DOI Heft:
Nr. 211 (September, 1914)
DOI Artikel:Price, Matlack: Architecture and imagination: a critical note
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.43456#0213
• STUDIO
VOL. LIII. No. 211 Copyright, 1914, by John Lane Company SEPTEMBER, 1914
A RCHITECTURE AND IMAGINA-
/\ TION: A CRITICAL NOTE
AA BY C. MATLACK PRICE
If there were to be brought against
American architecture a serious criticism, it would
be that it lacks imagination. Lacking imagina-
tion, no architecture, or any other art, can present
elements picturesque, intimate or interesting.
Closely allied to imagination, if not in actual fact
the seed and root of imagination, is inspiration,
and if the vast bulk of our architecture cannot
honestly be said to inspire the beholder (with any-
thing but indifference) it is because no inspiration
has entered into its making.
Perhaps we do not expect enough—we expect to
be inspired by paintings or sculpture or music or
splendid acting, because we feel that inspiration
has entered into their creation. I do not think
that the average person is close enough to the
architect—and the architect has never appeared in
fiction enough to ripen his acquaintance. The
veriest ignoramus knows that a painting must be
a work of art (whether it is or not), because it is
produced by an artist. His much more cultured
cousin, however, does not necessarily know that a
building is (or should be) a work of art because it
is produced by an architect.
This is all a matter of education—-not the
education of the schools, though I have always
thought elementary architecture should be a high-
school course—but the education of reading and
general connotation. Knowing nothing of the
architect, or that his “profession” is really an art,
we know nothing of his architecture, and knowing
nothing of architecture in general we never come
to know the architect.
And it is because of these very human circum-
stances that architecture in this country, broadly
speaking, has been what it is, or (more correctly
stated) has been what it should not be—-a tangled
skein of imported ideas, well or ill chosen, and
RESIDENCE OF DR. ARCHIBALD R. GARDNER
YONKERS, NEW YORK
DESIGNED BY H. T. LINDEBERG
(Albro &* Lindeberg')
XXXIX
VOL. LIII. No. 211 Copyright, 1914, by John Lane Company SEPTEMBER, 1914
A RCHITECTURE AND IMAGINA-
/\ TION: A CRITICAL NOTE
AA BY C. MATLACK PRICE
If there were to be brought against
American architecture a serious criticism, it would
be that it lacks imagination. Lacking imagina-
tion, no architecture, or any other art, can present
elements picturesque, intimate or interesting.
Closely allied to imagination, if not in actual fact
the seed and root of imagination, is inspiration,
and if the vast bulk of our architecture cannot
honestly be said to inspire the beholder (with any-
thing but indifference) it is because no inspiration
has entered into its making.
Perhaps we do not expect enough—we expect to
be inspired by paintings or sculpture or music or
splendid acting, because we feel that inspiration
has entered into their creation. I do not think
that the average person is close enough to the
architect—and the architect has never appeared in
fiction enough to ripen his acquaintance. The
veriest ignoramus knows that a painting must be
a work of art (whether it is or not), because it is
produced by an artist. His much more cultured
cousin, however, does not necessarily know that a
building is (or should be) a work of art because it
is produced by an architect.
This is all a matter of education—-not the
education of the schools, though I have always
thought elementary architecture should be a high-
school course—but the education of reading and
general connotation. Knowing nothing of the
architect, or that his “profession” is really an art,
we know nothing of his architecture, and knowing
nothing of architecture in general we never come
to know the architect.
And it is because of these very human circum-
stances that architecture in this country, broadly
speaking, has been what it is, or (more correctly
stated) has been what it should not be—-a tangled
skein of imported ideas, well or ill chosen, and
RESIDENCE OF DR. ARCHIBALD R. GARDNER
YONKERS, NEW YORK
DESIGNED BY H. T. LINDEBERG
(Albro &* Lindeberg')
XXXIX