646 MODERN ARCHITECTURE 



In no period of history have new systems and materials of con- 

 struction been so multiplied or so rapidly developed as in recent 

 years. I need only instance the remarkable rise of steel-frame or 

 skeleton construction, and the increasing use of reenforced concrete, 

 as examples. In the United States the growing scarcity of timber 

 will soon eliminate wood as a cheap material for houses and temporary 

 structures and thus create a new problem in cheap building. Here, 

 then, are three problems demanding serious study, and which, unless 

 our architects are active and watchful, will fall so completely into 

 the hands of the engineers, and receive from them so purely utilita- 

 rian a treatment, that it will take a half-century or a century of ugly 

 experiments to convert these to the service of true art. How shall 

 we approach the task? Do we not here need most of all the spirit 

 of devotion to pure beauty, under the guidance of common sense, 

 leaving the resulting style to be what it will? Let us not be con- 

 cerned either to perpetuate or to cast aside the language, the forms 

 and details of the traditional styles: our real concern must be to 

 produce beautiful buildings, using these new resources of the art as 

 means to that end. and employing or discarding, as this controlling 

 end may demand, the forms we have already learned by heart in the 

 schools and offices. When to lay bare and when to conceal, when to 

 emphasize and when to mask the structural framework, how to make 

 new materials count for beauty; when, where, and how to apply 

 decoration, and how far this shall be structural and how far applied, 

 these are the questions to be solved, and not the question whether 

 the forms we use shall be classic, Romanesque, Gothic, Oriental, 

 or the product of pure fancy. 



But this artistic adaptation of new materials and systems of con- 

 struction may, and doubtless will, proceed further than the mere- 

 invention of new decorative details and combinations. Already the 

 elevator, the hollow-brick arch, and the steel skeleton have begotten 

 a new type of building, the American tall office-building, or "sky- 

 scraper." The artistic handling of this monstrous problem is still 

 ft subject of earnest study. It seems not unlikely that if our architects 

 pursue a progressive course, other wholly new types of edifice will 

 arise, under the pressure of new requirements and the development 

 of new methods of building, in which broad spans, vast trusses, deep 

 underground apartments, and the like, will be important factors. 

 Xot merely the old details, but the old mass-forms may disappear 

 as has been the case, for example, in ship-building. The traditional 

 maxims of structural art. based on masonry construction, will relax 

 their hold, and practices be adopted in design which we of to-day 

 consider unorthodox: precisely as Gothic design threw over the 

 classic practice as to formal symmetry and emphasis of horizontal 

 divisions. It behooves our architects now upon the threshold of the 



