known. Yet there are Sibylline
leaves of his, still let us hope in circulation, which
have wielded a potent influence on the minds of a
generation of men now passing to maturity. It is
in the hope that his message may not be lost to the
youth of today and of tomorrow that the present
author now undertakes to summarize and interpret
that message to a public to which Mr. Sullivan is
indeed a name, but not a voice.
That he is not a voice can be attributed neither
to his lack of eloquence — for he is eloquent — nor
to the indifference of the younger generation of
architects which has grown up since he has ceased,
in any public way, to speak. It is due rather to a
curious fatality whereby his memorabilia have been
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confined to sheets which the winds of time have
scattered — pamphlets, ephemeral magazines, trade
journals — never the bound volume which alone
guards the sacred flame from the gusts of evil
chance.
And Mr. Sullivan's is a "sacred flame," because
it was kindled solely with the idea of service — a
beacon to keep young men from shipwreck travers-
ing those straits made dangerous by the Scylla of
Conventionality, and the Charybdis of License.
The labour his writing cost him was enormous. "I
shall never again make so great a sacrifice for the
younger generation," he says in a letter, "I am
amazed to note how insignificant, how almost nil is
the effect produced, in comparison to the cost, in
vitality to me. Or perhaps it is I who am in error.
Perhaps one must have reached middle age, or the
Indian Summer of life, must have seen much, heard
much, felt and produced much and been much in
solitude to receive in reading what I gave in writing
'with hands overfull.' "
This was written with reference to Kindergarten
Chats. A sketch Analysis of Contemporaneous
American Architecture, which constitutes Mr. Sul-
livan's most extended and characteristic preach-
ment to the young men of his day. It appeared in
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Louis Sullivan
1901, in fifty-two consecutive numbers of The Inter-
state Architect and Builder, a magazine now no
longer published. In it the author, as mentor,
leads an imaginary disciple up and down the land,
pointing out to him the "bold, upholsterrific blun-
ders" to be found in the architecture of the day,
and commenting on them in a caustic, colloquial
style — large, loose, discursive — a blend of Ruskin,
Carlyle and Whitman, yet all Mr. Sullivan's own.
He descends, at times, almost to ribaldry, at others
he rises to poetic and prophetic heights. This is
all a part of his method alternately to shame and
inspire his pupil to some sort of creative activity.
The syllabus of Mr. Sullivan's scheme, as it existed
in his mind during the writing of Kindergarten
Chats, and outlined by him in a letter to the author
is such a torch of illumination that it is quoted here
entire.
A young man who has "finished his education" at the
architectural schools comes to me for a post-graduate
course — hence a free form of dialogue.
I proceed with his education rather by indirection and
suggestion than by direct precept. I subject him to cer-
tain experiences and allow the impressions they make on
him to infiltrate, and, as I note the effect, I gradually
use a guiding hand. I supply the yeast, so to speak, and
allow the ferment to work in him.
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This is the gist of the whole scheme. It remains then
to determine, carefully, the kind of experiences to which
I shall subject the lad, and in what order, or logical
(and especially psychological) sequence. I begin, then,
with aspects that are literal, objective, more or less cyn-
ical, and brutal, and philistine. A little at a time I
introduce the subjective, the refined, the altruistic; and,
by a to-and-fro increasingly intense rhythm of these two
opposing themes, worked so to speak in counterpoint, I
reach a preliminary climax: of brutality tempered by a
longing for nobler, purer things.
Hence arise a purblind revulsion and yearning in the
lad's soul; the psychological moment has arrived, and I
take him at once into the country — (Summer: The
Storm) . This is the first of the four out-of-door scenes,
and the lad's first real experience with nature. It im-
presses him crudely but violently; and in the tense ex-
citement of the tempest he is inspired to temporary elo-
quence; and at the close is much softened. He feels in
a way but does not know that he has been a participant
in one of Nature's superb dramas. (Thus do I insidi-
ously prepare the way for the notion that creative archi-
tecture is in essence a dramatic art, and an art of elo-
quence; of subtle rhythmic beauty, power, and tender-
ness) .
Left alone in the country the lad becomes maudlin —
a callow lover of nature — and makes feeble attempts at
verse. Returning to the city he melts and unbosoms —
the tender shaft of the unknowable Eros has penetrated
to his heart — Nature's subtle spell is on him, to disappear
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Louis Sullivan
and reappear. Then follow discussions, more or less
didactic, leading to the second out-of-door scene (Autumn
Glory). Here the lad does most of the talking and
shows a certain lucidity and calm of mind. The discus-
sion of Responsibility, Democracy, Education, etc., has
inevitably detached the lurking spirit of pessimism. It
has to be: — Into the depths and darkness we descend,
and the work reaches the tragic climax in the third out-
of-door scene — Winter.
Now that the forces have been gathered and mar-
shalled the true, sane movement of the work is entered
upon and pushed at high tension, and with swift, copious
modulations to its foreordained climax and optimistic
peroration in the fourth and last out-of-door scene as
portrayed in the Spring Song. The locale of this clos-
ing number is the beautiful spot in the woods, on the
shore of Biloxi Bay: — where I am writing this.
I would suggest in passing that a considerable part of
the K. C. is in rhythmic prose — some of it declamatory.
I have endeavoured throughout this work to represent,
or reproduce to the mind and heart of the reader the
spoken word and intonation — not written language. It
really should be read aloud, especially the descriptive
and exalted passages.
There was a movement once on the part of Mr.
Sullivan's admirers to issue Kindergarten Chats in
book form, but he was asked to tone it down and
expurgate it, a thing which he very naturally re-
fused to do. Mr. Sullivan has always been com-
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pletely alive to our cowardice when it comes to
hearing the truth about ourselves, and alive to the
danger which this cowardice entails, for to his im-
aginary pupil he says,
If you wish to read the current architecture of your
country, you must go at it courageously, and not pick out
merely the little bits that please you. I am going to
soak you with it until you are absolutely nauseated, and
your faculties turn in rebellion. I may be a hard task-
master, but I strive to be a good one. When I am
through with you, you will know architecture from the
ground up. You will know its virtuous reality and you
will know the fake and the fraud and the humbug. I will
spare nothing — for your sake. I will stir up the cess-
pool to its utmost depths of stench, and also the pious,
hypocritical virtues of our so-called architecture — the
nice, good, mealy-mouthed, suave, dexterous, diplomatic
architecture, I will show you also the kind of architect-
ure our "cultured" people believe in. And why do they
believe in it? Because they do not believe in them-
selves.
Kindergarten Chats is even more pertinent
and pointed today than it was some twenty years
ago, when it was written. Speech that is full of
truth is timeless, and therefore prophetic. Mr.
Sullivan forecast some of the very evils by which
we have been overtaken. He was able to do this
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Louis Sullivan
on account of the fundamental soundness of his
point of view, which finds expression in the follow-
ing words: "Once you learn to look upon archi-
tecture not merely as an art more or less well, or
more or less badly done, but as a social manifesta-
tion, the critical eye becomes clairvoyant, and ob-
scure, unnoted phenomena become illumined."
Looking, from this point of view, at the office
buildings that the then newly-realized possibilities
of steel construction were sending skyward along
lower Broadway, in New York, Mr. Sullivan reads
in them a denial of democracy. To him they sig-
nify much more than they seem to, or mean to ; they
are more than the betrayal of architectural igno-
rance and mendacity, they are symptomatic of
forces undermining American life.
These buildings, as they increase in number, make
this city poorer, morally and spiritually; they drag it
down and down into the mire. This is not American
civilization; it is the rottenness of Gomorrah. This is
not Democracy — it is savagery. It shows the glutton
hunt for the Dollar with no thought for aught else under
the sun or over the earth. It is decadence of the spirit
in its most revolting form; it is rottenness of the heart
and corruption of the mind. So truly does this archi-
tecture reflect the causes which have brought it into
being. Such structures are profoundly anti-social, and
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as such, they must be reckoned with. These buildings
are not architecture, but outlawry, and their authors crim-
inals in the true sense of the word. And such is the
architecture of lower New York — hopeless, degraded,
and putrid in its pessimistic denial of our art, and of
our growing civilization — its cynical contempt for all
those qualities that real humans value.
We have always been very glib about democracy ;
we have assumed that this country was a democracy
because we named it so. But now that we are
called upon to die for the idea, we find that we
have never realized it anywhere except perhaps in
our secret hearts. In the life of Abraham Lincoln,
in the poetry of Walt Whitman, in the architecture
of Louis Sullivan, the spirit of democracy found
utterance, and to the extent that we ourselves par-
take of that spirit, it will find utterance also in us.
Mr. Sullivan is a "prophet of democracy" not alone
in his buildings but in his writings, and the pro-
phetic note is sounded even more clearly in his
What is Architecture? A Study in the American
People of Today, than in Kindergarten Chats.
This essay was first printed in The American
Contractor of January 6, 1906, and afterwards is-
sued in brochure form. The author starts by trac-
ing architecture to its root in the human mind : this
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Louis Sullivan
physical thing is the manifestation of a psychologi-
cal state. As a man thinks, so he is ; he acts accord-
ing to his thought, and if that act takes the form
of a building it is an emanation of his inmost life,
and reveals it.
