132 Mr Russell on the Construction of Buildings 



tlie writer's ordinary duties require from him the daily use of 

 buildings, to which the principles he is now to explain are ap- 

 plicable, he conceives that some circumstances may have been 

 forced upon his attention from which important consequences 

 may hereafter be deduced. 



In almost every large room designed for an audience or 

 spectators, or for both, because most people like to see, as well 

 as to hear a speaker, it may be noticed that certain seats are 

 the best. These seats are neither too far forward nor too far 

 back, that is, they are not so far forward as, by being imme- 

 diately under the speaker, to require to look up at a painful 

 angle of elevation, and to permit his voice to pass over our 

 heads ; or, on the other hand, so distant as to throw us behind 

 a mass of people by whom vision would be intercepted, and 

 over whose heads we should require to strain either to see or to 

 hear clearly. A perfectly good seat is one in which, without 

 inieasy elevation of the head or eye, without straining or stretch- 

 ing, we can calmly and quietly take any easy position, or variety 

 of positions, which we maybe disposed to assinne, and yet may 

 in all of them see and hear the speaker with equal clearness 

 and repose, so as to give him patient and undisturbed attention. 

 The person who occupies such a seat feels as if the speaker 

 Avere speaking principally to and for him ; he finds that no one 

 else stands in his way, and that he hears as well, and sees as 

 well, as if there were no one else in the room but himself and 

 the speaker. A room so constructed that every man in it 

 should feel in this manner, that he had got one of the best 

 places, and that no one else was in his way, — such a room would 

 be perfect. Such a room, or rather approximations to such a 

 room, we have sometimes, but very rarely, met with. On tak- 

 ing a particular seat, whether near the front or near the back, 

 of the audience, we have felt the comfortable assurance of hav- 

 ing one of the best seats in the room. 



The object of this paper is to discover in what manner the 

 interior of a building for public speaking should be formed, so 

 that throughout the whole range which the voice of a man is 

 capable of filling, each individual should see and hear without 

 interruption from any of the rest of the audience, with equal 



