Architecture And History

( Originally Published 1913 )

ADDRESS AT A BANQUET OF THE AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF ARCHITECTS IN WASHINGTON, DECEMBER, 1908.

My first duty is to thank you for the way in which you have received the toast to which I am desired to respond. I was touched by the simple manner in which your President gave the toast, "The King." He gave it in the same way in which it might have been given in A.D. 1759 in the North American colonies, when all patriotic hearts were swelling with pride at the news of the victory won by Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham and the winning of all North America for the benefit of those colonies. A good deal of water has flowed under the bridges of the Potomac since 1759; but things have got back, so far as relates to spirit and sentiment, to what they were just one hundred and fifty years ago, and I hope and believe that under this new order of things, when this gigantic Republic has for more than a century and a quarter managed its affairs in this continent in its own way, and when for nearly a century undisturbed peace has existed between Great Britain and the United States, the ties of sentiment, feeling, and affection which unite the two branches of the ancient stock are, and will remain, as deep and as strong as ever they were in the days of political union.

It is a pleasure to be the guest of the American Institute of Architects. I have always, as a humble layman, not understanding the principles and methods of the splendid art which you practise, but admiring its results, felt a very keen interest in your profession, and have thought it must be one of the most agreeable professions that a man could enter. There is, of course, one drawback connected with it -- that vexation which an architect must experience when his beautiful designs for a building, grand in its lines and refined in its ornament, are frustrated by the unresponsive tastelessness and tame ideas of the person for whom the building is to be erected and who probably prefers internal comfort to external beauty. That must be often a source of sore disappointment to you. But after all, every profession has its drawbacks. Quisque suos patimur Manes. In my own profession, that of the law, it does sometimes happen that the most eloquent speeches which are directed to secure the acquittal of a guilty man are neglected by a stupid jury. It does sometimes happen in the profession of medicine that a person whose malady has been pronounced incurable by a skilful practitioner subsequently recovers, and that his recovery is attributed not to the skill of the physician labouring against hope, but to the strength of the patient's constitution. It sometimes happens in the profession of the journalist that the efforts which the reporter who interviews a criminal makes to obtain absolute accuracy about the details of the crime are not successful, and that he does not even get credit for the strenuousness of those efforts. And I confess it is a serious drawback to the profession of the politician and legislator that one-half of his time and effort is apt to be spent, not in securing the passing of good laws, but in preventing the passing of those laws, be they good or bad, which the opposite party seeks to pass.

You, gentlemen (I am reminded of this by my reference to the transitory character of a great deal of the work politicians do), have one satisfaction which belongs to you, as compared with some of those other professions I have referred to. It is this: You do attain a solid, visible, tangible result. You produce something. There is the building. It stands there for the world to look at, and for yourself to admire. It stands ; it continues to serve some useful purposes ; it is there as something definitely attained and effected; and if after some fifty or sixty years faults in the construction cause it perchance to totter and fall, by that time it will have been forgotten who was the architect; and as for yourself, you will not suffer from any criticism, because you will be elsewhere, and will no doubt be enjoying a happiness sufficient to make you entirely indifferent to criticism.

So I come back to the conclusion that you are, on the whole, fortunate in your profession. And you have one other great advantage. You are following a profession, the study of which, pursued in an æsthetic as well as scientific spirit all your life through, and consisting largely in examining the masterpieces of architecture that have been erected before our own time, and in our own time, is in itself altogether profitable and delightful.

