SIX LECTURES
THE SCAMMON LECTURES AT
THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO
RALPH ADAMS
T H O MAS H A.STI N G S
CLAUDE RT?^ '
SIX LECTURES
ON ARCHITECTURE
THE UNIVERSITY OP CHICAGO PRESS
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
Agents
THE BAKER & TAYLOR COMPANY
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SHANGHAI
KARL W. HIERSEMANN
LEIPZIG
SIX LECTURES
ON ARCHITECTURE
BY
RALPH ADAMS CRAM
THOMAS HASTINGS
CLAUDE BRAGDON
THE SCAMMON LECTURES FOR 1915
PUBLISHED FOR THE ART INSTITUTE
OF CHICAGO BY THE UNIVERSITY OF
CHICAGO PRESS, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
COPYRIGHT 1917 BY
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
All Rights Reserved
Published January 1917
1028192
Composed and Printed By
University of Chicago Press
Chicago. Illinois. U.S.A.
NOTE
lectures presented in this volume com-
* prise the eleventh series delivered at the
Art Institute of Chicago on the Scammon foun-
dation. The Scammon Lectureship is established
on an ample basis by the bequest of Mrs. Maria
Sheldon Scammon, who died in 1901. The will
prescribes that these lectures shall be upon the
history, theory, and practice of the fine arts
(meaning thereby the graphic and plastic arts),
by persons of distinction or authority on the
subject on which they lecture, such lectures to
be primarily for the benefit of the students of
the Art Institute, and secondarily for members
and other persons. The lectures are known as
"The Scammon Lectures."
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
LECTURE I. THE BEGINNINGS OF GOTHIC
ART 3
LECTURE II. THE CULMINATION OF
GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE . . . 33
BY RALPH ADAMS CRAM
LECTURE III. PRINCIPLES OF ARCHITEC-
TURAL COMPOSITION . . . -6?
LECTURE IV. MODERN ARCHITECTURE . 98
BY THOMAS HASTINGS
LECTURE V. ORGANIC ARCHITECTURE . 123
LECTURE VI. THE LANGUAGE OF FORM . 145
BY CLAUDE BRAGDON
vii
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
[The illustrations face the pages designated unless otherwise indicated.]
LECTURE I
PACK
SANT' AMBROGIO . . . 8
DURHAM CATHEDRAL WEST FRONT 14
ABBAYE AUX DAMES, CAEN INTERIOR .... 20
ELY CATHEDRAL WEST FRONT 26
VEZELAY CATHEDRAL WEST DOORS 30
LECTURE II
CHARTRES CATHEDRAL INTERIOR 36
SOURCES CATHEDRAL NAVE 40
RHEIMS CATHEDRAL WEST FRONT 44
NOTRE DAME, PARIS 48
LAON CATHEDRAL WEST FRONT 52
BEAUVAIS CATHEDRAL SOUTH TRANSEPT .... 56
LINCOLN CATHEDRAL EAST END 60
LECTURE III
GlRALDA TOWER AND CATHEDRAL, SEVILLE ... 70
CATHEDRAL AND GIRALDA TOWER, SEVILLE . . 76
CATHEDRAL AND CAMPANILE, FLORENCE
FROM OR S. MlCHELE 82
MILAN CATHEDRAL 88
OSPEDALE MAGGIORE, MILAN THREE WINDOWS . . 94
LECTURE IV
CHATEAU DE BLOIS AILE DE Louis XII, FACADE . . .100
TOURS CATHEDRAL 106
CHURCH OF ST. ETIENNE DU MONT, PARIS . . .112
APSE OF CHURCH OF ST. PIERRE, CAEN . . . .118
ix
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Continued
LECTURE V
PAGE
PALACE OF VERSAILLES 1 30
MoNT-SAINT-MlCHEL 132
SANTA SOPHIA, CONSTANTINOPLE 134
HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT, LONDON 136
LECTURE VI
PINE TREE ON AN ISLAND HIROSHIGE . . . .148
BAS-RELIEF OF ATHENA AND HER OWL . . . . 149
PORTRAIT OF MADAME RECAMIER DAVID . . . .150
ROMAN IONIC ARCADE BY VIGNOLE .... On 1 5 1
DOORWAY, CHURCH OF SAINT TROPHIME, ARLES . -152
MADONNA DEL SACCO ANDREA DEL SARTO . . .152
APPLICATION OF THE EQUILATERAL TRIANGLE TO
THE ERECHTHEUM AT ATHENS .... On 153
SACRED AND PROFANE LOVE TITIAN 154
THE LAST SUPPER LEONARDO DA VINCI . . . .156
PATTERN DERIVED FROM GROUPED CUBES . . . On 162
A BAY WINDOW 162
PATTERN DERIVED FROM THE 6oo-HEDROiD . . On 164
PROJECTION OF THE 6oo-HEDROio ON A PLANE . . On 164
AN ORGAN CASE 164
GEOMETRICAL "WEB" AND ORNAMENT DERIVED
FROM THE 600-HEDROID On 1 66
THE WATER GATE 166
TETRAHEDRONS AND DERIVED ORNAMENT . . . On 167
FORMATION OF THE MAGIC SQUARE OF THREE . . On 168
KNOTS FROM MAGIC LINES On 168
BOOK COVER DESIGN BASED ON THE KNIGHT'S
TOUR OR MAGIC SQUARE OF EIGHT . . . On 169
x
THE PROMISE AND THE FULFILMENT
OF GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE
BY
RALPH ADAMS CRAM
THE BEGINNINGS OF GOTHIC ART
All great architecture is organic; every
building that has endured, or will endure, as a
monument of good art is, in a very real sense,
a living organism. Like the horse, the tiger, or
the eagle, all its parts are perfectly adapted to
their function, admirably co-ordinated, deter-
mined by exact considerations of the adaptation
of means to end, and expressed in forms and
lines that are in themselves beautiful. Like
man, it also is possessed of spirit, and the com-
bination of these two elements gives it an actual
life and almost places it in the category of the
creatures that exist by the will, and at the hand,
of God.
The variations in style between one century
and another are as human variations in race
and speech, and as those wide intervals that
separate one epoch of high civilization from
another of a correspondingly low type, or from
those intermediate stages which form the major
part of history. Like the life it so closely re-
sembles and so exactly represents, architecture
is a thing of infinite but rhythmical vicissitudes,
LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE
with brief periods of supreme achievement inter-
spersed with long intervals of slow rise and swift
decline, and again, like life, it shows no progres-
sive growth, no tendency toward earthly perfec-
tion. If there are moments when the art crests
in such splendid accomplishment as occurred in
Greece, in Byzantium, in the Middle Ages, it
cannot be said that as a whole the later mani-
festations reached higher levels than the earlier,
their individual excellence being only in certain
categories.
In every case, however, there is a close rela-
tionship between this art (and its allied arts) and
the civilization that brought it into being. There
is no great art with an immediately antecedent
condition of barbarism; there is no degraded art
in close succession from a high civilization. Art
and life do not synchronize; they form a sequence,
and as art itself comes at and after the cresting
of a wave of human development, we often find
a strange contemporaneousness of noble art and a
civilization that already has begun to decay.
To understand a style, therefore, it is necessary
to do more than scrutinize its material elements,
determining by scientific methods its line of sty-
listic descent and the peculiarities of its organic
mechanism. This is, it must be admitted, the
usual course, and it lands both historian and
W
BEGINNINGS OF GOTHIC ART
student in such a dilemma as that which con-
fronts those who, confining their scrutiny to the
material elements alone, find the Gothic of
France the most logical and perfectly worked-out
manifestation of a style that was almost Europe-
wide, and therefore, since the other national
modes fall short of this, deny to these even the
once derided, now universally revered, style of
"Gothic."
This process is less architectural history and
criticism than it is architectural biology and
pathology. In architecture, as in all arts, in all
existence, it is the spirit that giveth life; and
it is not the forms, it is the spirit behind and
within Greek, Byzantine, Gothic, and Chinese
Buddhist architecture that makes each live, as
do not the other epochs of its varied and illum-
inating career.
Fully to understand the great significance of
that era of architectural growth which, beginning
roughly with the year 1000, goes on with ever-
increasing vigor until it culminates about three
centuries later, we should have to study not
alone the rise of Romanesque, its transition into
the first Gothic, its astounding climax in the
first quarter of the thirteenth century, and its
slow and splendid decay through another two
hundred years; we should also have to merge
[5]
LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE
ourselves in the intricate history of this great
period of five centuries, in its political and eco-
nomic development, its philosophical adventures,
its crusades and guilds and communes, above
all in those religious experiences and determina-
tions that are its greatest exemplification as they
are its underlying cause.
Manifestly this is impossible within the scope
of two lectures. It is the labor of years (if it is
not the illumination of a moment) and not now
for us. All we can do is to note the most salient
points and block out the main lines of what I
hope for many may be subsequently a study as
revealing as it is absorbing.
I need not remind you of the original signifi-
cance of the word "Gothic" how it was given
in scorn by the self-sufficient amateurs of the
Renaissance to the art they had inherited but
could neither appreciate nor rival. To them the
word and the work meant anything barbarous
and illiterate, and illuminating as this is on the
point of their own intelligence, it is, I think,
hardly so discreditable as is that effort, of which
I have already spoken, on the part of modern
commentators to reduce one of the most inspired
and inspiring arts to the terms of a few structural
formulae. Gothic architecture and Gothic art
were an impulse and a tendency: as the Greeks
[6]
BEGINNINGS OF GOTHIC ART
took the simplest conceivable architectural norm
and developed it to final perfection, so the
mediaeval builders took the most complicated
problem and tried to develop it to that point of
perfection which they saw in some beatific vision,
and which was actually beyond the power of man
to attain.
Of course they failed; but they left, not a
perfected thing subject neither to change nor to
improvement, but a stimulating force ever in-
citing men to take up the work they left unfin-
ished, and high-heartedly to strive once more to
achieve the unattainable.
To this extent it was a greater art than had
been known before; for its aim was higher, its
goal more clearly revealed, and this goal was
that which lies at the very root of art itself, viz.,
the symbolical expression of otherwise inexpres-
sible ideas, i.e., those which by their very nature
are so high that they transcend all ordinary and
direct modes of human expression. Consciously
or unconsciously, mediaeval art was at bottom
sacramental, and this explains, in a way, its
immortality, its constantly recurring appeal, as
it explains the same immortality and appeal by
sacramental religion and sacramental philosophy
as of St. Bernard and St. Thomas Aquinas and
Hugh of St. Victor for it is only such art, such
LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE
philosophy, such religion, that will permanently
endure, since these alone are in eternal conformity
with life, which also is essentially and unchange-
ably sacramental.
Between mediaeval civ'lization and mediaeval
art the connection was so close as to amount to
practical identity. Rheims, Freiburg, Canter-
bury, are simply the Middle Ages made visible
and translated into the terms of an enduring and
dynamic influence. All the joy of life, the vivid
vitality, the humor, romance, and mysticism,
the simplicity and naivete of that opulent age
find outlet through the wrought stone and wood,
glass, and metal that assembled under eager
hands and at the impulse of ardent brains to
create that plexus of all the arts, a mediaeval
cathedral. We may read history without limit
and delve in original records for years without
acquiring as much sense of the real mediaevalism
as we could obtain through a day in Bourges or
York or Strasburg if only there we could find
what once was: all the arts assembled together
to make a Mass as it was before the shrines and
altars and windows were broken, and the bizarre
music and tawdry ceremonial of the nineteenth
century took the place of the massive Gregorians
and the solemn ritual of the fourteenth century.
Even now, however, in such a church as Chartres
[8]
BEGINNINGS OF GOTHIC ART
or Seville it is possible to re-create the dead past,
as is impossible in schoolroom or study or
lecture-hall.
Gothic art is a great unit, and into this enter
certain traditional, ethnic, and religious elements
that determine, not only its spirit, but its form as
well. Under the first heading we have all the
classical heritage from Rome and the East
through the Latin South of France and the
pseudo-Byzantine Carolingians; under the sec-
ond, the dominating northern blood, which,
whether Frank, Norman, or Burgundian, wholly
succeeded and dominated the decadent blood of
the South; under the third, that all-embracing
Catholicism which was the moving and regen-
erating force, directing, controlling, inspiring,
through monastic establishments, military orders,
and the crusades.
The Romanesque of the eleventh and twelfth
centuries in all Europe, the Gothic of the thir-
teenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries in
Flanders, France, Spain, and England, were the
direct expression of the greatest and most benefi-
cent religious reformation ever recorded in
Christendom, carrying in its train a civil reforma-
tion that redeemed western civilization from the
Dark Ages and built up for the first time a great
and measurably consistent Christian society. It
[9]
LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE
shows it; for of all art it is at once the most com-
petent and the most inspired, mingled equally of
active reason, good sense, brilliant thinking, and
a spiritual emphasis, a final idealism that we
may search long in world-annals to equal.
Beginning at the hands of monks of many
orders, this art infused the whole Church, being
taken up at last by the bishops and focused in
the vast and innumerable cathedrals, and so
extended through the laity, high and low, until
it became an intimate and indispensable attribute
of life itself.
The material and structural development of
Gothic architecture was a result neither of sud-
den revelation nor of headlong evolution; it was
a phenomenon of slow and logical growth. In
plan, structure, and organism, it reaches back
through Norman, Romanesque, Lombard, By-
zantine, and Syrian trails to Rome itself. Even
in the basilicas of the Eternal City we find the
nave and aisles separated by columns and arches,
the colonnaded triforium and clerestory, the
transept, choir, and apse. Transferred to the
shores of the Bosporus, the Roman mode of
building is divided into two followings the
basilican and the domical. Here they are sepa-
rated, the Eski Djouma and St. Demetrius in
Salonica being very noble examples of the first;
[10]
BEGINNINGS OF GOTHIC ART
Aya Sophia in the same city, SS. Sergius and
Bacchus, the churches of the Pantokrator and
the Chora, and of course Aya Sophia itself, in
Constantinople, immortal examples of the second.
Both are strictly Roman in origin; but as under
Constantine the basilican type was vastly en-
riched and developed over its Roman prototype,
so under Justinian the domical and cellular mo-
tive was elaborated into the almost unimagin-
able splendor of that most glorious church,
where, after five centuries of alien occupation,
we are now permitted to believe that we our-
selves may see the Christian Sacrifice offered
once more in petition and in expiation.
In Syria and Byzantium, Roman architecture
first became structurally and artistically con-
sistent, and the work of Justinian, through his
Greek architects and under a majestic religious
faith blended with the Christianized splendor of
the East, must be considered as one of the great
styles in history. Perfect as it was in all its
internal organism and decoration, it never worked
out a corresponding exterior, although, when
both basilican and domical types were imported
into Italy and Greece under the Exarchs, in
certain places, particularly in the latter, this last
development began, as in the exquisite little
monasteries of Styris and Daphne.
[ii]
LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE
It was too late, however; the stimulus of a
vital civilization had passed, and the evolution
was left for other hands and other races. This
came in part with the introduction of the strong
northern blood of the Lombards. The old
basilican mode had been carried on in Rome on
Christian lines after the Edict of Milan in 313,
but the Lombards after 568 introduced a totally
new spirit, and in Toscanella, and later in Pisa,
Verona, Lucca, Milan, we see the striking results
of a radically new departure marked by an im-
pulse as northern as all that had gone before had
been southern.
Venice was always a splendid anachronism, a
Byzantine colony in the midst of aliens, and
St. Mark's is not in the line of architectural
descent, which for the future was to be under
the direction of the supreme North.
There was, however, one element of great mys-
tery and equal uncertainty, the influence of the
Comacini. There are those who attribute to
them all that afterward was evolved under the
Carolings, the Normans, and the Franks; others
who look on them as half mythical and wholly
ineffective. For my own part, I incline, for once,
toward a middle ground, believing in their un-
doubted existence and their persistent influence,
but finding in the new and vital power of northern
[12]
BEGINNINGS OF GOTHIC ART
blood, fixed by monastic fervor for righteousness,
not only the unique bent toward new and splen-
did things, but also the elan that alone could
revitalize a tradition already moribund.
These Comacini were the colonies or guilds of
free builders (some call them free masons and
the progenitors of the modern secret societies of
the same name) who fled from Rome in the midst
of its downfall and sought refuge on an island in
Lake Como, in a region still under the evanescent
protection of the empire of New Rome, or Byzan-
tium. They are held to have brought with them
in their exile, not only the traditions of Roman
building, but dim memories and symbolisms
from the East, even from Jerusalem itself. Here,
in this island refuge, were preserved through the
Dark Ages the sole surviving tradition of the old
building of the days of classical culture, and
when at last Charlemagne desired to restore the
art of architecture again, it is from this island
that he drew his builders, who thereafter spread
slowly over Europe, founding new lodges and
transmitting to their successors the methods and
secrets and traditions of the immortal past.
Much of the evidence to support this theory is
circumstantial, but it must be admitted that it
is cumulative and generally convincing, and
those who are interested in an obscure and
[13]
LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE
tempting quest may follow it readily in Leader
Scott's Cathedral Builders, which, while not
always reliable as to dates and attributions, is
full of an immense amount of incontestible
testimony.
That the early "Lombard" work of the eighth
century in Italy, as at Toscanella, is novel and
vividly original as well as competent and beau-
tiful, is undeniable, and the peculiar qualities
there shown reveal themselves century after
century in Normandy, Burgundy, and the Rhine
country, as well as in Lombardy itself, until in
the twelfth century they come full-flower in
Padua, Verona, Pavia, Milan, Lucca, and Pisa.
In Italy it is a distinguished and an exquisite
style, vital and intelligent, quick with invention,
and with a certain wild charm that well covers
its sometimes refreshing naivete and even
barbarism. In the North it shows itself in many
ways, though here rather as a bending, not a
controlling, influence. We find it at Cluny, at
Jumieges, at Caen, and it is impossible now to
say how much of this persistent and wide-spread
quality may be due to the successors of the old
Roman guilds, how much to the latent force in
the Lombardic race. Some line of succession
was operative, influencing many peoples in many
lands and spreading far and wide, not methods
[Hi
DURHAM CATHEDRAL WEST FRONT
BEGINNINGS OF GOTHIC ART
of building alone, not types of ornament such as
the interlacing strands and the wild things from
the forests, but an elaborate and mystical sys-
tem of symbolism as well, so fully worked out
that the monk Durandus in the eleventh century
had it all at his finger ends.
Between the two types we are considering, the
question was live loads versus dead loads. The
basilica was inactive; its small nave arches had
little thrust and its apse semi-dome also; the
great triumphal arch to the choir was the only
thing that was seriously active. The domical
structure, even when its domes and vaults were
of concrete, was always pushing in every direc-
tion and putting a premium on that ingenuity
that was always busy devising balancing thrusts.
In spite of its simplicity and inexpensiveness, the
basilica yielded to the dome, partly for material
considerations of permanence and fire protec-
tion, partly because the northern mind was not
content with easy tasks. By 900 A.D., in Sant'
Eustorgio in Milan, transverse arches were being
thrown across the aisles from each pier, thus
involving the first rudimentary buttresses. In
985, as at the Church of Santi Felice e Fortunate
in Vicenza, these transverse arches were thrown
across the nave itself, as long before in Syria,
usually on the alternating system. Then from
LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE
the domical buildings of Syria, Byzantium, and
Ravenna came the masonry vaulting of the
smaller areas, and at last the masonry con-
struction of the high vault.
Before this last innovation, which brought
the whole system of Gothic construction and
organism in its train, the ribbed vault had to
be devised. When this happened no one knows,
but it was probably a northern invention and
meant the ultimate transformation of the simple
Roman organism into the most nervous and
highly articulated creation of the hand of man.
The aisle rib vaults at Montefiascone may be
original; if so, they date from 1032. The high
vault of Sant* Ambrogio is also doubtful and may
be of the year 1060. The present weight of evi-
dence points to Normandy, or even Durham in
England, where the ribbed vault is of the year
1093, but for my own part I believe it is Lom-
bard; for it is exactly in line with other undoubted
inventions of the same ingenious race.
Whatever its source, this ribbed and domed
vault was the greatest discovery of man in archi-
tecture, after the arch and the dome, and its
suppleness, adaptability, and perversity in the
matter of thrusts were stimulating to a degree.
The development of the compound pier and
archivolt and of the alternating system followed
[16!
BEGINNINGS OF GOTHIC ART
hand in hand with the evolution of the ribbed
and domed vault. The oblong vaulting spaces
for the nave, in place of square areas, were worked
out in Normandy through the abbeys of Caen,
by means of sexpartite stages, and at last the
flying buttress, which has grown from the arched
abutments of Sant' Ambrogio, through the half-
barrel vaults of the Abbaye aux Hommes, to
the true flying buttress of the Abbaye des Dames,
which was still modestly concealed below the
roof. At Noyon, about 1260, it emerged into the
light of day, and at the same time the pointed
arch, which is first recorded in France in the
Abbey of Cluny at the end of the eleventh cen-
tury, achieved complete acceptance, partly be-
cause of its adaptability, chiefly because of its
beauty, and not at all because it aided in the
vaulting of oblong compartments as is so often
claimed simply because it never was so used,
the device of stilting having already solved that
problem and made possible those subtle waved
surfaces that were and are the joy of the architect.
In the processes thus far narrated we have
acquired most of the elements in the Gothic
system: compound shaft and arch, ribbed,
domed, and stilted vaults (quadripartite, sex-
partite, and oblong), buttresses, flying buttresses,
pointed arches, while the vertical system of
[I?]
LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE
arcade, triforium, and clerestory, and the great
west towers are fully established through such
monuments as Jumieges, the abbeys of Caen,
St. Germer de Fly, and St. Denis. With the last
building comes the perfected chevet, that incom-
parable masterpiece of mediaeval genius, with
its polygonal apse, doubled aisles, and ring of
chapels. At first it would seem that this was a
special creation of Gothic intelligence, if not of
divine revelation, but stupendous as it is, it was
a development of successive stages from a very
old and equally simple norm. What has hap-
pened was this, and I think it very interesting.
The Syrian builders of the dioceses of Damas-
cus and Antioch had taken the primitive Roman
basilica secular and pagan and added to the
east end that semicircular apse which first
appears here in one or two heathen temples of
the early second century. They thus obtained
the standard type of the Christian basilica which
has persisted even to this day, whatever may
have been its racial impulse or its stylistic ex-
pression. Then they cut this apsed basilica in
two and took the simple semicircular apse with
its semi-dome to see what they could make of it.
They made much. First they completed it into a
circle; then they developed the little curved
niches of some of the early apses into true, but
[18]
BEGINNINGS OF GOTHIC ART
subordinate, apses, applied directly to the per-
imeter of the circle; they next raised the wall to
provide a clerestory of windows and encircled the
whole at the ground level with a polygonal aisle.
The memory of this early form in Syria is still
preserved in the much later San Vitale at Ra-
venna. The result was a great organism, though
not perfectly articulated. In such a church as
that at Bosrah, however, this defect was reme-
died; for here the aisle encircles the central
dome, and the apses are pushed to the outer
wall. The articulation is now complete, and
aesthetically the result affords the most won-
derful play of light and shade imaginable. On
the basis of this unique development which
surely worked itself out in the great days of the
Church in Antioch and was utterly forgotten
under the desolation that followed the Moslem
invasions, even until the last century were
reared all the wonderful structures of Byzantium,
of Charlemagne, and of Southern France, as for
example, Aya Sophia, Aix-la-Chapelle, and Tou-
louse. By the introduction of a square area
between two apses, and with its dome supported
on pendentives a device already used in Syria
and with its aisle curtailed and raised into two
stories, we have the first; with an increase of
height and the introduction of a triforium level,
[19]
LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE
the second; while in the apse of the third we find
the most extraordinary change of all nothing
less than the cutting of the circle in halves again,
the full evolution having been accomplished, and
the application of this half to its original position
at the end of the old basilica, now equally trans-
formed. Behold, then, with the other newly
devised elements I have already named, and with
its articulation raised to the point of finality,
Bourges, Chartres, Rheims, Westminster the
finished and ineffable product, the definitive
Gothic church.
Such is the structural evolution from 200 A.D.
until uoo A.D., one of the most remarkable
exemplifications of the power of human intellect
when it is infused by a vital religious faith and
for the last six of these nine centuries at least by
clean new blood and an almost abnormal vitality.
In this process certain buildings stand as mile-
stones, though we must always remember that,
so far as dates are concerned, this credit may be
partially undeserved, since it is possible, if not
probable, that the truly era-making works
those, that is, in which some master-builder
struck out first of all men some revolutionary
and prolific device have been utterly destroyed
or buried under the desert sand of Moslem devas-
tation or the heaped debris of revolution. On
[20]
ABBAYE AUX DAMES, CAEN INTERIOR
BEGINNINGS OF GOTHIC ART
the basis of what remains, however, these build-
ings are: the church at Bosrah, Charlemagne's
church at Aix-la-Chapelle, Sant' Ambrogio, Jumi-
eges, the two abbeys of Caen, St. Germer de Fly,
and St. Denis. In the first two of these we find
the promise and potency of the chevet; in the
third, the germs that were to develop into at
least three of the essential elements of Gothic;
in the fourth, the main qualities of Gothic mass
and organism; in the two Caen abbeys, the norm
of all French cathedrals on the one hand, of all
English abbeys and cathedrals on the other; in
St. Germer, the actual chevet itself, as the North
translated and glorified the dim prophecies of
the East; and in St. Denis, the final gathering
up of everything in preparation for the great
flowering that was to come in less than fifty
years. It was a masterly sequence, and it postu-
lates a great civilization behind; for after all, thus
far we have considered only the structural evolu-
tion. The qualities which give all this art, whether
Byzantine, Romanesque, or Gothic, its supreme
character are those subtle qualities of beauty,
inspiration, and evocative power which are the
vivifying spirit of great art and follow only from
a potent civilization.
Now while there was no violent revolution, no
artificial swerving of the line of development,
[21]
LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE
such as occurred, for example, in the case of the
Renaissance, there was a great transformation
in the spirit that was working in the world and
dominating it. If we are to gain any idea of
what this was and why it was so potent, you
must bear with me while I revert to a little
ancient, and very ancient, history.
By the year 500 Rome had fallen, and classical
civilization had become a name. Over the dis-
appearing frontiers of empire poured the hordes
of northern barbarians, and only the successor of
St. Peter was left in a desolated city to bear wit-
ness against anarchy, heresy, and chaos. And
yet, in the crash of toppling empires, in the
North the king of the Franks was baptized, and
in Rome itself Gregory the Great mounted the
chair of Peter. From him went out the streams
of energy that were to redeem and transform the
northern hordes, through the agency of those
monks who had accepted the Holy Rule of St.
Benedict, who himself was the center and the
energizing power of the new era that was to last
for a thousand years.
Neither Rome nor its successor, Catholic civil-
ization, was built in a day, and it took five full
centuries to bring the work of St. Benedict to
final fruition. There was a short-lived and par-
tial success under Charlemagne, but ruin followed
[22]
BEGINNINGS OF GOTHIC ART
after, and it was not until 927 that St. Odo
reformed the sterile Benedictinism of the Dark
Ages and, through the order of Cluny, made it
operative again as its great founder would have
had it. Almost at the same moment Otto the
Great restored civil order under a regenerated
Holy Roman Empire, St. Bruno began the
building of Germanic civilization, and Hugh
Capet with Bishop Gerbert set out on their
task of re-creating civilization in France. By
the year 1000 the Normans had become fixed
in Northern France, Christianized and ready
for action; the curtain rose, and the splen-
did drama of mediaevalism began to unfold
itself.
The first act is the era of a new Benedictinism
and what we call Romanesque and Norman
architecture. To this mode the Benedictine was
always devoted, and he made it a thing of power
and nobility and in the end inordinate rich-
ness. He began where Byzantium and Charle-
magne left off; he re-created architecture on
Christian lines, but he could not continue to the
end, for the reason that monasticism, while in-
destructible in essence, is human in its agencies,
therefore fallible, and doomed after each century
to sink to a point where a reformation is
imperative.
[23]
LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE
As the Cluniac wave so spent itself, it slipped
slowly back into a very human corruption, and
its art took on a splendor and a magnificence
that defeated its own ends. Then came the
inevitable reform in the shape of the great Cis-
tercian revolt against luxury of life and laxity
of morals and an unwholesome sumptuousness in
art. The Cluniac and the Norman created
Romanesque, the Cistercian and Frank created
Gothic, and Gothic in its beginnings was a
puritanical revolt against a too splendid art.
It was well that this should be so, for at once
men's minds were turned from ornament to form,
structure in a word, to organism, which is archi-
tecture. The round arched Benedictine style
was becoming a thing too costly to be endured;
too costly in its enormous masses of masonry,
too costly in its florid and superabundant decora-
tion. At first St. Bernard would have not even a
carved moulding, no stained glass, no costly fur-
nishings, no sumptuous ceremonial, while the
ingenuity of his master-workmen was exerted
toward finding a system whereby, through a
balancing of thrusts, the sheer bulk of building
material in any structure could be reduced
one-half.
They found it, and Gothic architecture was
the result; but in the process not of structural
[24]
BEGINNINGS OF GOTHIC ART
evolution, but of that social evolution which lay
behind they found and they created much else.
Justly estimated, the eleventh is one of the most
wonderful centuries in history; for then began,
and with astonishing vigor, all those great move-
ments that were to find their climax in what has
been well called the " thirteenth, greatest of cen-
turies." The monks of Cluny were spreading
enlightenment and order from a thousand centers
all over Europe. When Gerbert became pope as
Sylvester II, the degradation of the Papacy came
to an end, and such great pontiffs as Leo IX and
Gregory VII assumed sovereign direction of
Christian civilization. Heathenism and Moham-
medanism were beaten back, the Slav and Ger-
manic tribes (all but the Prussians) were Chris-
tianized, and into Britain, Italy, Sicily, the
Levant, poured the Normans, bringing with them
order and the Catholic faith. Schools were built
on monastic foundations in every land, the mer-
chant guilds came into being, art was reborn, and
at last the flame of universal fervor culminated
in the First Crusade.
As all architecture, and particularly Gothic
architecture, is pre-eminently organic, so was
the civilization that brought it into being and
used it as its chosen mode of visible expression.
The three centuries from 1000 A.D. to 1300 A.D.
[25]
LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE
were probably the most wholesomely organized
and the most sanely balanced and the most
physically and spiritually stimulating that Chris-
tian Europe has known at least so far as France,
England, and Germany (again omitting Prussia
and Brandenburg, which were not even Christian-
ized) are concerned. No one would deny the exist-
ence of violence, ignorance, corruption ; but these
things have always been and, if we are to judge
from the present condition of the world, always
will be. The point is that they were then less
dominating, less mordant in their influence, than
before or since, while they were largely neutral-
ized, or at least mitigated, by other elements of
supreme virtue and nobility that had issue in a
society, a civil government, an art, a philosophy,
and a religion that combined to produce a con-
dition of life which has in history few rivals in
the creation of fine human character.
It would be impossible to do more at this time
than to indicate lines of possible study, as, for
example, the origin and development under mo-
nastic influence of innumerable schools all over
Europe, particularly schools of philosophy, medi-
cine, and general culture; the growth of a spe-
cifically Catholic philosophy, on an essentially
Greek foundation, but wholly Christian in its
essence and destined to a final flowering in such
[26]
ELY CATHEDRAL WEST FRONT
BEGINNINGS OF GOTHIC ART
immortal figures as Duns Scotus, Hugh of St.
Victor, and St. Thomas Aquinas; the appearance
of the great merchant guilds, with the trade
guilds to follow, and the organization of those
landmarks in civil liberty and order, the village
and city communes; the founding of those potent
agencies of civilization, the military orders of
knighthood and chivalry; the outburst of a
creative and stimulating art that showed itself
in music in the enrichment of the early plain-
song, in the trouveres and troubadours; in poetry,
in the chansons de gestes, and the Arthurian
legends; in architecture in Pisa, Venice, San
Miniato al Monte, Worms, Speyer, and Maintz,
Poitiers, Le Puy, Angouleme, Aries, Toulouse,
Vezelay, Clermont, Caen, St. Georges de Bos-
cherville, Jumieges, Mt. St. Michel, in Canter-
bury, Winchester, Ely, Glastonbury, Durham;
in the stained glass of Le Mans, Poitiers, Canter-
bury, and Chartres; in the metal work of Hil-
desheim, the sculpture of Autun, Moissac, and
Chartres.
Finally, one might suggest study of some few
of the great and splendid characters of the
eleventh and twelfth centuries and of the causes
that led to such an unheard-of galaxy of honor-
able names: St. Odo, St. Bruno, Otto the Great,
Hugh Capet, Sylvester II, Hildebrand (Pope
[27]
LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE
Gregory VII), Chretien de Troyes, Innocent III,
St. Bernard, St. Anselm, St. Norbert, St. Thomas
a Becket, Peter the Venerable, Suger, Abelard,
Hugo of St. Victor, William of Champeaux,
Lothair II, Richard Coeur de Lion, Henry II,
Philip Augustus, Fulk of Anjou, Roger of Sicily,
Matilda of Tuscany, Eleanor of Guienne, Blanche
of Castile.
The great names coruscate like divine fire-
works, and they were not isolated personalities
in a wilderness of mediocrity or barbarism. The
qualities they possessed in such supreme degree
were merely intensifications of the general life in
which they were merged. Racial and national
self-consciousness, individual confidence and self-
respect, industrial emancipation and develop-
ment, all had become operative and dynamic
influences, and the result was a sane, consistent,
and character-building civilization that seemed
to leave nothing for the thirteenth century.
There was enough, however, as I shall try to
show in my second lecture, when I propose to
consider the development and full flowering of
Gothic art, and though only superficially, some
portion of the workings of the extraordinary elan
vital that lay behind.
In the meantime, it is well to realize the amaz-
ing nature of the work accomplished between
BEGINNINGS OF GOTHIC ART
St. Benedict and the First Crusade. It divides
itself naturally into three parts, which may be
called conservation, recovery, and expansion.
For the first the monks of St. Benedict were
responsible and for much else besides. They,
in their hidden monasteries that suddenly sprang
up throughout all the West, collected and treas-
ured the records of Latin culture, both sacred
and profane, furnished refuges for men and
women from the perennial blasts of destruction,
and cherished, however dimly, the flame of
righteousness and order, the tradition of such
forgotten things as right and wrong. To them
also belongs much of the credit of the second
period of recovery, when, under the House of
the Carolings, the world took breath again and
set itself to build a new earth. Not much was
accomplished perhaps the day between the
dawning of Charles Martel and the death of
Louis the Pious was too short but out of the
dusty and mouldering monasteries came what had
been saved from the wreck of worlds, and for a
few years Charlemagne's court did indeed do
much toward collating the treasure-trove and
giving it, if not a new life, at least the poten-
tiality for this when the time should be ripe.
With the eleventh century this time came; the
unspeakable horrors of the second Dark Ages
[29]
LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE
the ninth and tenth centuries had reached a
point when no further fall was possible. Feu-
dalism which had saved some semblance of
order in the first Dark Ages had become a
combination of brutal slavery and insane an-
archy. Kingship had ceased to be operative,
culture was unknown, misery universal, the
Papacy a stench and a blasphemy, and even the
Benedictines themselves had sunk into a degen-
eracy from which there seemed no escape.
And yet there was an escape, as always when
the world seems at the moment of extinction:
the year 1000 marked, not the end of the world,
but the end of an era; the new forces were
working hiddenly, and when St. Odo founded the
order of Cluny they came to the surface. At
once this astonishing power became the great
motive force in all Europe, reforming monasti-
cism, purging the Papacy, wrenching the fangs of
feudalism and secular control from the throat
of the Church, restoring education, art, and cul-
ture, while indirectly assisting in the emanci-
pation of the laborers and merchants and making
possible the guilds and the city communes.
Individual self-respect, the sense of solidarity,
and the national spirit grew apace, but perhaps
the most potent development potent in its
guaranty of great centuries to follow was the
[30]
BEGINNINGS OF GOTHIC ART
opening out of religion and its wide adaptation
to the needs and the instincts of men. During
the patristic period, whether in the East or the
West, the constructive work in the developing
and fixing of dogma had been largely intellectual.
It was concerned primarily with destroying in-
numerable and poisonous heresies, with the fixing
deeply of everlasting foundations. The passion-
ate human element of St. Augustine was excep-
tional, but the time had now come for carrying
still farther and developing more richly the
tendencies he represented, so making Catholic
Christianity forever a thing that met every
demand and hunger of the human soul.
In the time of Charlemagne, Radbertus had
put into definite form the full doctrine of tran-
substantiation, with all it meant of poignant
appeal and the sense of divine immanence.
Attempts to establish a strictly (as it was to be
in later years) Calvinistic doctrine of fore-
ordination and predestination were ruthlessly
crushed; the tender and merciful aspects of
Christianity were emphasized (though the meth-
ods were not always of that ilk) ; and sacramen-
talism, with its many modes of approach to God,
its simple and obvious duties and benefits, inter-
penetrated the whole fabric of the ecclesiastical
organism as well as that of secular society.
LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE
Finally, the place of the angels and saints, and
particularly that of the Blessed Virgin, in the
divine cosmogony, as conscious and affectionate
friends, companions, and intercessors, was recog-
nized and accepted as never before, with the
result that by the beginning of the eleventh
century religion had become, if not the most
important thing in life, at least the most per-
vasive and appealing, influencing all secular and
personal affairs and giving a unity and consist-
ency to human effort and human existence such
as had never been known before in history in
any similar degree.
It was the elan vital of the Middle Ages, and
its amazing workings were to have issue in that
unique and consistent civilization, from the year
noo to the year 1300, which, through its im-
mortal artistic expression, I shall consider, though
superficially, in my second lecture.
[3*1
II
THE CULMINATION OF GOTHIC
ARCHITECTURE
To some of those who are most deeply affected
by the art of mediaevalism comes at times a
questioning and a doubt. In the prose and
metrical romances they find subtle delicacy,
strong and sincere feeling, exquisite finish of
workmanship; in the great Latin hymns, deep
and poignant emotion coupled with a marvelous
technical mastery; in the music of the Gregorian
mode, an art of a perfection as unique as it is
compelling; in Catholic philosophy, profound
thought that is both analytical and constructive
to an amazing degree; and in theology, a quite
unparalleled mingling of keen recognition of
human needs, of massive and logical construc-
tiveness, of spiritual vision that transcends
thought and lays hold of ultimate things. In
the plastic arts they discover, as never before,
sculpture that in beauty and in mastery of line
and form matches only the best of Hellas, archi-
tecture that expresses itself as the most perfect
organism veiled in the most delicately beautiful
[33]
LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE
forms that history records, together with arts
altogether new, as those of glass and tapestry
and enamel, with, in every category, a handicraft
that records no equal antecedents for eighteen
hundred years.
By every law of analogy, every precedent of
history, these conditions, if they are not fictions
of autosuggestion, should argue the existence of
a civilization and a culture of corresponding
nobility and, necessarily, not only equal to that
which produced the great art of classical times,
but superior in all essential respects to that which
followed it, since this, confessedly, had issue in a
theology of doubtful value, a philosophy of
even now contested authority and diminishing
credit, and a complete downfall of all the arts
save poetry and music and, in a few instances,
the drama.
And against this they must set an almost
universal, and a solemnly authoritative, asser-
tion that behind this brilliant manifestation of
culture and of character lay social chaos, political
incapacity, universal warfare, cruelty, injustice,
oppression, superstition, bigotry, Cimmerian ig-
norance, and all those elements of barbarism
that go to the making of what we commonly
know as the Dark Ages. The antithesis is strik-
ing, the paradox baffles the understanding, and
[34]
CULMINATION OF GOTHIC ART
as a result, it is to be feared, some are brought
to the sorry pass of holding that after all there
need be no vital connection between culture and
civilization, and that art of any and every kind,
lofty philosophy, and a loftier religion, need not
be held to express anything of nobility or achieve-
ment in a nation or among a people, but may
manifest themselves through savagery as they
may disappear in an epoch of the highest
development.
Such a lamentable deduction is quite un-
necessary; for the paralyzing antithesis is only
apparent. It has neither reality nor even
plausibility, and is due partly to the misleading
and wrong-headed nature of written histories,
partly to a commonly inadequate and equally
wrong-headed system of education, partly to a
mental confusion and the loss of any adequate
standard of comparative values that are the
result of the two first-named agencies. Tem-
peramentally incapable of estimating history
except in terms of military operations, dynastic
vicissitudes, or concrete material achievements,
the popular historians, confused in the midst
of the apparently aimless and resultless events
and courses of the Middle Ages in these cate-
gories of unimportant activity, fall back on the
conclusion that these are the full revelation of
[351
LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE
the time, that there was nothing in it anyway;
and they write the history of the thirteenth
century in the terms of Hohenstaufen and Capet
and Plantaganet, of battles and councils and
treaties and "pragmatic sanctions," of militant
heresies and obscurantist scholasticism, of names
and dates and titles. Where there are few in-
deed who write living history as Henry Adams
writes it, or Henry Osborne Taylor, or Cardinal
Gasquet, or John Richard Greene, or Lord
Bryce, there are scores of the " baser sort," who
mask their lack of vision and of comprehension
by an erudition that almost persuades and by a
heaping of the Pelion of genealogical records on
the Ossa of military adventure that stuns if it
does not enlighten.
If you would know the Middle Ages and why
they brought into being the thing that was
themselves their culture you must needs aban-
don the accepted historical method and consider,
not the things that make facile textbooks, but
those that make life and character and person-
ality; for these were the essence of the Middle
Ages, and they lie outside court and camp and
council.
There is no little significance in the widespread
and penetrating change now affecting the atti-
tude of men toward the comparative position of
[36]
CHARTRES CATHEDRAL INTERIOR
CULMINATION OF GOTHIC ART
the arts of the Middle Ages, and toward its
positive quality as well. There is still greater
significance in the new estimate of the cultural
background of this art. Before the events of
the last five months of the year 1914 opened
our eyes to the shallow and meaningless nature
of our own civilization until then so highly
spoken of, if one remembers correctly there
were many who had gone back from mediaeval
art to its social antecedents and accompaniments,
who had rediscovered, and in some degree re-
estimated, its philosophy and its religion, and
who, rejecting the statistical history and the
superficial diagnosis of current and popular
chronicles, had found in the years between
1050 and 1300 a wonderland and a revelation.
