318 TOWERS AND TANKS FOR WATER-WORKS. 



there is little room for artistic architecture, and any pleasing 

 effect produced must grow out of consistency of design and a 

 thorough knowledge of the peculiarities of materials of construc- 

 tion and color. To an educated person, correct construction 

 always produces a sense of satisfaction, for in it is involved the 

 idea of proportion and appropriateness for the service to which 

 it is put. Concealment of constructive forms, by mouldings, 

 panels, or other devices, to suggest something else than what 

 the construction really is, is vulgar as well as dishonest. To 

 construct a girder bridge and give it the appearance of being 

 an arch illustrates what is here meant by falsity of architecture, 

 specimens of which more than one of our public parks contain. 

 Possibly to bridges more than to any other class of public w r orks 

 does the Ruskinian axiom (which cannot be repeated too often) 

 apply: 'Decorate the construction, but not construct decoration.' 

 Such a principle conscientiously kept in view cannot but result 

 in else than good work. Its violation results in a senseless fraud 

 demoralizing to the taste of the community where such violation! 

 may occur. Public works, in a certain sense, play a part in the 

 education of a people, and their authors and builders have con- 

 sequently to that extent a responsibility in addition to the mere 

 utilitarian idea of endurance and safety. The ideas herein 

 advanced are not novel ones by any means; but they cannot be 

 enforced too often, when in this boasted age of culture and civiliza- 

 tion a community will permit the huge architectural fraud of 

 the Fairmount Bridge over the Schuylkill at Philadelphia, and 

 hardly yet completed. Constructively, this bridge, with its 

 double tier of floors, spanning the Schuylkill in a single stretch 

 of 340 feet, is a monument to its designer and an honor to American 

 engineering. Instead of letting the enormous trusses stand in 

 all their grandeur, depending wholly upon judicious painting 

 and the design of the cornices and railings, etc., for their aesthetic 

 effect, thousands of dollars have been spent in actually covering 

 up the trusses to a great extent with sheet iron, forming an arcade 



