January, 1916 
9 
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THE PROMISE OF AMERICAN HOUSE BUILDING 
Why Modern American Architecture Stands High—Its Floundering Past—The Need for Honest 
Craftsmanship and How the Architect and Owner Can Revive It 
RALPH ADAMS CRAM 
Let us adopt the words “house building” in place of the 
pretentious and 19th Century “domestic architecture” and so 
begin forthwith by saying that modern house building in Amer¬ 
ica occupies a position of singular and admirable distinction. 
The statement is quite safe and boasts the added virtue of com¬ 
plete truth. There may be those that find our official architec¬ 
ture artificial and verbose, our churches eclectic, reactionary 
and archaeological, our schools either illiterate or damned by 
intensive (and offensive) efficiency, our municipal monsters, 
such as shops and hotels and office buildings, menaced on the 
one hand by the Scylla of anarchic individualism plus an in¬ 
temperate logic, on the other by the Charybdis of inherited but 
unaccommodating “orders”—1 do not know. But if there are 
such, the picking and stealing fingers of criticism are withheld 
from the whole category of house building. 
Commendable Modern Work 
Whatever we have done or left undone, we have in thirty 
years redeemed the architectural art of the householder from 
the pit it had digged for itself in the early and awful Eighties, 
and we now can point with pride to the houses of good citizens, 
from Portland in the East to Portland in the West, and from 
St. Paul to New Orleans. Not to all of them, of course; at 
least not in pride, but to so many, and so widely disposed, and 
Courtesy of the Architectural Record 
The type of mid-Western house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright—a study in horizontals and verticals. The residence 
of Avery Cooniey, Esq., at Riverside. Illinois 
