204 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



nineteenth, century, with its great wealth, its boundless resources, 

 and its extensive and diversified knowledge, to cast this cardinal 

 principle to one side. Savages may, indeed, be foolish enough, to 

 build houses which, exactly express the life of their builders and 

 answer every requirement of their primitive form of existence, 

 but we of this time are above such, petty expedients, and can well 

 afford to conform our lives to our architecture. We do not need 

 to make our architecture conform to ourselves. 



Judging from the monuments of our time, the view that archi- 

 tecture is not ornamentation but construction, not for beauty but 

 for utility, not for an elaborate exterior but for a well-devised in- 

 terior, not for something pleasing to look at, but for something to 

 live in or to be put to a certain well-defined purpose, is not one that 

 has any considerable support. A glance at a few of the chief 

 points of architectural history will show how true this is, and to 

 what an extent it underlies all that is good in the building art. 

 It is characteristic of the earliest stages of society, those in which 

 architecture had its birth, that nothing is built without a reason. 

 Then people had too few ideas, were provided with too limited 

 means, to be able, on the one hand, to think of unnecessary erec- 

 tions, or, on the other, to do more than was called for by abso- 

 lute necessity. Architecture was barren of ornament, and had a 

 crudeness that is almost repulsive to modern eyes ; but, never- 

 theless, primitive buildings answered their purpose, as a rule, 

 much more satisfactorily than many later ones. 



Illustrations of structures in which use, not beauty, is the cen- 

 tral idea, are to be found among the masters of art in antiquity. 

 The Egyptians, Assyrians, Greeks, Romans, all followed this 

 leading idea. There are, indeed, instances where the folly of a 

 wealthy tyrant has produced an overloading of ornament, an un- 

 necessary multiplication of details, and a striving after effect has 

 led to the employment of bad methods ; but these exceptions do 

 not disprove the rule. On the contrary, these very structures are 

 censured for their violation of this fundamental principle, and 

 it is those in which it is adhered to most closely that excite our 

 admiration and esteem. 



Utility, then, being the first element of successful architecture, 

 it follows that the structure of buildings varies according to the 

 use to which they are to be put. This proposition is self-evident, 

 and expresses only ordinary common sense. It would scarcely 

 call for demonstration, were it not for the fact that many modern 

 buildings are constructed on the basis that, if they look well, 

 whether the outward form is suitable or not for the purpose for 

 which they are intended, or whether the exterior expresses the 

 interior in any way, all has been done that is required. A very 

 different state of affairs existed in the past. The ancient Egyp- 



