June, 1923 
75 
Once Ignored and Neglected, It Is Now In Some 
Danger of Being Exaggerated 
MATLACK PRICE 
P erhaps psychologists have investi¬ 
gated and tabulated, among other 
facts about human weaknesses, the ten¬ 
dency of “going to extremes”. Most of 
history seems to bear out the fact that the 
swing from one extreme to the other is as 
marked as the well-worn old simile of the 
pendulum. It has been marked and duly 
recorded in the social history of the world, 
and the artistic history of the world is not 
without evidences of it. 
In this immediate consideration, the 
point of departure is the era of esthetic de¬ 
pravity generally known as the “eighties”, 
an era which comes down to us with monu¬ 
ments which even the scope and 
efficiency of professional wreck¬ 
ing companies diminish all too 
slowly. Even a century from 
now 7 examples will probably exist 
so that students can observe at 
first hand all that is deplorable in 
the matter of texture. 
The architectural camoufleurs 
of the eighties seem to have had 
no more reason or intelligence 
than they had esthetic morals. 
They sanded wood and cast iron 
to make it resemble stone, they 
painted brick courses on plastered stone 
walls, they artfully imitated the grains and 
figures of fine w : oods in paint, and made 
honest brickwork a farce by means of hide¬ 
ous colors and mechanically accurate 
painted joints. Few building materials 
were what they seemed to be, and what they 
seemed to be was usually the product of an 
uneducated artisan’s depraved delusion. 
The practice of senseless and often quite 
unnecessary imitation of one material by 
another, or the complete annihilation of the 
real character and identity of a material be¬ 
came so widespread that it w 7 as some time 
before the architectural awakening of the 
early nineties made any impression on the 
texture situation. 
Brickwork emerged from its disguise of 
paint, but still neglected its possibilities of 
texture; woodwork kept well within the 
limitations of mill finishes, and stonework 
began to assert itself as such, though it had 
a long struggle to get over the passion of 
architects and builders to painfully chip it 
in “rock-faced” effects. Even today rock¬ 
facing is practiced on stonework, and 
reaches the height of imbecility in the cast¬ 
ing of rock-faced concrete blocks for build¬ 
ing—a piece of meaningless artificiality as 
bad as anything that w 7 as perpetrated in the 
depraved “eighties”. 
It was a long time before any¬ 
body so much as thought of hand- 
hewn woodwork, and the develop¬ 
ment of varied textures in stucco 
progressed slowly, but steadily, a 
little behind the gradual develop¬ 
ment of stucco as a popular ex¬ 
terior finishing material. 
With the emergence of archi- 
§|§ tectural ideas and ideals into the 
present enlightened age, it became 
increasingly more apparent that 
(Continued on page 102) 
Because stucco is a plastic 
material, applied with a 
trowel, there is considerable 
latitude in the degree of tex¬ 
ture which it may assume 
Common brick here declares itself as a worthy and 
interesting building material, and the stucco finish has 
an agreeable color variation and texture. The treat¬ 
ment approaches the limits of the artificially primitive. 
Herbert Lippmann is the architect 
This stucco finish approaches 
the extreme to which rough 
texture may be carried with¬ 
out affectation. Color can 
also be added to the texture 