Everything is there for us to read, to interpret; and
this we may do at our leisure. The building has not
means of locomotion, it cannot hide itself, it cannot get
away. There it is, and there it will stay — telling more
truths about him who made it, than he in his fatuity
imagines; revealing his mind and his heart exactly for
what they are worth, not a whit more, not a whit less;
telling plainly the lies he thinks; telling with almost
cruel truthfulness his bad faith, his feeble, wabbly mind,
his impudence, his selfish egoism, his mental irrespon-
sibility, his apathy, his disdain for real things — until at
last the building says to us: "I am no more a real
building than the thing that made me is a real man!"
Language like this stings and burns, but it is just
such as is needful to shame us out of our comfort-
able apathy, to arouse us to new responsibilities,
new opportunities. Mr. Sullivan, awake among
the sleepers, drenches us with bucketfuls of cold,
tonic, energizing truth. The poppy and mandra-
gora of the past, of Europe, poisons us, but in this,
our hour of battle, we must not be permitted to
dream on. He saw, from far back, that "we, as a
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people, not only have betrayed each other, but have
failed in that trust which the world spirit of democ-
racy placed in our hands, as we, a new people,
emerged to fill a new and spacious land." It has
taken a world war to make us see the situation as
he saw it, and it is to us, a militant nation, and not
to the slothful civilians a decade ago, that Mr. Sul-
livan's stirring message seems to be addressed.
The following quotation is his first crack of the
whip at the architectural schools. The problem of
education is to him of all things the most vital; in
this essay he returns to it again and again, while of
Kindergarten Chats it is the very raison d'etre.
I trust that a long disquisition is not necessary in order
to show that the attempt at imitation, by us, of this day,
of the by-gone forms of building, is a procedure un-
worthy of a free people; and that the dictum of the
schools, that Architecture is finished and done, is a sug-
gestion humiliating to every active brain, and therefore,
in fact, a puerility and a falsehood when weighed in
the scales of truly democratic thought. Such dictum
gives the lie in arrogant fashion, to healthful human ex-
perience. It says, in a word: the American people
are not fit for democracy.
He finds the schools saturated with superstitions
which are the survivals of the scholasticism of past
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Louis Sullivan
centuries — feudal institutions, in effect, inimical to
his idea of the true spirit of democratic education.
This he conceives of as a searching-out, liberating,
and developing the splendid but obscured powers
of the average man, and particularly those of chil-
dren. "It is disquieting to note," he says, "that
the system of education on which we lavish funds
with such generous, even prodigal, hand, falls short
of fulfilling its true democratic function; and that
particularly in the so-called higher branches its
tendency appears daily more reactionary, more
feudal. It is not an agreeable reflection that so
many of our university graduates lack the trained
ability to see clearly, and to think clearly, con-
cisely, constructively; that there is perhaps more
showing of cynicism than good faith, seemingly
more distrust of men than confidence in them, and,
withal, no consummate ability to interpret things."
In contrast to the schoolman he sketches the
psychology of the active-minded but "uneducated"
man, with sympathy and understanding, the man
who is courageously seeking a way with little to
guide and help him.
Is it not the part of wisdom to cheer, to encourage
such a mind, rather than dishearten it with ridicule?
To say to it: Learn that the mind works best when
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allowed to work naturally; learn to do what your prob-
lem suggests when you have reduced it to its simplest
terms; you will thus find that all problems, however com-
plex, take on a simplicity you had not dreamed of;
accept this simplicity boldly, and with confidence, do not
lose your nerve and run away from it, or you are lost,
for you are here at the point men so heedlessly call
genius — as though it were necessarily rare; for you are
here at the point no living brain can surpass in essence,
the point all truly great minds seek — the point of vital
simplicity — the point of view which so illuminates the
mind that the art of expression becomes spontaneous,
powerful, and unerring, and achievement a certainty.
So, if you seek and express the best that is in yourself,
you must search out the best that is in your people;
for they are your problem, and you are indissolubly a
part of them. It is for you to affirm that which they
really wish to affirm, namely, the best that is in them,
and they as truly wish you to express the best that is in
yourself. If the people seem to have but little faith it
is because they have been tricked so long; they are weary
of dishonesty, more weary than they know, much more
weary than you know, and in their hearts they seek honest
and fearless men, men simple and clear in mind, loyal to
their own manhood and to the people. The American
people are now in a stupor; be on hand at the awaken-
ing.
Next he pays his respects to current architectural
criticism — a straining at gnats and a swallowing of
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Louis Sullivan
camels, by minds "benumbed by culture," and
hearts made faint by the tyranny of precedent. He
complains that they make no distinction between
was and is, too readily assuming that all that is
left us moderns is the humble privilege to select,
copy and adapt.
The current mannerisms of Architectural criticism must
often seem trivial. For of what avail is it to say that
this is too small, that too large, this too thick, and that
too thin, or to quote this, that, or the other precedent,
when the real question may be: Is not the entire design
a mean evasion? Why magnify this, that, or the other
little thing, if the entire scheme of thinking that the
building stands for is false, and puts a mask upon the
people, who want true buildings, but do not know how
to get them so long as Architects betray them with Archi-
tectural phrases?
And so he goes on with his Jeremiad : a prophet
of despair, do you say? No, he seeks to destroy
only that falsity which would confine the living
spirit. Earlier and more clearly than we, he dis-
cerned the menace to our civilization of the unre-
stricted play of the masculine forces — powerful,
ruthless, disintegrating — the head dominating the
heart. It has taken the surgery of war to open our
eyes, and behold the spectacle of the entire Ger-
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man nation which by an intellectual process appears
to have killed out compassion, enthroning Schreck-
lichkeit. In the heart alone dwells hope of salva-
tion. "For he who knows even a genuinely little of
Mankind knows this truth: the heart is greater
than the head. For in the heart is Desire; and
from it come forth Courage and Magnanimity."
You have not thought deeply enough to know that
the heart in you is the woman in man. You have de-
rided your femininity, where you have suspected it;
whereas, you should have known its power, cherished and
utilized it, for it is the hidden well-spring of Intuition
and Imagination. What can the brain accomplish with-
out these two? They are the man's two inner eyes; with-
out them he is stone blind. For the mind sets forth
their powers both together. One carries the light, the
other searches; and between them they find treasures.
These they bring to the brain, which first elaborates
them, then says to the will, "Do" — and Action follows.
Poetically considered, as far as the huge, disordered
resultant mass of your Architecture is concerned, In-
tuition and Imagination have not gone forth to illumi-
nate and search the hearts of the people. Thus are its
works stone blind.
It is the absence of poetry and beauty which
makes our architecture so depressing to the spirits.
"Poetry as a living thing," says Mr. Sullivan,
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Louis Sullivan
"stands for the most telling quality that a man can
impart to his thoughts. Judged by this test your
buildings are dreary, empty places." Artists in
words, like Lafcadio Hearn and Henry James, are
able to make articulate the sadness which our cities
inspire, but it is a blight which lies heavy on us
all. Theodore Dreiser says, in Sister Carrie — a
book with so much bitter truth in it that it was sup-
pressed by the original publishers:
Once the bright days of summer pass by, a city takes
on the sombre garb of grey, wrapped in Which it goes
about its labors during the long winter. Its endless
buildings look grey, its sky and its streets assume a
sombre hue; the scattered, leafless trees and wind-blown
dust and paper but add to the general solemnity of
color. There seems to be something in the chill breezes
which scurry through the long, narrow thoroughfares
productive of rueful thoughts. Not poets alone, nor
artists, nor that superior order of mind which arrogates
to itself all refinement, feel this, but dogs and all men.
The excuse that we are too young a people to
have developed an architecture instinct with that
natural poetry which so charms us in the art of
other countries and other times, Mr. Sullivan dis-
poses of in characteristic fashion. To the plea that
"We are too young to consider these accomplish-
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ments. We have heen so busy with our material
development that we have not found time to con-
sider them," he makes answer as follows:
Know, then, to begin with, they are not accomplish-
ments but necessaries. And, to end with, you are old
enough, and have found the time to succeed in nearly
making a fine art of — Betrayal, and a science of — Graft.
Know that you are as old as the race. That each man
among you had in him the accumulated power of the
race, ready at hand for use, in the right way, when he
shall conclude it better to think straight and hence act
straight rather than, as now, to act crooked and pretend
to be straight. Know that the test, plain, simple honesty
(and you all know, every man of you knows, exactly
what that means) is always at your hand.
Know that as all complex manifestations have a simple
basis of origin, so the vast complexity of your national
unrest, ill health, inability to think clearly and accurately
concerning simple things, really vital things, is easily
traceable to the single, actual, active cause — Dishonesty;
and that this points with unescapable logic and in just
measure to each individual man!
The remedy; — individual honesty.
To the objection that this is too simple a solution,
Mr. Sullivan retorts that all great solutions are sim-
ple, that the basic things of the universe are those
which the heart of a child might comprehend.
