The buildings themselves, moreover, have become beautiful by expressing
what we genuinely love to contemplate, and not all kinds of buildings
were proper to that happy end. For mere sale and barter, any shed in
the market-place might serve, but if we think of traffic in the large
way that Ruskin suggested, as something potentially heroic and noble,
as a feeding of the hungry and a clothing of the naked, as a soldierly
occupying of outposts against poverty and wretchedness, as a campaign of
conquest against nature, and as an exchange at last of spiritual hungers
and satisfactions among men, then our houses of business should look
like temples. So they begin to look, and only a very blind critic here
and there still fails to see that so they should look. With our love of
traffic goes our love of travel. In this country travel is necessary, but
it is also an ideal. Any sort of railway station will serve as a place
to buy a ticket or board a train, and until recently almost any kind of
barracks did serve for those purposes. But the haphazard building could
not express our delight in travel, our enjoyment of distance and speed
and punctilious arrivings and departings. The pleasant casualness of the
stage-coach and the road-side inn does not really appeal to us, except
in exotic moments; our religion of travel is uttered in the Pennsylvania
Station in New York, and in other such structures fast rising throughout
the country, where the ritualistic atmosphere, produced by carefully
selected elements from the buildings of antiquity, have little to do with
buying your ticket and a great deal to do with the American spirit. We
breathe more freely as we enter them, and enjoy the space and the height;
our instinctive comment is, “This is something like!” as though some part
of us had found expression at last. And if this success in architecture
is as yet in the field of business and travel, among public buildings,
the reason probably is that in those fields we know what our aspirations
are. In ecclesiastical architecture, by way of contrast, we are less
clear. We feel that if the Woolworth building is so lovely, it is but
respectable to improve the appearance of our churches, so we put up very
wonderful Gothic chapels and cathedrals—only to find, perhaps, that they
are a sort of weight on our conscience rather than an expression of our
desires; we sometimes try to cultivate the religion that produced them,
in order that so eloquent a language may have more content in its words.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account