Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1918 edition. Excerpt: ... AN INDIVIDUAL APPLICATION IN preceding chapters I have formulated a definition of architecture which appeals to me and which has influenced my attitude toward my own work as well as toward all individual and racial expression past or present. I cannot treat as real architecture, or worthy of serious consideration as bearing upon the problem of today, any product of the builder's art in which the exemplification of unified and perfected character is not sought through an idealized interpretation of the inhering structural forces. I can see in buildings not dominated by this principle nothing more than mere scene painting, --mere theatrical picture-making in three dimensions on a more or less stupendous scale. While I admire the art of picture-making in its proper place, yet, as applied to architecture, I conceive it to be most degrading and debasing, and altogether incompatible with clear thought or deep feeling. The glory of the Renaissance was its painting. Its architecture dawned as gloriously, but again the grandeur that was Rome overcame a glory that might have been the Renaissance had the Greek spirit prevailed and had not the painter-sculptors of the period begun to paint, as I have said, in three dimensions. There ceased to be an interpretation of life in terms of structure, and, instead, came a painting and modeling and superficial application of forms which once had functioned but which now were dead; not that the forms were not beautiful, --as the human lineaments are beautiful, often more beautiful, in death, but that the spirit had vanished and the forms had ceased to bear a vital relationship to living art. With the Renaissance began the reign of art for art's sake, beauty for the sake of entertainment and superficial.
