Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1930-09-27
COUTURE DICTATES
TYPES OF DESIGN
People of Wealth and Taste
Will Develop Worthy
Architecture.
BY CHARLES C. WILSON. F. A. l. A.

BY CHARLES C. WILSON, r. A. L. A,
From the Southern Architect and Buildins
An architect of genius and his disci-
pies, If they win and hold popular
favor. may possibly create and domi-
nate for a time the architecture of q
city or State. but If they are in ad-
vance of the culture, ideals and taste
of the people, their influence is limited
in extent and short lived. On the other
hand, a people of wealth and taste and
culture will always develop q worthy.
IL not great, architecture.
1t is the people and not the archi-
tects who make architecture, and it Is
the architects that architecture reflects.
The world Is lately coming to appre-
ciate the rare charm of the early archi-
lecture of tidewater Virginia. of the
coastal plains Of the Carolinas and
Georgia and of the black belt of Ala
bama and Mississippi, and wonders why
We have lost that charm and find it
so difficult to recapture. We are study
ing these old buildings in photographs,
in measured drawings, in the original;
we are returning to handmade brick, to
hand-planed molding. to stucco, to
hewn timber, but have not been able
Pringle house, a St. Michael's Church
or an Athens Ga. We theorize about
landscape and atmosphere and style,
but the distinctive character still
eludeS us.
The Southern architecture of the
eighteenth and of the first half of the
nineteenth century grew out of the
lives of the people, and almost entirely
without the aid of professional archi-
tects. mostly at the hands of amateur
proprietors, assisted by master builders
and skilled mechanics, and often slave
mechanics at that. The life of this
whole region was organized on an aris-
tocratic basis, with slavery-benevolent
slavery. if you please-as its fundamen-
tai institution: and the architecture
now so much admired was distinctly
an aristocratic architecture.
In that aristocratic society there was
developed culture, a refinement, a
charm without parallel in America, and
it expressed itself Enthusiastically in the
arts-in literature, in oratory, in paint
ing. in gardening and, more than all, in
architecture. In the SparseneSS of set
Elements, in the difficulties of travel, in
the absence of anusementS, a lavish
hospitality developed as one Of the chief
characteristics of the life of the times, for
which provision was necessarily made in
the homes. The baronial country estates
were designed largely for this function,
some of them going so far as to provide
spacious guest houses, where whole
families of visitors were entertained
with special retinues of servants, not
for day or q week end, but for months
at a time.
The point of this and of all that has
been written Is that the people, with
their wealth. their culture, their taste,
their character, make the architecture,
1t requires more than sunshine and
landscape and style and architects and
conscious effort to recapture that in
tangible and indescribable atmosphere
which the traveller through Dixie finds
so charming
The old era and the old architecture
can never come back, and should never
come back. A new democratic and in
dustrial culture is developing and Is
beginning to express itself in a worthy
architecture. In this day of easy travel
and communication and of standardiza-
ton and cosmopolitanisn1, distinctive
regional variation In architecture mus
largely disappear.
If our new architecture IS an honest
adaptation to climate and landscape
an honest use of native materials, ar
honest and unaffected accommodation
to the life and character of our people
we need have no fear that it will be-
lacking in distinctive charm.