324 The Evolution of Architecture. 



from the one level of the Louvre or Versailles than that glo- 

 rious jumble which the so-called palace of the Caesars must 

 have been in Eome, a group of palaces, no two upon one level ; 

 and the Acropolis of Athens presented a similar effect. Use 

 in architecture is not necessarily the enemy of beauty. For 

 all its technical defects even so useful a building as our capi- 

 tol at Washington is very nobly beautiful. Very beautiful 

 also were the town halls of Flanders, in Brussels, Ghent, 

 Liege, Louvain, and Oudenarde. Chicago has no church, 

 even the most useless, that is so beautiful as the great store- 

 house for dry goods which Mr. Richardson built for Mar- 

 shall Field. Nor are the arches of our Brooklyn Bridge less 

 admirable as architecture because they serve the daily use of 

 thronging multitudes. 



Much better than to define architecture as the art of those 

 constructions which have no use is it to say that it is the art 

 of building with an eye to beauty without sacrifice of use 

 where there is any use to serve " a shaping art of which 

 the function is to arouse emotion by combinations of ordered 

 and decorated mass." And what is meant by the evolution 

 of architecture is that in its historic changes there is noth- 

 ing accidental ; that each present form of it is rooted in 

 some past and has its bearing on the future ; that here also 

 there is a struggle for existence and the preservation of the 

 fittest to survive, which may or may not be the most beauti- 

 ful', that there is a development of degeneration as well as of 

 progress, as in animal and vegetable evolution ; that here, as 

 there, we have fixity of type and the tendency to variation, 

 and that the selected variations make new species in the 

 course of time. Indeed, there is hardly any principle of the 

 general philosophy of evolution which does not find some 

 illustration in the history of architectural form and decora- 

 tion. 



I do not propose at every stage of my discourse to point 

 the moral, but to give you a broad outline of the course of 

 architectural development, and let you make the application 

 for yourselves, with here and there a more explicit word. 



Building is not architecture till it makes for beauty, not 

 for use alone. Could there have been preserved to us any of 

 the caves, or huts, or tents, of the primeval races, we should 

 doubtless know that this " making for beauty " was at an 

 early stage. From the fact that the cave-dwellers of Europe 

 ornamented their tools and weapons it is a safe inference 

 that they strove to beautify the caves in which they lived. 



