130 AMEBICAN ASSOCIATION EOE, THE 



AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OP SCIENCE. 



(Concluded.) 



ACOUSTICS AS APPLIED TO PUBLIC BUILDINGS, BY PROFESSOR HENRY, OF THE SMITH- 

 SONIAN INSTITUTION. 



At the meeting of the American Association, in 1854, I gave a verbal account 

 of a plan of a lecture room adopted for the Smithsonian Institution, with some re- 

 marks on acoustics as applied to apartments intended for public speaking. At 

 that time the room was not finished, and experience had not proved the truth of 

 the principles on which the plan had been designed. Since then the room has been 

 employed for two winters for courses of lectures to large audiences, and I believe it 

 is the universal opinion of those who have been present that the arrangement for 

 seeing and hearing, considering the size of the apartment, is entirely unexception- 

 able. It has certainly fully answered all the expectations which were formed in re- 

 gard to it previous to its construction. 



The President of the United States directed Capt. Meigs to confer with Prof. 

 Bache and myself in regard to the acoustics of the new rooms in the ante-room of 

 the Capitol. Previous to this we first studied the peculiarities of the present hall 

 of the House of Representatives. This is allowed to be one of the worst possible 

 apartments for public speaking; and to determine the cause of the confusion of 

 sounds which exists during debate, is of considerable importance in suggesting im- 

 provements in the arrangement of the new rooms. We afterwards examined the 

 principal churches and halls in Philadelphia, New York and Boston, and the pecu- 

 liarities of these, as far as the investigation extended, may be referred to a few 

 well established principles of sound which have been applied to the construction 

 of this lecture room. To apply them generally, however, in the construction of 

 public halls requires a series of preliminary experiments. 



In every small apartment it is an easy matter to be heard distinctly at every point 

 but in a large room, unless from the first in the original plan of the building provision 

 be made on acoustic principles for a suitable form, it will be difficult, and indeed in 

 most cases impossible, to produce the desired result. The same remark may be 

 applied to lighting, heating and vantilation, and to all the special purposes to which 

 a particular building is to be applied. I beg, therefore, to make some preliminary 

 remarks on the architecture of buildings bearing on this point, which, though they 

 may not meet with universal acceptance, will, I trust, commend themselves to the 

 common sense of the public in general. 



In the erection of a building, the uses to which it is to be applied should be clearly 

 understood, and provision definitely made for every desired object. 



Modern architecture is not a fine art par excellence, like painting or sculpture, 

 the object of the latter is to produce a moral emotion, or awaken the feelings of the 

 sublime or the beautiful, and we egregiously err when we apply their productions to 

 a merely utilitarian purpose. To make a fire screen of Rubens' Madonna, or a can- 

 delabrum of the statue of the Apollo Belvidere, would be to debase these exquisite 

 productions of genius, and to do violence to the feelings of the cultivated lover of 

 art. Modern buildings are made for other purposes than artistic effect, and in them 

 the Eesthetical must be subordinate to the useful; then the two may coexist, and an 

 intellectual pleasure be derived from a sense of adaptation and fitness, combined 

 with a perception of harmony of parts and the beauty of detail. 



The buildings of a country should be an ethnological expression of the wants, 



