: The Atlantic Monthly Volume 01 No. 03 January 1858 A Magazine of Literature Art and Politics by Various - American periodicals The Atlantic Monthly

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THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS

NOTES ON DOMESTIC ARCHITECTURE.

If building many houses could teach us to build them well, surely we ought to excel in this matter. Never was there such a house-building people. In other countries the laws interfere,--or customs, traditions, and circumstances as strong as laws; either capital is wanting, or the possession of land, or there are already houses enough. If a man inherit a house, he is not likely to build another,-- nor if he inherit nothing but a place in an inevitable line of lifelong hand-to-mouth toil. In such countries houses are built wholesale by capitalists, and only by a small minority for themselves.

And where the man inherits no house, he at least inherits the traditional pattern of one, or the nature of the soil decides the main points; as you cannot build of brick where there is no clay, nor of wood where there are no forests. But here every man builds a house for himself, and every one freely according to his whims. Many materials are nearly equally cheap, and all styles and ways of building equally open to us; at least the general appearance of most should be known to us, for we have tried nearly all. Our public opinion is singularly impartial and cosmopolitan, or perhaps we should rather say knowing and unscrupulous. All that is demanded of a house is, that it should be of an "improved style," or at least "something different." Nothing will excuse it, if old-fashioned,-- and hardly anything condemn it, if it have novelty enough.

And this latitude is not confined to the owner's scheme of his house, but extends also to the executive department. In other countries, however extravagant your fancy, you are brought within some bounds when you come to carry it out; for the architect and the builder have been trained to certain rules and forms, and these will enter into all they do. But here every man is an architect who can handle a T-square, and every man a builder who can use a plane or a trowel; and the chances are that the owner thinks he can do all as well as either of them. For if every man in England thinks he can write a leading article, much more every Yankee thinks he can build a house. Never was such freedom from the rule of tradition. A fair field and no favor; whatever that can accomplish we shall have.

The result, it must be confessed, is not gratifying. For if you sometimes find a man who is satisfied with his own house, yet his neighbors sneer at it, and he at his neighbors' houses. And even with himself it does not usually wear well. The common case is that even he accepts it as a confessed failure, or at best a compromise. And if he does not confess the failure, , the house confesses it. For what else but self-confessed failures are these thin wooden or cheap brick walls, temporarily disguised as massive stone,--this roof, leaking from the snow-bank retained by the Gothic parapet, or the insufficient slope which the "Italian style" demands?

There is no lack of endeavor to make the house look well. People will sacrifice almost anything to that. They will strive their chambers into the roof,--they will have windows where they do not want them, or leave them out where they do,--in our tropical summers they will endure the glare and heat of the sun, rather than that blinds should interfere with the moulded window-caps, or with the style generally,--they will break up the outline with useless and expensive irregularity,--they will have brackets that support nothing, and balconies and look-outs upon which no one ever steps after the carpenter leaves them,--all for the sake of pleasing the eye. And all this without any real and lasting success,--with a success, indeed, that seems often in an inverse ratio to the effort. If a man have a pig-stye to build, or a log-house in the woods, he may hit upon an agreeable outline; but let him set out freely and with all deliberation to build something that shall be beautiful, and he fails.

This is all evident enough, and in principle generally admitted; but we dodge the application of the principle, because we are not ready to admit to ourselves, what history, apart from any reasoning, would show us, that those importations are failures, and that not accidentally in these particular cases, leaving the hope of better success for the next trial, but necessarily, and because they are importations.

All good architecture must be the gradual growth of its country and its age,--the accumulation of men's experience, adding and leaving out from generation to generation. The air of permanence and stability that we admire in it must be gained by a slow and solid growth. It is the product, not of any one man's skill, but of a nation's; and its type, accordingly, must be gradually formed.

But in this, as in everything else, there must be an aim, and one persisted in, else no experience is gained. A mere succession of generations will do nothing, if for each of them the whole problem is changed. The man of to-day cannot profit by his father's experience in the building of his house, if his culture, his habits, his associates, are different from his father's,--much less if they have changed since his own youth, and are changing from year to year. He will not imitate, he will not forbear to alter. On such shifting sands no enduring structure is possible, but only a tent for the night.

We talk of the laws of architecture; but the fundamental law of all, and one that is sure to be obeyed, is, that the dwelling shall typify man's appropriation of the earth and its products,--what we call property. A man's house is naturally just as fixed a quantity as the kind and the amount of his possessions, and no more so. The style of it, depending on the inherited ideas of the class to which he belongs, will be as formed and as fixed as that class. Then where there is no fixed class, and where the property of every man is constantly varying, our quantity will be just so variable, and the true type of our architecture will be the tent,--of the frame-and-clapboard variety suited to the climate.

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