To answer that question well one must needs be artist and engineer,
and I am neither. Moreover, one must employ words and phrases that
do not exist, for this world still does not dream of the things that
may be done with thought and steel, when the engineer is
sufficiently educated to be an artist, and the artistic intelligence
has been quickened to the accomplishment of an engineer. How can one
write of these things for a generation which rather admires that
inconvenient and gawky muddle of ironwork and Flemish architecture,
the London Tower Bridge. When before this, temerarious anticipators
have written of the mighty buildings that might someday be, the
illustrator has blended with the poor ineffectual splutter of the
author's words, his powerful suggestion that it amounted simply to
something bulbous, florid and fluent in the vein of the onion, and
L'Art Nouveau. But here, it may be, the illustrator will not
intervene.
Art has scarcely begun in the world.
There have been a few forerunners and that is all. Leonardo, Michael
Angelo; how they would have exulted in the liberties of steel! There
are no more pathetic documents in the archives of art than
Leonardo's memoranda. In these, one sees him again and again
reaching out as it were, with empty desirous hands, towards the
unborn possibilities of the engineer. And Durer, too, was a Modern,
with the same turn towards creative invention. In our times these
men would have wanted to make viaducts, to bridge wild and
inaccessible places, to cut and straddle great railways athwart the
mountain masses of the world. You can see, time after time, in
Durer's work, as you can see in the imaginary architectural
landscape of the Pompeian walls, the dream of structures, lighter
and bolder than stone or brick can yield.... These Utopian town
buildings will be the realisation of such dreams.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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