To the teachings of Ruskin and to the influence exerted by the works of his followers may be ascribed the commencement of a return to the more honest use of materials, as well as many more or less successful attempts at polychromy based upon the Gothic of the North of Italy. But the architectural movement which at the present time seems to bid fair to make Architecture a national art, whether or not it gives us a national style, can scarcely be said to have set in before the Centennial.
The Present last decade of architectural development —and, it must be confessed, the one which has given to the United States a large proportion of its most striking buildings—has been marked by two movements, the one purely xsthetic, the other constructional in its origin, but in its results affecting the architectonic aspect of recent buildings more than it can be affected by any "style," and tending, in fact, toward the development of a new style. The first of these movements is that which has purported to revive a late phase of English Renaissance— that of the age of Queen Anne, or, in other words, of the beginning of the eighteenth century. There is little that is worthy of imitation, little that possesses architectonic character, in the Architecture of the eighteenth century. It is that of the colonial period in America, and that of a very large part of the existing country-houses, as well as of many of the churches and much of the street-architecture in those parts of English cities which have escaped demolition and renovation.
" Queen structures erected under the name of " Queen Anne " bear little resemblance to thOse .they profess to take for their model, yet in common with them they have one hopeful feature: they dis card the conventional five orders. While the facade of a real eighteenth century house is a tabula rasa, that of the modern Queen Anne structure, whether erected for domestic or for commercial purposes, is usually a field for the display of varied shapes and varied ornament. It is, in fact, very hard to define what is meant by the term " Queen Anne," for the modern architect has not adhered to the limited series of forms adopted by those who started the movement, but, revelling in the freedom of decoration permitted by the absence of the orders, has taken up at his pleasure motives derived from the earlier Renaissance of Italy, from the English Elizabethan, from the French Early Renaissance, and from the Flemish • and German transitional and mixed styles.
Brick and the more important movement, the one which has done most to make modern Architecture a living art, has been the revival of the use of brick and terra-cotta. These materials were
largely employed in many of the phases through which the Renaissance passed in Europe, and were also used to some extent in the Gothic, but they are not of a nature to lend themselves to the construction of the massive-looking columns and pilasters required by the Greek, Roman, and Palladian-Italian manners. Thus, when, from motives of economy, brick has been employed as a material out of which to form one or all of the five orders, it has almost invariably been covered with some kind of stucco or cement. The modern movement has discarded the cement along with the orders, has substituted terra-cotta and moulded brick for mouldings run in plaster or stucco, and has to a large extent even replaced carved stonework with ornamental terra-cotta panels.
Iron and causes of this movement are twofold. The growing desire for honesty of construction, coupled with the necessity of finding some cheaper material than cut stone, has been one cause, but the other must be sought for in the purely utilitarian motive of the preven tion of fire. Repeated disasters have shown that iron, though incom bustible, is not fireproof, since, if wrought, it will twist and collapse through heat, and if cast, will crack the moment it is touched by water; that costly stone will scale, and even crumble, through intense heat; and that only brick and terra-cotta—materials that are the result of an ordeal of fire—will stand a repetition of that ordeal.
with the increased use of brick and terra cotta there has come about also a rage for wood-construction in buildings the walls of which are of brick or of stone. The two different manners in which wood is used in recent structures show that even now the accepted msthetic idea has not brought itself into harmony with the needs of life. On the one hand, wood is used in interior decoration in the form of panelling, wainscotting, etc.—only because such panelling and wains cotting were in vogue in Old English buildings—to such an extent as to endanger the safety of a structure intended to be fireproof; and on the other hand, wood in mass, in the shape of thick planks and solid beams, is coming into use as a substitute for iron in floors and roofs as a method of fireproofing. It may seem a paradox to those who are accustomed to wood as a combustible material to be told that, if properly used, it is more fireproof than iron, but such is nevertheless the truth. A wooden beam will char and yet remain sound at the heart in a conflagration that will bring down an iron structure like a house of cards.