37 
May, 1919 
THE CHIMNEY AS AN ARCHITECTURAL FACTOR 
Its Role and Construction in-Houses 
Down ihe Centuries 
H. D. EBERLEIN 
A S the points of lightning rods attract the 
. lightning, so do chimneys attract the eye. 
Being emphatic points of projection that invite 
and focus notice, they are necessarily telling 
factors in the general architectural aspect. 
Apart from their purely utilitarian physical 
office, they have a two-fold function to per¬ 
form—they give balance to the composition 
and they supply a feature of interest in them¬ 
selves. 
pressions they have seen during their terms of 
foreign service. 
To guard against the varied injection of mere 
caprice into our future domestic architecture, 
and the resulting anomalies to which such a 
course would give rise, we must view the whole 
question in a rational and sanely constructive 
manner. We must consider architectural ex¬ 
pression not only in the aggregate, but with 
reference to individual factors and with due 
recognition of the fact that it is the quality of 
the individual items that will inevitably impart 
the character to the whole composition. There 
is no single exterior feature of the house that 
After a great war or any other profound 
political and economic disturbance there is 
always, and always has been, a marked im¬ 
petus to fresh architectural manifestations. To 
look no farther back than our own civil war, 
there was wrought directly afterwards a mar¬ 
velous transformation in the architectural 
aspect of the country. Condemn its character, 
as we now may by the aid of more enlightened 
architectural standards, we cannot escape the 
convincing evidences presented by this post- 
bellum phase of 'architectural expression. In 
like mariner we may confidently expect an 
analogous access of building activity in the 
near future to follow in the wake of the recent 
world-wide hostilities. And we may also rea¬ 
sonably expect that, along with this building 
activity, there will be an appreciable infusion 
of fresh style phenomena. All the more so, 
indeed, because so many of our citizens have 
returned, or are returning, from overseas with 
either a newly awakened or with a quickened 
appreciation of the sundry architectural ex¬ 
In formal types of architecture a balanced disposition of the chimneys lends great dignity to 
a residence. In this English country house, designed by A. Winter Rose, architect, one of 
the garden side chimneys has a vertical sundial 
The buttressed chimney gives an air of solidity to the wall. In this home of the Pickering 
Hunt, Phoenixville, Pa., part of the buttress is shingled and the chimney face broken with a 
wrought iron monogram. Mellor & Meigs, architects 
will go further tow’ard making or marring the 
ensemble than the chimney. The chimney 
cannot be treated as a neutral element; there 
is no such thing as chimney neutrality, any 
more than there is such a thing as real mental 
neutrahty for any creature outside of a jelly¬ 
fish or a polyp. A chimney is either good or 
bad, of course in varying degree. If it is 
good, it is a distinct asset and helps the house. 
If it lacks character, or is even more pro¬ 
nouncedly objectionable, it is an architectural 
liability and negatives the effect of other better 
features. 
Chimney Points and History 
The points to be chiefly considered are; 
Position or placement; 
Scale and design; 
Contour and decoration. 
All of them are more or less intimately inter¬ 
related. For climatic reasons the chimney is 
a far more important feature in northern archi¬ 
tecture—that is, in English and French, and, 
of course, American—than in southern, to wit, 
Italian or Spanish. 
By reviewing briefly the history of the chim¬ 
ney we shall get an insight into its architectural 
significance and grasp the rationale of logical 
chimney design. In Norman and Gothic 
England the chimney, as we know it, was not 
a conspicuous factor in the structural aspect. 
As a matter of fact, it was mostly non-existent. 
The fire was commonly built on an open hearth 
in the middle of the hall and the smoke was 
allowed to find its way out through the open- 
timbered roof by chance openings or through 
a hole directly overhead. To keep out the rain 
and snow a raised cover with openings at the 
sides was set over the hole. This smoke-hole 
cover very soon took shape as a lantern, 
femerell or louver (the word is derived from 
the French I’ouvert, the open place) and as¬ 
sumed a recognized position as an architectural 
and decorative feature. The Gothic principle 
of “decorating structure” was freely applied 
and the femerells or louvers were often objects 
of much architectural interest. The openings 
for smoke were either narrow vertical slits or 
else were closed with horizontal louver boards 
or slats set aslant so as to permit free passage 
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