DOI issue:
No. 159 (June, 1906)
DOI article:Recent designs in domestic architecture
DOI Page / Citation link: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.20715#0068
Recent Designs in Domestic Architecture
“ It's onlY here and there by diligent searching
that it is possible to find materials which will
improve w’th age—tiles and bricks which, perhaps
somewhat harsh and monotonous in colour at first,
will quickly become not merely dirty and black
but stained with purple and gold. It is not
enough, however, that materials should alone
possess this quality of thus forming as it were a re-
ception canvas for the pictures which Nature paints.
Each substance that may be used has its own
peculiar character, and real beauty in building can
only result from the sympathetic divination of that
character on the part of the workman. Instead of
trying to make every surface smooth and every line
straight, he must try to express the character of the
material. He may strive to shew, for instance,
that this seeming cold and rigorous iron, of which
the hinge of a cottage door is made, became once
in the passionate heat of the furnace a soft and
ductile thing, and the expression of this idea is
seldom absent from the best work in wrought iron.
“ The true ideal of a good workman should be to
thus divine and express the real inwardness of each
particular material. The woodenness of wood, the
brassiness of brass, the leadenness of lead, must
all be sympathetically understood and expressed.
And this can only be achieved by hand wrork, or at
any rate by hand finish. Timber, which it has been
found expedient to cut into planks by the remorse-
less circular saw, should have its characteristic
qualities of surface revived by the adze or chisel
and not the plane, and however highly finished the
work may be, the subtle and all but imperceptible
variety of surfaces resulting from such a treatment
will make just that little difference in the final
effect which is all the difference.
“Gradually, as one by one the old faim houses
and cottages of England are giving place to
cockney villas, it might be well to begin to learn
some of these rudimentary methods of building
which make for beauty, and which these old
buildings illustrate so well.
“ But to revert from the general to the particular,
“ It's onlY here and there by diligent searching
that it is possible to find materials which will
improve w’th age—tiles and bricks which, perhaps
somewhat harsh and monotonous in colour at first,
will quickly become not merely dirty and black
but stained with purple and gold. It is not
enough, however, that materials should alone
possess this quality of thus forming as it were a re-
ception canvas for the pictures which Nature paints.
Each substance that may be used has its own
peculiar character, and real beauty in building can
only result from the sympathetic divination of that
character on the part of the workman. Instead of
trying to make every surface smooth and every line
straight, he must try to express the character of the
material. He may strive to shew, for instance,
that this seeming cold and rigorous iron, of which
the hinge of a cottage door is made, became once
in the passionate heat of the furnace a soft and
ductile thing, and the expression of this idea is
seldom absent from the best work in wrought iron.
“ The true ideal of a good workman should be to
thus divine and express the real inwardness of each
particular material. The woodenness of wood, the
brassiness of brass, the leadenness of lead, must
all be sympathetically understood and expressed.
And this can only be achieved by hand wrork, or at
any rate by hand finish. Timber, which it has been
found expedient to cut into planks by the remorse-
less circular saw, should have its characteristic
qualities of surface revived by the adze or chisel
and not the plane, and however highly finished the
work may be, the subtle and all but imperceptible
variety of surfaces resulting from such a treatment
will make just that little difference in the final
effect which is all the difference.
“Gradually, as one by one the old faim houses
and cottages of England are giving place to
cockney villas, it might be well to begin to learn
some of these rudimentary methods of building
which make for beauty, and which these old
buildings illustrate so well.
“ But to revert from the general to the particular,