Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/615

Rh fort, and economy. In other words, such desiderata mean proper shelter with efficient ventilation and adequate warming. And these now, as in the seventeenth century, are still indeterminate conditions in the problem of house-building.

If houses in Fuller's time were not built to live in, at least they were pleasant to look at. They pleased the judgment even more than the eye, for they fairly grew out of the requirements of the age, and were, in a great measure, the natural result of the ordinary materials at command. Not so the houses of the present day. Other times can boast their own styles. The castellated, the ecclesiastical, the Elizabethan, all express some idea, and are types of their own several ages and wants. But the nineteenth century, with its unlimited resources of iron and glass and its own peculiar civilization, has no distinctive style. The highest reach of architectural effort is a slavish reproduction of forms from which the spirit has lapsed with time and changed with custom. The interest attaching to a building of former ages arises partly from association and partly from the picturesque effect which age throws over it with its decay and damp. We might also say something of the poetic charm of desolation, the interest of rarity and historic truth—all, in short, which we instinctively feel can never be produced by the most perfect imitation.

But all that imagination and feeling conjure up, wherewith to clothe the rude forms of the past, are evidences of disuse and a superseded civilization. They no more accord with the full life and energy of the present age than hand-spinning does with the results of the steam-engine; and low wainscoted rooms, narrow windows, grotesque ornamentations, and rude domestic appliances, are only endurable when seen through the light of a tender, loving, hereditary pride. When, therefore, we see the constant and deliberate reproduction of old forms, and on assumed æsthetical grounds, we are justified in saying that such choice betokens the surrender of the judgment to a perverted taste; that the beauty of utility is not understood; and that the true object of house-building has yet to be learned.

The anomaly is made more apparent, if the result is less uncomfortable and unhealthy, when an architect breaks away from wholesome copying, and steals a little from various styles for the outside "treatment" of a modern dwelling. The result is a nondescript medley. Simplicity is ignored, proportion defied, fitness unthought of. For a rich man's use expense is disregarded in profuse variety; and for a poor man's dwelling—the balance is restored through the saving made in "jerry-building;" the result being what we have already stated, that average houses in the present day are built neither to live in nor to look at, but to let or to sell.

The anomaly of a medley of over-ornamentation and mixed styles in the individual villa, erected in the outskirts of large towns, is intensified into absolute mischief when such medley is applied to public