Sticks and Stones quotes

it broke up the internal unity of the village by giving separate individuals the opportunity by what was literally a “lucky haul,” to achieve a position of financial superiority.

Fishermen are the miners of the water.

Instead of the long, watchful care that the farmer must exercise from planting time to harvest, fishing demands a sharp eye and a quick, hard stroke of work;

whereas, while our civilization remains intact there are a hundred handbooks, measured drawings, and photographs which make a naive recovery of antiquity impossible.

Once we have genuinely appreciated the influence that created early colonial architecture, we see that it is irrecoverable: what we call a revival is really a second burial.

All the king’s horses and all the king’s men have been hauling and tugging vigorously during the last fifty years to bring back the simple beauties and graces of the colonial dwelling, and the collectors’ hunt for the products of the Salem, Newburyport and Philadelphia …

Photographic accuracy, neatly touched up—this is its capital virtue, and plainly, it has precious little to do with a living architecture.

Like the ruined chapel in The Pirates of Penzance, our modern colonial houses are often attached to ancestral estates that were established⁠—a year ago; and if their occupants are “descendants by purchase,” what shall we say of their architects?

King Alfred can perhaps remain a king, though he stays in a cottage and minds the cakes on the griddle; but most of us need a little scenery and ritual to confirm these high convictions.

If the tailors had not produced the frock-coat, Daniel Webster would have had to invent one.

The merchant wants his little comforts and conveniences; at most, he desires the architect to make his gains conspicuous; but the hero who has drawn his sword or addressed an assembly wants elbow room for gestures.

that the orders have lost their proportions, and that, unlike the wandering mechanic, who “with a few soiled plates of English architecture” helped Squire Jones, the builder could no longer pretend to talk learnedly “of friezes, entablatures, and particularly of the composite order.”

Alas for a bookish architecture when the taste for reading disappears!

The dominant designs of the early republican period proceeded directly or indirectly from such books as Stuart’s Antiquities of Athens, and from such well-known examples of temple architecture in southern Europe as the Maison Carrée at Nîmes.

… of the Age of Reason and white perukes would have been horrified, I have no doubt, at the “barbarism” of the original Greek temples, as they would doubtless also have been at the meanness of the dwellings in which Pericles or Thucydides must have lived.

Once the temple-house ceased to be a stage upon which the myth of classicism could be enacted, it ceased also to be a home. For who wishes to live in a temple?

That is a spiritual exercise we do not demand even of a priest.

Where industrialism took root, the traditions of architecture were disregarded; where romanticism flourished, on the other hand, in the mansions, public buildings, and churches, architecture became capricious and absurd, and it returned to a past that had never existed.

Against the gross callousness which a Bounderby exhibited toward beauty and amenity, there was only the bland piety of a Pecksniff.

The dream that is dying and the dream that is coming to birth do not stand in sequence, but mingle as do the images in a dissolving view;

Louis, and Chicago by the middle of the century had forfeited to the gambler in real estate, to pay the cost of street improvements, generous tracts of land which the original planners had set aside as civic centers.

Planned by men who still retained some of the civic vision of the early republic, the commercial city speedily drifted into the hands of people who had no more civic scruples than the keeper of a lottery.

The gridiron plan had one other defect which was accounted a virtue by the pioneer, and still is shared by those who have not profited by the intervening century’s experience.

Romanticism had not restored the past, nor had industrialism made the future more welcome.

Architecture wandered between two worlds, “one dead, the other powerless to be born.”

but the difficulty of getting rid of these Romanesque structures only increased the demand for a more frail and facile method of construction.

Romanticism met its great defeat in the office-building.

By the use of the passenger elevator, first designed for an exhibition-tower adjacent to the Crystal Palace in 1853, it had become possible to raise the height of buildings to seven stories: the desire for ground-rents presently increased the height to ten.

Such a retreat is the equivalent of surrender.

To hold to Gothic precedent in the hope of recreating the medieval community is to hope that an ancient bottle will turn potassium permanganate into claret.

The romanticists have never fully faced the social and economic problems that attend their architectural solutions: the result is that they have been dependent upon assistance from the very forces and institutions which, fundamentally, they aim to combat.

… from this to the introduction of polished granite and iron ornament in the post-Civil War cemetery, down to the mechanically perfect mausoleum, where the corpses are packed like the occupants of a subway train, that some of our more effusively progressive communities boast of today.

As we live, so we die: no wonder Shelley described Hell as a place much like London.

The Roman development of New York, Chicago, Washington, and the lesser metropolises, had an important effect upon the homes of the people. Historically, the imperial monument and the slum-tenement go hand in hand.

… my own part, I think we have at last acquired a criterion which will enable us to sum up the architecture of the imperial age, and deal justly with these railroad stations and stadiums, these sewers and circuses, these aqueducts and parkways and grand avenues.

Our imperial architecture is an architecture of compensation: it provides grandiloquent stones for people who have been deprived of bread and sunlight and all that keeps man from becoming vile.

Behind the monumental façades of our metropolises trudges a landless proletariat, doomed to the servile routine of the factory system;

The opulence, the waste of resources and energies, the perversion of human effort represented in this architecture are but the outcome of our general scheme of working and living.

Architecture, like government, is about as good as a community deserves.

The shell that we create for ourselves marks our spiritual development as plainly as that of a snail denotes its species. If sometimes architecture becomes frozen music, we have ourselves to thank when it is a pompous blare of meaningless sounds.

The opulence, the waste of resources and energies, the perversion of human effort represented in this architecture are but the outcome of our general scheme of working and living. Architecture, like government, is about as good as a community deserves.

The shell that we create for ourselves marks our spiritual development as plainly as that of a snail denotes its species.

If sometimes architecture becomes frozen music, we have ourselves to thank when it is a pompous blare of meaningless sounds.

