[Illustration: VANDERBILT HOUSE, FIFTH AVENUE & 52d ST.]
manifest plagiarism--plagiarism mostly of these architects’ more successful contemporaries in America. But the varying requirements of individual cases compel even those architects to adapt or else invent to meet contingencies where no precedent is available, so in practice it has come to be that nobody copies anything exactly.
Certainly, nobody copies a building of an earlier epoch that is susceptible of reincarnation to-day. I explained this point very clearly, I imagined, in an article I wrote for the _House Beautiful_ in May, 1901, entitled “How to Make a Successful House,” which magazine holds the copyright thereof, so that I cannot use the particular reference here I should like to use. The economy of the age would not let an architect reproduce Lambton Castle, for instance (see Plate LXXI), fascinating proposition though it be, and the architect wanted to do so, and could afford the expense of making the necessary minute examination, the necessary drawings and measurements, which I can assure you would be a work onerous and tedious almost beyond endurance for the impatient temperament of an American. Centuries have elapsed, and the province of the architect now is to make the castle perform its whole process of evolution noiselessly in his brain, and come down to date so as to meet the problem of a twentieth century home without disturbing the illusion of its history, a process entailing concerted tension of heart and brain to which the conditions imposed by mere abstract architectural design are puerile.
I have selected a Tudor castle because the field is practically untouched in American Renaissance and modern architecture generally. If there be fashion in adaptation, the fashion has been for Elizabethan and Jacobean adaptations rather than Tudor; but the real reason why we have no creditable offspring of that delightful old rambler--Haddon Hall (see Plate LXXII), in America is to be found in the fact that no American architect capable of exploiting the thing has thought about it or else he has lacked the opportunity, more probably the latter. I have often contemplated that ancient and wonderful staircase on the castle terrace while thrilling romances architectural have filled my