"Honesty stands in the universe of Human Thought
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Louis Sullivan
and Action, as its very Centre of Gravity, and is
our human mask-word behind which abides all the
power of Nature's Integrity, the profoundest fact
which modern thinking has persuaded Life to re-
veal."
If, on the other hand, the reader complains, "All
this is above our heads," Mr. Sullivan is equally
ready with an answer:
No, it is not. It is close beside your hand! and therein
lies its power.
Again you say, "How can honesty be enforced?"
It cannot be enforced!
"Then how will the remedy go into effect?"
It cannot go into effect. It can only come into ef-
fect.
"Then how can it come?"
Ask Nature.
"And what will Nature say?"
Nature is always saying : "I centre at each man,
woman and child. I knock at the door of each heart,
and I wait. I wait in patience — ready to enter with my
gifts."
"And is that all that Nature says?"
That is all.
"Then how shall we receive Nature?"
By opening wide your minds! For your greatest
crime against yourselves is that you have locked the
door and thrown away the key!
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Architecture and Democracy
Thus, by a long detour, Mr. Sullivan returns to
his initial proposition, that the falsity of our archi-
tecture can be corrected only by integrity of
thought. "Thought is the fine and powerful in-
strument. Therefore, have thought for the integ-
rity of your own thought.
Naturally, then, as your thoughts thus change, your
growing architecture will change. Its falsity will de-
part; its reality will gradually appear. For the integrity
of your thought as a People, will then have penetrated the
minds of your architects.
Then, too, as your basic thought changes, will emerge
a philosophy, a poetry, and an art of expression in all
things; for you will have learned that a characteristic
philosophy, poetry and art of expression are vital to the
healthful growth and development of a democratic peo-
ple.
Some readers may complain that these are after
all only glittering generalities, of no practical use
in solving the specific problems with which every
architect is confronted. On the contrary they are
fundamental verities of incalculable benefit to every
sincere artist. Shallowness is the great vice of de-
mocracy; it is surface without depth, a welter of
concrete detail in which the mind easily loses those
great, underlying abstractions from which alone
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Louis Sullivan
great art can spring. These, in this essay, Mr. Sul-
livan helps us to recapture, and inspires us to em-
ploy. He would win us from our insincerities, our
trivialities, and awaken our enormous latent, un-
used power. He says:
Awaken it.
Use it.
Use it for the common good.
Begin now!
For it is as true today as when one of your wise men
said it: —
"The way to resume is to resume ! "
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COLOR AND CERAMICS
THE production of ceramics — perhaps the old-
est of all the useful arts practised by man;
an art with a magnificent history — seems to
be entering upon a new era of development. It is
more alive today, more generally, more skilfully,
though not more artfully practised than ever be-
fore. It should therefore be of interest to all lov-
ers of architecture, in view of the increasing impor-
tance of ceramics in building, to consider the ways
in which these materials may best be used.
Looking at the matter in the broadest possible
way, it may be said that the building impulse
throughout the ages has expressed itself in two
fundamentally different types of structure: that
in which the architecture — and even the ornament
— is one with the engineering; and that in which
the two elements are separable, not in thought
alone, but in fact. For brevity let us name that
manner of building in. which the architecture is the
construction, Inherent architecture, and that man-
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Color and Ceramics
ner in which the two are separable Incrusted archi-
tecture.
To the first class belong the architectures of
Egypt, Greece, and Gothic architecture as prac-
tised in the north of Europe; to the second belong
Roman architecture of the splendid period, Moor-
ish architecture, and Italian Gothic, so called. In
the first class the bones of the building were also its
flesh; in the second bones and flesh were in a man-
ner separable, as is proven by the fact that they
were separately considered, separately fashioned.
Ruined Karnak, the ruined Parthenon, wrecked
Rheims, show ornament so integral a part of the
fabric — etched so deep — that what has survived
of the one has survived also of the other; while
the ruined Baths of Caracalla the uncompleted
church of S. Petronio in Bologna, and many a stark
mosque on many a sandy desert show only bare
skeletons of whose completed glory we can only
guess. In them the fabric was a framework for
the display of the lapidary or the ceramic art —
a garment destroyed, rent, or tattered by time and
chance, leaving the bones still strong, but bare.
This classification of architecture into Inherent
and Incrusted is not to be confused with the dis-
crimination between architecture that is Ar-
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ranged, and architecture that is Organic, a classi-
fication which is based on psychology — like the
difference between the business man and the poet:
talent and genius — whereas the classification
which the reader is asked now to consider is based
rather on the matter of expediency in the use of
materials. Let us draw no invidious comparisons
between Inherent and Incrusted architecture, but
regard each as the adequate expression of an ideal
type of beauty; the one masculine, since in the
male figure the osseous framework is more easily
discernible; the other feminine, because more con-
cealed and overlaid with a cellular tissue of shin-
ing, precious materials, on which the disruptive
forces in man and nature are more free to act.
It is scarcely necessary to state that it is with
Incrusted architecture that we are alone concerned
in this discussion, for to this class almost all mod-
ern buildings perforce belong. This is by reason
of a necessity dictated by the materials that we
employ, and by our methods of construction. All
modern buildings follow practically one method of
construction: a bony framework of steel — or of
concrete reinforced by steel — filled in and sub-
divided by concrete, brick, hollow fire-clay, or some
of its substitutes. To a construction of this kind
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Color and Ceramics
some sort of an outer encasement is not only aesthet-
ically desirable, but practically necessary. It
usually takes the form of stone, face-brick, terra-
cotta, tile, stucco, or some combination of two or
more of these materials. Of the two types of archi-
tecture the Incrusted type is therefore imposed by
structural necessity.
The enormous importance of ceramics in its rela-
tion to architecture thus becomes apparent. They
minister to an architectural need instead of gratify-
ing an architectural whim. Ours is a period of
Incrusted architecture — one which demands the en-
casement, rather than the exposure of structure, and
therefore logically admits of the enrichment of sur-
faces by means of "veneers" of materials more
precious and beautiful than those employed in the
structure, which becomes, as it were, the canvas of
the picture, and not the picture itself. For these
purposes there are no materials more apt, more
adaptable, more enduring, richer in potentialities
of beauty than the products of ceramic art. They
are easily and inexpensively produced of any de-
sired shape, color, texture; their hard, dense sur-
face resists the action of the elements, is not easily
soiled, and is readily cleaned; being fashioned by
fire they are fire resistant.
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So much then for the practical demands, in mod-
ern architecture, met by the products of ceramic
art. The aesthetic demand is not less admirably
met — or rather might be.
When, in the sixteenth century, the Renaissance
spread from south to north, color was practically
eliminated from architecture. The Egyptians had
had it, hot and bright as the sun on the desert; we
know that the Greeks made their Parian marble
glow in rainbow tints; Moorish architecture was
nothing if not colorful, and the Venice Ruskin
loved was fairly iridescent — a thing of fire-opal
and pearl. In Italian Renaissance architecture up
to its latest phase, the color element was always
present; but it was snuffed out under the leaden col-
ored northern skies. Paris is grey, London is
brown, New York is white, and Chicago the color
of cinders. We have only to compare them to yel-
low Rome, red Siena, and pearl-tinted Venice, to
realize how much we have lost in the elimination of
color from architecture. We are coming to real-
ize it. Color played an important part in the Pan-
American Exposition, and again in the San Fran-
cisco Exposition, where, wedded to light, it became
the dominant note of the whole architectural con-
cert. Now these great expositions in which the ar-
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Color and Ceramics
chitects and artists are given a free hand, are in
the nature of preliminary studies in which these
functionaries sketch in transitory form the things
they desire to do in more permanent form. They
are forecasts of the future, a future which in cer-
tain quarters is already beginning to realize itself.
It is therefore probable that architectural art will
become increasingly colorful.
The author remembers the day and the hour
when this became his personal conviction — his per-
sonal desire. It happened years ago in the Al-
bright Gallery in Buffalo — a building then newly
completed, of a severely classic type. In the cen-
tral hall was a single doorway, whose white marble
architrave had been stained with different colored
pigments by Francis Bacon; after the manner of the
Greeks. The effect was so charming, and made the
rest of the place seem by contrast so cold and dun,
that the author came then and there to the con-
clusion that architecture without polychromy was
architecture incomplete. Mr. Bacon spent three
years in Asia Minor, and elsewhere, studying the
remains of Greek architecture, and he found and
brought home a fragment of an antefix from the
temple of Assos, in which the applied color was still
pure and strong. The Greeks were a joyous peo-
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Architecture and Democracy
pie. When joy comes back into life, color will
come back into architecture.
Ceramic products are ideal as a means to this
end. The Greeks themselves recognized their
value for they used them widely and wisely: it has
been discovered that they even attached bands of
colored terra-cotta to the marble mouldings of
their temples. How different must have been such
a temple's real appearance from that imagined by
the Classical Revivalists, whose tradition of the
inviolable cold Parian purity of Greek architec-
ture has persisted, even against archaeological evi-
dence to the contrary, up to the present day.
In one way we have an advantage over the Greek,
if we only had the wit to profit by it. His palette,
like his musical scale, was more limited than ours.
