A FEW WORDS ON OUR PROGRESS IN BUILDING 



There is still another class of our countrymen who put on a hypercritical air, and 

 sit in judgment on the progress and development of the building taste in this country. 

 They disdain everything foreign. They will have no Gothic mansions, Italian villas, 

 or Swiss cottages. Nothing will go down with them but an entirely new " order," as 

 they call it, and they berate all architectural writers, (we have come in for our share,) 

 for presenting certain more or less meritorious modifications of such foreign styles. 

 What they demand, with their brows lowered and their hands clenched, is an " Ame- 

 rican style of architecture!" As if an architecture sprung up like the after-growth 

 in our forests, the natural and immediate consequence of clearing the soil. As if a 

 people not even indigenous to the country, but wholly European colonists, or their 

 descendants, a people who have neither a new language nor religion, who wear the fash- 

 ions of Paris, and who in their highest education, hang upon the skirts of Greece and 

 Kome, were likely to invent, (as if it were a new plough,) an original and altogether 

 novel and satisfactory style of architecture. 



A little learning we have been rightly told, is one of the articles to be labelled 

 " dangerous." Our hypercritical friends prove the truth of the saying, by expecting 

 what never did, and never will happen. An original style in architecture or any other of 

 the arts, has never yet been invented or composed outright; but all have been modifica- 

 tions of previously existing modes of building. Late discoverers have proved that G recian 

 Architecture was only perfected in Greece — the models of their temples were found in 

 older Egypt.* The Romans composed their finest structures out of the very ruins of pub- 

 lic edifices brought from Greece, and the round arch had its rise from working with these 

 fragments instead of masses of stone. The Gothic arch, the origin of which has been 

 claimed as an invention of comparatively modern art, Mr. Euskin has proved to be of 

 purely Arabic origin, in use in Asia long before Gothic architecture was known, and 

 gradually introduced into Europe by architects from the East. And whoever studies 

 Oriental art, will see the elements of Arabic architecture, the ground-work of the 

 style, abounding in the ruins of Indian temples of the oldest date known on the globe. 



It is thus, by a little research, that we find there has never been such a novelty 

 as the invention of a positively new style in building. What are now known as the 

 Grecian, Gothic, Roman and other styles, are only those local modifications of the 

 styles of the older countries, from which the newer colony borrowed them, as the 

 climate, habits of the people, and genius of the architects, acting upon each other 

 through a long series of years, gradually developed into such styles. It is, therefore, 

 as absurd for the critics to ask for the American style of architecture, as it was for the 

 English friends of a Yankee of our acquaintance to request him, (after they were on 

 quite familiar terms,) to do them the favor to put on his savage dress and talk a little 

 American! This country is, indeed, too distinct in its institutions, and too vast in 

 its territorial and social destinies, not to shape out for itself a great national type in 

 character, manners and art ; but the development of the finer and more intellectual traits 

 of character are slower in a nation, than they are in a man, and only time can develope 

 them healthily in either case. 



* According to the last conclusions of the savans, Solomon's Tennple was a pure model of Greek Architect 



