COBRESP ONDENCE. 



699 



CORRESPONDENCE. 



A. DEFENSE OF THE ARCHITECTS. 



Editor Popular Science Monthly : 



SIR : Mr. Barr Ferree's articles on modern 

 architecture, in the June and December 

 numbers of the Monthly, are interesting as 

 giving an outside view of the present con- 

 dition of that profession ; but the writer 

 fails to discriminate between past perform- 

 ance and present tendency, between evils 

 in the ascendency and evils on the decline. 

 He appears, indeed, quite uninformed as to 

 what is being done by our leading archi- 

 tects and as to the spirit and methods of 

 their work, and judges the architecture of 

 our time by its worst instead of its best 

 performances. The views he expresses are 

 more or less widely prevalent in the com- 

 munity, and now that they have found such 

 pointed and vigorous utterance, demand 

 that some one should call attention to the 

 fallacy of a part, at least, of their asser- 

 tions. Architects are not such unwilling 

 listeners to lay criticism as this writer 

 would have us believe, but they do ask that 

 it shall justify itself by clear definitions, 

 precise statements, and evidence of thor- 

 ough acquaintance with the various bear- 

 ings of the subject. These are to be looked 

 for in vain in the above-mentioned articles, 

 which, moreover, seem to ignore the prog- 

 ress made by the profession in the last 

 twenty years (in house - planning, for in- 

 stance, in which the work of our architects 

 has aroused wide-spread interest even among 

 the conservative French). Both articles at- 

 tribute to architects as a class a disregard 

 of sanitary and mechanical requirements 

 quite unwarranted by the facts, and depre- 

 cate the attention they pay to exterior de- 

 sign, although most critics find this the 

 weakest side of their work. They are writ- 

 ten in apparent ignorance of the fact that 

 it is to the architects that we owe in great 

 measure our municipal building laws and a 

 large part of the modern advance in scien- 

 tific construction and in sanitation applied 

 to building. The strictures in these papers 

 appear to be based on reading rather than 

 on careful observation. Their author fol- 

 lows hard after Ruskin in his apparent 

 hatred of the Renaissance, and the last part 

 of the Fifth Discourse in Viollet-Leduc's 

 Entretiens sur 1' Architecture would seem to 

 have furnished a large part of the ammuni- 

 tion for his December assault ; but the En- 

 tretiens were written seven-and-twenty years 

 ago, and the evils at which they were aimed, 

 however prevalent in France at the time, 

 and however characteristic even of our own 

 architecture twenty years ago, are not fairly 

 characteristic of it now. The article in 



question is out of date ; it is a quarter of a 

 century behind the times. 



It is practicable here to notice only in 

 a summary way the erroneousness of its 

 main contentions. The grain of truth in 

 them need not be denied. That there are 

 charlatans and ignoramuses among the ar- 

 chitects of our day is as true as it is of the 

 legal, medical, or clerical profession, or of 

 any other class of men following a common 

 pursuit. It may even be admitted that 

 among them are to be found not a few men 

 of intelligence and culture who are pursu- 

 ing their career along mistaken lines or 

 without sufficient technical training ; but 

 from this to the denial of the existence of 

 intelligence or conscience in the profession 

 is a long distance across which one should 

 not attempt to leap without looking. Is it 

 indeed true that charlatanry and ignorance 

 control the profession and give it its char- 

 acter ? Is it true that architects generally 

 subordinate common sense to caprice ? Is 

 it true that when a client comes with a 

 rational, well-considered, and practical pro- 

 gramme for a given building, the architect 

 generally disregards his wishes and fools 

 him out of his programme by pretty pict- 

 ures intended only to catch his eye and a 

 commission, or that in the average work of 

 representative architects the demands of ex- 

 terior ornamentation alone dictate the in- 

 terior planning '? Is it true that our archi- 

 tects have signally failed to avail them- 

 selves of modern progress in scientific con- 

 struction ? Is it not rather true that they 

 have, on the contrary, often been the pio- 

 neers in the introduction and development 

 of new materials, appliances, and building 

 processes ? It is certainly a mistake to as- 

 sert that Roman architecture paid no atten- 

 tion to exterior effect, and did not largely 

 avail itself of the splendor of internal 

 adornment by applied ornament. It was 

 subject to the changes of " fashion," and 

 its forms are largely the product of a change 

 of fashion following the conquest of the 

 Greek world. The like is true of many 

 phases of Gothic and other historic styles. 



The contentions of the articles under 

 consideration need only to be stated in the 

 plain and concise form of these queries and 

 denials to appear to every well - informed 

 and fair-minded student of our architecture 

 an almost grotesque caricature of the true 

 state of affairs. Their effect, in view of the 

 reputation of the magazine through which 

 they have been given" to the public, can only 

 be to foster existing prejudices, however 

 vague and unfounded, against architects 

 as a class, and to impede instead of helping 