Nearly the whole gamut of the spectrum is now
available to the architect who wishes to employ
ceramics. The colors do not change or fade, and
possess a beautiful quality. Our craftsmen and
manufacturers of face-brick, terra-cotta, and col-
ored tile, after much costly experimentation, have
succeeded in producing ceramics of a high order
of excellence and intrinsic beauty; they can do
practically anything demanded of them; but from
that quarter where they should reap the greatest
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Color and Ceramics
commercial advantage — the field of architecture —
there is all too little demand. The architect who
should lead, teach and dictate in this field, is often
through ignorance obliged to learn and follow in-
stead. This has led to an ignominious situation —
ignominious, that is, to the architect. He has
come to require of the manufacturer — when he re-
quires anything at all — assistance in the very mat-
ter in which he should assist: the determination of
color design. It is no wonder that the results
are often bad, and therefore discouraging. The
manufacturers of ceramics welcome co-operation
and assistance on the part of the architect with an
eagerness which is almost pathetic, on those rare
occasions when assistance is offered.
But the architect is not really to blame: the rea-
son for his failure lies deep in his general predica-
ment of having to know a little of everything, and
do a great deal more than he can possibly do well.
To cope with this, if his practice warrants the ex-
penditure, he surrounds himself with specialists in
various fields, and assigns various departments of
his work to them. He cannot be expected to have
on his staff a specialist in ceramics, nor can he,
with all his manifold activities, be expected to be-
come such a specialist himself. As a result, he is
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Architecture and Democracy
usually content to let color problems alone, for
they are just another complication of his already
too complicated life ; or he refers them to some one
whom he thinks ought to know — a manufacturer's
designer — and approves almost anything submit-
ted. Of course the ideal architect would have time
for every problem, and solve it supremely well;
but the real architect is all too human: there are
depressions on his cranium where bumps ought to
be; moreover, he wants a little time left to energize
in other directions than in the practice of his craft.
One of the functions of architecture is to reveal
the inherent qualities and beauties of different ma-
terials, by their appropriate use and tasteful dis-
play. An onyx staircase on the one hand, and a
portland cement high altar on the other, alike vio-
late this function of architecture; they transgress
that beautiful necessity which decrees that precious
materials should serve precious uses and common
materials should serve utilitarian ends. Now color
is a precious thing, and its highest beauties can
be brought out only by contrast with broad neutral
tinted spaces. The interior walls of a mediaeval
cathedral never competed with its windows, and by
the same token, a riot of polychromy all over the
side of a building is not as effective, even from a
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Color and Ceramics
chromatic point of view, as though it were con-
fined, say, to an entrance and a frieze. Gilbert's
witty phrase is applicable here:
"Where everybody's somebody, nobody's anybody."
Let us build our walls, then, of stone, or brick,
or stucco, for their flat surfaces and neutral tints
conduce to that repose so essential to good archi-
tectural effect: but let us not rest content with this,
but grant to the eye the delight and contentment
which it craves, by color and pattern placed at
those points to which it is desirable to attract atten-
tion, for they serve the same aesthetic purpose as a
tiara on the brow of beauty, or a ring on a delicate
white hand. But just as jewelry is best when it is
most individual, so the ornament of a building
should be in keeping with its general character and
complexion. A color scheme should not be
chosen at random, but dictated by the prevailing
tone and texture of the wall surfaces, with which
it should harmonize as inevitably as the blossom of
a bush with its prevailing tone of stems and foliage.
In a building this prevailing tone will inevitably be
either cold or warm, and the color scheme just as
inevitably should be either cold or warm; that is,
there should be a preponderance of cold colors
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Architecture and Democracy
over warm, or vice versa. Otherwise the eye will
suffer just that order of uneasiness which comes
from the contemplation of two equal masses,
whereas it experiences satisfaction in proportion-
ate unequals.
Nothing will take the place of an instinctive
colour-sense, but even that needs the training of
experience, if the field be new, and a few general
principles of all but universal application will not
be amiss.
First of all it should be remembered that the in-
tensity of color should be carefully adjusted to its
area. It is dangerous to try to use high, pure
colors, unrelieved and uncontrasted, in large
masses, but the brightest, strongest colors may be
used with safety in units of sufficiently restricted
size. For harmony, as well as for richness, the law
of complementaries, in its most general application,
is the safest of all guides, but it must be followed
with fine discrimination. Complementary colors
are like married pairs, if they find the right adjust-
ment with one another they are happy — that is,
there is an effect of beauty — but lacking such ad-
justment they are worse off together than apart.
Every artist who experiments in color soon finds
out for himself that instead of using two colors
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Color and Ceramics
directly complementary, it is better to "split" one
of them, that is, use instead of one of them two
others, which combined will yield the color in
question. For example, the color complementary
to red is green-blue. Now green-blue is equidis-
tant between yellow-green and blue-violet, so if for
red and blue-green; red, yellow-green and blue-
violet be substituted the combination loses its obvi-
ousness and a certain harshness without losing any-
thing of its brilliance, or without departing from
the optical law involved. Such a combination cor-
responds to a diminished triad in music.
Another important consideration with regard to
color as employed by the architect dwells in those
optical changes effected by distance and position:
the relative visibility of different colors and com-
binations of colors as the spectator recedes from
them, and the environmental changes which colors
undergo — in bright sunlight, in shadow, against the
sky, and with relation to backgrounds of different
sorts.
The effect of distance is to make colors merge
into one another, to lower the values, but not all
equally. Yellow loses itself first, tending toward
white. The effect of distance, in general, is to dis-
integrate and decompose, thus giving "vibration"
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as it is called. A knowledge of these and kindred
facts will save the architect from many disappoint-
ments and enable him to obtain wonderful chro-
matic effects by simple means.
Many architects unused to color problems de-
sign their ornament with very little thought about
the colors which they propose to employ, making
it an after-consideration; but the two things should
be considered synchronously for the best final
effect. There is a cryptic saying that "color is
at right angles to form," that is, color is capable
of making surfaces advance toward or recede from
the eye, just as modelling does; and for this
reason, if color is used, a great deal of
modelling may be dispensed with. If a re-
ceding color is used on a recessed plane, it
deepens that plane unduly; while on the other hand
if a color which refuses to recede — like yellow for
example — is used where depth is wanted, the reced-
ing plane and the approaching color neutralize
one another, resulting in an effect of flatness not in-
tended. The tyro should not complicate his prob-
lem by combining color with high relief model-
ling, bringing inevitably in the element of light
and shade. He should leave that for older hands
and concern himself rather with flat or nearly flat
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surfaces, using his modelling much as the worker
in cloisonne uses his little rims of brass — to confine
and define each color within its own allotted area.
Then, as he gains experience, he may gradually en-
rich his pattern by the addition of the element of
light and shade, should he so decide.
Now as to certain general considerations in rela-
tion to the appropriate and logical use of ceramics
in the construction and adornment of buildings, ex-
terior and interior. In our northern latitudes care
should be taken that ceramics are not used in places
and in ways where the accumulation of snow and
ice render the joints subject to alternate freezing
and thawing, for in such case, unless the joints are
protected with metal, the units will work loose in
time. On vertical surfaces such protection is not
necessary; the use of ceramics should therefore be
confined for the most part to such surfaces: for
friezes, panels, door and window architraves, and
the like. When it is desirable for aesthetic reasons
to tie a series of windows together vertically by
means of some "fill" of a material different from
that of the body of the wall, ceramics lend them-
selves admirably to the purpose — better than wood,
which rots; than iron, which rusts; than bronze,
which turns black; and than marble, which soon
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loses its color and texture in exposed situations of
this sort.
On the interior of buildings, the most universal
use of ceramics is, of course, for floors, and with
the non-slip devices of various sorts which have
come into the market, they are no less good for
stairs. There is nothing better for wainscoting,
and in fact for any surface whatsoever subject to
soil and wear. These materials combine perma-
nent protection and permanent decoration. But
fired by the zeal of the convert the use of ceramics
may be overdone. One easily recalls entire rooms
of this material, floors, walls, ceilings, which are
less successful than as though a variety of materials
had been employed. It is just such variety — each
material treated in a characteristic, and therefore
different way — that gives charm to so many for-
eign churches and cathedrals: walls of stone, floors
of marble, choir-stalls of carved wood, and rood-
screen of metal: it is the difference between an
orchestra of various instruments and a mandolin
orchestra or a saxaphone sextette. Ceramics
should never invade the domain of the plasterer, the
mural painter, the cabinet maker. Do not let us,
in our zeal for ceramics, be like Bottom the weaver,
eager to play every part.
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Ceramics have, as regards architecture, a distinct
and honorable function. This function should be
recognized, taken advantage of, but never over-
passed. They offer opportunities large but not
limitless. They constitute one instrument of the
orchestra of which the architect is the conductor, an
instrument beautiful in the hands of a master, and
doubly beautiful in concert and contrast with those
other materials whose harmonious ensemble makes
that music in three dimensions: architectural art.
