Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure; and Other Essays — John Shaqi
Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure; and Other EssaysCarpenter, Edward
Philosophy
Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure; and Other Essays
Carpenter, Edward
Civilization; Crime; Evolution; Science
and where far more perfectly and with far less toil they can be tended
than if scattered abroad in private hands. At one stroke half the labour
and all the anxiety of domestic caretaking will be annihilated. The
private dwelling places, no longer costly and labyrinthine in proportion
to the value and number of the treasures they contain, will need no
longer to have doors and windows jealously closed against fellow men or
mother nature. The sun and air will have access to them, the indwellers
will have unfettered egress. Neither man nor woman will be tied in
slavery to the lodge which they inhabit; and in becoming once more a
part of nature, the human habitation will at length cease to be what it
is now for at least half the human race--a prison.
Men often ask about the new Architecture--what, and of what sort, it is
going to be. But to such a question there can be no answer till a new
understanding of life has entered into people's minds, and then the
answer will be clear enough. For as the Greek Temples and the Gothic
Cathedrals were built by people who themselves lived but frugally as we
should think, and were ready to dedicate their best work and chief
treasure to the gods and the common life; and as to-day when we must
needs have for ourselves spacious and luxurious villas, we seem to be
unable to design a decent church or public building; so it will not be
till we once more find our main interest and life in the life of the
community and the gods that a new spirit will inspire our architecture.
Then when our Temples and Common Halls are not designed to glorify an
individual architect or patron, but are built for the use of free men
and women, to front the sky and the sea and the sun, to spring out of
the earth, companionable with the trees and the rocks, not alien in
spirit from the sunlit globe itself or the depth of the starry
night--then I say their form and structure will quickly determine
themselves, and men will have no difficulty in making them beautiful.
And similarly with the homes or dwelling places of the people. Various
as these may be for the various wants of men, whether for a single
individual or for a family, or for groups of individuals or families,
whether to the last degree simple, or whether more or less ornate and
complex, still the new conception, the new needs of life, will
necessarily dominate them and give them form by a law unfolding from
within.
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