202 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



UTILITY IN ARCHITECTURE. 



By BARK FEEEEE. 



IT is a significant commentary on the actual state of our culture 

 that architecture, the most ancient and grandest of the arts, 

 is to-day the least understood, the least satisfactory, the least 

 appreciated of all the achievements of our civilization. This is 

 the more remarkable because there are few periods so prolific of 

 building as our own. There have been times when great and 

 splendid works have been raised by some ambitious ruler who 

 has produced monuments quite unlike anything that is under- 

 taken at the present ; but, while we erect no costly palaces or mag- 

 nificent temples, we build thousands of smaller structures whose 

 combined cost in any one year or term of years greatly exceeds 

 the sums expended on the most elaborate edifices of antiquity 

 in the same time. This is especially the case in our own country, 

 where there is a constant and active demand for buildings of all 

 kinds, for the most expensive as well as the cheapest, for state use 

 and for the individual citizen. And yet, in spite of this undi- 

 minished call, which in any department of trade or of manufact- 

 ures would at once produce the very best results and the most 

 satisfactory methods, the architecture of our time is so thoroughly 

 bad, so wanting in the first principles of common sense, so de- 

 based, that this noblest of all the arts is scarcely included in the 

 term, and our critics speak patronizingly of it as just being 

 " gradually recognized " as such. 



Architecture has an historical chronology of at least four thou- 

 sand years during which we can trace its growth, and in which it 

 expressed in a very thorough manner the conditions under which it 

 was developed. It has been reserved for the superior knowledge 

 of modern times to cast it aside as one of the peculiar products of 

 a less intelligent age, as something to admire for its past monu- 

 ments, but as being quite out of our modern ideas of progress. 

 Because in the last few years a partial revival has taken place ; 

 because it has been discovered that it offers a convenient and 

 expensive way of impressing the beholder with the importance of 

 the builder ; because our rich men and large corporations want to 

 give some visual evidence of their resources — it has been taken 

 up as something that may be approved of as a means of testifying 

 to the wealth of our cities and adding to their general good looks. 

 The very art element of architecture has been the cause of its 

 degradation. From the most useful of arts, it has become mostly 

 ornamental. From meaning and expressing the utility of an edi- 

 fice, it has come to refer to its appearance only. People have for- 



