A zoned building, consisting of an H-shaped arrangement of parallelepipeds with two external areas. The influence of the American zoning law is visible in the upper part only. It accounts for the stepping-back of the central block and the octagonal tower that surmounts each corner. (Fraternity Clubs Building, New York, by Murgatroyd and Ogden.)
A zoned building, consisting of an H-shaped arrangement of parallelepipeds with two external areas. The influence of the American zoning law is visible in the upper part only. It accounts for the stepping-back of the central block and the octagonal tower that surmounts each corner. (Fraternity Clubs Building, New York, by Murgatroyd and Ogden.)
A zoned building, consisting of an H-shaped arrangement of parallelepipeds with two external areas. The influence of the American zoning law is visible in the upper part only. It accounts for the stepping-back of the central block and the octagonal tower that surmounts each corner. (Fraternity Clubs Building, New York, by Murgatroyd and Ogden.)
A zoned building, consisting of an H-shaped arrangement of parallelepipeds with two external areas. The influence of the American zoning law is visible in the upper part only. It accounts for the stepping-back of the central block and the octagonal tower that surmounts each corner. (Fraternity Clubs Building, New York, by Murgatroyd and Ogden.)
A building erected under the zoning ordinance will, therefore, occupy as much ground as its promoter is able to buy with borrowed money, and will, wherever possible, spread itself over the entire area of a city block, so that it is bounded by a street on all four sides. Its outline will, in addition, present two striking characteristics. It will rise on all sides in a succession of receding stages gathered at the summit in a central tower-like mass which, provided its area does not exceed a prescribed limit, may itself escape the restraining influence and rise unhindered. And while at each corner the street wall itself is brought to the full height permissible under the ordinance, the central part of each façade will be recessed so as to form one or several open courts or areas. At the moment of writing, London is about to witness the completion of its first building designed along these lines. Why the American zoning regulations should have been made to govern the design of the new Devonshire House building in London is not excessively clear, but this interesting piece of work does at any rate provide a valuable illustration of the laws of growth to which American architecture will in future be subject. For this reason it is by far the most interesting and the most characteristically modern of our large new buildings.There is just now a curious tendency to describe as modern a small number of structures whose windows are treated in accordance with a short-lived æsthetic fashion of thirty years ago. Devonshire House furnishes proof that architecture is able to be more modern than that, for here the new zoning ordinance is, for the first time in London, shown actively at work.
A zoned building, more recent than the last, showing the American zoning law in full operation. The central parallelepiped here runs across the two others, thus forming six external areas separated by six buttress-like projections. Each of these projections is stepped back in obedience to the zoning law. (Bell Telephone Building, St. Louis, by Russell and Crowell.)
A zoned building, more recent than the last, showing the American zoning law in full operation. The central parallelepiped here runs across the two others, thus forming six external areas separated by six buttress-like projections. Each of these projections is stepped back in obedience to the zoning law. (Bell Telephone Building, St. Louis, by Russell and Crowell.)
A zoned building, more recent than the last, showing the American zoning law in full operation. The central parallelepiped here runs across the two others, thus forming six external areas separated by six buttress-like projections. Each of these projections is stepped back in obedience to the zoning law. (Bell Telephone Building, St. Louis, by Russell and Crowell.)
A zoned building, more recent than the last, showing the American zoning law in full operation. The central parallelepiped here runs across the two others, thus forming six external areas separated by six buttress-like projections. Each of these projections is stepped back in obedience to the zoning law. (Bell Telephone Building, St. Louis, by Russell and Crowell.)
We may now see why it was remarked that zoning had substituted a new architectural impulse for the governing impulse of internal form to which we owe the major masterpieces of architecture. A zoned building can never be a masterpiece in the same sense as these. You cannot compare a zoned building to Chartres Cathedral, any more than you can compare a suit of clothes to a paper-weight. The form of the one is dictated by something working from inside outwards, while the form of the other is the result of an agency working upon the surface from without. The paper-weight may be as beautiful in its way, but its beauty does not arise, as the beauty of clothing arises, from its power to invest the human form with an apt, expressive and dignified integument. In the same manner the zoned building may be beautiful, but not with the beauty of the greatest architecture, which consists in the fashioning of a dwelling-place, human or divine, in such a manner as to guard and delight those who enter into it. The zoned building is, I repeat, like the University of Pittsburg, a matter of cubic feet piled up around a private road. Any new formal impulse that may control its growth resides in the street without; any new formal excellence it may exhibit has for its origin the directing authority of this street. But in spite of the inferior quality of its products, it is easy to see that the zoning ordinance holds out a considerable promise to the architecture of the future, supplying a fresh and vigorous motive in the place of an older that is rapidly failing, and setting up the authority of reason where caprice alone now rules.