It is not to be forgotten that while the dominant
tendencies in society were working themselves
out, with neither let nor hindrance, to that
logical culmination that revealed itself in the
first week of that memorable August of the year
of grace 1914, there was developing simultane-
ously a tendency as different as day from night,
and with equal swiftness and even more startling
vigor. Scientific efficiency, which united to
religious infidelity and state-worship has been
given the name of Kultur, was paralleled by a
very opposite thing, which has always been known
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LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE
as culture, and this latter, made up of religion,
philosophy, and art, was in its most essential
elements based on the earlier culture, not of
Hellenism, not of Roman imperialism, not of the
Renaissance, not of the evolutionary philosophy
and scientific efficiency of the nineteenth century,
but on those very centuries from St. Bernard to
St. Bonaventure, from Chretien de Troyes to
Dante, from Hildebrand to St. Louis, from
Noyon to Beauvais, that had been forgotten
for four hundred years and maligned by
every historian during that same space of
time.
Such a return, such a reaction, if you like, was
inevitable. In my former lecture I tried to show
something of the wonder of those crescent years
from the close of the Dark Ages in 950 to the
culmination of Catholic civilization three cen-
turies later those years that saw a new art,
born from the ruins of a shattered past, work
slowly through Norman and Romanesque and
Burgundian modes toward the full flowering of
perfected Gothic art. It is now for us to consider
in a paragraph what justly requires many vol-
umes the continuation of this great era of
growth and its intrinsic qualities that were the
basis of the most comprehensive and inspiring
art the world has known.
[38]
CULMINATION OF GOTHIC ART
The Middle Ages form a period of notably
high culture but of comparatively undeveloped
civilization. That this distinction is possible is
proved by many eras of history, and it must be
recognized if we are correctly to understand and
estimate this particular period. Culture is made
up of three elements philosophy, religion, and
art; civilization is measured by the degree to
which a people has diverged from barbarism in
motives, manners, and customs. Greece was a
center of supreme culture, but her civilization
was of no high order; Rome was superbly civil-
ized, but in philosophy, religion, and art she fell
immeasurably below the Greece she had de-
stroyed. During the Middle Ages there was
little ground gained in the recovery of the civil-
ization that had disappeard, together with cul-
ture itself, during the Dark Ages. Manners at
first were rude and direct, civil government rudi-
mentary, industry carried on by very primitive
methods, material efficiency almost unknown,
and yet philosophy rose to transcendent
heights, religion, both in theology and in
action, was vital, commanding, loftily beautiful,
and of a nature that endures forever, while
art, in whatever category, rose out of the nothing-
ness of the tenth to the dizzy heights of the
thirteenth century, where it forms a goal of
[39]
LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE
emulation thus far unattainable by succeeding
generations. Civilization is an excellent means
to an end, if that end be character or culture,
but if it is unfruitful of either, or if it produces
only the Dead Sea fruit of Kultur, it is no more
than the tree that bringeth forth evil fruit, and
it is cut down and cast into the fire. Culture,
on the other hand, does not necessarily follow
from civilization, nor does it always have issue
in civilization or in that human character which
is the object of life itself. Sometimes it casts
its glamor over very evil conditions indeed, as
in Greece and Byzantium, just as civilization
blinds us to equally evil conditions in the later
Renaissance, and in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, when true culture is at a lower ebb
than at any time for six hundred years. But
the mediaeval period was not of this nature, and
then, whatever we may say of efficient civiliza-
tion, the culture of philosophy, religion, and art
did produce character of the highest, while in
itself it finds few rivals in the preceding
centuries or in those that have followed.
From the twelfth century the thirteenth took
over all the great creative theology of St. Anselm
and St. Bernard and continued it to its logical
conclusion through the Fourth Lateran Council.
The pure piety and spiritual ardor of the great
BOURGES CATHEDRAL NAVE
CULMINATION OF GOTHIC ART
founder-monks of the preceding centuries blos-
somed into a world-wide monasticism that was
in general the most stimulating and beneficent in-
fluence of the epoch, and closed at last in the
perfect charity of St. Francis and the passionate
ardor of St. Dominic. Catholic philosophy
achieved its highest point in Albertus Magnus,
Duns Scotus, Roger Bacon, St. Bonaventure,
Raymond Lully, Alexander Hales, Hugh of St.
Victor, and St. Thomas Aquinas. Now the
Arthurian and Nibelungen epics take on their
final form, the minnesingers and meistersingers
follow the trouveres and troubadours, while Latin
hymnology creates a new and glorious category
of art, and Dante closes the line as the great
synthesis, the culmination of all. Music per-
fected its Gregorian mode and began its develop-
ment of harmony that was later to culminate in
the eighteenth century after the death of the
other arts; painting came into being through
Duccio, Cimabue, and Giotto; sculpture in
France, and later in Italy and England, recov-
ered the spirit and the mastery of Greece; stained
glass revealed itself in the amazing glories of
Chartres, Bourges, Angers, as art of the greatest,
while all the minor crafts of metal and wood and
textiles followed suit, and toward an unexampled
end.
[41]
LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE
Of the architecture of this amazing time I shall
speak immediately, since this is the long-deferred
object of this lecture; but first let me name one
or two out of the galaxy that prove beyond cavil
that here indeed culture, without the highest
efficiency of civilization, was not inconsistent
with the production of noble character. Note
only such names as Innocent III, Gregory IX,
Boniface VIII; Henry III and Edward I;
Frederick Barbarossa, Rudolph of Hapsburgh,
Ferdinand III, Alfonso the Wise, St. Louis
of France, Stephen Langton, Robert Grosseteste,
Blanche of Castile, St. Clare, St. Elizabeth of
Hungary. Everywhere, on civil and ecclesiastical
thrones, in cloister and on crusade, in the fast-
multiplying universities themselves the crea-
tion of mediaevalism we find the most notable
personalities, of a nature that establishes an
undying hope for humanity and a guaranty of
its powers of recuperation and lofty achievement.
The development of Catholic faith and practice
along those personal and appealing lines, to which
I have already referred, was the mainspring of
the new vitality, and this development showed
itself chiefly through an increasing richness and
intimacy in the sacramental system and in the
cult of our Lady and the saints. The crusades,
which synchronize with the whole epoch of me-
[42]
CULMINATION OF GOTHIC ART
diaevalism, the military orders of knighthood,
and the splendid pageant of chivalry, all acted
as connecting links between religion and secular
life, knitting them for a few brief centuries into
an organic whole. Everywhere, in all lands, on
the hills, in the sheltered valleys, beside the un-
polluted streams, were the monasteries, each
with its free school and sometimes with its cir-
culating library, the guiding spirit of youth, the
inspirer of manhood, the refuge for old age.
Universities with throngs of students rivaling
the most numerous of those today Prague,
Paris, Padua, Montpellier, Orleans, Valencia,
Valladolid, Oxford grew to a position of power
we can now hardly appreciate. In almost every
great city was a free hospital with isolation wards
for lepers and others afflicted with contagious
diseases.
So far as the development of civil liberty, the
formulating of law, and the organization of con-
stitutional government are concerned, it is pos-
sible to say that more was accomplished in the
Middle Ages than during any other equal period
in human history. The Provisions of Oxford,
Magna Carta, Bracton's De Legibus, the Codes
of Frederic II, the Institutes of St. Louis, the
Golden Bull of Andrew II of Hungary, the codices
of canon law of Gregory IX and Boniface VIII,
[43]
LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE
are the foundation stones of civil liberty and the
basis of modern law.
Conditions of this kind are the forcing-house
of art; it follows instinctively, without the inter-
vention of schools or lectureships or wealthy
amateurs. And it is a united art, expressing
itself, not along one line alone, but in myriad
ways. Architecture in the thirteenth century is
no greater than sculpture, or poetry, or music,
or glass; it is the vehicle of all, the plexus where
all unite with one impulse and one end. It is a
unity as perfect as that of Hellas, but it is dif-
ferent in its genesis and its operation; for it is a
popular art, not the art of an elect caste; it is the
work of free men, not of servile agents under a
few of high attainments and high authority; and
finally it is the expression of a personal and pas-
sionate religion that was life itself to every artist
and every craftsman, every noble and every
peasant, whose possession it was in fullest meas-
ure and without distinction of class or estate.
It can truthfully be said that the word "Gothic"
as applied to the plastic arts of mediaevalism is
synonymous with the word " Catholic."
Not that the plastic arts then, or at any time,
are alone entitled to be called art. The thing
itself is greater than these and includes more,
particularly poetry in every form, with music,
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RHEIMS CATHEDRAL WEST FRONT
CULMINATION OF GOTHIC ART
drama, and ceremonial. The modern fashion of
confining the "fine arts" to painting, sculpture,
and architecture is evidence in itself how far we
have fallen from the cultural ideal of the Middle
Ages.
Now, architecture, as I said in my first lecture,
is primarily organism; it is also synthesis, that
is, it cannot exist without many of the other
arts, and when as in the case of a Gothic
cathedral in operation it combines with itself
every other mode of art, then it becomes the
greatest art-manifestation possible to fallen man.
Chartres or Rheims or Westminster in the four-
teenth century during a pontifical mass was
undoubtedly the greatest and most comprehen-
sive work of art the mind can conceive or the
intelligence bring into being.
This organic quality on which I have laid so
much stress, not only because of its essential
importance, but also because it is the very qual-
ity most lacking today, was determined and
assured in the twelfth century. The thirteenth
was devoted to perfecting this to the highest
possible point and to infusing the result with the
spiritual elements of beauty and of emotional
stimulus. In this the artists of the time were
following a natural parallelism with such other
commanding artists as Homer, Plato, Shakes-
[45]
LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE
peare, Michelangelo, all of whom found their
enduring glory, less through original discovery
and creation, than through their power of gather-
ing up all the work of their forbears and breath-
ing into it the breath of life.
This great work of organic development may
be seen to perfection in the Cathedral of Our
Lady of Paris, and it is progressive from east to
west. The choir was begun in 1163, the west
front completed in 1235, and in these seventy
years all the promise of Jumieges was fulfilled in
more than abundant measure. From east to
west there is a steady growth in certainty of
touch, in structural articulation and integrity,
and in the development of the sense of pure
beauty. The plan is of the simplest only a
parallelogram with one semicircular termination,
divided into five aisles, the middle one being
twice the width of the others, with all the load
concentrated on points distributed with almost
the accuracy of an engineer. The interior order
i.e., arcade, triforium, and clerestory holds
still by the somewhat dull mechanism of early
Norman work, and the three elements are too
nearly alike in vertical height for a result either
beautiful or structurally significant. It lacks
rhythm and subtlety of composition. The shaft-
scheme of such transitional work as Noyon holds
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CULMINATION OF GOTHIC ART
here, with cylindrical columns in the arcade sup-
porting multiple shafts above, the vaulting shaft
resting directly on the capital of the arcade
column an inorganic device much admired by
Gothic theorists of the nineteenth century. On
the other hand, the little Lombard round win-
dow has blossomed into the "Mystic Rose,"
which here approaches sublimity, and is used as
the central feature of the terminations of nave
and transepts. The whole nave is full of trials,
experiments, changes, hurriedly adopted and
half completed, and the exterior is marked by
the same absorbing personality. In the chevet,
for example, the mad and unbeautiful flying
buttresses are not original; for at first the sys-
tem was the subsequently standard type two
flights of arches, each properly grounded through
pillar or wall-buttress. After a disastrous con-
flagration, however, some genius with a daring
disproportionate to his discretion conceived the
idea of covering both aisles with one enormous
span. The result never commended itself, how-
ever, and is almost unique, but it shows at the
same time the nemesis of structural pride that
in the end, at Beauvais, was to close the history
and the power over beauty of detail that was
not mitigated by structural indiscretions; for
the design of the buttress pinnacles of these
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Brobdingnagian arches is perhaps the most
beautiful single thing in Gothic architecture.
As for the west front, it ever remains the great
classical achievement of the Middle Ages, the
most superbly conceived work of architecture
that has ever issued from the hand of man in
any place or at any time. It has no rival in the
past, and none is conceivable for the future.
Laon was more or less contemporary with
Paris, later if anything; but it is as different as
may be. Where Paris is calm, serene, simple,
Laon is nervous, complex, almost fantastic. For
Paris two vast towers were enough, for Laon
seven could hardly suffice. The whole work is
tentative, vacillating, romantic, and, it must be
confessed, inferior. Only in its conception and
composition, however; in detail it is faultless,
and one realizes here how, whatever the vagaries
of the master-mason, the great body of artificers
were always on hand to redeem primary mistakes
by their conservative and assured taste and
sense of beauty a condition of things that
in a sense marks the length of road we have
traveled since then.
With Chartres, Bourges, and Rheims we come
to a trinity of masterpieces that group themselves
around the crowning years of Catholic civiliza-
tion and are its sufficient expression and if this
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\OTRE DAME, PARIS (Plate X from L 'Art gothique en France)
CULMINATION OF GOTHIC ART
were needed justification. Chartres dates in
the main from 1194, when it was begun anew
after a fire that destroyed all but the crypt and
the west front, to 1260, when it was consecrated.
In plan it is perhaps the noblest of all Gothic
churches, while its interior, in point of organism,
proportion, relation of parts, articulation, has
few rivals. It is, I believe, the most perfect
religious interior man has produced, as Paris
is the greatest exterior, so far as its fagade is
concerned.
Bourges was begun in the same year with
Chartres and its essential organism then deter-
mined, though the west bays of the nave were
not completed until the very end of the thir-
teenth century. Its plan is wholly different
from those of Paris, Laon, and Chartres (for
there was then no copying of one master-builder
by another) and its interior organism is quite
original. It has no transepts and therefore no
crossing, while its arcade is twice as lofty in
proportion as the arcades of its sister-churches.
It is the most aspiring and romantic of all and
in some respects is the most brilliant in its
artistic invention.
Rheims began to rise from its ashes in the year
1 21 1, just when the savage tribes of Prussia began
to yield to Christian missionaries the last of the
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LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE
heathen races of North Europe to accept Chris-
tianity for a time later to overwhelm in the
red ruin of shell and flame the great church
that in its building marked the moment of
their evanescent conversion. The west front, to
the base of the upper story of the towers, was
finished with the close of the century. In plan,
in exterior and interior organism, in detail, and in
sculpture, Rheims was the perfected work of the
Catholic civilization of the Middle Ages. Every
other building shows here and there experiment,
uncertainty, an almost nervous reaching out of
its creators toward a dim ideal that was yet the
one reality. Of this there was nothing in Rheims.
It was the work of a master so supreme in his
artistry that he laid hold on perfection where
his followers struggled toward it. I am not
sure that this perfect attainment raised it
very far above Chartres or Bourges or Cou-
tances. Final it was, in conception and in
every minutest part, but to me there is some-
thing in the tremulous daring of Bourges, in the
unsatisfied but eager desire of Paris, in the rapt
faith and awestruck groping for the hand of God
in Chartres, that appeals with a poignancy that
in Rheims yields to dumb reverence for final and
almost superhuman achievement. After all, man
is the creature that tries, and in the striving for
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CULMINATION OF GOTHIC ART
perfection we do not look for success; we resent
it, in a sense, when one approaches it too closely.
The great churches of the thirteenth century
tried, as man tries, to achieve the unattainable,
and in their failure they are sublime. One
achieved, or almost achieved Rheims and,
while we gave it the tribute of awed veneration,
our hearts went first to the more human monu-
ments of men, rather than of demigods. Rheims
almost achieved the unattainable; its martyrdom
has completed what its makers just failed of
attaining, and for the future in the hearts of
this and every succeeding generation, in saecula
saeculorum^ it will stand first in mind and in heart
as the perfect work of man when he wrought in
the fear of God.
Ten years after the beginning of Rheims the
first stones were laid of Amiens, which progressed
slowly through the century, the west towers
being finished in the last quarter of the four-
teenth century. Wonderful as the church is,
with its perfectly developed chevet and dizzy
nave, its exquisite carvings, and its masterly
sculptures, it is the first evidence of the swerving
of the thirteenth-century builders toward self-
confident science and away from a purer artistic
impulse. It is too competent, too perfect in its
balancing of thrusts, in its concentration of loads,
LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE
in the sumptuous decorations of its west front.
It is true that it suffers bitterly from lack of the
glass that glorifies Chartres and Bourges, and
once was the crown of Rheims, but even this
could not quite have blinded one to the conscious-
ness that constructive intelligence was beginning
to take the place of aspiration and inspiration,
of joy in design and mastery of workmanship,
of the divine ardor that lifted the tall arches of
Bourges and made of the porches of Chartres
and of the doors of Rheims masterpieces equaled
only, if at all, on the Athenian Acropolis.
The choir of Le Mans is contemporary with
Amiens and has the same merits and the same
defects, at once the most ingenious and highly
articulated in its chevet construction, and
touched everywhere with the too perfect accom-
plishment of the structural engineer. Ten years
after Amiens the choir of Beauvais was begun,
and this was finished, with the crossing and spire,
in 1274. Man already had accomplished more
than he could rightly claim for his own. Here he
tried for still more and failed; for twelve years
later the spire and vault, which had been raised
higher than Amiens and on more slender sup-
ports, fell in ruins, and though the choir was later
rebuilt, with added reinforcements, the crossing
tower was never reconstructed. The tran-
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LAON CATHEDRAL WEST FRONT
CULMINATION OF GOTHIC ART
septs were built in the fifteenth century, and
beautiful as they are, it is the beauty of the artist
in ornament, not of the creator of an almost
living organism, such as Chartres or Rheims.
With the close of the thirteenth century all
the great work had been accomplished in France,
where it had begun two centuries before. In
the end man strove to attain by reason what is
granted only to faith and prayer, and, as always
happens in such circumstances, disaster followed
close. After this only two things were possible:
the freezing of tradition into that cold mastery
that produced such correct and imposing monu-
ments as St. Ouen and Cologne, or the wandering
off into the wilderness of exuberant fancy and
lawless fantasticism from which emerged the
sumptuous front of Rouen and the impossible
jewel-work of Brou.
I have taken a few churches from France alone
to use as examples of the perfection of Catholic
art. Of course the result is partial only, but it
is impossible to concentrate in an hour the
products of the two greatest centuries in history
and to give some hints as well of the vital
impulse that brought them into existence. One
cannot know Gothic art as a whole without
full regard for its manifestations in Great
Britain or Spain, or Flanders, or the upper
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Rhine, for that matter for this art was one;
it reached from the Mediterranean to the
Firth of Forth, and from the Danube to the
Atlantic. There is no justification for those
who see in it only certain new and con-
summate structural inventions and devices and
so try to confine the name to masonry struc-
tures covered by ribbed and pointed vaults, or
to those where the system of balanced thrusts
is perfectly adhered to. Gothic is a spirit, as
well as a mode more than a mode the spirit
of a triumphant and universal Catholic culture;
and you can make of it no less, as you cannot
make of it more.
In Great Britain this culture was peculiarly
deep and compelling, and its art therefore is of
the noblest order, from Glastonbury through the
whole wonderful sequence of Salisbury, West-
minster, Lincoln, York Abbey, Guisborough,
Gloucester, and the chapel of Henry VII, where
it ends at last as French Gothic ended in Rouen
and the transepts of Beauvais. In France the
work was episcopal, communal, and secular; in
England it was largely and the best of it
monastic, which gives it a quality all its own and
invaluable in its record of the nature and the
influence of this greatest of mediaeval agencies
for the spreading of culture and civilization. In
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CULMINATION OF GOTHIC ART
France, again, the triumphant work is that of the
vast communal cathedrals; in England it is not
only of the almost equally vast abbeys, it is
even more especially of the myriad little parish
churches which developed a character and a
personality peculiar to themselves, equaled no-
where else, and as perfect in their way as the
overwhelming glory and majesty of Bourges or
Notre Dame.
France and England are the two great centers
of, mediaeval art expression, and France and
England were the two countries where mediaeval
culture reached its point of perfect development.
In almost every other part of Europe we find,
however, Gothic architecture, and in certain
directions, as in painting, greater results than
were achieved among Franks and Anglo-Saxons.
There is a very noble early Gothic in Spain, and
there also, and in Flanders, Italy, and the Rhine-
land, an art of later mediaevalism that is ex-
quisitely beautiful in its combination of delicacy
and opulent fancy. In every case it is tinged
with a strong and vital nationalism, differen-
tiating itself from the art of every other land,
yet invariably true in essentials and in spirit to
the great unity that, in spite of minor wars and
rivalries, bound Europe together as never before
or since.
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LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE
From the beginning of the fourteenth century
signs of decline showed themselves in architec-
ture, but in all the other arts the advance was
almost feverish in its intensity, particularly in
poetry and painting and letters; and even in the
failing architecture the loss was recorded rather
in the great cathedrals and churches than in the
minor productions of castles and civic halls and
dwellings. Until a few months ago eastern
France and Belgium were glorious with the
splendid works of a culture still dominant in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, though now
they are embers and ashes, after having been
granted immunity by the contending armies of
three centuries.
And this art continued in all its manifold
phases until the Reformation, when, the impulse
that had lasted for fifteen generations being
withdrawn, it ceased almost in a day, and,
except in music and poetry and spasmodically
in painting has never been restored, though five
other centuries have passed, clamorous for art,
insistent in its practice, ignorant of how it was
to be attained.
