PROBLEMS OF MODERN ARCHITECTURE 641 



modern engineers and architects taught us how utterly forbidding 

 and ugly a great, wide, and lofty roof can be made. Now that men 

 have learned the fallacy of the historic revivals, and have begun to 

 seek out more rational ways of handling these resources, they have 

 to contend with traditions established by seventy years of inartistic 

 engineering. The French alone have, during these years, given 

 the world the benefit of repeated efforts to lift iron construction out 

 of the slough of artistic despond, as in the Halles Centrales, the 

 Church of Saint Augustine, and the exhibitions of 1878 and 1889, 

 particularly the Salle des Machines of the latter exhibition. 



Architecture, thus, on the threshold of the twentieth century, 

 finds itself in a condition which it has never before experienced. Its 

 resources, both for construction and design, are richer than ever 

 before in history. The phenomenal activity and inventiveness of the 

 technical industries, and the interchanges of commerce, have placed 

 at the architects' disposal a marvelous variety of building-materials 

 and processes, which they are constantly increasing by new additions. 

 Iron, steel, bronze, and aluminum; concrete and artificial stones; 

 bricks of endless variety of form and color; terra-cottas, faience and 

 tiles without end; roofing-materials of ingenious design; paints and 

 cements and plasters of every sort; lumber and timber from the 

 ends of the earth, prepared in marvelously elaborate fashion; new 

 systems of construction of extraordinary ingenuity and efficiency - 

 all these the architect of to-day finds spread before him. Machinery 

 lightens the physical task of those who labor to produce the results 

 he seeks in his design. On the artistic side he has the advantage of 

 choosing, from the endless catalogue of building-forms and materials 

 offered him in open market, whatever shade, color, texture, quality, 

 and effect he desires, in wood or metal, stone, glass, tile, brick, 

 terra-cotta, plaster, or textile hangings. 



But along with this marvelous increase in its resources, architec- 

 ture has had laid upon it tasks at least proportionately more varied, 

 complex, and difficult than those of earlier ages. 



Greek architecture reached its perfection of refinement not only 

 because the Greeks were endowed with a marvelous artistic instinct, 

 but also because artistic effort was for centuries concentrated upon 

 a few simple problems. Every feature of the place, construction, and 

 detail of these could be and was worked out to final perfection because 

 for three centuries at least the requirements the programme of 

 the temple and propylsea and stoa remained substantially unchanged. 

 The problems of Roman architecture were far more varied and com- 

 plex, and Roman architecture, although in part the work of Greek 

 artificers, is marked in consequence of this complexity by flexibility 

 of adaptation and grandeur of scale rather than by extreme refine- 

 ment of detail. In medieval architecture, again, a single type that 