Before we leave this subject, a word may perhaps be added concerning the limitations of this method of control. It clearly cannot be applied everywhere with equally pleasing results. A town or a district in which the streets run at right angles to one another will show it at its best, for there, and there only, will it be possible for the defining lines to meet with any degree of regularity. London buildings, too, have sometimes to conform to a stipulated angle, though for anotherreason than those of New York. But the irregularity of our streets, and the narrowness of most of our building frontages, have caused these controlling angles to become a source of grotesque heterogeneity and ugliness instead of allowing them to establish a new kind of order. Nor should our town be one containing sites excessively large, or have some of its streets so narrowly spaced as to produce sites that are sensibly smaller than the average. The larger area will permit of too great a building height, the smaller of too little, and it would appear necessary that the “street block” should, in addition to a regular outline, observe an approximate equality of size also. Founded upon these two equalities, the zoning ordinances proceed to build up an equality of height, of content, which in its turn begets yet another that is the guarantee of their ultimate success. For nothing will prosper in America that does not pay, and fortunately zoning has been found to pay, and to pay very handsomely. The “realtors” of the big American towns did not take long to discover that, while the building of a skyscraper must enhance the value of the surrounding land, this enhancement is considerably greater where the growth is controlled than where it is left free tocongest, and stifle, and darken, as in the licence of nineteenth-century New York. To the neighbouring landowner an unregulated skyscraper, if it pointed to a new opportunity, was at the same time an evil and a discouragement, for, if all buildings simultaneously went up to those same heights, would they not mutually destroy one another? The zoning ordinance has thus become a part of the republican policy of the United States, under which a competitive society is made to bring forth numbers rather than eminence, and watches over these its children with democratic solicitude.
We have examined with some care the evolution of wheeled traffic and the changes its multiplication must inevitably bring about in the appearance of our streets. Is not flying, it may be asked, always described as the locomotion of the future, and is not the shape of our buildings likely to reflect so important a development? The first part of this question would take us beyond the scope of the present essay, but the answer to the second part may perhaps form the subject of a digressive paragraph. One might reasonably say that the design of a building is likely to respond to the needs of aerial traffic in three ways only, but not in any way that is likely to be of greatconsequence. The first possibility is that a building may be required providing means whereby aeroplanes are enabled to make a safe landing on its roof. A flat roof of ample dimensions thus becomes necessary, and yet we have seen that one of the effects of the zoning ordinance is to break up the roof surface of a building into a series of narrow ledges. A building upon the top of which it is desired to bring an aeroplane to land will, therefore, in those places where zoning prevails, need to be conspicuously low. Possibly a roof may here and there be projected outward beyond the walls of a building, an expedient whose drawbacks are such that it is unlikely to be often adopted. In any case it will be necessary to provide an entrance to the building from this roof, but there is nothing very new about that. The second possibility is that the aeroplane may have to be lowered from the roof of the building to the street level. The easiest way of making this descent is (to quote from a newspaper advertisement of the great Wanamaker exhibition to which I have referred) by “corkscrewing down the exterior of the building.” One of the great mural cartoons included (side by side with a Ford “family aeroplane”) in this exhibition shows an enormous cylindrical tower, encircled bya descending spiral, very much like a corkscrew in appearance. This tower is not, however, an ordinary city building, but, reaching high above the concourse of these, a special structure surmounted by a mooring mast for dirigibles. Happily the building has yet to be designed that will, while giving shelter, however unworthy, to human beings, wrap itself in a broad fire-escape for the convenience of corkscrewing aeroplanes. And there is, on the whole, no ground for supposing that our urban architecture will at any time pay so exorbitant a regard to the advance of the aeroplane as to transform itself in this manner.
