House and Garden 
MRS. COMEGYS HOUSE, CHESTNUT HILL, PHILADELPHIA 
Cope & Stevvardson, Architects 
but such as they were, they were met in the way in 
which the men of the Renaissance thought the men 
of the Augustan era would have met them. 
And thus for the first time arose the question of 
a deliberate choice of style, a resuscitation of a way 
of building in use in other ages and under other con¬ 
ditions. And this is what we have been trying to 
do ever since, only we out-Herod Herod. 1 he men 
of the Renaissance were in unison as to the style they 
wanted to imitate. We do not know our own minds; 
we do not know what age, what country to set up as 
our standard and the voices 
that would guide us are hut 
crying in this wilderness of 
indecision. But there is one 
thing well known, completely 
agreed upon by all who have 
given serious thought to it:— 
that it is not by the copying 
of the outward forms of any 
architectural style that we can 
hope to make our work vital 
and worthy. If from a plan 
suited to the needs of a given 
building, if from a reasonable 
and appropriate choice and 
handling of materials, there 
should grow beauty, it is all 
that we can ask and all that 
we need to ask. Simple as it 
sounds, the doing of the thing 
is difficult beyond conception. 
Few can do it well or even 
passably. Granted that this house at fox point, Wisconsin 
is the right way, the only way by 
which we can hope to make build¬ 
ings truthful and beautiful and elo¬ 
quent of their time and place, it is 
easy to see how a choice of style from 
a priori considerations is a most grave 
hindrance to the following of it. 
And having said all this, I am pre¬ 
pared to grant, paradoxical as it may 
seem, that style in architecture is the 
one quality that above all others se¬ 
cures for a building the esteem of 
generations of men. But style in this 
sense is not an affair of archaeology 
hut an abstract quality, a subtle excel¬ 
lence very hard to define. Perhaps it 
may be made clear by comparison 
with that same quality of style as we 
think of it in the sister art of literature. 
If a writer reaches real distinction, it 
may well be assumed that his work has 
the quality we call style, and we do 
not demand that this style be that of a 
definite school. We do not ask him to 
write like an Elizabethan dramatist, or a Georgian 
essayist, or a pre-Raphaelite poet. If he have 
something worth saying, and if he surround the 
saying of it with that indefinable thing called literary 
style, 1 it is enough. Now this precisely is the 
sort of style that we should demand of the 
architect. That he know the grammar of his art, 
that he plan simply and directly, that he build 
strongly is not enough. Has his work expression ? 
Has it the high quality of style ? Has it, in other 
words, an excellence of design that raises it to the 
Elmer Grey, Architect 
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