If we look for the secret of this strange and
compelling art, we find it (as I have tried to show)
in the unique culture of the time, which was the
result of a triumphant and universally accepted
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BEAUVAIS CATHEDRAL SOUTH TRANSEPT
CULMINATION OF GOTHIC ART
religious faith, a philosophy that supplemented
instead of denying it, a just estimate of com-
parative values (strikingly unlike our own),
and an industrial and economic system that
may have lacked the earmarks of what we are
pleased to call civilization, but produced fruits
of character which the latter sometimes fails to
reveal.
There was, we must always remember, but
one faith and one Church, and these were not,
as now, divided into an hundred inimical camps
and accepted as accessories to a dominating life
constituted on lines essentially antagonistic.
Religion was the prime consideration, the one
great reality, the personal possession of every
man, and the Church was the concrete fact that
made religion operative. Everywhere was a
perfectly organized monasticism, more perva-
sive even than the secular priesthood, and every
monastery was a center of culture, of education,
and of order. With a very remarkable com-
munal spirit went equal individuality, liberty,
and independence. Capitalism was unknown,
labor controlled its own destinies as it never has
succeeded in doing since, and the guild system
produced a condition of industrial vigor and
efficiency that guaranteed a great measure of
justice.
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It would be impossible to exaggerate the im-
portance of the guild system in connection with
the quality of the work produced. The Greek
workmen were slaves under a group of highly
'specialized experts; the Romans, slaves also,
subject to the orders of a superior type of freed-
men who were employed by their masters as
we employ milliners and decorators; the me-
diaeval artificers were free citizens strengthened
by co-operative association, and each man was
in himself an artist, granted the independence
of action due to such, and working under a power-
fully fostered impulse of emulation that is the
particular bete noire of the trade unions of today.
There was no such thing as an architect, superior
and supreme. An architect, as we count him
today, is a sign of inferior culture, necessary but
regrettable. There were master-workmen then,
but each was simply primus inter pares , inspiring
and co-ordinating, but leaving to his fellows
their just share in invention and their free field
for creative effort and aesthetic expression.
Behind the vitalizing power of religion and the
stimulus of free expression lay certain immemo-
rial traditions that undoubtedly reached back
through the mysterious Comacini, with their
traditions of symbolism and of mystic significa-
tion in numbers and forms and their relations,
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CULMINATION OF GOTHIC ART
together with those that controlled the variations,
irregularities, and refinements in the plan and in
the vertical elements of a building. This whole
question of symbolism and structural refine-
ments is as baffling as it is fascinating. There
is no longer room for questioning the existence
of these things, and we owe much to the persis-
tent investigations of Professor Goodyear, which
have finally demonstrated the premeditated
quality of the universal irregularities that reveal
themselves in all the best of the buildings of the
Middle Ages. The rationale of this strange
subtlety is still to be found, but the thing itself
is there, and it possibly reaches back through
different races and nationalities at least to the
time of the building of the Temple in Jerusalem,
and it is as certainly one of the great elements
in the perfect beauty of mediaeval work.
To this ancient and almost prehistoric form
of tradition was added all the peculiar quality
that grew out of the religion of Christianity,
and while we need not accept the mystical and
exaggerated theories of Huysmans, we must
admit that there is in all mediaeval work a great
mystery of symbolism and structural refinement,
of which we ourselves know nothing; for with
the coming in of capitalism after the close of
the Middle Ages, the workman and craftsman
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became slaves again, the secrets all were lost, the
sequence of tradition destroyed, and we are now
left naked to the tender mercies of the architect,
the general contractor, and unionized labor.
I have already spoken of the contributory
part played by all the other arts in the great
result, of the revitalized old arts of sculpture
and painting and music, of the new arts, such as
stained glass. In point of fact, it is wrong to use
the word "contributory"; for it was not a case
of many arts united to one end, it was rather
one art y as one and indivisible as the Catholic
religion and the Catholic Church, expressing
itself in many ways and through different types
of artists. With the Renaissance this unity was
broken, art split up into as many followings as
there were theological heresies during the Ref-
ormation, and no steps have been taken toward
restoring that unity again. Art today is in the
condition of Germany after the break-up of the
Empire, a hundred little piffling states, none
knowing where it was or what it existed for, and
with no co-ordination and no sense of unity. As
there, at times, through the whim of fate, some
margrave or grand duke or elector was born
greater than his kind, who gave for a moment a
sudden splendor to his little state, so now, in
any one of the arts, may arise, and does arise, a
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CULMINATION OF GOTHIC ART
genius who spreads a temporary glory on his
little art, as Wagner or Browning or Richardson
or St. Gaudens or Sargent; but each passes, and
his art returns again to its normal level of
mediocrity and general aimlessness.
Is there any possibility of recovery, of the
finding again of the great aim that restores the
vitalizing spirit, that unites art once more with
many methods but one end ? The art we have
been considering gives the answer, the conditions
now existing for half a year the opportunity.
Civilization, our civilization, without culture and
without any adequate sense of comparative
values, has broken down in universal and cata-
clysmic war. It is no war of wilful kings or
conscienceless diplomatists; it is no war without
excuse and without reason for existence. Inevit-
able, unescapable, it involves the world with the
grim fatalism that brought the universal Empire
of Rome to its most timely end. When the cul-
ture of the Middle Ages was overwhelmed by the
civilization of the Renaissance, certain tendencies
were initiated that were bound to work them-
selves out to their logical conclusion. They have
done so, and the perfect climax reveals itself
in that region of Europe, and under the di-
rection of that people, which last of all sur-
rendered its heathenism to Christianity, but too
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late to acquire the everlasting benefits of the
Middle Ages. On all the nations of the earth
has come a great fear, for they see now what
they themselves have made, and the evil and
dark wrong it has produced. This is the great
war between civilization and culture, between
as has been said Corsica and Galilee, between
the triumphant Renaissance-Reformation and
a recrudescent mediaevalism.
Where the victory will rest is no question for
argument; the answer is foreordained. Already
the great and efficient system of modern civiliza-
tion has over-passed its term and it must yield
to something older and better, to that opposing
culture which is the everlasting enemy of Kultur^
a culture made up of that religion which is true
because it is revealed by God, that philosophy
which supplements religion instead of denying it
and adapts its spiritual and mystical content to
the limited and finite human intelligence, that
art which is the harmonizing of both and their
perfect and divinely ordained expression.
The new-found art of mediaevalism has re-
vealed to the world the possibilities and the
significance of art at its highest; it has led us
back to the discovery of the comprehensive,
stimulating, and character-building culture be-
hind it. Through these things we can gain an
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CULMINATION OF GOTHIC ART
answer to the appalling question forced on us by
the Great War, seeing now the true nature of the
civilization that could have issue in such a thing
as this, realizing where, in spite of official "pa-
pers" of whatever color, right rests, and wrong,
and finally realizing the lines on which, once the
purging of the world is over, the new era must
be built if the beneficent and regenerating cul-
ture of true religion, sound philosophy, and vital
art is to return to a wasted but repentant and
regenerate world.
The study of mediaeval art and mediaeval
culture is not, at this time, a trivial playing with
archaeology. It is the finding of the answer to
the great question propounded by a world at war.
[63]
PRINCIPLES OF ARCHITECTURAL
COMPOSITION
and
MODERN ARCHITECTURE
BY
THOMAS HASTINGS
Ill
PRINCIPLES OF ARCHITECTURAL
COMPOSITION
Composition is not a subject for systematic
analysis. We may learn about it in the lecture-
room and by reading books, but in this way we
can never acquire the art of composing. As in
the case of the painter or sculptor, the architect
must be apprenticed. Mere work never made
an artist; a great work was never produced
without great working. A man can never be a
great artist without great industry. The extraor-
dinary amount of work done, and well done,
by the great masters in art work which has
survived is incomprehensible to the modern
artist. A man may think that he must wait for
a so-called inspiration; but the real artist will
find something to do for every hour and leave
inspiration to take care of itself. Inspiration
will come oftener, and with greater power, when
the artist works without waiting for it.
Let us undertake less and work more. The
mere direction of a number of draughtsmen to
do our work for us is not art. As soon as the
architect gives up the T-square and triangle and
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only directs others, he no longer advances, but
retrogrades by this method of trying to manu-
facture architectural designs. Nor is it honest
for an architect to pretend to be the author of
work that others are doing for him, any more
than it would be for a painter, a sculptor, or a
writer to take credit for work he has not done.
There are many principles upon which the
architect works and many laws which guide him
in his study which it would be impossible to
formulate, because he knows them intuitively.
There are many vital things in the art of composi-
tion, just as there are in our everyday life, which
are none the less true because we know them by
intuition. The fact that we cannot formulate
these things does not make them in any sense
the less real. It is also just as true that there
are many things in art which can be learned
only by instruction and in which it will not do
to trust to intuition. A proper instruction in
these things will quicken and develop the
intuition.
The most difficult thing in composition (and I
believe this to be true of all art) is to know how
to be simple, but to be simple without being
stupid and colorless; to be firm and strong with-
out being hard and angular; to have good detail,
which, on the one hand, does not assert itself to
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ARCHITECTURAL COMPOSITION
the injury of the ensemble, and, on the other
hand, is not timid for fear of a want of refine-
ment. When a man has acquired a certain
knowledge of his art, timidity is almost as bad
as vulgarity and weakness as unpardonable as
coarseness.
The highest logic in art is truth. It is neither
logical nor true to have a great auditorium or
principal room running through three or four
stories of a building without some indication of
it in the facade. If you are anxious to introduce
into a composition a tower, a dome, or even an
insignificant feature where the practical condi-
tions imposed upon you will not allow you to
expose such a motive in plan, do not build the
motive, but do something else rather than resort
to deceit or constructive trickery. If we only
knew how to compose, the more variety offered us
in the conditions imposed the more interesting
would it be to look for the artistic solution of the
problem. It is right to be logical; but a work of
art was never beautiful solely because logical.
There is no one who does more harm than the
mere purist who worships what he thinks logic,
but what is only prejudice, while he is blind to
the fact that he is admiring and encouraging
falsehood and vice in art and trampling truth
under foot.
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The more fertile the imagination of the com-
poser the more carefully should he train his
judgment, so that he will know what does not
look well in his own work with as much facility
and readiness as he would know what does not
look well in the work of those associated with
him. He must be his own impartial judge. A
bad idea suppressed is a triumph for the good.
There seem to be two mistaken tendencies in
our American methods of architectural education.
The one class of men with whom we have to
contend includes those who would dispense with
the triangle, compass, and T-square, and with
such familiarity with the orders and the prin-
ciples of composition as will enable the student
to use them with the utmost facility. They
neglect these things, forsooth, to make room for
what they call clever sketching. These men seem
to have a peculiar disdain for the legitimate
means of study, as though they were inartistic.
The other class of men includes the pretended
"savants" who would learn their profession as
though a good knowledge of the history and
literature of their art, with a course of general
lectures, were all-sufficient, if followed by a few
years of practical office experience.
To these so-called "savants," or the men who
would teach architecture only in scientific or
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ARCHITECTURAL COMPOSITION
literary ways, it should be said that architecture
is an art rather than a science, and that when
the architect is most skilled in his art he has
least need of recourse to science. Of course, an
architect must be familiar with descriptive
mathematics for the purpose of calculating the
intersection of vaults and roof, and for various
problems in stereoptomy; but if the floor-plan
has been well studied from an artistic or aesthetic
point of view, there will rarely be left other diffi-
cult engineering and mathematical problems for
the architect to solve. Here is the key to the
entire problem.
All good composition begins with the thorough
study of the plan. Few seem to realize that the
floor-plan is anything more than a mere matter
of the convenient arrangement of the several
parts of the building. A good floor-plan, as seen
on paper, has proportion, form, scale, color,
values, and character; or it may be clumsy and
inelegant. It determines the relation to each
other of two of the three dimensions in space.
It involves and determines the entire composi-
tion; the silhouette or outline of the whole
structure is really projected on the plane of this
drawing.
Not only does the silhouette or outline of the
elevation in every sense depend upon the plan,
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but the best kind of perspective of it is here im-
plied, because we can see therein the position and
relative size of the different parts. When the
plan is well studied, then it constructs well,
builds well, and we need very little of analytical
mathematics to assist us in our construction.
Until modern times, how much mathematics
besides geometry and the descriptives did archi-
tects know, as compared with what we are given
to learn, and what did they know of the strength
of materials ? With them it was mostly a ques-
tion of good judgment with a proper and uncom-
mon understanding of constructive principles and
of stereoptomy, and the other descriptive mathe-
matics. Analytical mathematics is comparatively
a modern science. While there existed graphical
rules for the approximate determination of the
thrusts from arches as early as the thirteenth
century, yet it practically is only in the past
fifty years that the correct principles of construc-
tive analysis have been fully developed; and
there is still room for improvement in this
direction. Until recently architects probably
never calculated the strength of their materials
or the thrust of arches and vaults. With them
it was a question of intelligence, and not of
ingenuity. It was the qualitative rather than
the quantitative principles of construction that
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they studied, and these were always based upon
experiment or experience. It was by knowing
how to avoid difficult problems, with art in the
floor-plan, that they escaped having difficult
analytical problems to solve. We must always
give precedence to practice before laws and
theories.
If you were to show me a well-studied plan
for the first time, I should not hesitate to say
because of its beautiful proportions and the
ability of its design that there is absolutely no
necessity of calculating the thrusts of the arches
and the strength of materials, excepting for the
purpose of verification. In a well-studied floor-
plan there will almost always be artistic reasons
for making a pier economical in size and strong
enough to support the weight that it has to
carry. By pure mathematics we can determine
only approximately what should be the size of a
pier. The strength of materials must be esti-
mated. We select at random several specimens
of the stone to be used in our building. We
obtain crucial tests for this purpose, and so we
are supposed to learn from these few specimens
the average weight per cubic inch which the
stone will support. This we call our coefficient
of strength in the stone chosen for our building.
Taking into account the fact that the quarry
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where the stone is obtained may have a great
fissure running through it, or may have other
imperfections, the mathematician enters upon
his calculations to learn how large a pier built
of this stone should be to support the weight
that is to be above it. After this the architect
practically admits the inexactitude of his prem-
ises by increasing two or more times the size of
the pier, and calls this the factor of safety or
ignorance. I believe in such calculations for
purposes of verification, but, in general, the piers
will be about as safe to build upon when studied
by an educated architect as when calculated by
engineers.
It is really architecture and well-proportioned
masonry versus engineering and iron girders.
Each has its use, but they are not interchange-
able. Buildings have stood for centuries which
were constructed without a knowledge of modern
engineering, solely because their plans as seen on
paper were so well studied, so thoroughly artistic
and beautiful, that constructive difficulties were
avoided.
Now that photographs and illustrated books
are so accessible to the student, copying or
adaptation is a greater temptation than ever
before. We compile more than we compose;
but if our plan is first thoroughly studied to
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meet the practical requirements of the problem
in hand, then when interpreting this plan and
designing the fagade we can neither copy nor
adapt. Copying destroys progress in art and all
spontaneity.
So long as a great many inartistic buildings
are put up, the mathematical verification is
needed for the protection of human life. Of
course, there is one most unfortunate condition
imposed upon us in these days, under which
condition the plan has but a very small part to
play in the solution of the problem the so-called
skyscraper. Here all would agree that expert
mathematicians and engineers should be called
in consultation, just as they are called in for
questions of steam heating, ventilation, or elec-
trical work. But even here great economy might
obtain if with art the plan is so subdivided as
to permit of a good distribution of weights and
as much repetition as possible in the lengths of
steel beams and girders. In monumental archi-
tecture the thicknesses of walls and piers should
be proportionately related to the spans of the
arches or to the distances and floor spaces. The
thickness of a column should be proportioned to the
intercolumniation, or distance between columns.
Do not misunderstand me. I would not dis-
parage the thorough study of the plan from a
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utilitarian point of view. This is, in fact, the
principal channel through which our life and
habits can influence our composition and style.
Before beginning to study the general composi-
tion of the floor-plan, it is first necessary to
reduce the problem to its simplest form from a
utilitarian point of view, taking into account
the number of the principal rooms or divisions
and the use to which they are to be put, their
sizes, and the most reasonable form that should
be given them. This is, as it were, the theorem
or the program of the composition. If the ques-
tion of disposition is not thus thoroughly under-
stood at first, it will arrest the freedom of the
mind and the imagination.
When a plan has been well studied, then in
developing the exterior or interior few changes
will be needed, even in details. In the further
development of the scheme we need only fill our
minds and hearts with the spirit, the ideas, and
the sentiments of our age, and study to interpret
the plan, in order to reach the best results.
Of equal importance is the question of the
position or site of the building and the principal
points from which it will be seen. Certain dis-
tributions of the several parts of the building
that would be well for a low and flat country
would be inappropriate for a hill. The streets,
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ARCHITECTURAL COMPOSITION
promenades, or squares, or possibly water
river, lake, or sea should of necessity have a
great influence upon this distribution. The
architect should know how to dispose his masses
and should calculate upon the different effects
with these conditions of environment taken into
account. The plan which does not satisfy all
such given conditions is not only impracticable,
but must in consequence thereof be absolutely
inartistic; for a good building must have obvious
adaptation, both to its uses and to its environ-
ment. A plan has what we call good circulation
when it is so arranged or composed that there
is direct and easy communication between its
different parts.
In general, it may be said that there are three
kinds of floor-plans: the regular, the irregular,
and the picturesque. A monumental floor-plan
is almost always regular, unless the peculiarities
of the site, or requirements, make this impos-
sible. The regularity consists in the plan's hav-
ing one principal axe. The irregular plan is an
adaptation to the imperatives of an irregular
site. It secures as much symmetry in the ar-
rangement of its parts and proportions as the
limitations of the site permit. The picturesque
plan is not merely eccentric or lawless, but it
is an attempt to conform to the picturesque
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conditions of the environment at the same time
preserving as much of symmetry in its details as
such adaptation will allow.
For the sake of contrast the length of one
room is ofttimes at right angles to the length of
another room. This law of contrast is dominant
in all art, and nowhere is the recognition of this
law more important than in the design of a floor-
plan. In general, the distribution of the rooms
and the relation they bear to each other, also
the thickness of the walls and the way they
compose with each other, must give an interesting
interior and exterior.
An architect delights in the study of a great
plan St. Peter's, for example. The original
conception of this plan was Bramante's. With
many elements of greatness, his design looked
weak and proved to be weak. After his death
there were thirty-three years of misfortune and
accidents, though Guiliano di San Gallo, Vignola,
Peruzzi, and others did some good work in try-
ing to modify and improve Bramante's design.
Then Michelangelo began by destroying the
greater part of what had been done and gave
us most of the plan as we now see it: namely,
that part which directly supports and encom-
passes the dome. About one hundred years
after Bramante's death Maderno added to
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Michelangelo's work, which was in the form of a
Greek cross, extending the nave and changing
the plan to the form of the Latin cross. This
addition is inferior to all the rest of the work.
To this part of the building belongs the present
facade, which is not worthy of the rest of the
structure. It was a most unfortunate thing for
Maderno that his work should be handed down
to posterity between that of Michelangelo and
that of Bernini, who planned the splendid colon-
nade and galleries in the front of the building.
Without further reference to its history, looking
at the plan as a whole, we all feel that it is a
great building. This plan as an original work is
one of the greatest ever conceived by the genius
of man. Study the colonnade and galleries.
The direction of the Vatican stairs, or the Scala
Regia, on the right side of the church, is not at
right angles to the facade. Bernini skilfully
planned the straight portion of the galleries in
axe with these stairs, and then, in order to sym-
metrize, he made the other gallery to correspond
with it. It was of more importance to preserve
the axes and symmetry than to have parallel
lines. This arrangement not only made a more
interesting silhouette, but it also made a better
and more agreeable junction between the circu-
lar portion of the colonnade and the straight
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galleries. The forms of the piers at the two
junctions are skilfully arranged, and they are
charmingly repeated at the centers and extremi-
ties of the circular colonnade.
Again, think of the great Roman plans, the
basilicas transformed into churches, the great
Gothic cathedrals, and, in modern times, the
Paris Opera House, the plan of which, without
thought of the elevations, is the making of the
building.
Having considered the plans of buildings, we
might speak briefly of the plan of the immediate
surroundings. We have a very characteristic
name for this portion of the composition. We
call it the "sauce of the architecture.'* It is
this portion of the design which unites or marries
the building with its natural surroundings or the
landscape. Most of the same principles of com-
position obtain in the planning of this portion of
the work as in the planning of the building itself.
The architect should always have control of the
design or plan of the immediate surroundings of
his building.
If the site will allow it, the building should be
so placed as to have the greater portion of the
grounds on one side of it. This is very desirable,
especially when the site is small in proportion
to the size of the building. The object is to give
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a large and open space at least on one side,
instead of a small frame or fringe all the way
around the building.
It would seem as if this were merely common-
sense, and yet how little is the principle recog-
nized! How dreary are the suburban homes of
the poorer classes in this country! It is mainly
because a man, when he builds, places his small
square house in the center of a square lot with a
square walk around the house and a fence that
forms a square around the walk; and, as if
this were not enough, even the streets all form
squares outside his lot.
While the landscape or surroundings should
govern the general composition of the building
in the beginning, the building should in turn,
when completed, influence and govern the ar-
rangement and composition of that portion of
the landscape work which comes in immediate
contact with it. This landscape work is to sur-
round and to support the building, serving both
as frame and as pedestal. The immediate
accessories of the architecture, such as the ter-
races, balustrades, paths, fountains, or open
spaces and vistas which come nearest the build-
ing, are really a part of the building itself.