But it will be remarked that aerial travel is bound to call into being a number of buildings of a special kind, devoted to this one purpose alone. May we expect such buildings to be as novel and as eminently characteristic as the Wanamaker cartoon would appear to suggest? It is difficult to believe that among them there will be anything more unusual than the dirigible hangar, which is already a familiar sight, and which, to do it justice, has a peculiar interest in that it is the only modern building whose purpose contains an unanswerable argument for a roof vaulted throughout its entire breadth. The hangar built at Orly by the Frenchengineer Freyssinet is perhaps the example best known in this country; if it is not, it certainly deserves to be. But though the rounded shape of a balloon clearly demands a vaulted roof, there is no reason why such roofs should not be used elsewhere, as they have in fact been used for many centuries; and in his Utrecht Post Office the Dutch architect Crouwel has given us a building that, stripped of its great clock and its counters and other furnishings, might easily be mistaken by a wandering dirigible for its accustomed lair. Striking though the appearance of the Orly hangar may be found, it would scarcely be fair to attribute its success to the peculiar function it so efficiently discharges. And if this is all that the dirigible balloon is likely to do for architecture, what shall we say of the aeroplane? It would appear that only when practising the movement described by our American friends as “corkscrewing” will the aeroplane need the help of the architectural innovator. Till then we must remain content to see it inhabit a structure hardly distinguishable from the coach-house of our forbears.
The prospect opened to us by aerial locomotion is limited, for no matter how high our winged vehicles may one moment soar, they cannot approach theearth without losing much of their glamour and strangeness. Let us turn instead to the far more considerable factor which came before us at the beginning of this essay. The emancipation of modern woman was there glanced at in only one of the three aspects of which the two others have still to be regarded. We saw how, as a consumer of wealth, she has been instrumental in withdrawing the art of building from the light of its central inspiration, and depriving it of the most highly treasured of its resources. As a producer of wealth, her influence has perhaps been less momentous, but it is by no means to be disregarded, for the modern dwelling-house exhibits the fruits of it in almost every detail of planning and equipment. So profound are the changes it has suffered that a medium-sized house, built, say, three generations ago, and left in its original state, presents almost insuperable difficulties to the housewife of to-day. Its cavernous succession of kitchens and larders, its monumental boiling ranges, its numberless stairs and endless dim passages, all of these things must fall into desuetude, unless a regiment of muscular girls and women is enlisted to maintain order among them. We all know how in the leisurely age of ourgreat-grandmothers a house was much more loosely, more vaguely planned, with nothing resembling the meticulous precision that is brought to bear upon it to-day. It was not necessary in those days to measure the distance the housewife had to walk in order to put the dinner on the table, for the walk was one which she was never called upon to take. There was no need to place a roomy and well-ventilated linen-cupboard close to the principal bedrooms, for the bedroom linen might be kept anywhere and fetched from anywhere without inflicting appreciable hardship upon the housewife. But wide though the gulf may be that divides the modern house from that of the early nineteenth century, the novelty of the former would not be nearly so apparent were it not for the much broader gulf by which it is divided from that of a generation later. During the second half of the century the romantic revival was scattering over the country a number of houses whose unpracticalness was so gigantic that they could only strike the beholder completely dumb. The labyrinth at Knossos being at that time still undiscovered, these structures are generally presumed to derive from the cathedrals and dungeons of the Middle Ages. It is by comparison with these preposterousinventions that the post-war house stands out in a yet more appealing and more individual light. Instead of losing purpose and definition, like the typical city building, it has gained vastly in both these qualities, and it has gained because, from being the scene of the housewife’s activities, it has become her instrument and ally, and sometimes (it must be admitted) her accomplice even.
