American Architect and Architecture Volume N . 56 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1897 Excerpt: ... the mediaeval architects were guided in designing these irregularities, and suggesting the importance of ascertaining whether they were planned in conformity with a recognized and intelligent system, handed down by tradition, or whether their authors simply followed empirical rules still current in the guilds, and probably inherited from the Romanesque period. How this question is to be answered no one can say, for literature seems to be silent on the subject; but not only as a part of the history of art, but as a matter of everyday practice, the reply will be of great interest. We know, from the best of evidence, that derived from actual measurements, that all the important buildings of antiquity, all those of the Romanesque period in Italy and France, and, possibly, in Germany, and many, if not all, the best of the great mediaeval buildings in Italy, France and England, were designed with intentional departures from the symmetry, rectangularity aud straightness which are now so universally accepted as necessary to architectural design that we are only just beginning to find out that architects could ever have failed to observe them. As it costs a great deal more to build stonework on a designed curve than to set the blocks with a straight-edge and a string, our predecessors must have felt very strongly the aesthetic necessity for such departures from geometrical precision; but we cannot even guess at the period when a tradition so ancient, or an aesthetic feeling so important, fell into neglect. 30 far as the feeling is concerned, we are not sure that it has yet disappeared from the building world. Professor Ware writes somewhere about an observant old plasterer of his acquaintance, who said to him one day that a long moulded cornice, if made perfectly h...