HOUSE AND GARDEN 
4 
January, 
19 x 0 
Half-timber walls are not always of timber and plaster; bricks 
have been used here for the filling or “ nogging ” 
Two examples of the same motive, but separated by hundreds 
of years and thousands of miles 
On Mr. Jackson’s own house, at Cambridge, Mass., the half-timbering 
is used sparingly for the parts to be accented 
The rambling picturesque quality of half-timber work depends not on 
symmetry but on balance for its harmonious composition 
at home in serving British institutions as one would expect such 
a typically Italian product to be. 
Even if we admit that long custom had served to imbue these 
borrowed forms with something of the Anglo-Saxon temperament, 
we still have the inherent unsuitableness of an essentially monu¬ 
mental style of architecture forced to serve intimate, and domes¬ 
tic uses. It is the Arab steed harnessed to the plow. Its sim¬ 
plicity and dignity are all very well but they are bound to a 
tyrannical symmetry, rigid and immutable. 
We all know the Colonial house, the front door in the center 
flanked on either side by the paired windows above and below; 
each window the exact size of every other; one-half the front the 
mathematical counterpart of the other. It may be there is a 
guest room on one corner and a bath-room on the other, but it 
never appears on the surface. We might have liked for comfort 
and convenience to have had three windows on one side and two 
on the other, or perhaps higher, or smaller, but it will do us but 
little good to carry our request to this austere front. 
Like the unlucky traveler in the bed of Procrustes, the poor 
plan is made to fit by brute force, either by stretching or lopping 
off. 
Now it is an architectural maxim, that, without regard for 
style, the elevations of a building shall express the plan, but how 
is it possible for the meanest and the most honored rooms to be 
expressed on the exterior by the same thing — the window for 
instance? If one window is a truthful expression of the one room, 
how can it possibly be of the other? Working in the deriv¬ 
atives of [the classic style as applied to domestic work, not to be 
able to tell from the outside, the bath-room from the parlor, the 
butler’s pantry from the ball room, is a basic defect of style that 
forces many undesirable compromises that would be unnecessary 
in a more flexible and less rigid system. There should not be this 
conflict between the plan and its elevations by which one must 
give way to the other, serious sacrifices having to be made before 
the two can be coaxed into joining hands. 
In this feud between Truth and Harmony, Utility stands but 
a sorry chance. 
As has been said, a primary necessity of good architecture is 
that the elevations shall follow and grow from the plan, that they 
shall express what they shield; they must be the effect and never 
the cause. Beauty must wait on Use and is only noble when it 
serves. 
If, then, our exteriors will not subordinate themselves; if they 
are not perfectly tractable and flexible, it is a weakness, and this 
weakness is one that we think exists in the classic style, a weak¬ 
ness which never shows so plainly and disastrously as in the mani¬ 
fold exigencies of modern house-building. And it is in this very 
matter that the strength of the true English work lies. The plas¬ 
ter and half-timber houses, by ignoring symmetry (but never 
composition) gain at the outset an immense freedom. 
The plan may fulfil the most extraordinary requirements, 
may house the most incongruous matters under one roof; china 