The next step, indeed, has already been taken. It is possible even now to watch the modern residence gradually assuming the properties of a machine. At the beginning of the last century nine-tenths of the cost of a house went into the structure, while the remaining tenth paid for its fixtures and equipment. Nowadays we spend almost as much on drains and plumbing, on baths and closets, on bedroom lavatory basins supplied with hot water, on central heating, electric light, telephones and suchlike, as we spend on the building of the house. So remarkable has been this development that an American writer has prophesied a period when houses will be given away free with the plumbing. It is doubtful whether such munificence will ever become a commercial possibility, but the prophecy contains more than a modicum of truth. We may reasonably expect to see allbut the most indispensable furniture done away with in the small house of to-morrow, while its walls, ceilings, and doors will assume a blankness and roundedness that has hitherto been thought needful only in the operating chambers of our hospitals. In order still to reduce the housewife’s labours, the apartments will be brought together in those vast blocks that are meeting with such strenuous opposition from private householders in the United States, an opposition to which the zoning authorities have almost invariably given every support. What is the reason for this opposition? It is that a new apartment house will (in the words of a recent American Court pronouncement) “increase the fire hazard” of the district upon which it intrudes, and will be “creative of noises from autos, taxis, milk wagons, drays, etc., in a locality where peace and quiet now prevail; it will obstruct light and air, and sooner or later it will bring with it the immoralities which always attend the building of such structures.” The list of its potential misdeeds goes on, but I have quoted at sufficient length to show what are the conditions to be expected when the house is supplanted by large, noisy, and efficient machines, which none but the richest and the poorest may altogether elude.
Is it inevitable that they will be so supplanted? The displacement is steadily going on, and the scope and rapidity of the process must depend upon the eagerness with which modern woman sets herself to pluck the fruits of liberty that are now so compliantly brought within her reach. It should be borne in mind, however, that the mechanization of the house is inspired by a purpose diametrically opposite to that entertained by the pioneers of modern methods in industry. The triumph of the powerloom over the handloom was conditioned by its ability to produce so many more yards of material than the handloom could be made to yield. But while the machine was introduced into the industrial world in order to multiply the products of labour, the object of the modern house is to diminish the necessity for labour. By exchanging the handloom for the powerloom the weaver could, while still taking the same amount of trouble, produce a greater result, but when the modern housewife moves into a labour-saving flat her object is by taking considerably less trouble to produce the same result as before. How and where she spends the hours of leisure thus acquired is a question which does not bear upon our present argument, except in so far as this leisurehas enabled her to raise the drapery store to the exalted place it occupies to-day, and by this means to divert the trend of modern architecture in the direction which we have just been following.
It is, then, largely by virtue of her new position as a producer that the woman of to-day has become able to exercise such a signal influence in her quality of consumer of wealth. But from both these points of view we may perceive her acting immediately upon the main architectural current, while, if we consider her from the conjugal point of view, her influence will show itself only in the flow of the tributary stream which is conveniently described as decoration. It is a regrettable fact that the decorative arts in England had, until they suddenly came within this influence, shown not the smallest sign of vitality since Soane and Nash translated the Attic enthusiasm of Shelley, Landor and Winckelmann into stone and stucco. Learned though he may have been, there can be no doubt that John Soane was as genuinely moved by the masterpieces of Greek decoration as Shelley by the large and authentic voices of Plato and Æschylus. The modern decorator, however, who ransacks the storehouse of history from Robert Adam to the caves of prehistoric man, is never animated bybetter instincts than those of the merchant adventurer, and often enough by worse. Of a creative impulse he is completely innocent. And what are we to say of the teaching of Ruskin, who followed upon the heels of these great men, except that it was calculated to impart a knowledge not so much of decoration as of botany, while its temper was wholly inimical to such pleasure as might yet be taken here and there in decorative skill? Stifled by the tedious pullulation of Ruskin’s “natural forms,” this pleasure appears to be awakening once more, and it is to modern woman that we must look for the cause of this awakening.
A convenient way of picturing the change of outlook that has led to this revival is to compare two familiar works of nineteenth-century fiction separated by a generation or two. Gautier’sMademoiselle de Maupincontains long passages redolent of that nature-worship which made Wordsworth a best-seller and which inspired our Ruskin to discard the principles of decorative design in favour of those derived from the study of plant growth. Innumerable landscapes are presented to us in this book, many of them bathed in moonlight of the most impeccable romantic quality. Country mansions, pleasure-pavilions, creeper-cladcottages, all these are concealed beneath a dense mass of verdure, their existence briefly hinted at, while the sinuous paths by which they may be approached are made the subject of the closest description, together with the trees, shrubs, creepers, herbs and mosses which form their setting. Such power of attention as remains in the reader is skilfully directed upon the subject of feminine apparel, to the treatment of which the author brings a sympathy and animation almost equal to those with which he approaches the vegetable kingdom. But the apartments through which his characters move, the walls and furniture against which their forms, so exquisitely clad, stand disclosed to the reader, receive as little thought as the exterior of the buildings, so that it is impossible for us to say what they are like. As soon as the men and women cross the threshold of a house, an impenetrable mist descends upon their surroundings. Alas, there was no one to take any interest in even the most delightful of the houses or rooms, and we are left to reconstruct them for ourselves, aided only by our knowledge of a few authentic remains.
