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Waterbury House, Fifth Avenue and Eleventh Street, New York.

LV--Remaining Half of the Colonnade, New York City.

Typical architecture of the transitional period.

LVI--"And that house with the coopilows his'n."

A Fifth Avenue Mansion during the Reign of Terror.

LX--Franco-American Roof. Typical example.

Jacobin architecture was at least symmetrical.

Fashionable House, Eastlake School.

An Ultra-fashionable Colonial House of the Present Day, 1904.

Canterbury Keys, Wyoming, N. J.

LXX--House of W. K. Vanderbilt, Fifth Avenue and Fifty-second Street, New York City.

Kingdor, detail.

LXXX--A Cottage at East Orange, N. J.

Princessgate, rear.

The Modern American Dwelling. Exemplifying fashion.

Detail in South Eighth Street, Philadelphia.

Detail, Princessgate.

XC--Green Tree Inn, Germantown.

XCI--Princessgate developed from Dutch and English Farm-house Motives.

Try to have the rear of your house as attractive as the front.

XCII--Biltmore, in North Carolina.

XCIV--House of H. W. Poor, Tuxedo, N. Y.

XCV--Garden Gate at Wyoming, N. J.

Window of a Dining-room, Wyoming, N. J.

AMERICAN RENAISSANCE

ETHICS

The magnificence of this subject, even of a single branch--the domestic phase--is disproportionate to a review in one volume, in the scope of which, I fear, I cannot achieve much more than a respectable introduction. But even an introduction, like the overture to an opera, is better begun at the beginning.

Civilized man, and especially one of Anglo-Saxon descent, is a home-loving creature. To him the dwelling-place stands for his most important institution. The arts, sciences and traditions he pursues, mainly as they are to minister unto it, and its fruition is the goal of life. About this dwelling-place, then, there must be a very great deal to be said, indissolubly associated as it is with everything in life worth having--one's childhood, parents, children, wife, sweetheart, and next to these one's own personal comfort--one's hours of leisure and recreation. Therefore, just so much as domestic architecture departs in an impersonal, artificial way from whatever relates to or reflects these associations, just so much does it err--does it fail. It will be obvious, upon a moment's consideration, that any cold-blooded practice or discussion of academic formulae, alone, looking to the development of American domestic architecture, is hopelessly inefficient.

pictures, rare volumes, diaries, letters and state archives to link him up properly in historical succession and progression. We are covetous of our niche in history. We want to belong somewhere and to something, not to be entirely cut off by ourselves as stray atoms in boundless space either geographical or chronological. The human mind is a dependent thing and so is happiness. We may not, indeed, have inherited the house we live in; the chances are we have not. We may not remember that either of our parents or any of our grandparents before us, ever gloried in the quiet possession of as ideal a homestead as is illustrated in Plate I to convey the atmosphere intended; but for the sake of goodness--for the sake of making the world appear a more decent place to live in--let us pretend that they did, and that it is now ours. Let us pretend that God has been so good to us, and that we have proved worthy of His trust. With this amount of psychological preparation, I believe it is possible for every cultivated American man or woman to approach the subject of American Renaissance architecture--domestic architecture--in the true spirit of understanding.

The predominant local color which distinguishes American Renaissance has been given to it by what has been our great national building commodity, i. e., wood. The Greeks and Romans built of stone when they had the money to pay for it, as does everybody else; otherwise, people in new countries fall back upon a less expensive material. Our less expensive material was wood. Both stone and wood have grain, and have to be used with the same careful regard to it. Whether we build our columns up of stone or wooden sections--latitudinal in the one case, longitudinal in the other--to support a cornice also constructed in sections according to the convenient sizes of commerce for the particular material, makes no difference to the canons of art so long as we are not trying to deceive or to imitate one material with another simply with that end in view. It is extremely doubtful if our American ancestors were ever guilty of premeditated deception. Their material was an honest material; it had to be fashioned in some way, why not after the manner of the Renaissance? In our own day of numerous short-comings in matters architectural it rarely enters the head to deceive upon this point. Notwithstanding the tremendous resources now at command we yet prefer wooden columns to stone ones for dwelling-houses. As national wealth has increased, however, there has been that natural tendency, of course, to carve the Renaissance details of stone, and the white marble porches of Washington square, North may be cited as splendid bits of American Renaissance. But if we go further, and by reason of accumulated affluence erect the entire structure of the new Colonial house in stone--columns, cornices, window and door casings, etc., strange to say we lose an indefinable charm--a certain warmth and personality with which American history has invested wood. Besides, the fashion and style of Renaissance motive and detail is as suitable to wood as it is to stone; and if the first named material is not quite so durable it is much more easily repaired and replaced.

In English Renaissance, local conditions commonly restricted the use of wood to the interiors. In American Renaissance, the plenitude of this material enabled the Colonial builders to use it for the outside as well,

Had America been settled and colonized two centuries earlier, under a Tudor king, most likely there would have been a Gothic influence in the early work. It is difficult to know in our day how it could possibly have been exploited in wood, and there is no excuse for our attempting anything of the kind at this time of unlimited resources in the building trade. Battlements, keeps and moats were Feudal protectory measures, and would have been worse than useless constructed of anything inflammable. About the only legitimate Gothic architecture expressed in wood which

has stood the test of time, is represented by the 17th and 18th century ch?lets of Switzerland, and I doubt if even Yankee ingenuity could have evolved anything half so good. As a matter of fact we have no ancient Gothic exemplars. It is said that the old Pickering house on Broad Street in Salem, built A.D. 1649 , was a replica in wood of a Jacobean tavern in England, namely, the Peacock Inn, Derbyshire. The venerable dwelling at Salem has passed through many vicissitudes, and in 1842, when the influence of John Ruskin was so misused in America, the Pickering house was largely remodeled, so that it is impossible to say, to-day, how successful an adaptation of Jacobean work this was. But even Jacobean architecture is scarcely Gothic architecture since England incorporates it with all the rest of her Renaissance.

