Page:America Today, Observations and Reflections.djvu/41

 In short, architecture is here a living art. Go where you will in these up-town regions, you can see imagination and cultured intelligence in the act, as it were, of impressing beauty of proportion and detail upon brick and terra-cotta, granite and marble. And domestic or middle-class architecture is not neglected. The American "master builders" do not confine themselves to towers and palaces, but give infinite thought and loving care to "homes for human beings." The average old-fashioned New York house, so far as I have seen it, is externally unattractive (the characteristic material, a sort of coffee-coloured stone, being truly hideous), and internally dark, cramped, and stuffy. But modern houses, even of no special pretensions, are generally delightful, with their polished wood floors and fittings, and their airy suites of rooms. The American architect has a great advantage over his English colleague in the fact that in furnace-heated houses only the bedrooms require to be shut off with doors. The halls and public rooms can be grouped so that, when the curtains hung in their wide doorways are drawn back, two, three, or four rooms are open to the eye at once, and charming effects of space and light-and-shade can be obtained. Of this advantage the modern house-planner makes excellent use, and I have seen more than one quite modest family house which, without any sacrifice of comfort, gives one a sense of almost palatial spaciousness. An architectural exhibition which I saw the