“It is, I believe, historically true, in the history of the world, with one conspicuous exception, that down to the Italian Renaissance, some four centuries ago, the architect was himself a builder. The exception is the classical period in Rome. The Grecian builders, as all of you know, had taken the simplest possible construction, that of the post and lintel, two uprights carrying a crossbeam, and they had developed that into a refined and beautiful thing. The Romans admired that, and they wished to reproduce it in their own buildings, but the construction of their own buildings was an arched construction; it was a wall pierced with arches. They did not develop that construction into what it might have been. They simply pierced their wall with arches and overlaid it with an envelope of the artistic expression of another construction, which they coarsened in the process. According to some accounts, they hired Greek decorators to overlay it with this architecture which had nothing to do with it, and there was the first illustration in all history of this difference between the art of architecture and the art of building. In every other country in the world the architect had been the builder. I think that is true down to the Italian Renaissance; and then building was really a lost art. There hadn’t been anything really built in the fifteenth century; and they began to employ general artists, painters and sculptors and goldsmiths, to design their buildings, and these men had no models before them except this Grecian-Roman architecture of which I speak.[A] These men reproduced that in their designs, and left the builder to construct it the best way he could, and that, I am told, is a process which sometimes prevails in the present time. But before that everything had been a simple development of the construction and the material of the building, and since that men have thought they perceived that architecture was one thing and building was another, and they have gone on to design buildings without any sort of reference to the materials of which they were composed, or the manner in which they were put together. That is the origin of the exclusively modern practice of working in architectural styles, as it is called. Why, before the fifteenth century, I don’t suppose any man who began to build a building ever thought in what style he should compose it any more than I thought before I got up here in what language I should address you; he simply built in the language to which he was accustomed and which he knew. You will find this perfect truth is the great charm of Grecian architecture, and ten or fifteen centuries later it was the great charm of Gothic architecture; that is to say, that it was founded upon fact, that it was the truth,