While speaking of composition in plan, some-
thing should be said with reference to the general
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plan of cities, that is, the laying out of streets,
avenues, or parks.
The plan of a city is rather an evolution than
the work of an architect, and so gives precious
testimony to the different phases of the life of
the people. Many of the most interesting sou-
venirs of the past are seen in the general dis-
position of the streets and public squares. How
much art, however, may be displayed in the
influence of this evolution can be seen by look-
ing at some of the cities of modern times. The
greater portion of every city is the accumulated
work of generation after generation. This devel-
opment is determined by local circumstances,
by the political constitution, and by the com-
mercial and domestic life of the inhabitants.
But happy is the city whose development in the
cutting of new avenues and the building of new
squares and parks has been governed or guided
by men of thorough architectural training.
In this country, I feel that with the many
good intentions in the appointment of federal
commissions for the planning of the future
development of cities, we architects have almost
always undertaken too much and have been too
ambitious in our planning. Such plans generally
defeat themselves, and, alas, ofttimes frighten
intelligent laymen. I know of several instances
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where work has been either entirely abandoned
or engineers have been employed and the archi-
tects disregarded. This is a great economic as
well as practical mistake.
The plan, once determined and well studied,
should suggest all it will in elevation and deter-
mine, in a way, all its component parts. Too
much emphasis cannot be given to the thorough
knowledge and understanding of the classic
orders, especially the Roman orders the foun-
dations of all modern architecture since the
Renaissance. In applying these classic orders
to composition, we must remember that restraint
is not bondage; it makes perfect freedom and
progress possible, while slavish bondage ends
every good work. Restraint does not destroy,
but promotes, originality, guiding and stimu-
lating it and opening the only safe paths which
lead to usefulness and success.
In our American enthusiasm for Greek archi-
tecture we have too often lost sight of the
greatness and nobility of the Roman school.
The Greeks have never been surpassed in exqui-
site beauty of form and proportion, in extreme
and subtle simplicity and refinement, or in the
perfect harmony which pervades their every
structure. They established the alphabet and
rhetoric of all the true architecture which has
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come into the world since their time. It seems
to me that most of their work was the outcome
of each generation being content to improve the
general composition bequeathed by the genera-
tion preceding, so as to make the temple, theater,
or choragic monument a little better than ever
before, thus coming so much nearer to perfection.
When Ictinus built the Parthenon, we might
almost say that the general composition was
bequeathed to him. I would not for a moment
say that it did not require just as high an order
of genius to take the general composition which
had been handed down and to make the Par-
thenon perhaps the most perfect and most intel-
lectual monument ever built as it required to
compose and originate the great dome of the
Pantheon with scarcely a precedent leading up
to it. This too was a great artistic achievement,
perhaps never surpassed in the further develop-
ment of domes. As if this were not sufficient
in itself, it was probably the first great structure
of this form on so large a scale that was ever
built; and, in fact, the Romans and Etruscans
were practically the originators of this mode of
construction.
The Roman architect worked with independ-
ence and a singular self-sufficiency as a composer.
His personality came to the foreground as he
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used this Greek alphabet and rhetoric to broaden
out his work in more elaborate composition.
Such buildings as the Baths of Caracalla, one
of the finest plans ever made, the Pantheon, the
Colosseum, the Basilica of Constantine, the sev-
eral triumphal arches, and many other buildings,
are not only great, but original, conceptions.
What a splendid development the Romans made
of the arch, both as a rational and a beautiful
mode of construction! They were certainly not
an imitative people. They did so much to make
architecture meet more varied conditions of life
that this brings them nearer to the still more
varied conditions of today. Bramante, San Galo,
Michelangelo, Paladio, Vignola, however, and all
the great architects of the Renaissance, in every
country, designed with the Roman orders for
their classic standards.
There may not be a column or entablature in
a building, but as long as there is a molding, a
cornice, a window-sill, or an architrave, the
architect will show in his work that he knows
his orders and is familiar with their proportions
and details.
Repetition is a governing principle. We Amer-
icans too often lose sight of this law for fear of
being monotonous. A certain amount of monot-
ony is a good thing, if we can get it in the right
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place and in the right way. What is there more
beautiful and more impressive than a row of
trees on either side of a straight country road!
On the other hand, variety is another principle.
It should always be characterized by order and
symmetry and should be subservient to the
ensemble of the composition.
Contrast in architecture is the bringing to-
gether of the two qualities or forms that are in
opposition to each other, such as: simple wall
surfaces with rich carving, light with shadow, a
perpendicular line in contrast with a horizontal,
a high story with a low story, a large opening
with a small opening, a high and narrow opening
with a broad and low opening. Contrast gives
composition warmth and color; it is one of the
salient characteristics of the Spanish Renais-
sance, and it is oftentimes found there in excess.
Probably this is due to the influence of national
character and climate.
The proper use of materials is to keep a true
harmony between the design and the material
in which it is to be executed, remembering that
stone has to be cut; iron forged or molded;
wood sawed, planed, or carved; while terra-
cotta has to be modeled, molded, and baked.
It would be useless for me to discuss how design
must take into account the character of the
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materials to be used in construction. All of us
know that a wooden column must be lighter
than a stone one and an iron column much
smaller than either, with sharper and more clean-
cut moldings, all its members being drawn out
longer and thinner. (These are the things that
it is best not to theorize about too much, but to
learn by practice.)
Perhaps the most important part of composi-
tion remains to be considered namely, propor-
tion and scale. In architecture, proportion is
the mutual relation of the dimensions of the
several parts of a building. For example, if an
arch looks well, it is because there is a proper
relation between its height and width. Good
proportions practically depend upon a refined
sense of what looks well and of what is in the
highest sense harmonious with the purpose of
the building. Vitruvius, Albert, and others have
given certain systems of geometrical formulas to
assist the architect in verifying or determining
proportions, both in plan and in elevation. I
believe that comparatively few artists have
strictly adhered to any of them or have even
taken many of them into serious account. There
are certain principles of proportion which all
must regard, but these principles cannot be
reduced to formulas. The dimensions of a
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principal room or court which is not square or
round i.e., when it is a parallelogram are
ofttimes either double the width or equal
to the diagonal of the square of the smaller
side.
I believe that as a rule these geometrical
formulas would hinder rather than help the
imagination. There are certain relations that
should exist between the diameter and the height
of a column or between the height of a column
and of the entablature and its intercolumniations.
Again, such simple rules as that the height of an
opening might be twice its width or that, under
other circumstances, the height should be equal
to the diagonal of the square of the smaller side,
as in determining the proper proportions of an
important room such simple rules as these,
modified according to circumstances, have al-
ways been accepted. The relation of one part
of a building to another practically constitutes
almost all that is beautiful in architecture. The
relation of a column to the arch or wall in con-
tact with it, whether over it, under it, or at one
side of it, the relation of one story to another,
of window openings to wall surfaces these are
all things, when we have new problems to solve,
which, if they cannot be determined by the study
of precedents, must be determined by that feeling
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and artistic judgment which come only with
practice.
Men have become accustomed to seeing things
done in a certain way, and, while this way can-
not be formulated and is sometimes vague, we
must conform to it wherever we can under our
conditions. There is therefore a kind of unwrit-
ten law of proportion which only helps the archi-
tect and by which he need be limited no more
than the painter or sculptor is limited in repre-
senting forms of nature. We are accustomed to
seeing the human figure with certain proportions,
and when we find in a drawing that these propor-
tions are violated it shocks our sensibilities, not
so much because such a deformity would not meet
the conditions of existence, but because we are
not accustomed to such proportions. The more
the architect draws from both architecture and
nature, the more quickened will his sensibilities
be to distinguish what is good from what is bad.
Conditions change or vary the proportions mate-
rially: for example, a column which has to sup-
port several stories must be heavier than one
which is only decorative or which is on the upper
floor, while a difference of materials would also
require a change of the proportions. It is well
known that a column which looks well with a
wall behind it would look thin if it were to stand
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out against a clear sky. Thus a monument in
the form of a single column surmounted by a
statue is generally only six or seven of its diam-
eters in height. Notwithstanding these varia-
tions, to meet exceptional conditions the true
artist endeavors to keep a certain judicious equi-
librium among all such variations. Much has
been written about the necessity of altering the
proportions of things which perspective fore-
shortens, or which are hidden in part by pro-
jecting cornices, or which will be seen from
different points of view, in order to meet these dif-
ferent conditions. I believe that too much has
been said upon this subject, and that, while
there should be some accommodation to different
conditions, there are not nearly so many required
as one would think. An important thing to
remember is that when any such accommodation
is made, or when conditions are in any way taken
into account, the final drawing of the elevation
with the shadows cast must in every case have
good proportions and look well.
A proof that a building which looks well in
plan and elevation is almost sure to look well in
execution or perspective is the fact that when
we examine the measured elevations of great
historical buildings, as given us in architectural
books, we never see any distortion of any kind
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to remedy the effects of foreshortening, or any
details increased in size so as to be out of pro-
portion in the drawing because they are to be
seen at a great height.
In general, the passer-by divines what pro-
jections conceal, because the shadows cast make
him unconsciously estimate these projections.
The mind works instinctively in making allow-
ance for distances, just as we imagine the size
of a ship or of a man seen in the distance. Thus
the judgment rectifies illusions. Most of the
exceptions are cases where a building has several
surfaces in different planes, one surface coming
behind another for example, a tower rising be-
hind a roof. Though the tower may need lifting
to be seen, it would be a great risk to lift it so
much that it does not look well in elevation.
There must be an intelligent disposition of
things and a proper method of carving or
modeling the details according to the height
for which they are intended rather than a
changing of proportions or an enlargement of
the ornament.
Closely allied to this question of proportion
is what is known among architects as scale.
This is one of the most subtle and indescribable
things in all art. Proportion and scale are dif-
ferent things, though closely related. Proportion
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is the relation between the different parts of a
composition; scale is the relation between the
size of all these parts and an imaginary unit of
measure which is determined by our sense of the
fitness of things. This imaginary unit is fixed
by our education, observation, and associations.
To illustrate: we associate with a horse and a
dog two different sizes. We might imagine a
dog the size of a horse, and yet well proportioned;
but he would be out of scale. One part of another
animal might be out of proportion with the rest
and yet not be out of scale; but one part out of
scale would of necessity be out of proportion, if
all the rest of the parts were not in scale with it.
A horse's head may be ill formed, yet it may
not be out of proportion; but if it is too large or
too small, then it is out of scale and out of
proportion also.
Experience and association demand a certain
accord between the size of an object and its
form. There is an intuitive demand in the
minds of all men that the size of any object,
though varying under different conditions, must
correspond with the unchangeable things that
surround it. The merit of a design should be
such that it would not be consistent to increase
or diminish any portion of the building, or even
any detail.
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The human figure is for the architect the unit
of measure, because its normal or average size
is most fixed upon his mind and because it was
by man and for man that everything in archi-
tecture was originally conceived and developed.
The height of a balustrade was for him to lean
upon or to protect him; the size of a door for
him to go through with comfort; the size of a
building stone was for him to handle with con-
venience and reasonable facility; the size of a
step was for him to mount. We might say
approximately that in ordinary circumstances
the balustrade should be about three feet high,
the door not less than eight, the building stone
from twelve to sixteen inches thick, the step six
inches rise and twelve inches tread. Now, when
these measurements meet the practical require-
ments they are right, not only from a utilitarian
point of view, but also from an artistic point of
view, and we speak of them as being in good
scale or in scale with the rest of the building.
The actual size in feet and inches of other things,
such as columns, pediments, windows, cornices,
arches, corbels, molding, ornaments, architraves,
etc., has not been fixed by utility. The architect
has acquired, by experience and association, a
sense which determines the size as well as the
proportions of these things, in order to make
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them appear in his building as they really
are, without having to compare them with
the size of a man standing by, for a unit of
measure.
With the variation of the size of the building
up to a given point, the number of parts or
motives in the building itself need not necessarily
change, but the relations that these parts have
to each other and their respective proportions
must change. To illustrate this principle: the
normal man is larger than the dwarf, or the horse
than the pony, but while in both instances the
same features exist in each, their proportions are
so different that in a photograph or an accurate
drawing we can always distinguish the normal
man from the dwarf or the horse from the pony.
This is because in all four cases the characteristic
features are in scale. This we feel either instinc-
tively or by observation.
Now take an architectural example. There
are certain buildings which do not look their
real size. Instead of being impressed with the
immensity of a building, we are surprised to find
how small a man looks when we see him standing
near it. That is because, while the proportions
may be, in general, good, the building lacks scale.
It could almost be said that it might be reduced
to one-half its size, and without some definite
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unit of measure to compare it with we should
scarcely notice the reduction.
In building, all things are good in scale when
they seem as large as they are. Bigness, for the
sake of bigness, is small art. Often a small
thing looks bigger than some big thing which
looks small. If we err one way or the other, it
is better to make a thing somewhat large in scale.
Yet things that are large in feet and inches may
be architecturally small. This entire question of
scale is too often neglected and should always be
given thought and careful study. Before begin-
ning to work, it is well to sketch a man at one
side of the paper, drawing him at the scale
to be adopted. This is for comparison and
guidance.
A large window and a large door look well if
not exaggerated. A large arch or a large column
in scale is imposing; if not in scale, it is ugly,
and its bigness only emphasizes its ugliness. In
general, when the size of a motive increases as,
for example, in a cornice the number of its
minor parts, such as moldings, should increase,
though by no means proportionately with the
increase of the cornice.
In our study, in order to understand fully the
true conditions of things and the real proportions
and the scale of our building, we should always
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blacken-in the walls of our plan, and draw and
color-in the shadows of our facades and sections;
otherwise we can never judge how the building
will look in execution. This way of rendering
drawings reveals the true proportions and con-
ditions of things, while a perspective drawing
distorts and misleads.
Though it is not universally the case, we can
generally detect either one, two, or three clearly
marked divisions in the height of a well-composed
building. There is, as it were, a beginning, a
middle, and an end in this vertical growth.
Possibly this comes from the fact that nature
itself seems to favor this triple division. We
see it in space length, breadth, and height; in
time past, present, and future; in the kingdoms
mineral, vegetable, and animal. We have
always seen the triune in the aspirations and
longings of men in ancient mythologies and
religions, and in Christianity itself in its idea of
the Trinity. There is a common tendency in
writing to run one's adjectives in triads, for ex-
ample: "He was honest, courteous, and brave"
a tendency which was very marked in
Dr. Johnson. Dr. Holmes thinks that this
comes of an instinctive and involuntary effort
of the mind to present a thought or image with
the three dimensions that belong to every solid,
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an unconscious handling of an idea as if it had
length, breadth, and thickness.
We have so few well-composed buildings in
the short history of American architecture that
we have a right to expect from those who govern
us such patriotism as will hold fast to the best
as well as the time-honored landmarks of our
national civilization. The historic monuments
of a people may be regarded as the features of
its countenance, through which is revealed the
soul of that people. They should show respect
for age. Our country has too few of these ex-
pressive lines of experience in its youthful his-
toric countenance, and should have the soul to
respect and save every one of them. It is per-
haps not strange if, in the mad excitement of
rebellion or revolution, men's passions lead them
to destroy the very best of their own inheritance;
but in times of peace, with calm and quiet delib-
eration to destroy the ancient landmarks which
our forefathers have set for us this seems utterly
irreverent and inexcusable.
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We American architects are ofttimes con-
fronted with the question why we have not an
architecture of our own one which is essentially
American; and why it is that so many of us who
have studied in Paris seem inclined to inculcate
the principles of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts into
our American architecture. The majority of
people do not seem to realize that in solving the
problems of modern life the essential is not so
much to be national, or American, as it is to be
modern, and of our own period.
The question of supreme interest is: What
influence has life in its different phases upon the
development of architectural style ? Style in
architecture is that method of expression in the
art which has varied in different periods, almost
simultaneously throughout the civilized world,
without reference to the different countries, be-
yond slight differences of national character,
mostly influenced by climate and temperament.
Surely modern architecture should not be the
deplorable creation of the would-be style in-
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ventors, the socialists who have penetrated the
world of art farther than they have the world of
politics, who are more concerned in promulgating
an innovation than in establishing a real improve-
ment so-called Futurists, New Thinkers, Cu-
bists, art nouveau followers, all unrelated to the
past without thought of traditions. No more
should modern architecture be the work of the
illogical architect, living in one age and choosing
a style from another, without rhyme or reason,
to suit his own fancy or that of his client.
The important and indisputable fact is not
generally realized that from prehistoric times
until now each age has built in one, and only
one, style. Since the mound-builders and cave-
dwellers, no people, until modern times, ever
attempted to adapt a style of a past epoch to
the solution of a modern problem. In such
attempts is the root of all modern evils. In each
successive style there has always been a distinc-
tive spirit of contemporaneous life from which
its root drew nourishment. But in our time,
contrary to all historic precedents, there is this
confusing selection from the past. Why should
we not be modern and have one characteristic
style expressing the spirit of our own life ? His-
tory and the law of development alike demand
that we build as we live.
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One might consider the history and develop-
ment of costumes to illustrate the principle
involved. In our dress today we are modern,
but sufficiently related to the past which we
realize when we look upon the portraits of our
f ancestors of only a generation ago. We should
not think of dressing as they did, or of wearing
a Gothic robe or a Roman toga; but, as indi-
vidual as we might wish to be, we should still
be inclined, with good taste, to dress according
to the dictates of the day.
The irrational idiosyncrasy of modern times
is the assumption that each kind of problem
demands a particular style of architecture.
Through prejudice, this assumption has become
so fixed that it is common to assume that if
building a church or a university we must make
it Gothic; if a theater, we must make it Renais-
sance. One man wants an Elizabethan house,
another wants his house early Italian. With
this state of things, it would seem as though the
serious study of character were no longer neces-
sary. Expression in architecture, forsooth, is
only a question of selecting the right style.
The two classes with which we must contend
are, on the one hand, those who would break
with the past, and, on the other, those who would
select from the past according to their own fancy.
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Style in its growth has always been governed
by the universal and eternal law of development.
If from the early times, when painting, sculpture,
and architecture were closely combined, we trace
their progress through their gradual development
and consequent differentiation, we cannot fail to
be impressed by the way in which one style has
been evolved from another. This evolution has
always kept pace with the progress of the po-
litical, religious, and economic spirit of each
successive age. It has manifested itself uncon-
sciously in the architect's designs, under the
imperatives of new practical problems, and of
new requirements and conditions imposed upon
him. This continuity in the history of architec-
ture is universal. As in nature the types and
species of life have kept pace with the successive
modifications of lands and seas and other physical
conditions imposed upon them, so has architec-
tural style in its growth and development until
now kept pace with the successive modifications
of civilization. For the principles of develop-
ment should be as dominant in art as they are
in nature. The laws of natural selection and
of the survival of the fittest have shaped the
history of architectural style just as truly as
they have the different successive forms of life.
Hence the necessity that we keep and cultivate
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the historic spirit, that we respect our his-
toric position and relations, and that we realize
more and more in our designs the fresh demands
of our time, more important even than the
demands of our environment.
What determining change have we had in the
spirit and methods of life since the revival of
learning and the Reformation to justify us in
abandoning the Renaissance or in reviving
mediaeval art Romanesque, Gothic, Byzantine,
or any other style ? Only the most radical
changes in the history of civilization, such as,
for example, the dawn of the Christian era and
of the Reformation and the revival of learning,
have brought with them correspondingly radical
changes in architectural style.
Were it necessary, we could trace two dis-
tinctly parallel lines, one the history of civiliza-
tion and the other the history of style in art.
In each case we should find a gradual develop-
ment, a quick succession of events, a revival,
perhaps almost a revolution and a consequent
reaction, always together, like cause and effect,
showing that architecture and life must corre-
spond. In order to build a living architecture,
we must build as we live.
Compare the Roman orders with the Greek
and with previous work. When Rome was at
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its zenith in civilization, the life of the people
demanded of the architect that he should not
only build temples, theaters, and tombs, but
baths, basilicas, triumphal arches, commemo-
rative pillars, aqueducts, and bridges. As each
of these new problems came to the architect, it
was simply a new demand from the new life of
the people, a new work to be done. When the
Roman architect was given such varied work to
do, there was no reason for his casting aside all
precedent. While original in conception, he was
called upon to meet these exigencies only with
modifications of the old forms. These modifica-
tions very gradually gave us Roman architecture.
The Roman orders distinctly show themselves
to be a growth from the Greek orders, but the
variations were such as were necessary so that
the orders might be used with more freedom in
a wider range of problems. These orders were
to be brought in contact with wall or arch, or to
be superimposed upon one another, as in a Roman
amphitheater. The Roman recognition of the
arch as a rational and beautiful form of con-
struction, and the necessity for the more intri-
cate and elaborate floor-plan, were among
the causes which developed the style of the
Greeks into what is now recognized as Roman
architecture.
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We could multiply illustrations without limit.
The battlements and machicolated cornices of
the Romanesque, the thick walls and the small
windows placed high above the floor, tell us of
an age when every man's house was indeed his
castle, his fortress, and his stronghold. The
style was then an expression of that feverish
and morbid aspiration peculiar to mediaeval life.
The results are great, but they are the outcome
of a disordered social status not like our own,
and such a status could in nowise be satisfied
with the simple classic forms of modern times,
the architrave and the column.