In Zola’s Nana we have a complete antithesis to this fatigue, this chlorosis of the decorative faculty. The adornmentof her immediate setting has with this famous character become a consuming passion. Her intuitive artistic knowledge, her manifold inventiveness, never cease to astonish the architects and decorators who work at her bidding. Nor, in her brief but triumphant career through the world of vice, does she once tire of devising fresh schemes of decoration, schemes which Zola himself appears to regard with an enthusiasm approaching that of his heroine. As she pauses at last on the brink of financial ruin, this passion for decoration flares up with an almost hysterical intensity. It is then that she dreams of “un prodige, un éblouissement ... un lit comme il n’en existait pas, un trône, un autel ... en or et en argent repoussés, pareil à un grand bijou.” To the end her preoccupation maintains its firm hold upon her, for through it alone it was that she could gain her mysterious ascendancy over the minds and the senses of men. “Jamais elle n’avait senti si profondément la force de son sexe,” remarks Zola as he shows her to us happily contemplating the scenes of prodigious elegance that she had established around her. Such is the change of attitude which nineteenth-century society must somehow have witnessed before it could be so brilliantlyrecorded in writing. It is a similar change that has infused new life into modern decoration.
The question may present itself whether to connect this movement with Zola’s unfortunate heroine is not to detract from its merit or importance. That must remain entirely a matter for individual judgment. I will here but remark that, in borrowing their light from the constellation of unhappy spirits in which Nana shone so vividly, the decorative arts are only imitating the example set throughout Europe and America by the art of feminine dress, and that whatever is said of one of these arts applies to the other also. But this superficial resemblance is not the only thing that unites decoration with dress, for the modern movement in decoration cannot be better described than as an enlargement of the old and more immediate business of personal adornment. Both currents spring from a common source, and if the younger of them will always remain in some respects apart from its sartorial companion, grown with the centuries into a venerable historic stream, we yet have reason to be thankful that the arid waste of decoration is being watered again, however fitfully.
What is it that has turned the decorator of to-day into a kind of transcendentcostumier? I here have room to hint at a couple of reasons only. In the first place, it should be remembered that while the avowed ideal of masculine clothing is to render its wearers inconspicuous by causing them all to look alike, the ideal of feminine clothing is to give an appearance of strangeness and singularity. Now, nothing could accord more happily with our mechanical civilization than the masculine ideal; nothing, on the other hand, could come into more violent and more disappointing conflict with it than the feminine. Modern industry does not discriminate; it holds out to both sexes the same opportunities for acquisition, it heaps upon both the same monotonous profusion of manufactured goods. A hat, a mantle, a gown, is no sooner devised than a million others of the selfsame pattern pour in steady streams into every corner of the world. A startling colour cannot be affected by someone eager to achieve distinction of appearance without multiplying more rapidly than the budding green in Mr. Wells’Time Machine. Provincial visitors to the West End of London are astonished at the number of well-dressed women they see about the streets, and profess themselves unable to distinguish between a duchess and a shop-assistant, while Londoners whotread for the first time the pavements of Paris or New York find themselves similarly baffled. Thanks to the ceaseless activities of the large drapers’ store (supported by the admirable enterprise of artificial silk manufacturers) no woman to-day, however penurious, need deny herself any of those elegant accessories that were the crowning luxury of her ancestors. But, pleasing as this facility may be to the multitude, is it to be imagined that the more fortunate or ambitious can look upon it with the same satisfaction? Assuredly not, for they have even invoked the law of copyright in their attempt to resist it.