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SYMBOLS AND SACRAMENTS
ARCHITECTURE is the concrete presentment
in space of the soul of a people. If that
soul be petty and sordid — "stirred like a
child by little things" — no great architecture is pos-
sible because great architecture can image only
greatness. Before any worthy architecture can
arise in the modern world the soul must be aroused.
The cannons of Europe are bringing about this
awakening. The world — the world of thought and
emotion from whence flow acts and events — is no
longer decrepit, but like Swedenborg's angels it is
advancing toward the springtide of its youth: down
the ringing grooves of change "we sweep into the
younger day."
After the war we are likely to witness an art
evolution which will not be restricted to statues and
pictures and insincere essays in dry-as-dust archi-
tectural styles, but one which will permeate the
whole social fabric, and make it palpitate with the
rhythm of a younger, a more abundant life.
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PLATE XV. SYMBOL OF RESURRECTION
Symbols and Sacraments
Beauty and mystery will again make their dwelling
among men; the Voiceless will speak in music, and
the Formless will spin rhythmic patterns on the
loom of space. We shall seek and find a new lan-
guage of symbols to express the joy of the soul,
freed from the thrall of an iron age of materialism,
and fronting the unimaginable splendors of the
spiritual life.
For every aesthetic awakening is the result of a
spiritual awakening of some sort. Every great re-
ligious movement found an art expression eloquent
of it. When religion languished, such things as
Versailles and the Paris Opera House were pos-
sible, but not such things as the Parthenon, or Notre
Dame. The temples of Egypt were built for the
celebration of the rites of the religion of Egypt; so
also in the case of Greece. Roman architecture
was more widely secular, but Rome's noblest mon-
ument, the Pantheon, was a religious edifice. The
Moors, inflamed with religious ardor, swept across
Europe, blazing their trail with mosques and pal-
aces conceived seemingly in some ecstatic state of
dream. The Renaissance, tainted though it was
by worldliness, found still its inspiration in sacred
themes, and recorded its beginning and its end in
two mighty religious monuments: Brunelleschi's
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and Michael Angelo's domical churches, "wrought
in a sad sincerity" by deeply religious men.
Gothic art is a synonym for mediaeval Christianity;
while in the Orient art is scarcely secular at all, but
a symbolical language framed and employed for
the expression of spiritual ideas.
This law, that spirituality and not materialism
distils the precious attar of great art, is perma-
nently true and perennially applicable, for laws of
this order do not change from age to age, however
various their manifestation. The inference is
plain: until we become a religious people great
architecture is far from us. We are becoming re-
ligious in that broad sense in which churches and
creeds, forms and ceremonies, play little part.
Ours is the search of the heart for something greater
than itself which is still itself; it is the religion of
brotherhood, whose creed is love, whose ritual is
service.
This transformed and transforming religion of
the West, the tardy fruit of the teachings of Christ,
now secretly active in the hearts of men, will re-
ceive enrichment from many sources. Science will
reveal the manner in which the spirit weaves its
seven-fold veil of illusion; nature, freshly sensed,
will yield new symbols which art will organize
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Symbols and Sacraments
into a language; out of the experience of the soul
will grow new rituals and observances. But one
precious tincture of this new religion our civiliza-
tion and our past cannot supply; it is the heritage
of Asia, cherished in her brooding bosom for un-
counted centuries, until, by the operation of the law
of cycles, the time should come for the giving of it
to the West.
This secret is Yoga, the method of self-develop-
ment whereby the seeker for union is enabled to
perceive the shining of the Inward Light. This is
achieved by daily discipline in stilling the mind and
directing the consciousness inward instead of out-
ward. The Self is within, and the mind, which is
normally centrifugal, must first be arrested, con-
trolled, and then turned back upon itself, and held
with perfect steadiness. All this is naively ex-
pressed in the Upanishads in the passage, "The
Self -existent pierced the openings of the senses so
that they turn forward, not backward into himself.
Some wise man, however, with eyes closed and
wishing for immortality, saw the Self behind."
This stilling of the mind, its subjugation and con-
trol whereby it may be concentrated on anything
at will, is particularly hard for persons of our race
and training, a race the natural direction of whose
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consciousness is strongly outward, a training in
which the practice of introspective meditation finds
no place.
Yoga — that "union" which brings inward vision,
the contribution of the East to the spiritual life of
the West — will bring profound changes into the art
of the West, since art springs from consciousness.
The consciousness of the West now concerns itself
with the visible world almost exclusively, and West-
ern art is therefore characterized by an almost
slavish fidelity to the ephemeral appearances of
things — the record of particular moods and mo-
ments. The consciousness of the East on the other
hand, is subjective, introspective. Its art accord-
ingly concerns itself with eternal aspects, with a
world of archetypal ideas in which things exist not
for their own sake, but as symbols of supernal
things. The Oriental artist avoids as far as pos-
sible trivial and individual rhythms, seeking al-
ways the fundamental rhythm of the larger, deeper
life.
Now this quality so earnestly sought and so
highly prized in Oriental art, is the very thing which
our art and our architecture most conspicuously
lack. To the eye sensitive to rhythm, our essays in
these fields appear awkward and unconvincing,
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Symbols and Sacraments
lacking a certain inevitability. We must restore
to art that first great canon of Chinese aesthetics,
"Rhythmic vitality, or the life movement of the
spirit through the rhythm of things." It cannot be
interjected from the outside, but must be inwardly
realized by the "stilling" of the mind above de-
scribed.
Art cannot dispense with symbolism; as the let-
ters on this page convey thoughts to the mind, so do
the things of this world, organized into a language
of symbols, speak to the soul through art. But in
the building of our towers of Babel, again mankind
is stricken with a confusion of tongues. Art has
no common language; its symbols are no longer
valid, or are no longer understood. This is a con-
dition for which materialism has no remedy, for
the reason that materialism sees always the pattern
but never that which the pattern represents. We
must become spiritually illumined before we can
read nature truly, and re-create, from such a read-
ing, fresh and universal symbols for art. This is
a task beyond the power of our sad generation,
enchained by negative thinking, overshadowed by
war, but we can at least glimpse the nature of the
reaction between the mystic consciousness and the
things of this world which will produce a new Ian-
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guage of symbols. The mystic consciousness looks
upon nature as an arras embroidered over with sym-
bols of the things it conceals from view. We are
ourselves symbols, dwelling in a world of symbols
— a world many times removed from that ultimate
reality to which all things bear figurative witness;
the commonest thing has yet some mystic meaning,
and ugliness and vulgarity exist only in the unil-
lumined mind.
What mystic meaning, it may be asked, is
contained in such things as a brick, a house, a hat,
a pair of shoes? A brick is the ultimate atom
of a building; a house is the larger body
which man makes for his uses, just as the Self has
built its habitation of flesh and bones; hat and shoes
are felt and leather insulators with which we seek
to cut ourselves off from the currents which flow
through earth and air from God. It may be ob-
jected that these answers only substitute for the
lesser symbol a greater, but this is inevitable: if for
the greater symbol were named one still more ab-
stract and inclusive, the ultimate verity would be
as far from affirmation as before. There is noth-
ing of which the human mind can conceive that is
not a symbol of something greater and higher than
itself.
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The dictionary defines a symbol as "something
that stands for something else and serves to repre-
sent it, or to bring to mind one or more of its quali-
ties." Now this world is a reflection of a higher
world, and that of a higher world still, and so on.
Accordingly, everything is a symbol of something
higher, since by reflecting, it "stands for, and serves
to represent it," and the thing symbolized, being
itself a reflection, is, by the same token, itself a
symbol. By reiterated repetitions of this reflecting
process throughout the numberless planes and sub-
planes of nature, each thing becomes a symbol, not
of one thing only, but of many things, all inti-
mately correlated, and this gives rise to those un-
derlying analogies, those "secret subterranean pas-
sages between matter and soul" which have ever
been the especial preoccupation of the poet and the
mystic, but which may one day become the subject
of serious examination by scientific men.
Let us briefly pass in review the various terms
of such an ascending series of symbols: members
of one family, they might be called, since they
follow a single line of descent.
Take gold: as a thing in itself, without any sym-
bolical significance, it is a metallic element, having
a characteristic yellow color, very heavy, very
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soft, the most ductile, malleable, and indestructible
of metals. In its minted form it is the life force
of the body economic, since on its abundance and
free circulation the well-being of that body de-
pends; it is that for which all men strive and con-
tend, because without it they cannot comfortably
live. This, then, is gold in its first and lowest
symbolical aspect: a life principle, a motive force
in human affairs. But it is not gold which has
gained for man his lordship over nature; it is fire,
the yellow gold, not of the earth, but of the air, —
cities and civilizations, arts and industries, have
ever followed the camp fire of the pioneer. Sun-
light comes next in sequence — sunlight, which
focussed in a burning glass, spontaneously pro-
duces flame. The world subsists on sunlight; all
animate creation grows by it, and languishes with-
out it, as the prosperity of cities waxes or wanes
with the presence or absence of a supply of gold.
