A Word for Architecture 



now it looks weak despite its actual solidity, 

 and careless despite the very careful study 

 that must have been bestowed upon it. 



All over the country we find, in street 

 and park and private country-place, hun- 

 dreds of architectural things which lack the 

 merits of this bridge and have more than its 

 defects. Many of them, so pronounced has 

 been the effort to secure simplicity, seem to 

 take us back to the very infancy of art, 

 when there were not even steel tools to work 

 with, but only hatchets of bronze. But of 

 course they do not strike us as simple ; of 

 course we do not believe for a moment that 

 this was the most natural way for their 

 builders to work. They strike us as exces- 

 sively sophisticated, self-conscious, affected. 

 They are not protests against over-elabora- 

 tion. They are — in effect if not in inten- 

 tion — elaborate protests against the existence 

 of architecture as an art. 



20I 



