American renaissance; a review of domestic architecture. Joy Wheeler Dow
0
PLATE VIII.
THE NEWLY INVENTED ARCHITECTURE.
| ANALYSIS. | ||
| Moresque Spain | 10 | per cent. |
| Moresque Algiers | 10 | “ |
| Moresque California Mission | 10 | “ |
| East Indian | 5 | “ |
| Newly reclaimed land | 10 | “ |
| Chinese ornament | 5 | “ |
| Modern invention, pure | 50 | “ |
| Anglo-Saxon home atmosphere | 00 | “ |
EASTOVER TERRACE AND PERISTYLE.
For convenient reference of the reader a sample of this newly-invented architecture is respectfully submitted (Plate VIII), and a very clever sample it is. The inventors of the style themselves could have done no better; only the irresistible melancholy in the rhyming of Poe’s poem is not easily put out of the head, especially when, as in this case, it happens to be extremely appropriate. So let us continue:
“And we passed to the end of a vista,
But were stopped by the door of a tomb—
By the door of a legended tomb.”
Certainly it is unfamiliar environment from which one’s mind naturally reverts to his childhood (you must have had a childhood)—reverts to the wondrous houses we visited in the impressionable days of long ago. Ah, they were a very different kind of houses, were they not?—houses with significance, houses with personality, if building material may ever be said to incorporate that. They had a history to tell. They had legends, too. As we think of them they seem to have been literally covered with legends, some of them cut with the jack-knife deep in the attic timbers. But they were all legends that appeal to happiness. They were not the legends of tombs. And the old sensations come back to us again. Perhaps it is just as the afternoon light begins to fail so that we can no longer read, and the sunset is very beautiful.
No, no, the vagaries of geometrical invention will never supplant those first loves!
For you, then, when your lamp is lighted—I hope it is not the dazzling, 16-candle-power electric bulb of commercialism, made still further terrifying by a gorgeous glass globe—for you I have a treat in store to soothe the nerves the newly-invented architecture has indescribably rasped. It is a “sure enough” old-fashioned house. To borrow the style of Ik Marvel in his “Reveries of a Bachelor,” I can see how you will carefully put this book where you will not miss it to show your architect in the morning. You will remember the number of the page that you do not waste the time of a busy professional man in finding the place; and this is about what you will say to him: “I do not know how good the architecture is, that
PLATE IX.
EASTOVER.
The Garden Front.
A modern development of Annapolitan architecture under the Colonial régime in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. Time of George II.
the old house on Benefit Street in Providence represents (Plate VII); but I do know it has just the atmosphere that reaches the inner man, and that is the atmosphere I want.”
But not every architect is able to give you this atmosphere (Plate X). None of the architectural schools teach it, and commercialism in some form usually doles out the architect’s bread and butter, so that he is accustomed in his work to reduce your proposition to a cold calculation of so much house for so much money. He is made to smile grimly (with Mr. R. H. Davis’s kind permission) over what he considers your sentimental impracticality, then says: “We build houses by the cubic foot, you know.” And after the size, position, number of rooms, etc., are determined, then, whatsoever art may be applied just as well as not without materially adding to the cost is made to serve as the meek handmaid of commercialism; and I must say of this applied art as we see it every day, exemplified in America, it certainly looks the part.
All through the Berkshires, wherever a commanding eminence rises in the midst of natural loveliness, the bristling odd conceits—they are not art—of the prodigious captain of industry who has made his money by always “driving three in a buggy,” testifies that even in his dwelling-place he calculates to get the worth of every dollar, and every dollar is made to show—a veritable monument to his commercial sagacity. But to my mind, Sharon in Connecticut, which lies some fifty miles, perhaps, to the southward of the Berkshires, is the most beautiful inland village we have in New England. Architecturally, it is not remarkable either for good or bad work; but toward the lower end of the main street there is one startling beauty in the fabric of the John Cotton Smith manse. (See illustrations, Plates X and XXXIV.) As an appreciative tenant is about vacating, I suppose the envious eyes of commercialism will soon light upon this charming exemplar of Colonial days with an idea of adding extensions, verandas or what not to make it “real stylish like.” But for once, commercialism will be disappointed, for I am told that money will not buy the Cotton Smith house.
The despoiler of beautiful landmarks, however, is
PLATE X.
NOT EVERY ARCHITECT IS ABLE TO GIVE YOU THIS ATMOSPHERE.
MONEY WILL NOT BUY THE COTTON SMITH HOUSE.
rarely idle. He knocks first at one door, and then at the next. New houses or old, it makes no difference so long as the design be good, and worth spoiling. The Cotton Smith mansion is one bright particular exception that goes to prove the rule, for, ordinarily, commercialism suffers no rebuke, and especially is this true of New York City. Here, whatever commercialism wants it takes without more ado. A “sky-scraper”