The Architectural Magazine, and Journal of Improvement in Architecture, Building, and Furnishing, and in the Various Arts and Trades Connected Therewith Volume 3 (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE ARCHITECTURAL MAGAZINE. JANUARY, 1836. OriginAii Communications. A.rt. I. On the different Significations of the Words " a Whole," in Architecture. JFrora the French of QuATREMiRE De Quincy. The expression, " a whole," has a double signification, and it is used in two different senses; the one, simple and material; the other, compound and intellectual; or, in other words, theoretical. Under its commonest acceptation in architecture, a whole means the general mass of an edifice, or the entirety of the different parts which compose it. We say thus: " The whole of the Vatican and its dependencies covers such a space of ground;" ? " Such a monument, or such a public establishment, forms a whole of such or such an extent;" ? " The aspect of such an edifice gives the idea of a great whole." According to the sense of these phrases, it is evident that the words, " a whole," must be considered in them under their material aspect. In architecture, there is another manner of understanding the tout ensemble, or entire whole, of a plan or an edifice; and there is an art of making, in a moral sense, a whole, the parts and tlie ensemble of which would be reciprocally subordinate to each other. The art of making them thus subordinate consists in giving to the parts of a building, whether great or small, an agreement of form, disposition, and decoration, which establishes among them a necessity of being thus, and makes them appear as one body, each member of which explains the whole; as the whole, in return, enables us to form a judgment of each of the parts. It is the principle of this relative subordination that is called the principle of a whole, in every architectural work. The merit of a whole, such as we have just defmed it, consists in its being rarely met with, par...