The magnetic force of the sun, specialized as prana
(which is not the breath which goes up and the
breadi which goes down, but that other, in which the
two repose), fulfils the same function in the human
body as does gold in civilization, sunlight in na-
ture: its abundance makes for health, its meagre-
ness for enervation. Higher than prana is the
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mind, that golden sceptre of man's dominion, the
Promethean gift of fire with which he menaces the
empire of the gods. Higher still, in the soul, love
is the motive force, the conqueror: a "heart of
gold" is one warmed and lighted by love. Still
other is the desire of the spirit, which no human
affection satisfies, but truth only, the Golden Per-
son, the Light of the World, the very Godhead itself.
Thus there is earthy, airy, etheric gold; gold as
intellect, gold as love, gold as truth; from the curse
of the world, the cause of a thousand crimes, there
ascends a Jacob's Ladder of symbols to divinity it-
self, whereby men may learn that God works by
sacrifice: that His universe is itself His broken
body. As gold in the purse, fire on the forge, sun-
light for the eyes, breath in the body, knowledge in
the mind, love in the heart, and wisdom in the un-
derstanding, He draws all men unto Him, teaching
them the wise use of wealth, the mastery over na-
ture, the care of the body, the cultivation of the
mind, the love of wife and child and neighbour,
and, last lesson of all, He teaches them that in
industry, in science, in art, in sympathy and under-
standing, He it is they are all the while knowing,
loving, becoming; and that even when they flee
Him, His are the wings —
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"When me they fly, I am the wings."
This attempt to define gold as a symbol ends with
the indication of an ubiquitous and immanent divin-
ity in everything. Thus it is always: in attempting
to dislodge a single voussoir from the arch of truth,
the temple itself is shaken, so cunningly are the
stones fitted together. All roads lead to Rome,
and every symbol is a key to the Great Mystery:
for example, read in the light of these correspond-
ences, the alchemist's transmutation of base metals
into gold, is seen to be the sublimation of man's
lower nature into "that highest golden sheath, which
is Brahman."
Keeping the first sequence clearly in mind, let us
now attempt to trace another, parallel to it: the
feminine of which the first may be considered the
corresponding masculine. Silver is a white, duc-
tile metallic element. In coinage it is the synonym
for ready cash, — gold in the bank is silver in the
pocket; hence, in a sense, silver is the reflection, or
the second power of gold. Just as ruddy gold is
correlated with fire, so is pale silver with water;
and as fire is affiliated with the sun, so do the waters
of the earth follow the moon in her courses. The
golden sun, the silver moon: these commonly em-
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ployed descriptive adjectives themselves supply the
correlation we are seeking; another indication of
its validity lies in the fact that one of the character-
istics of water is its power of reflecting; that moon-
light is reflected sunlight. ' If gold is the mind,
silver is the body, in which the mind is imaged,
objectified; if gold is flamelike love, silver is brood-
ing affection; and in the highest regions of con-
sciousness, beauty is the feminine or form side of
truth — its silver mirror.
There are two forces in the world, one of projec-
tion, the other of recall; two states, activity and
rest. Nature, with tireless ingenuity, everywhere
publishes this fact: in bursting bud and falling
seed, in the updrawn waters and the descending
rain; throw a stone into the air, and when the im-
pulse is exhausted, gravity brings it to earth again.
In civilized society these centrifugal and centripetal
forces find expression in the anarchic and radical
spirit which breaks down and re-forms existing
institutions, and in the conservative spirit which
preserves and upbuilds by gradual accretion; they
are analogous to igneous and to aqueous action in
the formation and upbuilding of the earth itself,
and find their prototype again in man and woman:
man, the warrior, who prevails by the active exer-
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cise of his powers, and woman, "the treasury of
the continued race," who conquers hy continual
quietness. Man and woman symbolize forces cen-
trifugal and centripetal not alone in their inner
nature, and in the social and economic functions
peculiar to each, but in their physical aspects and
peculiarities as well, for man is small of flank and
broad of shoulder, with relatively large extremities,
i. e., centrifugal: while woman is formed with
broad hips, narrow shoulders, and small feet and
hands, i. e., centripetal. Woman's instinctive and
unconscious gestures are towards herself, man's are
away from himself. The physiologist might hold
that the anatomical differences between the sexes
result from their difference in function in the re-
production and conservation of the race, and this is
a true view, but the lesser truth need not necessarily
exclude the greater. As Chesterton says, "Some-
thing in the evil spirit of our time forces people
always to pretend to have found some material and
mechanical explanation." Such would have us be-
lieve, with Schopenhauer and Bernard Shaw, that
the lover's delight in the beauty of his mistress
dwells solely in his instinctive perception of her fit-
ness to be the mother of his child. This is un-
doubtedly a factor in the glamour woman casts on
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man, but there are other factors too, higher as well
as lower, corresponding to different departments
of our manifold nature. First of all, there is mere
physical attraction: to the man physical, woman is
a cup of delight; next, there is emotional love,
whereby woman appeals through her need of pro-
tection, her power of tenderness; on the men-
tal plane she is man's intellectual companion, his
masculine reason would supplement itself with her
feminine intuition; he recognizes in her an objecti-
fication, in some sort, of his own soul, his spirit's
bride, predestined throughout the ages; while the
god within him perceives her to be that portion of
himself which he put forth before the world was, to
be the mother, not alone of human children, but of
all those myriad forms, within which entering, "as
in a sheath, a knife," he becomes the Enjoyer, and
realizes, vividly and concretely, his bliss, his wis-
dom, and his power.
Adam and Eve, and the tree in the midst of the
garden! After man and woman, a tree is perhaps
the most significant symbol in the world: every tree
is the Tree of Life in the sense that it is a represen-
tation of universal becoming. To say that all
things have for their mother prakriti, undifferen-
tiated substance, and for their father purusha, the
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creative fire, is vague and metaphysical, and con-
veys little meaning to our image-bred, image-fed
minds; on the physical plane we can only learn
these transcendental truths by means of symbols,
and so to each of us is given a human father and
a human mother from whose relation to one another
and to oneself may be learned our relation to na-
ture, the universal mother, and to that immortal
spirit which is the father of us all. We are given,
moreover, the symbol of the tree, which, rooted in
the earth, its mother, and nourished by her juices,
strives ever upward towards its father, the sun.
The mathematician may be able to demonstrate, as
a result of a lifetime of hard thinking, that unity
and infinity are but two aspects of one thing; this
is not clear to ordinary minds, but made concrete
in the tree — unity in the trunk, infinity in the foli-
age — any one is able to understand it. We per-
ceive that all things grow as a tree grows, from
unity to multiplicity, from simplicity and strength
to beauty and fineness. The generation of the line
from the point, the plane from the line, and from
the plane, the solid, is a matter, again, which chiefly
interests the geometrician, but the inevitable se-
quence stands revealed in seed, stem, leaf, and
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fruit: a point, a line, a surface, and a sphere.
There is another order of truths, also, which a tree
teaches: the renewal of its life each year is a sym-
bol of the reincarnation of the soul, teaching that
life is never-ending climax, and that what appears
to be cessation is merely a change of state. A tree
grows great by being firmly rooted ; we too, though
children of the air, need the earth, and grow by
good deeds, hidden, like the roots of the tree, out of
sight; for the tree, rain and sunshine: for the soul,
tears and laughter thrill the imprisoned spirit into
conscious life.
We love and understand the trees because we
have ourselves passed through their evolution, and
they survive in us still, for the arterial and nervous
systems are trees, the roots of one in the heart,
of the other in the brain. Has not our body its
trunk, bearing aloft the head, like a flower: a cup
to hold the precious juices of the brain? Has not
that trunk its tapering limbs which ramify into
hands and feet, and these into fingers and toes, after
the manner of the twigs and branches of a tree?
Closely related to symbolism is sacramentalism;
the man who sees nature as a book of symbols is
likely to regard life as a sacrament. Because this
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is a point of view vitalizing to art let us glance at
the sacramental life, divorced from the forms and
observances of any specific religion.
This life consists in the habitual perception of
an ulterior meaning, a hidden beauty and signifi-
cance in the objects, acts, and events of every day.
Though binding us to a sensuous existence, these
nevertheless contain within themselves the power
of emancipating us from it: over and above their
immediate use, their pleasure or their profit, they
have a hidden meaning which contains some heal-
ing message for the soul.
A classic example of a sacrament, not alone in
the ordinary meaning of the term, but in the special
sense above defined, is the Holy Communion of the
Christian Church. Its origin is a matter of com-
mon knowledge. On the evening of the night in
which He was betrayed, Jesus and His disciples
were gathered together for the feast of the Pass-
over. Aware of His impending betrayal, and de-
sirous of impressing powerfully upon His chosen
followers the nature and purpose of His sacrifice,
Jesus ordained a sacrament out of the simple ma-
terials of the repast. He took bread and broke it,
and gave to each a piece as the symbol of His
broken body ; and to each He passed a cup of wine,
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as a symbol of His poured-out blood. In this act,
as in the washing of the disciples' feet on the same
occasion, He made His ministrations to the needs
of men's bodies an allegory of His greater ministra-
tion to the needs of their souls.
