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. 
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