I wish tasteless, conventional, and
machine-made architecture were as much of a "back-number" in England as
it is here. A practised observer could confidently date any prominent
building in New York, to within a year or two, by its architectural
merit; and the greater the merit the later the year.
In short, architecture is here a living art. Go where you will in these
up-town regions, you can see imagination and cultured intelligence in
the act, as it were, of impressing beauty of proportion and detail upon
brick and terra-cotta, granite and marble. And domestic or middle-class
architecture is not neglected. The American "master builders" do not
confine themselves to towers and palaces, but give infinite thought and
loving care to "homes for human beings." The average old-fashioned New
York house, so far as I have seen it, is externally unattractive (the
characteristic material, a sort of coffee-coloured stone, being truly
hideous), and internally dark, cramped, and stuffy. But modern houses,
even of no special pretensions, are generally delightful, with their
polished wood floors and fittings, and their airy suites of rooms. The
American architect has a great advantage over his English colleague in
the fact that in furnace-heated houses only the bedrooms require to be
shut off with doors.
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