Now, I cannot honestly say that the whole of the study of the law is enjoyable. In every system of law there is much that is artificial. The system of procedure is full of dreary technicalities which sometimes obstruct the march of justice. Statutes contain many arbitrary rules. There are cases which establish precedents that have to be followed because the decision was so given, although we think them opposed to sound principle. But you are not hampered in any such way. You have to follow principles based on science, and canons of taste which have been, for the most part, settled by the practice of the greatest among your predecessors, while nevertheless leaving ample scope for your own sense of beauty in their application to the objects of the building and the conditions of the spot in which it is to be placed. A large part of your training consists in the study of the noblest works erected by men of genius in earlier times. In the study of those which remain from antiquity in Egypt, Greece, and Italy, and in the study of the far greater number produced in the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance in many parts of Europe, you have an ever fresh and undiluted source of pleasure. I can remember no happier days than I have spent, — and I am sure they would have been still more happy had it been my good fortune to possess a special and technical knowledge of your art, — in examining and sometimes trying to sketch old churches and old castles and old city walls and municipal buildings and palaces, especially in the cities of Italy and Spain. One can hardly think of any higher or keener enjoyment than lies in seeing what man has done in the effort to combine beauty and convenience in buildings meant to endure, and in following by the light of history the progress of architecture from Greek and Roman days down to the eighteenth century, as one sees that progress in Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, and Britain. To this I may add that your art has a special claim upon all who love the past, because it is, more than any other art, the sister and interpreter of history. There is nothing that helps so much to a comprehension of history as the study of the buildings of a country. In them you see how men faced the conditions of their life; you see exactly what they needed in the way of defence and in the way of comfort; you see what form of structure and what internal arrangements the usages of religion prescribed for houses of worship ; you see by tracing the type of buildings in each particular province or district of a country what were the racial, political, and cultural influences that operated upon that district at the time when the building you are studying and undiluted source of pleasure. I can remember no happier days than I have spent, — and I am sure they would have been still more happy had it been my good fortune to possess a special and technical knowledge of your art, — in examining and sometimes trying to sketch old churches and old castles and old city walls and municipal buildings and palaces, especially in the cities of Italy and Spain. One can hardly think of any higher or keener enjoyment than lies in seeing what man has done in the effort to combine beauty and convenience in buildings meant to endure, and in following by the light of history the progress of architecture from Greek and Roman days down to the eighteenth century, as one sees that progress in Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, and Britain. To this I may add that your art has a special claim upon all who love the past, because it is, more than any other art, the sister and interpreter of history. There is nothing that helps so much to a comprehension of history as the study of the buildings of a country. In them you see how men faced the conditions of their life; you see exactly what they needed in the way of defence and in the way of comfort; you see what form of structure and what internal arrangements the usages of religion prescribed for houses of worship ; you see by tracing the type of buildings in each particular province or district of a country what were the racial, political, and cultural influences that operated upon that district at the time when the building you are studying was erected ; and you are able, in a word, to make the buildings of a country illustrate its history and make its history explain the buildings. Someone ought to write a manual of travel for those who visit civilized countries, such as the Manual Francis Galton, compiled for explorers in wild countries thirty years ago; and in such a manual there might well be allotted to the elements of architectural history a chapter sufficiently full to enable an intelligent observer to find pleasure in the study of buildings as well as of Nature. It is a pleasure which has this advantage, that one can hunt up buildings both in city and in country, whereas in the city one can pursue no branch of natural history other than the discovery of microbes. I doubt if there is anything which could be better done for a student of history than to send him on an architectural tour through France, for instance; make him learn to comprehend the Northern, Eastern, and Southern types of building, and to distinguish between the subdivisions of these types, and to comprehend what were the influences that gave one character to the churches of Lorraine or of Burgundy, let us say, and other characters to those of Provence or Aquitaine. How interesting it is to compare the Romanesque of Germany with the more generally graceful Romanesque of France and the perhaps almost more perfect work of the same age in the churches of such a Spanish city as Avila. Everywhere the buildings interpret the age and the age interprets the buildings.

When one thinks of all the exquisite monuments of architectural genius which adorn such a country as Italy or France, one has to remember that they represent the accumulated ingenuity and skill and labour and taste of many generations of men. No one of those generations of men ever had such opportunities as architects both here and in England have during the last sixty years enjoyed. It is true that artistic designers of the last sixty years have not had quite so free a field as we assume that your predecessors had in the Renaissance, because they have been more hampered by committees, boards of trustees, municipal councils and other authorities who cannot realize, as did Lorenzo the Magnificent at Florence or King John III of Portugal, or other equally large-minded princes, that the great architect ought to have carte blanche for the building he has planned. But, except as respects that difficulty, you have enjoyed in this country, and in western Europe also, extraordinary opportunities during more than half a century of economic prosperity. Never, I suppose, was there a time when so many edifices, and so many large and important edifices, were erected, when there was so general an interest in building, and when so much money was lavishly spent in bricks and mortar. In England we developed some seventy years ago a sudden access of zeal in ecclesiastical matters which not only covered the outskirts of our growing cities with new churches, but set people to the repairing of old churches. And I grieve to have to confess that this zeal has in one way worked for evil rather than good. We have committed a crime which you here could not commit — I hope that even if the opportunity had presented itself, you would not have committed it, but have resisted the temptation. Anyhow, the opportunity did not come to you ; and to us it did come, and we, purely from want of thought, yielded to the temptation. We have been restoring not only some of our cathedrals, but many of our ancient parish churches, — of which there were more that had come down untouched from before the Reformation of the sixteenth century than any other country could boast, — and having sometimes restored them almost out of recognition, we have unfortunately obliterated a great deal of the history that was written in those churches. The same thing has happened in France, but not so widely, because not so much interest has been taken there in the parish churches. Some of the French cathedrals, however, have suffered more seriously than any English cathedral. The vast and splendid cathedral church of Perigueux, probably the grandest building of Byzantine character north of the Alps, has been so transformed by restoration that it is practically impossible to discover the features it had half a century ago. As regards England, it was not till after much irreparable harm had been done that between twenty and thirty years ago an enlightened band of scholars and artists, the most energetic and conspicuous of whom was the poet William Morris, took the field and exerted themselves to rouse the public and to stop, as far as possible, the process of transmogrifying an old church into something that was neither new nor old, but a hope-less jumble. The work of ruin has now been checked, but the harm already done is a calamity to weep over. Here you have not had ancient buildings to injure, and historical feeling has made you spare most of the buildings that possessed any sort of interest and dated more than a century back.

