Fads in A BOUT six months ago an enter- 
Building ddx. prising builder, possibly influ¬ 
enced by the desire to embody 
some beauty and a little art in a practical structure, built a Gothic 
office building. That Is, the ornamentation, detail and window de¬ 
sign were after Gothic motifs. Almost immediately five or six 
of the mushroom crop of similar structures going up began to 
appear in the same dress. Where the first one showed restraint, 
careful selection of details and proportion, the buildings appear¬ 
ing later ran to a riot of carving, tracery, scroll work, quartrefoil 
windows and so forth. It is not our purpose to make criticism 
of the Gothic office building; that is outside the house and beyond 
the garden. There is, however, something to say on the psychol¬ 
ogy of imitation that is disclosed. 
In a certain section of Massachusetts some experimenter in 
comparative areas felt that he had made a great discovery. This 
was that if he should build a house which approached a circle in 
ground outline he would gain in floor area in proportion to wall 
surface. The result of this brilliant idea was an octagonal house. 
History does not record what he said when he discovered that 
each additional angle necessitated waste at the corners in work 
and joinery; but he finished his structure and left it an architec¬ 
tural eyesore. But he got his revenge in the way his house was 
copied, so he was not alone in his discomfort. To-day one may- 
find scattered through the state octagonal pill-box houses with 
octagonal wings; octagonal houses of every size and condition. 
Not so different was the imitation which has left in some sec¬ 
tions of our suburbs the melancholy remains of what is sometimes 
called the late Victorian type. Possibly some of us do not have 
to walk far from home to see rows of houses decorated with intri¬ 
cate sawed and turned grille work, cut-out moons and stars and 
little Turkish minarets. The wave of these grotesque styles has 
swept over sections of this country and left a haphazard flotsam 
and jetsam of fad building. 
It is not so much American architecture that is at fault, but it 
is the peculiar compelling force of imitation that seems to make 
men follow the false lead of the first bizarre builder they see. We 
notice this same thing in modern dress. A new cloak is designed 
with some novelty of color, texture or cut, and presto, it is re¬ 
duplicated by thousands. What is it that drives the whole coun¬ 
try like sheep after the wether ? It seems no other force than the 
tinkle of the bell of novelty. It is this that spread the bungalow 
so widely through the land until its simplicity and honesty were 
lost and every conceivable form of structure from summer-house 
to ten-story apartment were designed after it. 
The remedy will not come from the evolution of an entirely 
new, absolutely different style. Such a thing would be apt to die 
from this reduplication. It is much better to be reactionary and 
still stay with the old traditions than seek an ideal type that 
has nothing but an air foundation and is built from the roof 
downward. Let some of us remain original in clinging to the 
established and the tried until the new can offer us a sane develop¬ 
ment with utility and beauty as twin considerations. 
Some Architectural T T is strange that hand in hand with 
Dogmas a voracious gobbling up of the 
bait of newness is a sleepy cling¬ 
ing to ancient tradition. .Mr. R. A. Briggs in his recently im¬ 
ported “The Essentials of a Country Home” spends an introduc¬ 
tory chapter on “fallacious legends.” These he considers to be 
the senseless copying of old forms that have exhausted their use¬ 
fulness and are simply repeated from year to year as a force of 
habit. One of these dogmas is the mirror over the mantel. We 
here in America are less addicted to this peculiar obsession than 
Mr. Briggs's fellow-Englishmen are, but nevertheless many a 
house-owner still insists on the mirror over-mantel without know¬ 
ing why or wherefore. 
The mirror was originally not a decorative feature. It is that 
by-product of vanity that is now essential to regulate the costume 
and arrange the coiffure. It is to serve a useful purpose and is 
now a very unromantic article of the household machinery. For 
this it belongs in the dressing-room or the boudoir, but surely not 
over the mantelpiece. There is no reason why that location should 
be chosen. It cannot be that madame desires to admire herself 
standing before the fireplace, or to arrange her toilette in the 
living-room. It is a relic of the Louis XVI time, according to Mr. 
Briggs, for with the style of that period mirrors were part of the 
decoration and were located as decorative units. To-day it is 
another matter. We need no Louis XVI ideas in the living-room 
that is not of period decoration. Besides, there are many more 
fitting and attractive substitutes for the glass. 
The House and TT is a far cry back to the time when 
the Man the man exchanged his cave for a 
rudimentary house. Probably the 
search for greater convenience led him to do it; at any rate there 
was little consideration of the esthetic. To-day it is different. We 
no longer are limited by desires to satisfy elementary wants; we 
have complex requirements of beauty and art and kindred needs 
of the esthetic side of our nature. The house is not merely a 
shelter from the rain and wind and the wild beasts, but a place of 
careful planning for our mental pleasure as well. Colors are 
chosen to delight us; we consider form and arrangement and rela¬ 
tion of parts. The conflict of various decorative elements is 
to-day as much a reflection upon the man as in former times an 
undeveloped knowledge of handling the sword was. Indeed 
these ideas have become so important that there are now rival 
schools of interior decoration which arouse the same interest in 
the public that a schism in the Established Church did formerly. 
Location geographically, site and merits are considered in 
choosing one’s house and its trim, but very little is said about the 
man who is to live in it. 
In Germany, where they proceed from the theory to the prac¬ 
tice and evolve the principle and then apply it, they have some- 
thingfto say about the man. 
The new idea is that the house is made to order for the occu¬ 
pant. His architects advise him and recommend according to his 
temperament. Colors he should be able to decide to fit his own 
taste, but the rest is made to fit him. For instance, the German 
designers can see no rhyme and reason for a twentieth-century 
man living in a seventeenth-century house, any more than that he 
should seek a first-century house. The conditions of the ages are 
so different that the appearance of a man to-day in a room of a 
former time is an anachronism and therefore inharmonious. To 
correct such things as this they are designing and decorating 
homes that shall be built upon the single idea of utility. They 
will be as beautiful as may be, but nothing except the useful will 
be there. To this end they have designed the furniture to fit the 
inmates and in proportion to human anatomy, not built after the 
articles produced long ago. Tradition, in so far as it denotes 
natural growth, is preserved, but all that is merely ornamental, and 
exists for decorative purposes only is swept away. Think what 
a blessing a house without dust-gathering bric-a-brac would be! 
Whatever objections there may be to these theories one must 
grant them much soundness of reasoning in these points. We 
await with interest the outcome of the new German movement. 
(46) 
