A representative architect in New York city has declared impressively, “We are no longer architects, but adapters!” To him, looking upon his own achievement and that of his contemporaries as well as the general tendency of the times in which we live, it seemed, indeed, he had framed an unimpeachable aphorism. It is a funny thing about architecture:--nearly as it concerns our every day needs, much as it is criticised about our ears, our knowledge of it, nevertheless, continues to be absurdly inexact and experimental. I am speaking now of architecture as a fine art, not as the science of an engineer. One has only to read the reviews to note how little the authors themselves know to tell us, how they go ’round and ’round the animal, with more or less entanglement, as we have read of picadors doing in a bull fight. And when they have finished can we call
[Illustration: “It seemed they were coming to--to a river--a sombre, swift-flowing river, and a huge gray building resting upon arches spanned its width. Ascending a little elevation in the road, further up, the vision becomes clearer and fascinating to the dreaming horseman. It is the Château of Chenonceau.”--MISS. POLLY FAIRFAX.]
to mind a single statement wherein they have committed themselves to anything definite? The whole proposition architectonic is to the average reviewer an egregious bugbear before which he is anything but sure of himself.
He hints at the mysteries of design, half advocating, half condemning, the two salient American traits--namely, originality and enterprise; for he readily sees that if he commends those traits unequivocally, he must acknowledge the architects of our Reign of Terror to have been the greatest of all American architects whose work has passed into history, as they were assuredly the most original and enfranchised. And this, of course, would never do for the Della Cruscan critic of America.
Upon the other hand, he is expected, by a species of professional jealousy which is somehow perennial, to cavil at that kind of architecture called at the present time “adaptation.” From which fault-finding the reader gathers that adaptation is but a polite synonym for cribbing and thieving from the masterpieces of antiquity. Then, while preparing his argument, numerous contradictory things suggest themselves to the reviewer that are exceedingly difficult of assimilation. If he be fair, sincere with himself, while caviling at adaptation, how can he make use of such a class of architecture as we have exemplified in every-day acquaintances like Trinity Church by Upjohn and Grace Church by Renwick, two intensely American designs, yet gauged by the standard of modern criticism, out and out adaptations of mediæval Gothic! Again, it will not do for him to endeavor to extricate himself with credit by declaring that adaptation belongs by right only to ecclesiastic edifices, for there, before one in a moment, stands the Capitol at Washington sharply cutting a piece out of the blue sky on the horizon of Maryland, the pride of every American citizen, acknowledged to be the most successful specimen of American Renaissance of its class (legislative buildings), yet the most loyal to its Italian antecedents, making the newer State capitols with domes look tawdry in consequence, proportionately as they are less Italian and significant historically. So that altogether the case appears to be one hopelessly involved and complicated.