The sacrament of the Lord's Supper is of such
beauty and power that it has persisted even to the
present day. It lacks, however, the element of
universality — at least by other than Christians its
universality would be denied. Let us seek, there-
fore some all-embracing symbol to illustrate the
sacramental view of life.
Perhaps marriage is such a symbol. The public
avowal of love between a man and woman, their
mutual assumption of the attendant privileges,
duties and responsibilities are matters so pregnant
with consequences to them and to the race that by
all right-thinking people marriage is regarded as
a high and holy thing; its sacramental character is
felt and acknowledged even by those who would be
puzzled to tell the reason why.
The reason is involved in the answer to the ques-
tion, "Of what is marriage a symbol?" The most
obvious answer, and doubtless the best one, is found
in the well known and much abused doctrine, com-
mon to every religion, of the spiritual marriage be-
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tween God and the soul. What Christians call the
Mystic Way, and Buddhists the Path comprises
those changes in consciousness through which every
soul passes on its way to perfection. When the
personal life is conceived of as an allegory of this
inner, intense, super-mundane life, it assumes a sac-
ramental character. With strange unanimity, fol-
lowers of the Mystic Way have given the name of
marriage to that memorable experience in "the
flight of the Alone to the Alone," when the soul,
after trials and purgations, enters into indissoluble
union with the spirit, that divine, creative principle
whereby it is made fruitful for this world. Mar-
riage, then, however dear and close the union, is
the symbol of a union dearer and closer, for it is
the fair prophecy that on some higher arc of the
evolutionary spiral, the soul will meet its immortal
lover and be initiated into divine mysteries.
As an example of the power of symbols to induce
those changes of consciousness whereby the soul is
prepared for this union, it is recorded that an emi-
nent scientist was moved to alter his entire mode of
life on reflecting, while in his bath one morning,
that though each day he was at such pains to make
clean his body, he made no similar purgation of
his mind and heart. The idea appealed to him so
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profoundly that he began to practise the higher
cleanliness from that day forth.
If it be true, as has been said, that ordinary life
in the world is a training school for a life more
real and more sublime, then everything pertaining
to life in the world must possess a sacramental
character, and possess it inherently, and not merely
by imputation. Let us discover, then, if we can,
some of the larger meanings latent in little things.
When at the end of a cloudy day the sun bursts
forth in splendor and sets red in the west, it is a
sign to the weather-wise that the next day will be
fair. To the devotee of the sacramental life it
holds a richer promise. To him the sun is a sym-
bol of the love of God; the clouds, those worldly
preoccupations of his own which hide its face from
him. This purely physical phenomenon, therefore,
which brings to most men a scarcely noticed aug-
mentation of heat and light, and an indication of
fair weather on the morrow, induces in the mystic
an ineffable sense of divine immanence and benefi-
cence, and an assurance of their continuance be-
yond the dark night of the death of the body.
When the sacramentalist goes swimming in the
sea he enjoys to the full the attendant physical ex-
hilaration, but a greater joy flows from the thought
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that he is back with his great Sea-Mother — that
feminine principle of which the sea is the perfect
symbol, since water brings all things to birth and
nurtures them. When at the end of a day he lays
aside his clothes — that two-dimensional sheath of
the three-dimensional body — it is in full assurance
that his body in turn will be abandoned by the in-
wardly retreating consciousness, and that he will
range wherever he wills during the hours of sleep,
clothed in his subtle four-dimensional body, related
to the physical body as that is related to the clothes
it wears.
To every sincere seeker nature reveals her se-
crets, but since men differ in their curiosities she
reveals different things to different men. All are
rewarded for their devotion in accordance with
their interests and desires, but woman-like, nature
reveals herself most fully to him who worships not
the fair form of her, but her soul. This favored
lover is the mystic; for ever seeking instruction in
things spiritual, he perceives in nature an allegory
of the soul, and interprets her symbols in terms of
the sacramental life.
The brook, pursuing its tortuous and stony path-
way in untiring effort to reach its gravitational cen-
tre, is a symbol of the Pilgrim's progress, impelled
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Symbols and Sacraments
by love to seek God within his heart. The modest
daisy by the roadside, and the wanton sunflower
in the garden alike seek to image the sun, the god
of their worship, a core of seeds and fringe of petals
representing their best effort to mimic the flaming
disc and far-flung corona of the sun. Man seeks
less ardently, and so more ineffectively in his will
and imagination to image God. In the reverent
study of insect and animal life we gain some hint
of what we have been and what we may become —
something corresponding to the grub, a burrowing
thing; to the caterpillar, a crawling thing; and
finally to the butterfly, a radiant winged creature.
After this fashion then does he who has em-
braced the sacramental life come to perceive in
the "sensuous manifold" of nature, that one di-
vine Reality which ever seeks to instruct him in
supermundane wisdom, and to woo him to super-
human blessedness and peace. In time, this read-
ing of earth in terms of heaven, becomes a settled
habit. Then, in Emerson's phrase, he has hitched
his wagon to a star, and changed his grocer's cart
into a chariot of the sun.
The reader may perhaps fail to perceive the
bearing of this long discussion of symbols and sac-
raments upon the subject of art and architecture,
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but in the mind of the author the correlation is
plain. There can be no great art without religion:
religion begins in consciousness as a mystic experi-
ence, it flows thence into symbols and sacraments,
and these in turn are precipitated by the artist into
ponderable forms of beauty. Unless the artist
himself participates in this mystic experience, life's
deeper meanings will escape him, and the work of
his hands will have no special significance. Until
it can be said of every artist
"Himself from God he could not free,"
there will be no art worthy of the name.
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SELF-EDUCATION l
I TAKE great pleasure in availing myself of this
opportunity to speak to you on certain aspects
of the art which we practise. I cannot for-
get, and I hope that you sufficiently remember, that
the architectural future of this country lies in the
hands of just such men as you. Let me dwell then
for a moment on your unique opportunity. Per-
haps some of you have taken up architecture as you
might have gone into trade, or manufacturing, or
any of the useful professions; in that case you have
probably already learned discrimination, and now
realize that in the cutting of the cake of human
occupations you have drawn the piece which con-
tains the ring of gold. The cake is the business
and utilitarian side of life, the ring of gold is the
aesthetic, the creative side: treasure it, for it is a
precious and enduring thing. Think what your
work is: to reassemble materials in such fashion
that they become instinct with a beauty and elo-
1 An address delivered before the Boston Architectural Club in
April, 1909,
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quent with a meaning which may carry inspiration
and delight to generations still unborn. Immortal-
ity haunts your threshold, even though your hand
may not be strong enough to open to the heavenly
visitor.
Though the profession of architecture is a noble
one in any country and in any age, it is particu-
larly rich in inspiration and in opportunity here
and now, for who can doubt that we are about to
enter upon a great building period? We have what
Mr. Sullivan calls "the need and the power to
build," the spirit of great art alone is lacking, and
that is already stirring in the secret hearts of men,
and will sooner or later find expression in objective
and ponderable forms of new beauty. These it is
your privilege to create. May the opportunity find
you ready! There is a saying, "To be young, to
be in love, to be in Italy!" I would paraphrase
it thus: To be young, to be in architecture, to be
in America.
It is my purpose tonight to outline a scheme of
self-education, which if consistently followed out I
am sure will help you, though I am aware that to
a certain order of mind it will seem highly mystical
and impractical. If it commends itself to your
favor I shall be glad.
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Many of you will have had the advantage of a
thorough technical training in your chosen profes-
sion: be grateful for it. Others, like Topsy, "just
growed" — or have just failed to grow. For the
solace of all such, without wishing to be under-
stood to disparage architectural schooling, I would
say that there is a kind of education which is worse
than none, for by filling his mind with ready-made
ideas it prevents a man from ever learning to think
for himself; and there is another kind which
teaches him to think, indeed, but according to some
arbitrary method, so that his mind becomes a canal
instead of a river, flowing in a predetermined and
artificial channel, and unreplenished by the hidden
springs of the spirit. The best education can do no
more than to bring into manifestation that which is
inherent; it does this by means of some stimulus
from without — from books and masters — but the
stimulus may equally come from within: each can
develop his own mind, and in the following man-
ner.
The alternation between a state of activity and a
state of passivity, which is a law of our physical
being, as it is a law of all nature, is characteristic
of the action of the mind as well: observation and
meditation are the two poles of thought. The tend-
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ency of modern life and of our active American
temperament is towards a too exclusive functioning
of the mind in its outgoing state, and this results in
a great cleverness and a great shallowness. It is
only in moments of quiet meditation that the great
synthetic, fundamental truths reveal themselves.
Observe ceaselessly, weigh, judge, criticize — this
order of intellectual activity is important and val-
uable — but the mind must be steadied and strength-
ened by another and a different process. The
power of attention, the ability to concentrate, is the
measure of mental efficiency; and this power may
be developed by a training exactly analogous to that
by which a muscle is developed, for mind and
muscle are alike the instruments of the Silent
Thinker who sits behind. The mind an instrument
of something higher than the mind: here is a truth
so fertile that in the language of Oriental imagery,
"If you were to tell this to a dry stick, branches
would grow, and leaves sprout from it."
