Architecture; Architecture -- United States; Decoration and ornament; Sullivan, Louis H., 1856-1924
The author remembers the day and the hour when this became his
personal conviction--his personal desire. It happened years ago in
the Albright Gallery in Buffalo--a building then newly completed, of a
severely classic type. In the central hall was a single doorway,
whose white marble architrave had been stained with different colored
pigments by Francis Bacon; after the manner of the Greeks. The effect
was so charming, and made the rest of the place seem by contrast so
cold and dun, that the author came then and there to the conclusion
that architecture without polychromy was architecture incomplete. Mr.
Bacon spent three years in Asia Minor, and elsewhere, studying
the remains of Greek architecture, and he found and brought home a
fragment of an antefix from the temple of Assos, in which the applied
color was still pure and strong. The Greeks were a joyous people. When
joy comes back into life, color will come back into architecture.
Ceramic products are ideal as a means to this end. The Greeks
themselves recognized their value for they used them widely and
wisely: it has been discovered that they even attached bands of
colored terra-cotta to the marble mouldings of their temples. How
different must have been such a temple's real appearance from
that imagined by the Classical Revivalists, whose tradition of the
inviolable cold Parian purity of Greek architecture has persisted,
even against archæological evidence to the contrary, up to the present
day.
In one way we have an advantage over the Greek, if we only had the wit
to profit by it. His palette, like his musical scale, was more limited
than ours. Nearly the whole gamut of the spectrum is now available to
the architect who wishes to employ ceramics. The colors do not
change or fade, and possess a beautiful quality. Our craftsmen and
manufacturers of face-brick, terra-cotta, and colored tile, after much
costly experimentation, have succeeded in producing ceramics of a
high order of excellence and intrinsic beauty; they can do practically
anything demanded of them; but from that quarter where they
should reap the greatest commercial advantage--the field of
architecture--there is all too little demand. The architect who should
lead, teach and dictate in this field, is often through ignorance
obliged to learn and follow instead. This has led to an ignominious
situation--ignominious, that is, to the architect. He has come
to require of the manufacturer--when he requires anything at
all--assistance in the very matter in which he should assist: the
determination of color design. It is no wonder that the results are
often bad, and therefore discouraging. The manufacturers of ceramics
welcome co-operation and assistance on the part of the architect with
an eagerness which is almost pathetic, on those rare occasions when
assistance is offered.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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