We often find among the old masters elegant architectural paintings, street views, taken from the picturesque cities they lived in. We should like to find some one bold enough to paint a street view of Broadway or Washington street or Chestnut street.
It is a pity that our architects are unwilling to acknowledge the importance of the _buttress_. Concerning this feature, it is not easy to say whether beauty or utility is most apparent. It is the very idealization of strength, and hence its inherent elegance. Suppose Nôtre Dame or Milan Cathedral stripped of their double tiers of flying buttresses. Would you not say that their glory was gone--their beauty departed? And yet the old builders did not pile them up against their naves for mere beauty's sake. By no means. But they knew the immense weight of their vaulted roofs, and anticipated the outward thrust of the walls. That was the problem, and most fairly was it met. They counteracted the outward pressure from within by an inward pressure from without, and there was the buttress. But what if they had said, We are not going to spoil our fine churches by sticking props all around them, and had resorted to concealed bedplates and invisible rods of iron, would their structures have been better or nobler or more enduring? Fortunately, they gave themselves no concern, as to how they would look--for architecture was honest in those days--they simply built them, allowing decoration to come in afterward in its proper order; and thereupon the buttress became the distinguishing feature of Gothic art.
Perhaps this is the very reason why we so neglect it; but symptoms are already appearing which lead us to hope that gothophobia is on the decline, and not the least of them is the outcropping of something that would be a buttress if it dared to, but hides its real intention under a classic mask, and passes off as a pilaster or a panel border. But it has a guilty look, and the sooner it puts off its borrowed garments the better. Certainly the demand for it is immense. So long as we are a commercial people, vast warehouses, piled from cellar to roof with heavy merchandise, must abound in all our cities. And yet how utterly incompetent would many such buildings be to stand alone! So long, too, as we are a manufacturing people, must we have huge mills crowded full with heavy apparatus, vibrating machinery, and _human lives_. Have we forgotten Lawrence? Let us not wait for another such holocaust ere we learn wisdom. We can do without ornament, but we must have safety. A mere increase of dead weight is no remedy; there should be a well-studied mechanical disposition of material. If buttresses are applied to warehouses and factories with sole reference to their utility, elegance will grow upon them afterward as naturally as leaves grow upon trees.