There is nothing original in the method of mental
development here indicated ; it has been known and
practised for centuries in the East, where life is
less strenuous than it is with us. The method con-
sists in silent meditation every day at stated peri-
ods, during which the attempt is made to hold the
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Self-Education
mind to the contemplation of a single image or idea,
bringing the attention back whenever it wanders,
killing each irrelevant thought as it arises, as one
might kill a rat coming out of a hole. This turn-
ing of the mind back on itself is difficult, but I know
of nothing that "pays" so well, and I have never
found any one who conscientiously practised it who
did not confirm this view. The point is, that if a
man acquires the ability to concentrate on one thing,
he can concentrate on anything; he increases his
competence on the mental plane in the same manner
that pulling chest-weights increases his competence
on the physical. The practice of meditation has
moreover an ulterior as well as an immediate ad-
vantage, and that is the reason it is practised by
the Yogis of India. They believe that by stilling
the mind, which is like a lake reflecting the sky,
the Higher Self communicates a knowledge of Itself
to the lower consciousness. Without the working
of this Oversoul in and through us we can never
hope to produce an architecture which shall rank
with the great architectures of the past, for in Egypt,
in Greece, in mediaeval France, as in India, China,
and Japan, mysticism made for itself a language
more eloquent than any in which the purely ra-
tional consciousness of man has ever spoken.
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We are apt to overestimate the importance of
books and book learning. Think how small a part
books have played in the development of architec-
ture; indeed, Palladio and Vignola, with their hard
and fast formulae have done the art more harm
than good. It is a fallacy that reading strengthens
the mind — it enervates it; reading sometimes stim-
ulates the mind to original thinking, and this de-
velops it, but reading itself is a passive exercise,
because the thought of the reader is for the time
being in abeyance in order that the thought of the
writer may enter. Much reading impairs the
power to think originally and consecutively. Few
of the great creators of the world have had use for
books, and if you aspire to be in their class you
will avoid the "spawn of the press." The best plan
is to read only great books, and having read for five
minutes, think about what you have read for ten.
These exercises, faithfully followed out, will
make your mind a fit vehicle for the expression of
your idea, but the advice I have given is as perti-
nent to any one who uses his mind as it is to the
architect. To what, specifically, should the archi-
tectural student devote his attention in order to
improve the quality of his work? My own answer
would be that he should devote himself to the study
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Self-Education
of music, of the human figure, and to the study of
Nature — "first, last, midst, and without end."
The correlation between music and architecture
is no new thought; it is implied in the famous say-
ing that architecture is frozen music. Vitruvius
considered a knowledge of music to be a qualifica-
tion of the architect of his day, and if it was desir-
able then it is no less so now. There is both a
metaphysical reason and a practical one why this
is so. Walter Pater, in a famous phrase, declared
that all art constantly aspires to the condition of
music, by which he meant to imply that there is a
certain rhythm and harmony at the root of every
art, of which music is the perfect and pure expres-
sion; that in music the means and the end are one
and the same. This coincides with Schopenhauer's
theory about music, that it is the most perfect and
unconditioned sensuous presentment known to us
of that undying will-to-live which constitutes life
and the world. Metaphysics aside, the architect
ought to hear as much good music as he can, and
learn the rudiments of harmony, at least to the ex-
tent of knowing the simple numerical ratios which
govern the principal consonant intervals within the
octave, so that, translating these ratios into intervals
of space expressed in terms of length and breadth,
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height, and width, his work will "aspire to the con-
dition of music."
There is a metaphysical reason, too, as well as a
practical one, why an architect should know the
human figure. Carlyle says, "There is but one
temple in the world, and that is the body of man."
If the body is, as he declares, a temple, it is no less
true that a temple, or any work of architectural art
is in the nature of an ampler body which man has
created for his uses, and which he inhabits, just as
the individual consciousness builds and inhabits its
fleshly stronghold. This may seem a highly mysti-
cal idea, but the correlation between the house and
its inhabitant, and the body and its consciousness is
everywhere close, and is susceptible of infinite elab-
oration.
Architectural beauty, like human beauty, de-
pends upon a proper subordination of parts to the
whole, a harmonious interrelation between these
parts, the expressiveness of each of its functions,
and when these are many and diverse, their recon-
cilement one with another. This being so, a study
of the human figure with a view to analyzing the
sources of its beauty cannot fail to be profitable to
the architectural designer. Pursued intelligently,
such study will stimulate the mind to a perception
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Self-Education
of those simple yet subtle laws according to which
nature everywhere works, and it will educate the
eye in the finest known school of proportion, train-
ing it to distinguish minute differences, in the same
way that the hearing of good music cultivates the
ear.
It is neither necessary nor desirable to make
elaborate and carefully shaded drawings from a
posed model; an equal number of hours spent in
copying and analyzing the plates of a good art
anatomy, supplemented with a certain amount of
life drawing, done merely with a view to catch the
pose, will be found to be a more profitable exercise,
for it will make you familiar with the principal and
subsidiary proportions of the bodily temple, and
give you sufficient data to enable you to indicate a
figure in any position with fair accuracy.
I recommend the study of Nature because I be-
lieve that such study will assist you to recover that
direct and instant perception of beauty, our natural
birthright, of which over-sophistication has so be-
reft us that we no longer know it to be ours by right
of inheritance — inheritance from that cosmic mat-
ter endowed with motion out of which we are fash-
ioned, proceeding ever rationally and rhythmically
to its appointed ends. We are all of us participat-
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Architecture and Democracy
ors in a world of concrete music, geometry and
number — a world, that is, so mathematically con-
stituted and co-ordinated that our pigmy bodies,
equally with the farthest star, throb to the music
of the spheres. The blood flows rhythmically, the
heart its metronome; the moving limbs weave pat-
terns ; the voice stirs into radiating sound-waves that
pool of silence which we call the air.
"Thou canst not wave thy staff in air,
Or dip thy paddle in the lake,
But it carves the bow of beauty there,
And ripples in rhyme the oar forsake."
The whole of animate creation labours under
the beautiful necessity of being beautiful. Every-
where it exhibits a perfect utility subservient to
harmonious laws. Nature is the workshop in
which are built beautiful organisms. This is ex-
actly the aim of the architect — to fashion beautiful
organisms; what better school, therefore, could he
have in which to learn his trade?
To study Nature it is not necessary to go out into
the fields and botanize, nor to attempt to make
water colours of picturesque scenery. These
things are very well, but not so profitable to your
particular purpose as observation directed toward
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the discovery of the laws which underlie and deter-
mine form and structure, such as the tracing of the
spiral line, not alone where it is obvious, as in the
snail's shell and in the ram's horn, but where it
appears obscurely, as in the disposition of leaves or
twigs upon a parent stem. Such laws of nature
are equally laws of art, for art is nature carried to
a higher power by reason of its passage through a
human consciousness. Thought and emotion tend
to crystallize into forms of beauty as inevitably,
and according to the same laws, as does the frost on
the window pane. Art, in one of its aspects, is the
weaving of a pattern, the communication of an or-
der and a method to lines, forms, colors, sounds.
All very poetical, and possibly true, you may be
saying to yourselves, but what has it to do with
architecture, which nowadays, at least, is preemi-
nently a practical and utilitarian art whose highest
mission is to fulfil definite conditions in an econom-
ical and admirable way; whose supreme excellence
is fitness, appropriateness, the perfect adaptation
of means to ends, and the apt expression of both
means and ends? Yes, architecture is all of this,
but this is not all of architecture; else the most effi-
cient engineer would be the most admirable archi-
tect, which does not happen to be the case. Along
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with the expression of the concrete and individual
must go the expression of the abstract and univer-
sal; the two can be combined in a single building
in the same way that in every human countenance
are combined a racial or temperamental type,
which is universal, and a character, which is indi-
vidual. The expression of any sort of cosmic
truth, of universal harmony and rhythm, is the
quality which our architecture most conspicuously
lacks. Failing to find the cosmic truth within our-
selves, failing to vibrate to the universal harmony
and rhythm, our architecture is — well, what it is,
for only that which is native to our living spirit can
we show forth in the work of our hands.
Your work will be, in the last analysis, what
you yourselves are. Let no sophistry blind you to
the truth of that. There are rhythms in the world
of space which we find only in the architecture of
the past, and enamoured of their beauty we repeat
them over and over (off the key for the most part),
on the principle that all the songs have been sung;
or we just make a noise, on the principle that noise
is all there is to architecture anyway. It is not so.
Those systems of spatial rhythms which we call
Egyptian, Classic, Gothic, Renaissance architecture
and the rest, are records all of the living human
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spirit energizing in the stubborn matter of the phys-
ical plane with joy, with conviction, with mastery.
When that undying spirit awakes again in you,
stirred into consciousness by meditation, which is
its prayer; by music, which is its praise; by the
contemplation of that fair form which is its temple;
and by communion with nature, which is its look-
ing-glass; you will experience again that ancient
joy, hold again that firm conviction, and exercise
again that mastery to transfuse the granite and iron
heart of the hills into patterns unlike any that the
hand of man has made before.
[213]
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