Compare a workman of today building a
Gothic church, slavishly following his detail
drawings, with a workman of the fourteenth
century doing such detail work as was directed
by the architect, but with as much interest,
freedom, and devotion in making a small capital
as the architect had in the entire structure.
Perhaps doing penance for his sins, he praised
God with every chisel-stroke. His life interest
was in that small capital; for him work was
worship; and his life was one continuous psalm
of praise. The details of the capital, while beau-
tiful, might have been grotesque, but there was
honest life in them. To imitate such a capital
today, without that life, would be affectation.
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Now a Gothic church is built by laborers whose
one interest is to increase their wages and dimin-
ish their working hours. The best Gothic work
has been done and cannot be repeated. When
attempted, it will always lack that kind of medi-
aeval spirit of devotion which is the life of
mediaeval architecture.
We might enumerate such illustrations in-
definitely.
If one age looks at things differently from
another age, it must express things differently.
We are still living today in the period of the
Renaissance. With the revival of learning, with
the new conceptions of philosophy and religion,
with the great discoveries and inventions, with
the altered political systems, with the fall of the
Eastern Empire, with the birth of modern science
and literature, and with other manifold changes
all over Europe, came the dawn of the modern
world; and with this modern world there was
evolved what we should now recognize as the
modern architecture, the Renaissance, which
pervaded all the arts and which has since en-
grossed the thought and labor of the first masters
in art. This Renaissance is a distinctive style
in itself, which, with natural variations of char-
acter, has been evolving for almost four hundred
years.
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So great were the changes in thought and life
during the Renaissance period that the forms of
architecture which had prevailed for a thousand
years were inadequate to the needs of the new
civilization, to its demands for greater refinement
of thought, for larger truthfulness to nature, for
less mystery in form of expression, and for
greater convenience in practical living. Out of
these necessities of the times the Renaissance
style was evolved taking about three genera-
tions to make the transition and around no
other style have been accumulated such vast
stores of knowledge and experience under the
lead of the great masters of Europe. Therefore
whatever we now build, whether church or dwel-
ling, the law of historic development requires
that it be Renaissance, and if we encourage the
true principles of composition it will involun-
tarily be a modern Renaissance, and with a view
to continuity we should take the eighteenth
century as our starting-point, because here
practically ended the historic progression and
entered the modern confusion.
Imagine the anachronism of trying to satisfy
our comparatively realistic tastes with Gothic
architectural sculpture or with paintings made by
modern artists! Never, until the present gen-
eration, have architects presumed to choose from
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the past any style in the hope of doing as well as
was done in the time to which that style belonged.
In other times they would not even restore or
add to a historic building in the style in which
it was first conceived. It is interesting to notice
how the architect was even able to complete a
tower or add an arcade or extend a building,
following the general lines of the original com-
position without following its style, so that
almost every historic building within its own
walls tells the story of its long life. How much
more interesting alike to the historian and the
artist are these results!
In every case where the mediaeval style has
been attempted in modern times the result has
shown a want of life and spirit, simply because
it was an anachronism. The result has always
been dull, lifeless, and uninteresting. It is with-
out sympathy with the present or a germ of
hope for the future only the skeleton of what
once was. We should study and develop the
Renaissance and adapt it to our modern condi-
tions and wants, so that future generations can
see that it has truly interpreted our life. We
can interest those who come after us only as we
thus accept our true historic position and de-
velop what has come to us. We must accept
and respect the traditions of our fathers and
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grandfathers and be, as it were, apprenticed by
their influence. Without this we shall be only
copyists, or be making poor adaptations of what
was never really ours.
The time must come and, I believe, in the
near future when architects of necessity will be
educated in one style, and that will be the style
of their own time. They will be so familiar
with what will have become a settled con-
viction and so loyal to it that the entire
question of style, which at present seems to be
determined by fashion, fancy, or ignorance, will
be kept subservient to the great principles of com-
position which are now more or less smothered
in the general confusion.
Whoever demands of an architect a style not
in keeping with the spirit of his time is responsible
for retarding the normal progress of the art. We
must have a language if we would talk. If there
be no common language for a people, there can
be no communication of ideas, either architectural
or literary. I am convinced that the multiplicity
of printed books and periodicals written by liter-
ary critics and essayists who have not even been
apprenticed but are writing with authority about
art, has, perhaps, been more instrumental than
anything else in bringing about this modern con-
fusion. I believe that we shall one day rejoice
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in the dawn of a modern Renaissance, and, as
always has been the case, we shall be guided by
the fundamental principles of the classic. It will
be a modern Renaissance, because it will be
characterized by the conditions of modern life.
It will be the work of the Renaissance architect
solving new problems, adapting his art to an
honest and natural treatment of new materials
and of new conditions. Will he not also be un-
consciously influenced by the twentieth-century
spirit of economy and by the application of his
art to all modern industries and speculations ?
Only when we come to recognize our true
historic position and the principles of continuity
in history, when we allow the spirit of our life
to be the spirit of our style, recognizing, first of
all, that form and all design are the natural and
legitimate outcome of the nature or purpose of
the object to be made only then can we hope
to find a real style everywhere asserting itself.
Then we shall see that consistency of style which
has existed in all times until the present genera-
tion; then, too, shall we find it in every per-
formance of man's industry, in the work of the
artist or the artisan, from the smallest and most
insignificant jewel or book-cover to the noblest
monument of human invention or creation,
from the most ordinary kitchen utensil to the
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richest and most costly furniture or painted
decoration.
We must all work and wait patiently for the
day to come when we shall work in unison with
our time. Our Renaissance must not be merely
archaeological the literal following of certain
periods of the style. To build a French Louis XII
or Francis I or Louis XIV house, or to make an
Italian cinquecento design, is indisputably not
modern architecture. No architect until our
times slavishly followed the characteristics of
any particular period, but he used all that he
could get from what preceded him, solving such
new problems as were the imperatives of his
position.
What did a man like Pierre Lescot, the archi-
tect of the Henry II Court of the Louvre, en-
deavor to do ? It would have been impossible
for him actually to define the style of his own
period. That is for us, his successors, to do.
For him the question was how to meet the new
demands of contemporaneous life. He studied
all that he could find in classic and Renaissance
precedents applicable to his problem. He com-
posed, never copying, and always with that
artistic sense of the fitness of things which was
capable of realizing what would be harmonious
in his work. In the same way all architects, at
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all times, contributed to a contemporaneous
architecture, invariably with modifications to
meet new conditions. This must be done with
a scholarly appreciation of that harmonious re-
sult which comes only from a thorough educa-
tion. So, with freedom of the imagination and
unity of design, an architecture is secured
expressive of its time.
Again, as in all times until now, there will be
design and not mere novelty in the carriage,
automobile, or boat, as well as in the endless
variety of implements of utility or amusement.
How is it with us in modern times ? Not only
do many architects slavishly follow the character
of some selected period, but they also deliber-
ately take entire motives of composition from
other times and other places to patch and apply
them to our new conditions and new life. Every
man's conscience must speak for itself as to
whether such plagiarism is right; but while the
moral aspect of this question has very little to
do with art, yet intellectually such imitative
work, though seemingly successful, positively
stifles originality, imagination, and every effort
to advance in the right direction.
The way is now prepared for us to endeavor
to indicate what are some of the principal causes
of the modern confusion in style. With us
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Americans an excessive anxiety to be original is
one of the causes of no end of evil. The imagina-
tion should be kept under control by given prin-
ciples. We must have ability to discern what is
good among our own creations and courage to
reject what is bad. Originality is a spontaneous
effort to do work-in the simplest and most natural
way. The conditions are never twice alike; each
case is new. We must begin our study with the
floor-plan and then interpret that floor-plan in the
elevation, using forms, details, and sometimes
motives, with natural variations and improve-
ments on what has gone before. The true artist
leaves his temperament and individuality to take
care of themselves.
Some say that if this is all that we are doing
there is nothing new in art; but if we compose
in the right way there can be nothing that is
not new. Surely you would not condemn nature
for not being original because there is a certain
similarity between the claw of a bird and the
foot of a dog, or between the wing of a bird and
the fin of a fish. The ensemble of each creature
is the natural result of successive stages of life,
with variations of the different parts according
to the principles of evolution. There are count-
less structural correspondences in the skeletons
of organic life, but these show the wonderful
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MODERN ARCHITECTURE
unity of the universe; and yet, notwithstanding
this unity, nature is flooded with an infinite
variety of forms and species of life.
We must logically interpret the practical con-
ditions before us, no matter what they are. No
work to be done is ever so arbitrary in its prac-
tical demands but that the art is elastic and
broad enough to give these demands thorough
satisfaction in more than a score of different
ways. If only the artist will accept such prac-
tical imperatives as are reasonable, if only
he will welcome them, one and all, as friendly
opportunities for loyal and honest expression
in his architecture, he will find that these very
conditions will do more than all else besides
for his real progress and for the development of
contemporaneous art in composition.
Never resent what at first thought may seem
to be limitations and in despair try to change
conditions which, if reasonable, should suggest
new and interesting design. Frederick the Great
said: "The great art of policy is not to swim
against the stream, but to turn all events to
one's own profit. It consists rather in deriving
advantage from favorable conjunctures than in
preparing such conjunctures." And when told
of the death of the Emperor Charles VI, he said
to a friend who was with him: "I give you a
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problem to solve: When you have the advantage,
are you to use it or not ?"
The architects in the early history of America
were distinctly modern and closely related in
their work to their contemporaries in Europe.
They seem not only to have inherited traditions
but religiously to have adhered to them. I
believe that it is because of this that the genuine
and naive character of their work, which was of
its period, still has a charm for us which cannot
be imitated. McComb, Bulfinch, Thornton,
Letrobe, L'Enfant, Andrew Hamilton, Strick-
land, and Walters were sufficiently American
and distinctly modern, working in the right
direction, unquestionably influenced by the Eng-
lish architecture of Indigo Jones, Sir Christopher
Wrenn, James Gibbs, Sir William Chambers, and
others. Upjohn and Renwick, men of talent,
were misled, alas, by the confusion of their times,
the beginning of this modern chaos, the so-called
Victorian-Gothic period.
Gifted as Richardson was, and great as was
his personality, his work is always easily distin-
guished, because of its excellent quality, from the
so-called Romanesque of his followers. But I
fear the good he did was largely undone because
of the bad influence of his work upon his pro-
fession. Stumpy columns, squat arches, and
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rounded corners, without Richardson, form a
disease from which we are only just recovering.
McComb and Bulfinch would probably have
frowned upon Hunt for attempting to graft the
transitional Loire architecture of the fifteenth
century upon American soil, and I believe that
all will agree that the principal good he accom-
plished was due to the great distinction of his
art and to the moral character of the man himself
rather than to the general influence and direction
of his work.
Whether we agree with Charles F. McKim or
not in wanting to revive in the nineteenth cen-
tury the Italian Renaissance of the sixteenth
century, the art of Bramante, St. Galo, and
Peruzzi, he had perhaps more of the true sense
of beauty than any of his predecessors in Ameri-
can art. His work was always refined, individual,
and had a distinctly more classic tendency in
his most recent buildings.
We have seen that the life of an epoch makes
its impress upon its architecture. It is equally
true that the architecture of a people helps to
form and model its character, in this way react-
ing upon it. If there be beauty in the plans of
our cities and in the buildings which adorn our
public squares and highways, its influence will
make itself felt upon every passer-by. Beauty
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in our buildings is an open book of involuntary
education and refinement, and it uplifts and
ennobles human character. It is a song and a
sermon without words. It inculcates in a people
a true sense of dignity, a sense of reverence and
respect for tradition, and it makes an atmos-
phere in its environment which breeds the proper
kind of contentment, that kind of contentment
which stimulates true ambition. If we would
be modern, we must realize that beauty of de-
sign and line in construction build well, and with
greater economy and endurance than construc-
tion which is mere engineering. The qualitative
side of a construction should first be considered,
then the quantitative side. The practical and
the artistic are inseparable. There is beauty in
nature because all nature is a practical problem
well solved. The truly educated architect will
never sacrifice the practical side of his problem.
The greatest economic as well as architectural
calamities have been performed by so-called
practical men with an experience mostly bad and
with no education.
It is, I believe, a law of the universe that the
forms of life which are fittest to survive nay,
the very universe itself are beautiful in form
and color. Natural selection is beautifully ex-
pressed, ugliness and deformity are synonymous;
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and so it is in the economy of life what would
survive must be beautifully expressed.
Has the world beheld in art that which we
call style, changing with each age, the visible
expression of man's inner consciousness, appear-
ing above the horizon with the dawn of civiliza-
tion, gradually developing in orderly sequence,
one degree upon another, following the course of
time ? Has all this come into existence only to
disappear again on the other side of the small
circle of its horizon ? Has history recorded its
progress from dawn to twilight, unconscious of
its rapid fading into the darkness of night ? Or
will it rise again, following the natural laws of
the universe ? Or, like the falling star, is it lost
in the confusion of eternal space, never to appear
again ?
As each age tells its own story in its own lan-
guage, shall we tell our story to future genera-
tions in our own way ? A great tide of historic
information has constantly flowed through the
channel of monuments erected by successive
civilizations, the art of each age being an open
book recording the life and spirit of the epoch,
ofttimes verifying the truth of its own literature,
an integral part of the whole scheme of evidence.
The archaeologist thus supplements the historian,
but alas, with the chain divided, the future will
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have drifted away from the past into a vast
ocean of discord, where architectural continuity
will have ceased to exist.
The recently discovered buried cities of Assyria
give us a vivid idea of the civilization lost
to history. The Pyramid of Cheops and the
temples of Karnak and Luxor tell us more of
that ingenuity which we cannot fathom and
of the grandeur and life of the Egyptian
people than the scattered and withered docu-
ments or fragments of inscriptions that have
chanced to survive the crumbling influences of
time.
The Parthenon and the Erectheum bespeak
the intellectual refinement of the Greeks as much
as their epic poems or their philosophy. The
triumphal arches, the aqueducts, the Pantheon,
and the basilicas of Rome tell us more of the
great constructive genius of the early republic
and the empire of the Caesars than the frag-
mentary and contradictory annals of wars and
political intrigues. The unsurpassed and inspir-
ing beauty of the Gothic cathedrals which
bewilder us, and the cloisters which enchant us,
impress on our minds a living picture of the
feverish and morbid aspirations of mediaeval
times, a civilization that must have had mingled
with its mysticism an intellectual and spiritual
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APSE OF CHURCH OF ST. PIERRE, CAEN
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grandeur which the so-called Dark Ages of the
historian have failed adequately to record; and
in America, even amid the all-absorbing work of
constructing a new government, our people
found time to speak to us of today in the silent
language of their simple colonial architecture
of the temperament and character of our fore-
fathers.
And when in the tumult of this modern war-
fare men's passions overcome their reason, and
the great monuments of history that have sur-
vived the ages are subjected to the onslaught of
modern armament, let us hope that they may not
be further subjected to the work of the architect
who would fain restore them in the style which
has passed and so rob us of all that is left.
Let them be protected by every device from
further destruction, to tell the story of this
twentieth-century civilization, this vaunted
culture which has failed to respect and protect
its heritage.
Will our monuments of today adequately re-
cord the splendid achievements of our contem-
poraneous life, the spirit of modern justice and
liberty, the progress of modern science, the genius
of modern invention and discovery, the elevated
character of our institutions ? Will disorder and
confusion in our modern architectural styles
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express the intelligence of this twentieth century ?
Would that we might learn a lesson from the
past that modern architecture, wherever under-
taken, might more worthily tell the story of the
dignity of this great epoch and be more expressive
of our contemporaneous life!
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and
THE LANGUAGE OF FORM
BY
CLAUDE BRAGDON
ORGANIC ARCHITECTURE
With the echoes of distant battles in our ears
and in the face of economic and industrial prob-
lems which clamor for solution, it may seem the
height of futility to discuss mere matters of
aesthetics. It is not so, however, any more than
it is futile to forecast the harvest even while
last year's stubble disappears before the plough.
Outworn social orders go down before the can-
non and sword in order that mankind may realize
new ideals of beauty and beneficence already
existent in the germ.
It is clear that "the old order changeth," not
alone in the House of Life, but in the Palace of
Art. Anarchy clamors at that door too. In
painting, in music, and in the drama we are
entered upon that phase in which the bolder
spirits are rejecting alike the passing fashions
and the forms sanctified by time, and are seeking
new generalizations. Architecture, the least
plastic of the arts, lags a little; but the great
unrest has seized that also.
We observe a great confusion of ideas upon
the whole subject of architecture, not alone on
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the part of the public, but in the profession itself.
Eminent architects are found to differ widely in
their opinions, and these differences find expres-
sion in their work. It is clear that there is no
common agreement among them as to what con-
stitutes excellence. If we apply only the criterion
of everyday common-sense, it would appear that
the modern architect has not grasped the modern
problem. Let me try to prove to you that this
is so.
First j the architect of today fails to think and
work in terms of his -place.
A proof of this failure is found in the unsuit-
ability of many commonly used architectural
forms and features to practical needs and to
climatic and environic conditions. Cornices,
made for the etching of strong shadows and for
protection from a tropic sun, frown down from
the skylines of our cloudy northern cities, where
they gather dirt and soot in summer and in
winter become traps for snow and ice. Arcades
and colonnades, originally designed for shade
and shelter, rob overstrained eyes of the precious
light of day. Expensive and useless balustrades
protect waste spaces of roof where people could
not take their pleasure if they would.
Secondly, the architect Jails to think and work
in terms of his time.
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A proof of this failure is found in the perfectly
meaningless character of the architectural orna-
ments in common use: the acanthus scroll, the
egg and tongue, the Greek fret and waterleaf,
the festoon and wreath, a cartouche, a shield, a
lion's head echoes all of the past, not one elo-
quent of the present.
Thirdly y the architect fails to think and work
in terms of his materials.
A proof of this failure is found in the common
practice of substituting one material for another
wood for iron, terra-cotta for stone, stone for
concrete, or vice versa by reason of their dif-
ferences in cost, without essential modification
in design. One of the most important functions
of architecture is thus violated the showing
forth of the splendor and beauty (be it a beauty
of strength or of fragility) of different materials,
making the most of the unique characteristics of
each.
Now the beauty of terra-cotta, for example,
is not less than that of stone, but it is different.
Witness a Delia Robbia lunette and a carved
granite Egyptian bas-relief. Imagine the terra-
cotta arcades of the Certosa of Pavia carved in
stone. One would fairly ache at the thought of
so much labor and feel a sort of terror at so
great a weight so insufficiently supported. On
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the other hand, were the heavily rusticated street
front of the Pitti Palace in Florence translated,
without change, from stone to terra-cotta, the
result would be no less distressing, but for the
opposite reason. There would be no charm of
detail and texture to compensate for the splendid
ponderosity of stone.
In the face of these facts, it will be well if we
first of all find out exactly where we stand and
what we are doing. Let us therefore try to get
this clear without further loss of time.
Looking at the matter from the broadest pos-
sible point of view, it is evident that we dwell
in a composite environment: that in which we
find ourselves, Nature; and that which we make
for ourselves, the product of industry and art.
In this city of Chicago, for example, a wilder-
ness of railroads, stockyards, houses, skyscrapers
has obliterated the earlier wilderness of trees and
swamp and prairie grass. Nothing so diametri-
cally foreign to Nature as this gridiron plan and
these rectilinear buildings could well be imagined.
Man has himself essayed the role of creator and
follows a different dream.
This has been the case more or less ever since
the stern desire for mastery and the sweet dis-
ease of art disturbed the balance of Nature in
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men's souls. When we come to consider archi-
tecture throughout the world and down the ages,
we find it bisected by a like inevitable duality:
either it is organic, following the law of natural
organisms; or it is arranged, according to some
Euclidian ideal devised by proud-spirited man.
In other words, it is either cultivated, like the
flower; or it is cut, like the gem.
It is important that this fundamental differ-
ence in aim and method should be clearly per-
ceived and thoroughly understood. This will be
best accomplished by comparing and contrasting
Gothic architecture, so-called, which is pre-
eminently a striving toward a free organic
expression of plan and construction, with Renais-
sance architecture, wherein predetermined canons
of abstract beauty are imposed.
The popular conception of Gothic architecture
is of a manner of building practiced throughout
the north of Europe during the Middle Ages,
the distinguishing characteristics of which were
pointed arches, groined vaulting, buttressed
walls, traceried windows, and the like. But if
we study those principles of planning and con-
struction which produced and determined the
above-mentioned characteristics of the style, we
might appropriately describe Gothic as a manner
of building in which the form is everywhere deter-
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mined by the function, changing as that changes.
Renaissance architecture, on the other hand,
represents an ideal in conformity with which the
function is made to accommodate itself, to a
certain extent, to forms and arrangements chosen
less with a view to their exact suitability and
expressiveness than to their innate beauty. In
short, Gothic architecture is organic; Renaissance
architecture is arranged.
These definitions, embodying the distinction
noted, should not be taken to imply any dis-
paragement of Renaissance architecture, that
strained and triply refined medium through
which some of the noblest strivings of the human
spirit toward absolute beauty have achieved
enduring realization. Arranged and organic
architecture correspond to the two hemispheres
of thought and feeling into which mankind is
divided, the one pre-eminently intellectual, the
other psychic. They represent fundamental dif-
ferences of principle and ideal, unrelated to
considerations of time and space.
