H ouse and Garden 
tesquely to a small week-end retreat to which the 
truly cottage precedent had far better have been 
adapted. It is hard to say which of these two 
mistakes is the more unsightly, the mock modesty of 
the one or the snobbish self-assumption of the other. 
How all too common this mistake has been in the 
United States may be gathered by those who have 
not crossed the Atlantic from the words of Mr. 
Elihu Root in the speech he delivered at the meet¬ 
ing of the American Institute already referred to. 
“Since then (the days of Jefferson),” he said, 
“we have passed through a dreadful period. 
The stern requirements of conquering a continent, 
the engrossment of hardened toil, withdrew our 
people from the consideration of the elegant and 
the beautiful in life which the Virginia planters 
were at liberty to cherish. In this period the first 
acquisition of wealth, bringing a longing for 
ornament, found the people untrained and ignorant 
of art. Basswood castles and sawed scrollwork 
were the first expression of a desire for the beauti¬ 
ful. A multitude of men calling themselves archi¬ 
tects covered the face of the country with horrible 
objects of ingenious distortion, including a vast 
number of libels upon that excellent lady whose 
name has been given to the supposed style of 
Queen Anne. I'he American idea, that any 
American can do anything, prevailed in archi¬ 
tecture. The simple dignity of the log cabin, born 
of its conditions, wedded to its environment, gave 
place to the meretricious adornment of the con¬ 
fectioner. 'fhe perfectly appropriate and charm¬ 
ing little white house with green blinds, with a 
persistent survival of classical details at the hand 
of the good honest carpenter, gave way to wooden 
towers and arches, and to cheap pretence.” 
Arising out of this regard for the surrounding 
buildings comes, of course, the question of em¬ 
ploying local materials. In this there is natur¬ 
ally more and more elasticity. Before the in¬ 
vention of railways, to bring materials except 
from the nearest available source was practically 
unheard of. Transport was a slow and difficult 
operation. All this has been altered by modern 
industrial conditions. The architect to-day is faced 
with the problem whether he shall, say, set up a 
red brick mansion amongst the granite houses of 
Aberdeen, or bring Aberdeen granite to a town 
like Reading, or build respectively in the local 
granite and almost universal red brick. The 
answer, it is obvious, varies in different localities 
and countries. In the United States, as Mr. Day 
notes, local traditions have been largely broken 
with and “for the most part throughout our land 
there is no local way of building that rises above 
the commonplace. ” He himself would evidently 
like definite local traditions in the art of building 
but such traditions cut both ways. Slavish simi¬ 
larity invariably leads to monotony. Where the 
neighbourhood is one in which “the turrets of the 
rich and the hovels of the poor” are pretty evenly 
divided, it is often unwise to employ the same 
local materials for both classes indiscriminately. 
Material as much as style requires to be decided 
by the actual building to be put up. Moreover 
there are localities (it would be invidious to mention 
them by name) in which the local traditions are 
uniformly bad, and surely it then becomes the 
bounden duty of any architect to break away com¬ 
pletely and inaugurate a new tradition even at 
the cost of clashing with the old bad style and 
materials. But, take it all round, it is pretty 
safe to say that the local materials should be 
employed as far as is practicable. Sentiment 
covers a multitude of sins, only sentiment should 
not lead us into false methods. To build an honest 
brick wall, nail strips of wood against it, and 
plaster the space between them, is indeed a pre¬ 
posterous imitation of a once reasonable method 
of construction only too often found in the dis¬ 
tricts of the real old half-timbered houses, and 
just as false art as that seen in many shops to-day 
where apparently solid columns really support 
nothing at all beyond the hats or umbrellas which 
may be hung upon them. 
And last of all comes the personal bias of the 
architect himself. Exactly how far that personal 
bias should be developed in the architect, or at 
any rate, if it he almost necessarily spontaneously 
developed, how far it should be indulged or re¬ 
pressed, is a nice question. It is the old story of 
the specialist and the general practitioner. Were 
every architect frankly a specialist in some partic¬ 
ular style clients could then select their archi¬ 
tect according to the general type of house they 
wished to have built; whereas nowadays, while 
few architects profess to be experts only in one 
style, almost all have a natural hankering after 
some particular style, and are sometimes too ready 
to drag it in where it is really quite unsuitable. 
After all it is not an unmixed compliment to say 
of an architect that his style can never be mistaken. 
In conclusion it must be again repeated that to 
give any hard and fast rule is absolutely impos¬ 
sible. But there are certain broad, general con¬ 
siderations which are more or less applicable to 
the majority of cases, and the study of which may 
possibly render easier the problem of choosing 
the style for a house. It is just these broad gen¬ 
eralities which have been given here. 
26 
