The daily morning journal and courier., 1894-10-09
Fashion in Architecture.

| Fashion in Architecture.
 To the Editor of the JOURNAL AND COURIER.
 The Morning News. speaking of a new building erected In this city, asserts
 that as in dress. so there is fashion in architecture. The Queen Anne style, SO 1t says, Is now being abandoned for the recti!lnear walls of olden times.
 For the sake of higher aspirations. for the sake of good taste, for the sake of art, a question. :-
 Can in reality fashion rule in archi-
 lecture as 1t does in dress?
 Imagine a lady of the Louis XVI. style with a ship or some other foolish ornament in her high towering wig, standing alongside of few other pro- ducts of the changing moods of Dame Fashion, eternalized in brick and brown stone along the sidewalk or in some public yard. Take a lady with far reaching cue, and lady with puff sleeves, and another in decollette ball. dress, and give them the same fate. Obviously the only comment this pro- ceeding would arouse would be that of ridicule.
 But a Venus de Milo, Diana, a Ceres, may be placed on a pedestal, hewn in pure Carara, or in stone of any color or description, and the eye that beholds it will be pleased. and the brain behind it will look on in admira- tion.
 It is because art does not recognize or cater to the often ugly and distort- ing peculiarities of Dame Fashion. The high priest of art has always served the laws of beauty and harmony, and other laws he does not know in his noble work.
 Now, gentlemen of the Morning News, and you public in general who stand beautified when you, see a gorgeous thing that Is costly, are your methods and opinions contradictory to that which every artist considers positive axioma, or is architecture not to be counted any more among the high and noble arts? Is architecture the slave of fashion? Has it ever been SO in the mind of the true artist, the creator of new forms? Will it ever be so, so long as the artist will covet the highest height of human nobility? .t.q.
 The answer is easy. Just as there are
 poets and poetasters, so there are arch itects and builders, artists and ordinary workmen. Our art we have received after a long process of development from the ancient nations of Europe. For the laws of aesthetics we consult the authors and the statues of Greece. l Now it would be an impossibility to build in any country of Europe a house | with straight lines and straight walls | utterly lacking all attempt at artistic ! ornamentation or artistic lines, and then have the public or the papers l speak about it as a model of architec- l ture in the higher and better sense of l the word.
 Money-making; taking the best ad- vantage of space, so that there will be as much money as possible left for the business man who builds, may be ex- cellent business method. But we would hesitate a hundred years before we would like to have that classified among l the types of architecture, and running the danger of thereby giving occasion l to comparison between buildings so erected, and those produced by a de- sire for harmonious beauty, such as for instance the palaces in Italian renais- sance. This way of building expensive hollow stone-prisms may be good enough for gorgeous Chicago or for ex- cited New York, where it however actu- ally already commences to be aban- doned, but for our poetic City of Films we would vastly prefer the quiet har- monious aspect of a row of Queen Anne cottages to a street of gorgeous stone parallellopoxida, statues as they are in marble of the commonplace lack of extraordinarily in certain elements of our larger cities.
 If we are to possess some expensive buildings, towering high above the e1ms-and no man in this town will not rejoice to witness any token of growing prosperity-let us build them by all means; but let us not forget the laws of beauty and aesthetics; let us not forget that one of the departments of this towns university is a school of art, and that to the artists made there the inn pressions received in this city will and must be source of inspiration for all their life. Where science prevails let beauty, the artistic taste, accompany it. In fact, if as of yore, the architect would take pride in the work which he may accomplish, we would at every in- stance receive something better than four straight walls with windows and door, looking more commonplace than many a horse stable built for the wealthy. An imitation in stone of some of our many beautiful wooden build- ings would make a new style, peculiar to the town, and in complete harmony with the surroundings. The stone lay CTS in the walls of old Gothic churches give a more monumental example of this same principle.
 Cities will gradually grow Nobody wishes them to stop in the midst of their development. But if we can keep beauty and harmony fin our homes, and in our general home, the town with its artistic aspect, by all means let us keep it. The good Lord save us from pluto cratic gorgeousness and from all barba- rism. JACOBUS CALISCH,
 S2S Chapel street.