Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/398

384 design, for no beauty of mere architectural effect will compensate for discomfort and bad internal arrangement.

A good plan will make a good elevation; but an elevation in which specific rules which might be fitting for a Greek temple or a mediæval fortress are insisted on, is in no way suitable to an ordinary house, in which the first essentials are lofty and well-arranged windows, and proper light and air space.

Gothic tracery and pointed openings are not suited to ordinary sash windows, and it surely is inconsistent with modern street design to attempt anything in which one or other of the so-called five orders of classic architecture has to be worked into a house in which the frontage is perhaps eighteen or twenty feet at most. When it was attempted in the beginning of this century, in the terraces of Regent's Park, generally two or more houses were embraced in the design, a manifest inconvenience and absurdity when one owner wants to paint his front red and the other yellow.

The fashion of the day is running into modern Dutch, or so-called Queen Anne, and inasmuch as this style admits of ample fenestration, and does not limit the size of light-openings, and relies for its piquancy and character on honest red brick instead of sham plaster and vulgar imitation, we may be thankful for small mercies, and be content with a revival of a sixteenth and seventeenth century Renaissance school of architecture, which gives us at least color and picturesqueness in our London streets.

I go so far as to say that the man who builds a red-brick house in a town, where want of color tends to make everything glaring or, where smoke-covered, gloomy, is a benefactor to his species; and I go still further in saying that to a great extent the materials used should, in a manner, be those which are peculiar to the country and locality. Stone of various kinds is indigenous to certain localities, and naturally suggests itself to the particular neighborhoods.

We have plenty of good brick clay; we can obtain readily first class red bricks and terra-cotta, and both these materials are more lasting and more suitable to London smoke and the deleterious action of London atmosphere than almost any stone which exists.

Glazed and colored brick, and faience, and terra-cotta, admit of almost any variety of design; they give picturesqueness, warmth, and color where they are wanted.

I should like to see London streets made picturesque and beautiful in color, with terra-cotta and glazed faience, which every shower of rain would cleanse and improve, and should like to see every stucco fronted building decaying and unlet. As a rule, this sort of work is not only imitation of stone, bad in taste, bad in construction, and unfit to last any time, but glosses over inferior building, and covers a multitude of sins which it would be well for the occupiers, from a mere common-sense and sanitary point of view, to lay bare.