In what, more specifically, do these differences
consist ? The basic one is that organic architec-
ture, both in its forms and in the disposition of
these forms, follows everywhere the line of the
least resistance, achieving an effect of beauty
mainly by reason of the fact that utility is the
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parent of beauty and that any increase in fitness
is an increase in beauty.
In arranged architecture, on the other hand,
this principle yields precedence to a metaphysical
ideal of pure or abstract beauty, achieved by the
employment of forms, rhythms, and arrange-
ments, developed by a process of selection and
survival, and having for that reason a less vital
relation to the whole construction than in the
case of Gothic architecture.
Organic architecture does not reject any form
or any arrangement developed by long use and
of acknowledged beauty, so long as it, as well
as another, tells a given story or accomplishes a
given end. As soon as it becomes inexpressive
or inefficient, however, by reason of changed
conditions, it is modified or rejected, or a new
one is created; whereas in arranged architecture,
forms originally organic survive even after they
have lost their raison d'etre. It was for this rea-
son that the Romans employed the orders after
they had developed the arch. To the devotee
of arranged architecture, beauty is its own suffi-
cient justification; to him who follows the organic
ideal, as soon as a thing becomes false to the
mind it ceases to be fair to the eye.
The spirit behind organic architecture is
adroit, inventive, fertile, resourceful. It is
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economical of materials and means, even in its
most sumptuous creations. It is most itself
when engaged in attaining a given end in the
simplest and most direct manner possible. It
is given to short cuts and uses the tools and
materials nearest to its hand. The great cathe-
drals are built of stones of easily manageable
size, requiring no elaborate machinery. The
spirit behind arranged architecture, on the other
hand, disdains these considerations. There is a
sublime arrogance in the way in which, to com-
pass one of its grandiose effects, it spends money
by millions and kills men like flies. The first
seems to say to Nature: "Permit me, madam,
to assist you; there is a final felicity which, with
your permission, I shall add." And it does this
quite in Nature's manner, without, so to speak,
disturbing a hair of her head. The second says,
rather, "I'll show you a trick worth two of that,"
and proceeds to obliterate the landscape and put
something altogether different in its place. It is
inconceivable, for example, that the Gothic
builders would have converted a swamp into a
pleasure garden, as Louis XIV, that prince of
bromides, did at Versailles, at such enormous
cost of lives and treasure. It is equally incon-
ceivable that the architects of the Renaissance
would have hung a church upon a crag, as the
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mediaeval builders did at Mont Saint Michel
without, at least, leveling and terracing the crag.
In all true Gothic there exists so intimate a
relation between the interior arrangement and
the exterior appearance between the plan and
the elevation that from a study of the latter
the former may with fair accuracy be read. The
manner of construction rules the whole structure
and declares itself at sight. In Renaissance
architecture, even at its best, this by no means
follows; the elevation, determined by considera-
tions of grandeur, symmetry, proportion, is often
only a mask. St. Paul's Cathedral, in London,
is an example of this. The buttresses of the
arches of the nave are concealed behind a cur-
tain wall surmounted by a balustrade which
stands, independent of any roof, high aloft in
the air. The stone lantern which crowns the
dome appears to be supported by it, but the
visible dome is of wood, a falsework which con-
ceals the truncated cone of brickwork which
alone saves the lantern from tumbling into the
center of the church. This mendacity of the
Renaissance spirit is one of its distinguishing
characteristics. The application to a wall of
columns and entablature, arches and imposts,
which support nothing, not even themselves, is
one of its most common and most innocuous
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forms. Some of these artifices are quite justi-
fiable from the standpoint of mere aesthetics, as
I shall endeavor to show in my second lecture;
but the true Gothicist will have none of them,
his motto being, "Beauty is Truth; Truth,
Beauty."
In arranged architecture, the various parts and
details are assembled and combined by the
sovereign good taste of the architect; in organic,
they are melted and fused by the creative heat,
the eagerness for self-expression. In whatever
form it appears, organic architecture seems to
spring up without effort, almost of its own voli-
tion, a natural outcropping of national and racial
vitality. Men do not have to learn to understand
it; they recognize themselves in it because they
carry the clue to its meaning in their hearts.
Arranged architecture, on the other hand, is the
self-conscious embodiment of the pomp and the
pride of life. Like Little Jack Horner, it seems
to say, "What a great boy am I!"
It is not profitable to multiply these distinc-
tions, for this might lead more to confusion than
to clarity of mind. It is necessary only to re-
member that the real point of cleavage between
organic and arranged architecture is the one first
dwelt upon. In order to determine to which
hemisphere of expression a given building belongs
ORGANIC ARCHITECTURE
it is necessary only to apply the acid test of
Mr. Sullivan's formula and ask, "Does the form
follow the function, or is the function made
subservient to the form ? Did the spirit build
the house, or does the house confine the spirit ?"
If the first, it is organic; if the second, it is
arranged.
Ponder this formula, then apply it. Strange
truths emerge. It is plain from existing evi-
dences, and from our knowledge of their psychol-
ogy, that the Greeks built in the organic spirit,
and that there is more real identity in principle
between the Erechtheum, let us say, and the
Saint Chapelle, than between the former and
the most correctly classic building in all Paris.
The Romans worked organically in the planning
and construction of their vast and complicated
basilicas, theaters, and baths; but they knew
not where to stay their hand, and, seduced by a
beauty which they did not comprehend, they
meaninglessly applied the orders to their arch
and vault construction that is, they employed
organic forms as mere ornament, after the vir-
tue had flowed out of them by reason of a change
of structural methods.
Turning the searchlight of our formula in dif-
ferent directions up and down the ages, we
discern that the Church of Santa Sophia in
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Constantinople is organic, for the reason that
it consists of a single consistent system of con-
struction that of the round arch and spherical
vault carried to its logical development, no-
where hidden, everywhere expressed. The
Houses of Parliament in London, on the other
hand, with a whole bagful of Gothic tricks, are
nevertheless arranged architecture. They are
this for the reason that the elaborately com-
posed river fagade gives no hint of what lies
behind it, and the towers might have been in
one place as well as another, or not at all, so
far as any necessity is concerned. In other
words, the element of inevitability is lacking,
that sure index of the organic spirit. Called
upon to create a Gothic design, Sir William
Barry, the architect, could change the clothing
of his idea, but not the complexion of his
mind.
It is held by those who have intimate knowl-
edge of the curious architecture of Japan that
the Japanese built organically in the carrying
of wood architecture to the highest logical de-
velopment that the world has ever seen.
That Mr. Cram should himself be the author
of a delightful and scholarly treatise on Jap-
anese architecture is an eloquent fact in this
connection.
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Coming again to the consideration of modern
architecture here in America barring a few
thrice-blessed exceptions it is certainly not
organic, and to call it arranged would place it in
the same category with the masterpieces of the
Renaissance, which would be to pay it a higher
tribute than it deserves.
Let us consider the main features of this archi-
tecture, if on the face of chaos features can be
discerned. To consider modern architecture
from the standpoint of structure presents no
difficulty. Every important building of today
adheres to substantially one method of construc-
tion. Even a layman knows its characteristic
features: a steel framework, floors and roof of
hollow tile or reinforced concrete, an outer cover-
ing of brick, stone, or terra-cotta, as the case
may be. But when we come to consider the
language in which the story is told to the be-
holder, there is the greatest confusion of tongues.
Venetian palaces elbow French chateaux and
Roman temples; pseudo-Gothic competes with
neo-Greek, each masquerading as something
other than it is a Brobdingnagian saturnalia
of vociferous unreason.
The cause of this discrepancy between the
inner structure and its outward manifestation is
not far to seek. The construction has been
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shaped by the living hand of necessity, and is
therefore rational and logical; the outward
expression is the result of the architect's "dig-
ging in the boneyard." There has been laid
upon it the dead hand of the past. Free of this
incubus, the engineer has succeeded; subject to
it, the architect has failed. That is, he has not
seen that the new construction imperatively
demanded a new space-language for its expres-
sion. By limiting himself to the great styles
of the past and the forms developed by super-
seded methods of construction, he has shown
himself impotent to create for this great age
an architecture eloquent of it. This is the
manner and measure of his failure, and it is
grave.
Now it is true that architectural styles are
not created merely by taking thought of the
matter, but grow imperceptibly, new conditions
modifying old traditions. Conservatism in archi-
tecture is therefore a good and necessary thing,
but in times like the present conservatism ceases
to be a virtue. The architect who clings blindly
to precedent in dealing with the unprecedented,
as he is now constantly forced to do, is in the
position of the boy who stood on the burning
deck. This habitual attitude of looking back-
ward at the past over the shoulder of the present,
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instead of fronting the future, has resulted for
the architect in the atrophy of his creative
faculty.
Of course, no architect can afford to dispense
with a knowledge of his art as practiced through-
out the world and down the ages. It is even well
that he should train himself to think and work
in terms of this style and of that, if only to learn
that a style takes its form and characteristics
from the materials and methods of construction
employed, and its ornament from the racial and
national psychology. From the history of archi-
tecture nothing is clearer than that a change of
construction, or a change of consciousness, de-
mands and finds fresh architectural forms for
its expression. We of today use a kind of con-
struction unknown to the ancients, and our psy-
chology is different; yet we look about us in
vain for a space-language which expresses both
in terms of beauty. I use the term "space-
language" because the time-language of today
already exists or is in process of formation in
the modern drama, the modern novel, and mod-
ern music new art forms made to meet new
needs of expression. The need is not less
urgent for a new architectural language. It is
bound to come in time. The question natu-
rally arises: To which of the two hemispheres
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before mentioned will it belong; will it be
organic or will it be arranged ?
The answer to this question is probably in-
volved in the answer to a more grave and vital
question, one which the clouded and ambiguous
aspect of the times cannot fail to suggest to every
thoughtful mind. Putting aside all purely local
and temporal issues, the great issue of the im-
mediate future is between the forces of material-
ism, on the one hand, which work against the
practical realization of human brotherhood, and
those obscure spiritual forces which are working
for it. If materialism triumphs and materialism
is as strongly intrenched in the hovel as in the
mansion, in the church as in the market-place
architecture, however highly developed and per-
fected, will be the work of slaves for masters
arranged by master-minds. If, on the other hand,
the spirit of democracy and of true brotherhood
triumphs, architecture will become again organic,
the ponderable expression of the truths of the
spirit, wrought out in all humility and loving-
ness by those who are its subjects but not its
slaves.
We are warranted in this conclusion by the
history of art itself. Every organic architectural
evolution followed in the wake of a religious im-
pulse, and the ideal of brotherhood is the impulse
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which today moves men to those fervors and
renunciations which have marked the religious
manifestations of times past. If today we use,
only to misuse, the architectural languages of
the past, it is because materialism holds us and
rules us; if tomorrow we are able to express
ourselves in a language of new beauty, it will be
the result of some fresh outpouring of spiritual
force, such as occurred long ago in Egypt, later
in Greece, in China following the introduction
of Buddhism, and in Northern Europe during
the two mystic centuries of the Middle Ages.
Signs are not lacking that this change will come
upon us too. The dense materiality of modern
life is not necessarily an adverse factor; for of
all paradoxes this is the most sublime, that good
comes from evil, purity from corruption. The
favorite food of epicures springs from the
dunghill; the unspeakable saturnalia of Imperial
Rome had issue in Christian saints and martyrs.
Already may be noted presages of change. In
the familiar warmed and lighted chamber of our
everyday environment we sit snugly content,
playing at what we call the game of life, when
suddenly, just when we fancied we were safest,
we are rapt out of ourselves into the infinite
beatitude, as a fevered gambler might be
summoned from his table by some beautiful,
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veiled woman, who leads him out into the cool,
illimitable night.
After such an experience, life can never be
the same. You who have dreamed are forced to
follow your dream to realize it if you are an
artist. From that day you are bound by an
obligation which others do not and need not
share. You can no longer dissipate your time
and such talents as you possess in assimilating
the popular taste in order to reproduce it. This
would be a prostitution far more ignoble than
that of the man who has never been thus elected
to the service of beauty. To him, the fleshpots of
the world, the price of a virtue which was never his ;
to you, the eternal quest, wherever it may lead.
Do not conceive of beauty in any narrow way,
as limited to mere aesthetics. Seek out the
things that thrill you and be sure that there is
beauty in them, for the test of beauty is the
measure of the joy it brings. Beauty is mystery
and enchantment, the thing with star-dust on it.
Learn to recognize the brush of its invisible wing,
not alone in art galleries and concert halls, but
in a face in a crowd, a song at twilight, moonrise,
sunset; in the din and glare of cities as well as
in the silence of great spaces; in the train taking
its flight to the seaboard as well as in the crow
taking its flight to the rooky wood.
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Knowing not when nor in what questionable
shape beauty may reveal itself, it behooves you
to cultivate so wide a catholicity of taste that
no manifestation, however strange and disturb-
ing, may pass untested through the alembic of
your mind. You should constantly strive to
realize what I have called the organic ideal in
the work of your hands, not permitting your
personal power of invention to atrophy by con-
tinual copying of the work of others, no matter
how beautiful nor how sanctioned by time that
work may be. Of everything you create you
should ask: first, is it sincere and expressive;
second, is it beautiful to you ?
Doubtless failure will crown your efforts more
often than success. A pioneer and a precursor
in a movement which, when all is said, may never
move, the best that you can hope for is to labor
at the foundation of a Palace of Art which will
be reared, if it is reared at all, by other hands.
Your reward will be that should the tide turn,
while you live and work, from the ordered ideal
to the organic, some part of the mighty current
will flow through you, instead of tossing you
relentlessly aside.
Because the word "Gothic" has been taken
as the type of the art which is organic and
"Renaissance" as a type of that which is ar-
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ranged, there is still danger of misunderstanding.
Comprehend clearly that in speaking of organic
architecture I do not refer solely to the art as
practiced during the Middle Ages; in speaking
of Renaissance architecture I use it only as
indicative of a habit of mind which is timeless.
If we except the architecture of edifices of the
established religion in which the Gothic style is
traditional, and therefore appropriate, nothing
could be more absurd than the use by us of the
mere externals of the mediaeval Gothic style.
The forms of classic and Renaissance architec-
ture are, of the two, on the whole more appro-
priate and amenable to modern needs and
conditions; and if we are sticklers for precedent,
they are better justified. The architecture of
the future, whether arranged or organic, will
probably resemble neither Gothic nor Renais-
sance. If it springs from deep within the soul,
it will unfold new and unimagined beauties. If
it is a product of the purely rational conscious-
ness, it will consist of additions to, and modifica-
tions of, the architecture which we already have.
Because spirituality is the source of all beauty,
arranged architecture proceeds from and suc-
ceeds organic. When the mystic spirit which
produces organic architecture departs, the forms
of its creating survive by reason of their beauty,
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but they are meaninglessly employed. All of
the time-honored forms and arrangements of our
so-called classic architecture were originally
organic. Nothing could be more organic than
the colonnade of a Grecian temple;, nothing
could be less so than the same colonnade with an
iron stanchion buried in each column and the
lintel held up by concealed steel beams.
Now, while it is necessary to draw these dis-
tinctions, and even to insist upon them, there is
a higher synthesis in which they disappear.
Every masterpiece disdains and defies classifi-
cation. If it succeeds, we know that whatever
the means and methods, they can be only the
right ones and are their own sufficient justifica-
tion. As a matter of fact, every architectural
masterpiece, whatever its style or period, is both
organic and arranged. However artificial it may
be, it obeys some organic law of the mind; how-
ever naturalistic, it is full of self-conscious
artifice.
In art there is a demonic element which places
it above and beyond all man-made classifications
and categories. The true artist is guided by an
over-soul, whether he acknowledges or whether
he denies its sway.
The passive master lent his hand
To the vast soul that o'er him planned.
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It is this larger aspect of the whole subject
which I propose to treat in my next lecture. In
it I shall occupy myself, not with differences,
but with identities. I shall attempt to discover
the unchanging principles which determine every
kind of formal beauty, to indicate the rudiments
of the grammar of that language through which
every thought of the human mind which writes
itself on space must needs be expressed.
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VI
THE LANGUAGE OF FORM
In my previous lecture I tried to make you
acutely conscious of the confusion of tongues
which attends the building of our towers of Babel,
and I endeavored to arouse you to the need of
developing a form-language which should be to
the modern world what Greek architecture was
to Pagan Greece, Gothic architecture to Chris-
tian Europe. As a preliminary to this high
endeavor, let us seek to discover some of the
unchanging principles which are at the root of
every kind of beauty in other words, to formu-
late the rhetoric of spatial expression.
The first and chief of these principles is un-
doubtedly that of unity; for the potency of any
work of art is measured largely by the singleness
of its appeal. An Egyptian pyramid, for example,
has unity, but this quality is inherent in a Greek
temple as well. In the case of the pyramid, the
means whereby the effect of unity is produced
are clear: every line leads to the summit; all
converge into a single visible point. In the case
of the Greek temple, the means remain a mystery
to the beholder, but, as a matter of fact, in
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principle they are the same. The difference is
that in the latter case the focal point is not visible;
it is a point in space, high aloft in the air. Most
of you probably know that the columns of the
Parthenon all have a slight inclination inward.
They are not parallel, but convergent; and if
their axes were prolonged they would at last
intersect. I do not claim, of course, that the
effect of unity is solely due to this artifice; but
this artifice is a contribution to it. As a symbol,
it is magnificent. All manifoldness proceeds
from and returns to the invisible where it is one.
This matter of invisible focal points is highly
important. Did you ever think that somewhere
in the air under the great open eye of the roof
of the Roman Pantheon is a point which deter-
mined every arc of the curve of the giant dome;
that somewhere in the ruined arena of the Colos-
seum are the two foci which determined the
sweep of its circumscribing walls; that aloft in
the apse of a Gothic cathedral is a point to which
all its vaults converge and from which they seem
to emanate ? About the center of the central
arch of most of the best triumphal arches is
described a greater circle which determines the
main proportions of the rectangular structure.
These and similar artifices aid in co-ordinating
the edifice into one memorable impression.
[146]
THE LANGUAGE OF FORM
If unity is the first and controlling principle
of a form-language, what is the second ? Before
we come to that, let us ask ourselves what a
form-language is. It is some aggregation of
symbols, borrowed from nature or fabricated by
art, in endless variety of combination, for the
expression of some ideal thing. By means of
these symbols the inner spirit of life is drawn
into a kind of diagrammatic representation of
its nature and gets itself externalized made
flesh, so to speak. But behind the forms and
arrangements employed, whether they are nat-
ural or artificial, are geometrical forms and
arrangements; for "Nature geometrizes," as
Emerson says. A form-language, therefore, may
be reduced to geometry in the same way that a
spoken language may be resolved into sounds
and combinations of sounds. Just as sounds
may be classified as vowel and consonant, so
may forms be classified as straight (rectilinear)
and curved, masses as light and dark, or as void
and solid, producing the effect of light and dark.
Colors, similarly, are warm and cold, brilliant
and neutral, gay and grave.
This, then, is our second principle, duality
the polarity of related opposites. Before apply-
ing this principle to composition, let us discrim-
inate between the different kinds of composition.
[H7]
LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE
For our purposes, there are three kinds: line
composition, mass composition that is, notan,
light and dark and color composition. In a
sense these correspond to line, plane, and solid
spaces of one, two, and three dimensions. Linear
composition involves neither of the other two;
notan composition, being concerned with light
and dark masses, cannot dispense with line, for
lines bound these masses; color composition
combines both line and mass. As the method of
the mind is to proceed from the simple to the
complex, the Japanese, those masters of composi-
tion, in producing their designs devote them-
selves first to the problem of line rhythms, then
to the disposition of their lights and darks, and
finally to color harmony, though they keep all
three things in mind simultaneously, as is neces-
sary for a successful issue; otherwise these things
interfere with and destroy one another.
Since I have mentioned Japanese art, let us
take for our first illustration of the law of duality,
or polarity, one of Hiroshige's best-known color
prints, "The Pine Tree on an Island" (see Fig. i).
It is so faithful a rendering of the subject that a
Japanese, seeing the print in my office, exclaimed,
"I have been to that place, I have seen that
wonderful old tree." And yet, though so true
to nature, it is a piece of self-conscious art. The
[148]
B AS RELIEF OF ATHENA AND
HER OWL
FIG. 2
THE LANGUAGE OF FORM
line composition is as simple and uncompromising
as could well be the vertical lines of the straight-
falling rain, the horizontal lines of the water, and
the island, in strong contrast to the irregular
curved outline of the pine tree. The mass com-
position is not less simple and conforms to, and
accentuates, the line composition the light sky,
the darker water and embankment, the dark
foliage. These three in color are, respectively,
gray, blue, and black. With nothing to mitigate
this cold color scheme, however, the law of
polarity would not be honored by a due observ-
ance, so the artist has introduced a note of dull
red in the upper left-hand corner a matter of
no pictorial significance, but necessary to the
color harmony of the whole.
My second example, a bas-relief of Athena
with her owl Attic work of about 465 B.C. (see
Fig. 2) exhibits the same artful juxtaposition
of straight lines and curves, even more simply
disposed and contrasted. There is here the
same regard for related masses, and, though
unfortunately the color has disappeared (it was
once colored; for the end of the spear was
apparently painted on), we cannot doubt that
the law of color contrast received recognition too.
