If a man
have a pig-stye to build, or a log-house in the woods, he may hit
upon an agreeable outline; but let him set out freely and with all
deliberation to build something that shall be beautiful, and he fails.
Not that the failure is peculiar at all to us. In Europe there may,
perhaps, be less bad taste,--though I am not sure of that; but there,
and everywhere, I think, the memorable houses, among those of recent
date, are not those carefully elaborated for effect,--the
premeditated irregularity of the English Gothic, the trig regularity
of the French Pseudo-Classic, or the studied rusticity of Germany,--
but such as seem to have grown of themselves out of the place where
they stand,--Swiss _chalets_, Mexican or Manila plantation-houses,
Italian farm-houses, built, nobody knows when or by whom, and built
without any thought of attracting attention. And here I think we get
a hint as to the reason of their success. For a house is not a
monument, that it should seek to draw attention to itself,--but the
dwelling-place of men upon the earth; and it must show itself to be
wholly secondary to its purpose.
We have had a good deal of exhortation lately, now getting rather
wearisome, about avoiding pretence in architecture, and that we
should let things show for what they are. The avoidance of pretence
should begin farther back.
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