VITAL ACTION VS. NATURE-ACTION 201 



VI. The Architecture of Plant Life 



Beauty in architecture is the manifest Tightness in 

 the ways and means of accomplishment in the face of 

 adversity. Nowhere in nature is this structural beauty 

 so apparent to the casual observer as in a growing plant 

 or flower. Its very existence, every aspect and attitude 

 of form and color, the inmost texture of leaf, and stem, 

 and root, and branch, is the triumphant expression of 

 a fundamental Tightness of being; of a successful re- 

 sistance to the stress of nature-action, and a right usage 

 of nature-action in self-construction. 



In its architecture and well-being is sharply dis- 

 played that dual sovereignty to which we have already 

 referred ; that is, the existence, in the plant itself, of a 

 definite vital purpose, so far successfully accomplished, 

 and the existence, in its outer world, of a lawful, com- 

 pelling action to which it must submit. It is this 

 beauty of a triumphant vitality, so clearly expressed in 

 the stability, economy, and utility of every growing 

 thing, that man is forever trying to express in his own 

 architecture. 



Thus the housings of mankind, when rightly built, 

 display in the position, shape, dimensions, and dura- 

 bility of their walls, roofs, doors, windows, chambers, 

 and passage ways, the vital, sovereign purpose of their 

 inhabitants, as well as the sovereign action of gravity, 

 heat, light, wind and rain; the sources from which they 

 come; the directions in which they act; man's usage of 

 them and his defense against them. Man's life and art 

 is beautiful only so far as it manifests this Tightness of 

 usage and defense. More or less than that is ugliness. 