In drawing our conclusions from this spectacle of unwelcome equality it is useful also to bear in mind the relation between the female and the male populations of Western Europe. During the last half century the excess of women in this country has, roughly speaking, doubled in proportion to the total number of inhabitants of both sexes. The effect of a fixed and constant inequality may be neutralized by a series of adjustments in the social structure, but when the inequality threatens to increase fourfold in the course of a century the pressure it engenders is not so easily relieved. One of the most distressing sights to be metwith in Paris to-day is the large number of coloured and mostly negroid males that is gradually being assimilated by the white population. There are some even who predict that France will soon have become a bi-coloured republic. Should this unpleasant prophecy be realized, the present excess of white females will no doubt go a long way to account for the change. Whether or not this excess has done anything to stimulate the new movement in decoration it is, of course, impossible to say with certainty, but our surmise receives the strongest confirmation from the fact that in the United States of America, alone among modern countries in this respect, the modern decorative movement appears to be awakening no response at all. For in that country alone the male population exceeds the female by a surplus that is increasing at almost exactly the same rate as our own female surplus is increasing.
The new movement has been described as an enlargement of the art of dress, an affinity which those who visited the 1925 Paris Exhibition of Decorative Art will be ready enough to acknowledge. Among the most skilful of the exponents of the movement is M. Maurice Dufrène, and no one could wish for a more complete expressionof its main characteristics than hisChambre de Dame, shown at the 1925 exhibition along with other apartments by the same artist. Wherever one may turn in this room, one’s eye rests upon long sinuous curves whose rise and fall is as the billowing of an exquisite garment. The richness and amplitude of its lines recall nothing so much as the famous liquefaction that the silk frock of Herrick’s Julia would undergo, more particularly while the poet watched her in the act of walking. The dressing-table undulates round its absent mistress with a softness of movement that causes one to think of a fur or a cloak, while in the distance, framed in a background of streaming silver, the bed rolls lazily like a magic carpet suspended on the breeze. The cushions and lampshades have the appearance of intimate garments too pertly displayed. From an elongated hollow in the ceiling, fringed with curling foam, a golden light descends with studied moderation upon the skin of a giant polar bear, the canine adjunct enlarged and architecturalized, its muzzle caught in the loops of a heavy rope of silver. Everybody said the room was a distinguished success, and this, in so far as it served to enhance a brilliant though imaginary personality, it indubitably was.
The chief manifestation of the new movement, however, lies not so much in its forms as in the teguments wherein those forms are clothed. They are invariably of the greatest succulence. Soft, smooth, evenly or sharply luminous, they answer one another like the modulated textures of the dressmaker’s products. Even metallic surfaces are made to play their dull or glittering part in the combination, for there is nothing, as Baudelaire wrote in one of his poems, that provides so telling a foil to the warmth of woven materials as “l’énivrante monotonie du métal, du marbre et de l’eau.” It is only fit, therefore, that among the most successful of all these designers should be the metalworker Edgar Brandt, whose fame has securely established itself even on the other shore of the Atlantic. To infuse with profound feminine charm the design of a metal grille or an ornamental chandelier may appear difficult, but this is what M. Edgar Brandt has succeeded in doing; nor could we ask for a more striking testimony to the strength and singleness of the impulse from which this modern movement in decoration derives than we may find in his triumphant enlistment of such unlikely aids as these. The proper place andfunction of his work, of which I will not attempt a detailed description, is as unmistakable as the work itself. Only the other day a candidate for an academic prize in architecture introduced an imitation of it into a design for a bank building. Of course, he had to be rebuked on behalf of the prize committee, happily through the person of that witty and scholarly critic, Mr. H. S. Goodhart-Rendel. The particular manner of design he had chosen, the designer was told, should be confined to “the surroundings of beautiful and expensive women.” Its nature could not have been more succinctly defined.