In an article chiefly devoted to praise of the skyscraper, in a number of The Arts, the majority of the illustrations were taken from a point that the man in the street never reaches.

In short, it is an architecture, not for men, but for angels and aviators!

If buildings are to be experienced directly, and not through the vicarious agency of the photograph, the skyscraper defeats its own ends;

There is a sense, of course, in which these modern colossi express our civilization. It is a romantic notion, however, to believe that this is an important or beautiful fact.

Our slums express our civilization, too, and our rubbish heaps tell sermons that our stones conceal.

The only expression that really matters in architecture is that which contributes in a direct and positive way to the good life:

Except for a handful of good precedents, our mechanical work in America does not express this vitality.

The machine has stamped us; and we have not reacted.

Moreover, in the building of separate houses in the city and its suburbs, where the demands of mechanical efficiency are not so drastic as they are in the office building, the effect of the machine process has been to narrow the scope of individual taste …

The charming designs that the European modernists make testify to the strength of their long architectural tradition even in the face of machinery; the truth is that they fit our modern methods of house-production scarcely much better than the thatched cottage of clay and wattle.

The nemesis of mechanism is that it inexorably eliminates the architect⁠—even the architect who worships its achievements!

So much of the detail of a building is established by factory standards and patterns that even the patron himself has precious little scope for giving vent to his impulses in the design or execution of the work;

he must find his requirements in Italy, Colonial America, France, Tudor England, or Spain—woe to him if he wants to find them in twentieth-century America!

Thus the machine process has created a standardized conception of style: of itself it can no more invent a new style than a mummy can beget children.

If one wishes a house of red brick it will be Georgian or Colonial; that is to say, the trimming will be white, the woodwork will have classic moldings, and the electric-light fixtures will be pseudo-candlesticks in silvered metal.

Buildings which do not answer to this general description are either aristocratic relics of the age of handicraft, enjoyed only by the rich, or they are fugitive attempts to imitate cheaply the ways and gestures of handicraft.

We have attempted to live off machinery, and the host has devoured us.

It is time that we ceased to play the parasite: time that we looked about us, to see what means we have for once more becoming men. The prospects of architecture are not divorced from the prospects of the community.

The notion that our architecture will be improved by courses of appreciation in our museums and colleges is, to put it quite mildly, one of the decadent deceits of snobbery.

It is only paper flowers that grow in this fashion.

In order to get our bearings, we shall pull apart, one by one, the principal elements in our heritage of civilization in the United States, and examine them separately.

There is no doubt a little truth in this observation; but it was not merely our attachment to republican government that caused this behavior: it was even more, perhaps, our disattachment from the affiliations of a settled life.

The pioneer, to put it vulgarly, was on the make and on the move; it did not matter to him how he treated the land, since by the time he could realize its deficiencies he had already escaped to a new virgin area.

“What had posterity done for him?”

These distinctions are bound up with a difference in the forms that are used; and it is through these esthetic differences that we may, perhaps, best see how the personal and mechanical may be apportioned in the architecture of the future.

The key to handicraft esthetics, it seems to me, is a sort of vital superfluity.

The carpenter is not content with his planed surface; nor is the mason satisfied with the smooth stone; nor does the painter impartially cover the bare wall:

Granting that art is an end in itself, is it not an end to the worker as well as the spectator?

A great part of craftsmanship needs no other justification than that it bears the mark of a joyous spirit.

When we compare an ideal product of handicraft, like a Florentine table of the sixteenth century, with an ideal product of mechanical art—say a modern bathroom—the contrasting virtues and defects become plain.

Art, in fact, is one of the main ways in which we escape the vicious circle of economic activity. According to the conventional economist, our economic life has but three phases: production, distribution, and consumption.

We work to eat so that we may eat to work.

This is a fairly accurate portrait of life in an early industrial town; but it does not apply to the economic processes of a civilized community.

… is nothing to the real estate speculator that the growth of a city destroys the very purpose for which it may legitimately exist, as the growth of Atlantic City into a suburb of Broadway and Chestnut Street ruined its charm as a seaside fishing village.

Sufficient unto the day is the evil he creates.

Most of the important changes that must be effected in relation to industry and the land cannot be accomplished without departing from these dominant mores—from the customs and laws and uneasy standards of ethics which we carry over from the days of our continental conquest.

With respect to the needs of recreation, home-life, and health, the growth of a city to the point where the outlying citizen must travel two hours a day in the subway between his office and his place of work is unintelligent and arbitrary.

A city, properly speaking, does not exist by the accretion of houses, but by the association of human beings.

When the accretion of houses reaches such a point of congestion or expansion that human association becomes difficult, the place ceases to be a city.

… side of the picture and have occasionally overemphasized the weaknesses and defects of the American tradition, it is only because in our present appreciation of what the American architect has already given form to, we are likely to forget the small area these achievements occupy.

So far we have achieved patches of good building; more than once we have achieved the mot juste, but we have not learnt the more difficult art of consecutive discourse.

With respect to the architecture of the whole community, medieval Boston and medieval New Amsterdam had more to boast than their magnificently endowed successors. Just as Mr.

more than once we have achieved the mot juste, but we have not learnt the more difficult art of consecutive discourse. With respect to the architecture of the whole community, medieval Boston and medieval New Amsterdam had more to boast than their magnificently endowed successors.

Just as Mr. Babbitt’s great ancestor, Scadder, transformed a swamp into a thriving metropolis by the simple method of calling it New Eden, so do we tend to lighten our burdens by calling them the “blessings of progress”; but it does not avail.

Our mechanical and metropolitan civilization, with all its genuine advances, has let certain essential human elements drop out of its scheme; and until we recover these elements our civilization will be at loose ends, and our architecture will unerringly express this situation.