STRUCTURES IN LANDSCAPE 



the building almost certainly should be the dominant object in the 

 composition. This effect is not difficult to attain, for to the ordinary 

 person a building, like any of the other works of man, is in itself inter- 

 esting. A building attracts interest also by its form, definite, rec- 

 tilinear, obvious, expressing the uses for which man designed it. Then, 

 too, the definiteness of a building's texture and the crispness of its 

 decoration attract the attention more than does the texture of natural 

 trees and rocks ; and in color, though to be sure the flowers may boast 

 colors as bright, few natural objects present such considerable areas 

 or simple schemes of unbroken color, and few indeed can vie with the 

 colors of our modern American wooden houses, whether in the city or 

 in the country. Where marble or limestone or any light-colored stone 

 is used, the building becomes a very conspicuous object in contrast to 

 the vegetation about it. And an important consideration a 

 building of an architectural style in which the parts are all obviously 

 related to one compositional whole, particularly if there is balance 

 and repetition of parts, will be thereby especially unified, distinctive, 

 and conspicuous in the landscape. (See Drawing XXV, opp. p. 196.) 



In the immediate surroundings of buildings, the outdoor forms may 

 be definitely subordinated to a dominant architectural conception by 

 the creation of terraces, parterres, ramps, steps, by the formal in- 

 closure of areas of ground, by the use of vines and shrubs and trees 

 trimmed and clipped as objects of architectural decoration. (See 

 Drawing X, opp. p. 80.) Farther from the building, the trees may 

 retain their natural forms, though still made a part of the same scheme 

 as the building by being arranged in man-made compositions. The 

 roads and paths, perhaps formal, perhaps yielding their formality 

 unwillingly to topographic necessities, in any case express man's use 

 of the ground, and point to the building as the center of the scheme. 

 Of course there is a limit in any man-made scheme beyond which man 

 does not endeavor to make the whole of the landscape express his will. 

 In the Italian villas, there is usually a definite wall which marks this 

 limit. In many English estates and modern American parks and 

 large country places, there is a transition rather than a demarcation 

 between man's and nature's domain. Whatever may be the treatment 

 of the immediate surroundings of the buildings, however, the buildings 