Sir Christopher Wren was supreme upon the architectural stage of England when the prosperity of the American colonies was sufficient to warrant the academic study of domestic architecture upon this side of the Atlantic, and Sir Christopher was the very life of the English Renaissance in its stricter sense. During this great history-making epoch, the giant forests of America came into excellent play for following out--if often in a crude and kind of miniature way--whatever the prodigious architect executed in stone. There was no bit of classic detail from either Athens or Rome, transmitted to London through what I may call the "Florentine Clearing-house" presided over by Palladio, Sansovino, Scammozzi and their contemporaries, but what could be carved more readily in wood; and time and history have thrown a glamour over all this wooden development of ours, and established its right of succession with a hall-mark.

But the main point in favor of Renaissance architecture, it must be remembered, was that it lent itself extremely well to the Anglo-Saxon home-feeling. It emanated from a land that had reached the pinnacle of attainment in the arts of peace--Italy--and it was so easy to fashion and make minister to most Anglo-Saxon home requirements. Luckily, the Colonial builders were conservative artificers, neither so clever nor so restless as this generation, or they, certainly, could not have resisted the eloquence of false prophets and knavish architectural promoters and fakirs who came their way. And we should have been deprived of our illustrious inheritance, which, happily, cannot be taken from us now.

Fortunately for American architecture, Sir Christopher Wren was what we would call in our vernacular "all right." He had a good thing, an inexhaustible mine for supplying ideas for all manner of buildings, and he worked it for the best interests of all concerned. His reputation and success have fired many a modern, would-be Wren to dare to try the experiment of some rival kind of architecture. Such is the aspect we have now of the late H. H. Richardson and his Romanesque style .

Trinity Church in Boston was a superb design when it was finished, and continues to be so to-day. But its best influence, I fear, has been perverted forever. A quarter of a century ago Richardson was hailed as an apostle equal with Wren, and America went mad, not in a Romanesque revival, but in a carnival of it, by which I mean to say it was burlesqued. It is sad to reflect that such a genius as the man who designed the church in Boston should have allowed himself to succumb to the wiles of the flatterers enough to be drawn into the disgraceful saturnalia which followed so close upon his brilliant d?but.

Now the home of the Romanesque was not Florence. It pretended to nothing of the court of Lorenzo the Magnificent, which, if it stood for anything, was elegant living. Mediaeval, benighted south of France was the home proper of the Romanesque, and its proper medium of expression--churches, cloisters, and monasteries. What could such a style of architecture contribute to the Anglo-Saxon home? Absolutely nothing. And when Trinity Church was finally completed, Richardson had practically exhausted everything there was in the newly borrowed style. He could have gone on, probably, raising ecclesiastic edifices, designing an occasional library or two in good form, without directly cribbing from his masterpiece; but neither he nor his imitators--and they were legion--cared a fig for the ethics or proprieties of architecture. They appear to have been actuated alone by the same principles of expediency which govern the

"New Art" movement. They invented an exaggerated architectural grammar, without doubt derived from the old mediaeval cathedrals in the south of France, but so vulgarized as to establish a clear case of libel for those eminently respectable prototypes. This grammar the rabid reformers proceeded to apply to every kind of secular building in America, finally to American dwelling-houses themselves. They did not reckon with their grandparents for an instant, not they. They apparently took the keenest delight in walking rough-shod over every sacred home memory. They openly insulted the very ancestors to whom they owed existence. But the balance of good and evil there is in the world cannot be disturbed so suddenly or arbitrarily. Outraged history was not slow to assert itself, and after a while would have no more of the dwelling-house Romanesque. I regret to say that Richardson's imitators were not the last of their race, and that there have been other and as rabid architectural reformers, of whom I shall speak in the next chapter.

ART AND COMMERCIALISM

Not very long ago two enterprising architects in a Western State succeeded in inventing a characteristic style of architecture of some merit. I do not know its name. I am not sure that it has any. But as it is likely to be somewhat in vogue for several years to come, I may as well print herewith a simple recipe for combining its essential elements:

Recipe: First, you must endeavor to find some valuable fragment of ancient Greece or Rome, preferably a pedestal for a statue, base of a column, or even the shaft itself and capital, which should not be too attenuated, however, and is to be translated, if necessary, from a cylindrical form into a rectangular one. Now, here is the scheme:

Punch your elevations full of rectangular holes in seemly rows, divide them into latitudinal sections by

several belt courses of East Indian flat-carving, and bore a semi-circular opening or a series of them upon the ground line or the projected edifice to afford a mode of ingress and egress corresponding, proportionately, to the same convenience designed for bees in a bee-hive. Next, pour in Alice in Wonderland's "Drink me" elixir to make it grow, and await results of the magic drug. This is the critical moment. All must work harmoniously, and, having reached the height limit imposed by the elevator manufacturer, perhaps, quickly cap the building with some red, corrugated tiles, if you choose, in the form of a Moresque roof, ornament with lantern and flagstaff, and, behold!--the charm operates!--the great American "sky-scraper" of a commercial city has been achieved.

"Oh, hasten!--oh, let us not linger! Oh, fly!--let us fly!--for we must."

For convenient reference of the reader a sample of this newly-invented architecture is respectfully submitted , 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:

Certainly it is unfamiliar environment from which one's mind naturally reverts to his 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

the old house on Benefit Street in Providence represents ; but I do know it has just the atmosphere that reaches the inner man, and that is the atmosphere I want."

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. 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.

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