Such, then, are, to the best of my belief, the most important forces at work in architecture to-day. Without doubt these forces will drive the architecture of to-morrow into a mould that is much like the one I have here attempted to describe. Are any new currents likely to manifest themselves, adding their influence to that of the currents with which we are already familiar? Few men living to-day are so bold that they would care to prophesy without some visible omen to justify their words. Our ideas about progress and the future have themselves shrunk somewhat; they have become more modest than they were. To the nineteenth-centuryEuropean, whose faith was so miraculously fortified by the discovery of natural selection, these things had grown to be the first and greatest realities of human existence. Progress was to him a pleasing and uninterrupted enlargement of his worldly self, a direct and positive increase of comfort, power, and general importance. As for the future, the element of variability, of possible differentiation, that was contained in it seemed about as great as the growth of a crystal might show in a constantly replenished solution. Even to-day there are some men living who (like that most eloquent of worshippers at the favourite Victorian shrine, Mr. H. G. Wells) still look forward to a continued expansion of the social organism, an unbroken if less unvarying accession of prosperity and power. But it is becoming only too clear that the band of orthodox believers is rapidly dwindling; already in some places the object of their worship is openly blasphemed against. We are told that the growth of an industrial society must necessarily be limited in extent—nay, that it must even be of limited duration. It is argued with depressing force that the opening-up of markets is like everything else in this world, and can only continue so long as there are markets to open up.Every day the future of our urbanized civilization appears wrapped in a darker cloud. Every day it becomes more uncertain how long Balbus will continue to build even in fulfilment of needs that exist here and now. The modern amorphous building, the “zoning” of volume and outline, the labour-saving residence, the subservience of the new decoration to feminine dress: all these spring from forces that exist to-day and that must continue for some time longer provided civilization is able to maintain itself in its present form. More than this it is impossible to foretell, except one thing only, with an inadequate reference to which I must bring this essay to an end.
It has been observed how the growth of population of our towns is even now being followed by the architectural expansion which is the somewhat retarded concomitant of such a growth. This growth, however, is slowing down and, it may be, gradually subsiding. We continue to build, but the tenants of the buildings we put up will before long have ceased to multiply. We have rediscovered the first principles of the forgotten art of town-planning, but only at a time when our towns are becoming almost adequate to the needs of their populations. One of the most momentouschapters in the history of humanity is thus about to be closed, and it is surely permissible at such a moment to speculate awhile on what will succeed it. What is to follow the great age of city-building, whose ironic fate it was to discern the laws that should have governed its activities when it was too late to obey these laws except on a point of secondary importance, being then able to obey only under penalty of death? Are we to meet, after failing to grasp the illusive opportunities of town-planning, with new, and real, and unexhausted opportunities of country-planning? I have not in this essay attempted a detailed description of the growth of our towns, which is a thing of the present and the past, but have confined myself to certain things that must happen within the boundaries of these towns before many more years have elapsed. And though it is too early as yet to speak with any particularity of the repopulation of the countryside, it is clear that no discussion of the future can claim to be even approximately just if it does not bear witness to this new phase in the history of building. Following unobtrusively upon a lengthy procession of works on town-planning, the first treatise on country-planning has recently made its appearance. Thoughonly a pamphlet of modest dimensions, it is fairly certain that the outward growth it heralds will not be less important than the centripetal one which is even now being arrested, for the exodus from the city has hardly begun to-day, and the architecture of the countryside still requires to pass beyond the experimental stage and assume some measure of permanence. But when rural England has grown thus far, we may rest assured that its permanence and stability will exceed all that the city at any time possessed, and in this manner will come to pass what was prophesied to the Roman philosopher Ædesius who, it will be recalled, awoke one morning and saw that the back of his left hand was covered with writing. “After reverently saluting his hand and the letters,” so the story goes, “he found that the following oracle was written on his hand: ‘On the warp of the two Fates’ spinning lie the threads of thy life’s web. If thy choice is the cities and towns of men, thy renown shall be deathless, shepherding the god-given impulse of youth. But if thou shalt be the shepherd of sheep and bulls, then hope that thou thyself shalt be the associate of the blessed immortals.’” Thus speaks the divine portent of the future of architecture also, and to whom except thearchitect skilled in country-planning, the architect of to-morrow, could it be said (as it was said of Ædesius and his pupils) that “when they spread their wings further than those of Icarus, though they were even more fragile, he would lead them gently down, not into the sea, but to the land and to human life”?
Transcriber’s Notes:Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.The Publisher’s Catalog for theTo-day and To-morrowseries, referred to in the front matter above, was not contained in the source material.
Transcriber’s Notes:
Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.
Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.
The Publisher’s Catalog for theTo-day and To-morrowseries, referred to in the front matter above, was not contained in the source material.