It was the all but universal practice of artists
of the great age of the Renaissance to display
[149]
LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE
their figures in an architectural setting, for this
was the most obvious and effective way of
achieving the contrast between geometrical and
flowing forms to which I call your attention. I
need not show examples, for you yourselves will
recall any number. Instead, I shall exhibit a
photograph of a painting of later date, David's
exquisite portrait of Madame Recamier, which,
by reason of the obviousness of its composition,
is related more nearly to the examples you have
already seen (see Fig. 3). Note how the gracious
curve of the womanly figure is enhanced by its
contrast with the long horizontal line of the
couch and by the vertical standard of the
candelabrum.
Transferring our attention now to architecture,
we find in this familiar combination of arch and
engaged order the same polarity of which I speak
(see Fig. 4). From these simple elements "has
been expanded the architectural art, as a great
and superb language wherewith man has ex-
pressed, through the generations, the changing
drift of his thoughts." In the Romanesque portal
of Saint Trophime at Aries you find those ele-
ments more beautifully, because more logically,
arranged (see Fig. 5). Learn to give them instant
recognition, wherever encountered, be it in such a
grand combination as is exhibited by the cam-
[150]
THE LANGUAGE OF FORM
THE; LAW OF TRINITY
panile of St. Mark's
against the long hori-
zontal and many-
domed church of
St. Mark, or in so
small a thing as a
simple egg and dart.
The source and secret
of beauty are the
same in both cases
contrasting straight
and curved forms.
The third law to
which I would direct
your attention is the
law of trinity. It is
latent, as you already
doubtless discern, in
polarity for everything is from its very nature
twofold; but while the semicircular arch changes
imperceptibly from vertical to horizontal, and
therefore may be considered a unit, vertical and
horizontal lines cannot be thus reconciled and
must be recognized as independent. Therefore
we have in architecture three elements: lines
vertical, horizontal, and curved.
Now there is a secret potency which appears
to reside in the number three itself. At least
A ROMAN ICNIGAfcGAD BY
VIONOLL^-THE COLUMN. THL
ENTABLATURE AND THL ARCH
CORRESPOND TO LJN&J VE/&T
ICAL HORIZONTAL AND CURVED
FIG. 4
LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE
three notes are necessary for full harmony in
music, the three primary colors for complete
color harmony, and the trinity of vertical, hori-
zontal, and curved lines for architectural har-
mony. Three straight lines are the least number
which will inclose a space. The geometrical
correlative of the number three is naturally the
triangle, and particularly the equilateral triangle.
This figure, for which the eye has an especial
fondness, is everywhere present in the arts of
design, sometimes clearly displayed, more often
obscurely. It performs the function of uniting
and co-ordinating the various parts of a design
in a manner analogous to that in which the
accompaniment carries along and co-ordinates
an air. So universal was the recognition of this
need of the eye during the great age of Renais-
sance painting that the pyramidal composition
became one of its conventions. Introduced by
Fra Bartolomeo, it continued to be employed to
and through the decadence. You all recall
plenty of examples, but to show you just what I
mean I call your attention to the triangular
synopsis of Andrea del Sarto's "Madonna del
Sacco" (see Fig. 6).
Architecture, of whatever style and period, is
rich in similar examples. Out of many hundreds
I show only one: the perfect little Erechtheum
THE LANGUAGE OF FORM
APPLICATION OF THE EQUILATERAL
TRIANGLE TO THE ER.ECHTHEUM~
AT ATHENS
WEST SIDE,
PORJCH OF THE, CARYATIDES
FIG. 7
of the Athenian Acropolis (see Fig. 7). The
main proportions of French cathedrals were
determined by this sort of triangulation, both in
plan and in section, as Viollet le Due has shown
in the first volume of his Discourses.
LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE
Thus it is that every priest of the religion of
Beauty must be a Unitarian, a Dualist, and a
Trinitarian. He is no less a Nature-worshiper,
and in his communion with her visible forms he
cannot but discover her infinite manifoldness.
This leads him to the perception of a fourth
principle of aesthetics, that of variety in unity,
of the part imaged in the whole and the whole
in the part. Nature is an air with variations;
she abounds in repetitions, echoes, consonances.
Surely I need not give examples of this, and yet
to put the matter clearly before you, note the
major and minor repetition of the theme in the
subsidiary details of Titian's "Sacred and Pro-
fane Love"; note also the reversed and con-
trasted triangles (see Fig. 8). In architecture,
the flutes of a Greek Doric column are echoed
in the channeled triglyphs above. The balus-
trade of a Renaissance colonnade repeats the
colonnade itself; the flanking domes of Brunelles-
chi's great dome of the cathedral of Florence
prepare the eye for the mighty upward sweep.
The fifth principle to which I would direct
your attention is not less obvious and universal,
but it is one for which it is difficult to find a
name. Call it rhythmic diminution. This law
is in the eye itself; for any series of equal and
regular units, such as a row of columns and their
[154]
THE LANGUAGE OF FORM
intercolumniations, for example, when viewed in
perspective become rhythmically unequal. They
diminish as they recede from the eye, accord-
ing to a mathematical law. This law is in the
ear itself; for any musical note dies away into
harmonics, each one fainter and higher than the
last. Observe a column of smoke rising in still
air. It puts forth spirals, these spirals split up
into smaller spirals, and so on. A tree segre-
gates, in the same way, into branches and the
branches into twigs. These things will give you
an idea of what I mean by rhythmic diminution.
In architecture it is illustrated by the entasis of
a column, by the diminishing spiral of an Ionic
volute, by the artifice of superimposing the
slenderer and more ornate orders on the simpler
and sturdier. The most perfect and complete
expression is found perhaps in a Gothic cathe-
dral, which from a simple and massive substruc-
ture rears a veritable lacework of pinnacles
against the sky. Gothic architecture and Gothic
tracery rise flamelike, growing more intricate
and wonderful as they ascend.
The sixth principle is that of radiation.
Radiation is the arrangement of the units of a
composition with reference to focal points the
relation of variables to some invariable. This,
too, is in the eye itself and in the ear itself; for
LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE
all horizontal lines in architecture appear to
converge at the point of sight on the horizon,
and in music the air returns to the tonic note
of the scale. In radiation we return by a long
detour to our starting-point, unity. They are
opposite aspects of one and the same thing.
You may say that all the lines of a pyramid
lead from base to apex, but it is no less true that
from the apex all lines lead to the base.
To illustrate the universality of these six
principles in art, and to fix them more firmly
in your mind by a recapitulation, I show you in
what manner they are obeyed and illustrated
in an acknowledged masterpiece of painting,
Leonardo's "Last Supper" (see Fig. 9). It has
unity: it poignantly portrays a dramatic moment
in the life of the Savior of mankind. The vari-
ous parts are fused by the creative fire in the
soul of the artist into one memorable impres-
sion. Duality is achieved by the time-honored
device of placing the figures in an architectural
setting; the long horizontal of the table, the
vertical panels of the walls, are what the accom-
paniment is to the air. Trinity appears in the
three openings of the background, the arrange-
ment of the twelve disciples in four groups of
three figures each, and in the inclosure of the
central figure of Christ in an equilateral triangle.
[156]
THE LANGUAGE OF FORM
By the law of consonance this triangle is echoed,
as it were, in the triangular supports of the table
and in the triangular synopses to which the
groups of figures variously submit themselves.
The great drama is broken up into a number of
individual dramas, portrayed on the faces of the
disciples as the Master utters the fateful words,
"One of you shall betray me." Rhythmic dimi-
nution is illustrated in the diminishing lengths
and sizes of the wall panels and the ceiling
beams; and radiation, by reason of the fact that
the point of sight of the whole composition, to
which all the horizontal lines vanish, is in the
figure of Christ.
I do not claim that every masterpiece illus-
trates these laws in this completeness and per-
fection, but no masterpiece was ever created
which does not illustrate some of them. They
need not have been present in the mind of the
artist who conceives the work, nor of the
observer who contemplates it, in order to exer-
cise their potent magic. You should know about
them because they constitute the mode and
method whereby the spirit of life writes itself in
materiality. I do not claim that they constitute
the only mode and method. Other laws there
are, no less fundamental and universal. Books
have been written upon the spiral line in nature
[157]
LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE
and art; numerical ratios, corresponding to
the consonant musical intervals, properly con-
stitute part of the rhetoric of the language of
form; but these things I can only mention, for
I must now pass to the consideration of the
second necessary element in a language of form
ornament.
A complete and adequate form-language con-
sists, first, in a system of construction expressing
itself in appropriate forms, and a system of
ornament, though it is true that these two
things are sometimes so vitally related as to be
scarcely separable. The architectural forms
come of themselves they are a matter of
orderly evolution but this is not so true of
ornament. Ornament depends less upon struc-
tural necessity than upon psychology. It is the
psychological mood objectively presented or
expressed. This is the reason why any muti-
lated and time-worn fragment out of the great
past, when art was a living language, can be
assigned with certainty to its place and its period.
The connoisseur has no difficulty in discriminat-
ing between Chinese, Hindu, Egyptian, Greek,
and Etruscan ornament, because in each the
soul of a people found adequate and appropriate
utterance. The fact that today, when it comes
to the question of ornament, we are content to
[158]
THE LANGUAGE OF FORM
adorn our creations with the grave-clothes of
whatever dead style suits our fancy is simply
one proof the more that we have no form-
language of our own. While the development
of architecture along new lines may safely be left
to necessity and time and is already just beyond
the horizon, the same is not true of ornament.
We have done nothing in this field of any value
whatever. We have not even tried to do any-
thing, but have been perfectly content to beg
the whole question. It is clear that we can do
so no longer; but in what direction shall we seek ?
Three alternatives suggest themselves: first,
a new ornamental mode might be the creation
of some wonderfully gifted individual; second,
it could be derived from nature; third, it
might be developed from geometry. Let us
consider each of these alternatives. The first
we must summarily reject. Even supposing the
advent of a personal savior in this field, the im-
position of the idiosyncratic space rhythm of a
single individual upon an entire architecture
would be unfortunate. Genius does not propa-
gate itself; it descends neither from father to
son nor from teacher to disciple. In Mr. Sullivan,
for example, we have an ornamentalist of the
highest originality and distinction, quite aside
from his sterling qualities as an architect; but
LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE
his secret is incommunicable, his disciples either
imitate his mannerisms or they develop a man-
ner and a method of their own. This leaves
us with our problem unsolved. We do not want
an ornament which is individual, but one which
is universal; not one which has style, but one
which is a style.
Consider now the second suggestion: shall we
be able to find what we seek by conventionalizing
natural forms ? There is precedent for such a
procedure. The Egyptian lotus, the Greek
honeysuckle, the Indian palmette, the acanthus,
achieved their apotheoses in art. Even today
in Japan, where art is still a living language, the
bamboo, the chrysanthemum, the wistaria, are
successfully used as motifs for ornament. I
think it would be a very good thing if the prob-
lem of the conventionalization of our native
fruits and flowers were given to art students
instead of the botanizing of old dry specimens.
This has been done and is being done to some
extent, but as a solution of the problem of orna-
ment, it offers one difficulty which should not
be overlooked. Today the native flora of a
country loses much of its distinctive quality by
reason of scientific agriculture and intensive cul-
tivation under glass, coupled with ease and
rapidity in the matter of transportation. Corn,
[160!
THE LANGUAGE OF FORM
buckwheat, tobacco, though indigenous to Amer-
ica, are less distinctively so than they once were.
Moreover, our divorce from nature is more com-
plete so much so that dwellers in the city, where
the giant flora of architecture for the most part
raise their skyscraping heads, are more familiar
with corn in the can than corn on the cob; they
know buckwheat only in the form of buckwheat
cakes; and not one smoker in ten would recog-
nize tobacco as it grows in the fields. This
vitiates, though it does not veto, recourse to
natural forms for ornament.
The third alternative remains to be considered,
and, to my thinking, it is that in which resides
the richest promise. Let us consider it with care.
Geometry has furnished, not one system of orna-
ment, but many. A great deal of Chinese and
Hindu ornament is rigidly geometrical; Moorish
ornament is almost exclusively so. Gothic tra-
cery is nothing but combinations of straight
lines, circles, and the arcs of circles. The inter-
esting development of decorative art which has
taken place in Germany of late years makes use
of little else but the square and the circle, the
parallelogram and the ellipse. These systems,
all derived from geometry, are widely different
from one another. What has been done can
be done; geometry may provide us with
[161]
LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE
the very thing we
seek. The problem
is simply one of
selection and de-
velopment. How
shall we set about
our task ? For we
are in the position
of Sinbad in the
valley of diamonds;
we are surrounded
by treasure of which
we do not know
how to possess our-
selves.
Ornament must
not only satisfy
the aesthetic sense,
but it must be symbolically significant. This
can be accomplished if in some way ornament
can be made to indicate the trend of con-
sciousness if some relation can be established
between ornament and psychology. This may
seem at first thought an impossible proposition,
but perhaps it is not so impossible as it appears.
Do not think that I am only juggling with words
when I suggest that the problem may be solved
by recourse to the fourth dimension of space.
[162]
PATTERN DERIVED FROM
GROUPED CUBES
FIG. 10
A BAY WINDOW
FIG. ii
THE LANGUAGE OF FORM
This is a phrase of varied and ambiguous mean-
ings, often heard, yet little understood under-
stood least, perhaps, by those who use it most.
To the mathematician it means a direction at
right angles to every one of the so-called three
dimensions of space. By the man on the street
it is used to describe anything which is arcane
and mysterious.
But behind this loose use of a loose phrase lies
a true intuition: the intuition, namely, that the
modern mind, so lately exclusively scientific,
enamored of mere facts, has taken a turn in a
new direction at right angles to every direction
known heretofore. The past few years have wit-
nessed the rebirth of wonder. Science, scornful
of the occult, has now an occult of its own to
deal with. Philosophy, hopeless of translating
life through the reason in terms of inertia, per-
ceived a universal flux, the meaning of which the
intuition alone can grasp; and religion, aban-
doning its narrow orthodoxies and man-made
moralities of a superior prudence, seeks the
mystical experience above and before all. To
each the best thing in the world has come to
seem something out of it. Our House of Life,
where we had thought to dwell always more
snug and content, is haunted by footfalls from
another world. Now the fourth dimension of
[163]
LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE
the mathematician
is a perfect symbol
of this land which
is "back of the
north wind and
behind the looking
glass." The sub-
lime idea that the
personal self of each
one of us is but the
transitory mani-
festation on the
plane of materiality
of an immortal
individual whose
habitat is on higher
planes of being, has
its analogue in the mathematical conception that
all three-dimensional figures are projections on
three-dimensional space of four-dimensional
forms. That is, the
PATTERN DERIVED FROM THE
6oo-HEDROID
Fro. 12
f> ii flip
C 1& H1C
jection of the hyper-
sphere, the cube of
the hyper-cube, and
so on, in the same
way that the circle
may be considered
PROJETDCN OF THE GOO-HEDRDID ON A PLANE
PARAUB. TO ONE FACE. AND DERJVED ORNAMENT
FIG. 13
[164]
AN ORGAN CASE
FIG. 14
THE LANGUAGE OF FORM
as the plane projection of the sphere, the
square of the cube. The elements of four-
dimensional figures are known to mathematics.
Their projection in spaces of lower dimen-
sions is a matter of no great difficulty. What
I propose, therefore, is to derive from these
projections material for ornament, and in so
doing to symbolize the dominant fact of the
modern world, that we are attempting to explore
that reality from which we are shut off by the
limitations of our sensuous mechanism.
Four-dimensional geometry is as real a thing
and richer far than three-dimensional geometry,
bearing the same relation to the latter as that
does to plane geometry. It is indeed so rich a
field that only a few of the most elementary
figures and configurations are sufficient to fur-
nish the ornamentalist with all the material
he needs.
To explain these figures in detail and the
method of their representation would be impos-
sible within the limits of this lecture. To make
them fully intelligible would require more time
than is at my disposal and the assistance of
numerous models and diagrams. I can show
you only a few of the achieved results (see Figs.
10-16). This failure to gratify your curiosity as
regards method is unimportant; for with patience
[165]
LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE
and intelligence you can develop a method of
your own, in case the examples I show you have
the good fortune to please your aesthetic sense.
That is the final test, and if you fail to find here
the needed element of beauty my labor has been
in vain, my logic false, and my philosophy futile.
If, however, you find here hints and intimations
of a beauty which does not submit itself to clas-
sification in any of the familiar categories to
which labels have already been attached, I com-
mend the whole matter to your attention as a
possible contribution to the form-language of the
future. It possesses the following advantages:
first, the one already dwelt upon the relation
of the ornamental mode to the psychological
mood; second, the richness of the field, of
GECWmjCAL -WEE,' FKCM THE 6OOHEDRO1D
O2MAMENT DERIVED IT2CM THE 6OO- KEDfcOlD E
FIG. 15
[166]
THE LANGUAGE OF FORM
which you may gain some idea by comparing
solid geometry with plane geometry, four-
dimensional geometry being related to solid
geometry in a manner analogous to this; third,
the opportunities offered for originality and the
expression of individuality
within wise and reasonable
limits. The principle once
assimilated, every designer
would inevitably apply it
in an individual manner,
and yet just by reason of
its being founded upon a
principle and not a whim,
there would result that
family resemblance which
we always discern in the
work of individuals work-
ing within the limits of
what we name a style;
fourth, the principles and
method are communicable,
teachable, and though without the aid of a
highly developed aesthetic sense no fine result
is possible, it gives to that sense the material
and a method.
There is another source of ornament which I
may mention, of not less symbolical value, for
GROUP:
TETRAHEDRONS AND
DERIVED ORNAMENT
FIG. 17
LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE
FORMATION CF THE; MA0K! tfqUAEg Cf
FIG. 1 8
it has occult associations. I refer to magic lines
in magic squares. You all know what a magic
square is: it is a sort of numerical acrostic, an
arrangement in square form of numbers which
yield the same magic sum when added in vertical
and horizontal columns and along the diagonals.
Magic squares are of very ancient origin. There
is one carved in stone on an old temple gate in
India. Albrecht Diirer
introduced one into his
engraving of "Melan-
cholia," and they are
known to have occupied
the minds of medi-
aeval philosophers and
mystics. Today one
finds them in the puzzle departments of the maga-
zines, and the principle of their formation has
engaged the attention of the followers of pure
[168]
KNOT? BOM MA31C UNES
KNOtf FROM A
UNECf
ANDCF 1
FIG. 19
THE LANGUAGE OF FORM
mathematics. Now every magic square contains
a magic line, found by following the numbers in
their natural order from square to square. These
magic lines are often very interesting and even
beautiful, exhibiting an intricate and unusual type
BOOK COVER DESIGN BASED ON THE
KNIGHT'S TOUR OR MAGIC
SQUARE OF EIGHT
FIG. 20
of symmetry. Translated into curves and inter-
laced, they are so strongly reminiscent of Celtic
interlaces that it suggests the possibility that
Celtic ornament may have been developed accord-
ing to this method. Another curious fact in this
LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE
connection is that Diirer, who, as we know, was
interested in magic squares, devoted some of his
inexhaustible industry to the designing of inter-
lacing knots.
The decorative value of many magic lines is
beyond question. To prove this, I need show
you only one or two: the first and simplest, that
derived from the magic square of three; the
second, a magic square of four (see Fig. 19), and
a decorative treatment of the line traced by the
knight in making what is known as the knight's
tour on the chessboard (see Fig. 20). This is a
familiar feat of chess-players. It consists in
starting at any square, and by the knight's
move (two squares forward and one to right
or left) touching at each square once and return-
ing to the starting-point. This path or track
is really a magic line of a magic square, and
the trick is done by remembering sixty-four
numbers in a certain order. Kellar, the
magician, used to introduce this trick in his
performances.
Now as the number of magic squares is prac-
tically limitless, and as each of them yields a
magic line, you can readily see that there is
much matter for the designer of ornament, even
though all magic lines do not lend themselves
to his particular purpose.
THE LANGUAGE OF FORM
Besides appropriate and beautiful structural
forms, appropriate and beautiful ornament, a
form-language should possess a third element,
that of color. The great ages of great art reveled
in color, and each developed it in a distinctive
way. A Roman bath, a Greek temple, the in-
terior of a Gothic cathedral, were gorgeous with
color. Today, in our architecture, we beg the
whole question of color. It is a confession of
our incompetence we are afraid. Into this
question of color I cannot go in a constructive
way. To do so, even if I could, does not fall
within the limits already overpassed which I
have assigned to this lecture. I simply note the
necessity and leave it there.
These matters to which I have called your
attention are after all only bright pebbles picked
up almost at random on the shoreless ocean of
beauty, whose tides forever flow beneath the
very casements of our House of Life. Our
aesthetic poverty is of our own making; we can
end it at any moment by utilizing the beauty
everywhere at hand. There is nothing more
absurd than to suppose that our age is bankrupt
of beauty. It is pre-eminently an age of power,
and power at the ordained season translates
itself to beauty in men's souls and thence flows
into visible and ponderable forms. "There is a
LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE
fount about to stream." Out of modern civiliza-
tion, chastened by suffering and sacrifice, awed
into reverence by supernal revelations, stirred
into hope by an immanent divine, man will
weave new patterns on the loom of space just
as he did anciently in China, in Assyria, in
Egypt, and in Greece.
This is the artist's work, and let every artist
in this audience rededicate himself to the task.
As was said by Emerson, our great high priest,
of that beauty which endures, "Fear not the
new generalization."
NA Cram, Ralph Adams
2560 Six lectures on
C83 architecture
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