This, however, is a digression. I return to the main subject by observing that neither in England nor any-where in western Europe has full use been made of the opportunities for the display of original genius in architecture which the expenditure of vast sums of money on the erection of an immense number of buildings provided. We have not succeeded there, nor any more do architects in Germany or France seem to have succeeded, in evolving anything that can be called a new style distinctive of our age. When we look back upon every century from the end of the eighteenth to the beginnings of the West European Romanesque type of building in the tenth or eleventh century, we see that the buildings of almost every age show something that is characteristic of the time, some forms which at once denote to us the date of the work. But if we look at the work of our own and of the last century — and the same thing is as generally true in France and Germany as in Britain — we see a motley array of all sorts of different styles, from the eleventh century to the eighteenth. I speak chiefly of ecclesiastical architecture, for of course in private residences and municipal buildings some styles are less convenient for practical purposes than others. Efforts are sometimes made to combine the features of different styles, but this eclecticism is seldom successful, and the total result in beautiful and impressive buildings is not worthy of the amount of knowledge and pains that has been devoted to the work as a whole and of the amount of money that has been spent upon it. Some fine things have been produced, but few in proportion to the whole.

Neither have you here in the United States developed any characteristically American style of building since the so-called " colonial " type of pre-Revolutionary days. There is no style distinctive of the different sections of the country, except a few traces of Spanish work in Santa Fe (in New Mexico), and here and there in California, and a touch of French influence in the older parts of New Orleans. Nowhere in the western world does one find any parallel to the long architectural history of Europe or of India. Even in Spanish America, where people built from the first in stone, whereas your ancestors built in wood, there is little variety. Nearly all the churches and public buildings vary but little from the prevalent sixteenth century type which the Spaniards brought with them from Europe. Will this be always so, or will you of the New World, after two, three or four centuries, develop one or more styles characteristic of America, and offer to the historians of a still distant future a field of study like that which the Old World presents to us now ?

Here in the United States you seem to have made one new departure in which you have gone ahead of us Europeans. Your designs for houses in cities, and perhaps even more for suburban houses and sea-side cottages, have more variety, more freshness, more charm than the designs of those descriptions have in most parts of Europe. You have certainly made more use in cities of some of the earlier mediæval forms of architecture than we have succeeded in doing in England, and in that respect your recent work may show more originality than ours does. But still, you would probably agree that you have not yet succeeded either in inventing a new style, which perhaps may (for all we laymen know) be impossible, — for, after all, the possibilities of invention are limited, -- or in so combining and harmonizing some of the features of different styles as to make one which shall be distinctive of the nineteenth or twentieth century. Now that is just what the students of history would be now looking out for and longing for, if there were grounds for expecting it. Three or four hundred years hence, when the student follows the course of the development of architecture from the tenth century to his own time, he will find, as he descends the stream of time to the eighteenth, that there is a regular succession of forms of construction and decoration, and that he can approximately fix the date of a building by its general style and structure as well as by its mouldings and its ornaments. But when he comes to the nineteenth century he would be completely at a loss. He will find that of three churches erected about the same time, one was designed to reproduce the style of the twelfth century, another that of the fifteenth, a third that of the seventeenth. So the historically minded layman feels, when he tries to project himself into the position of an historian living in the twenty-fourth century, that this latter would rejoice to be able to realize what the twentieth century had been doing through its buildings as we to-day realize what the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries did.

There is, at any rate, a wide field still open in this country for inventive genius. You have had several architects of unquestioned genius, and will doubtless have more. Your wealth, the growth of your population, your noble contempt for expense, your boldness and grandeur of conception are known to all men on both sides of the Atlantic.

The new Central Station at Washington, with its two long vaulted halls, is as fine as anything of the kind in Europe. Still vaster and more majestic are the halls of the station which the Pennsylvania railroad company is erecting in New York. I have seen magnificent plans for the decoration of Washington ; I have seen a still more wonderful plan for the building of a new Chicago out in the lake, a plan which we in England, or indeed people anywhere in Europe, would not be able to consider on the score of cost. But expense has for you no terrors. I will not say that there is nothing that Congress will not do for Washington, because I am told that you and other men of light and leading have projects looking to the beautifying of Washington for which Congress is still hesitating to vote the money required ; but I know that there is nothing that Chicago fears to do if it will increase the splendour of that great city, and I dare say that is true of many other cities also. He who marvels at the gigantic schemes that are being attempted in New York and Chicago, is ready to believe that there is no enterprise designed for the benefit of such great communities from which its liberal and large-minded citizens will recoil on the score of cost.

I congratulate you, therefore, not only on the attractions of the profession to which you belong, but on the great opportunities which are open to you. We shall watch you from our side of the Atlantic without any jealousy of your superior wealth, but with admiration of your energy and with high hopes of what you will achieve for the adornment of those enormous cities which have sprung up on the North American Continent.