Builders: Old and New

Progress, Volume IX, Issue 10, 1 June 1914, Page 1120

Builders: Old and New

That the age of the great cathedrals had its jerry-builders and grafters and incompetents, even as this present day we are assured by a writer in “The Engineering Uncord” (New York), It is only the fit structures that have survived; a medieval building means to us a solid and enduring piece of work, but that is only because it is the enduring that endures ; the other kind crumbles early and is forgotten. An architectural hornet’s nest was recently stirred up by a writer in a London paper who bemoaned the passing of the craftsman from his one-time leadership, and lamented that the master builder of medieval times had given place to the mere architect of to-day. Says “The .Record’ ’ : “Granting that there were giants in those days who left behind them monuments of such eternal beauty that they have been the chief inspiration of all that has come after, it is by no means true that the merit belongs to the builder or the craftsman alone. The great work of antiquity was wrought by the combination of artist and mason in proportions now unknown, with time as their silent partner. However the creative mind began its career, its host was usually sleeping in the crypt it had planned a century or so before the building, as we know it, was finished. As to the most of medieval work, it has gone to well-deserved decay long since. We let our imaginations run riot in dreams of the faithful workman’s loving artistry, forgetting the nameless and pestilent bunglers whose clumsy fingers wrought abominations in wood and stone. And few even of the masterpieces have escaped the stupid and ruthless meddling of the renovator, whether architect or builder by training. . ' “No, the old days were as full of bad design and worse execution as our own. The ruins of St. Mary’s Abbey in York, for instance, show as vile

a grade of rubble as any cheap contractor of the twentieth century could imagine, and the building tumbled easily into the decay it deserved. Some of the good and stable work of the past has happily remained to us and has served as a model from century to century. The ordinary architect of today makes fewer mistakes by copying it than by trusting to his own imagination. Whether his predecessor began as artist or as mason makes precious little difference. “But before passing hasty judgment upon the architect of our own times, think a moment of the evil days upon which he has fallen. In the medieval times he must perforce know only the technic of masonrythe rest was his art. If he were building a church the fine stimulus of the Gothic was his inspiration, and his medium was craftsmanship in stone. To-day he must know masonry and concrete, structural steel and sanitary plumbing, lighting and heating, electric wiring and acoustics. The old congregation did not need to read and mostly couldn’t, expected to be cold and generally was, could not understand the Latin of the service even if it chanced to hear it. Little need for wonder or blame then if the architect, having to be a Jack of all trades, bungles a goodly number of structures if he tries to cover the whole range singlehanded. The wonder is not that he sometimes does badly, but that he ever succeeds in rising out of the turmoil into greatness. “Besides all this he has to struggle against or make surrender to a complex commercialism that makes the machinery of construction terribly intricate. His predecessor did not have to plan for buying his stone from one source, his steel from another, and his woodwork from a third; he was not hounded by agents of patented devices nor pestered by circulars of supplies offerinp- him “the usual architect’s commission of per cent.’ If he were a grafter it was by malice prepense, and not by daily temptation. All these things the architect of to-day has to endure, besides being called a slavish copyist if he turns to the best in antiquity and a commonplace innovator if he does not. “His chief hope is in suiting himself as best he may to new conditions, calling in technical advisers on the details which he can not in the nature of things have time to master, even if he has the ability, standing the more firmly by the interests of his client as he confronts a regiment of subcontractors, and remembering that he must be artist before being engineer or contractor. Originality and resourcefulness are much more difficult to find than technical or constructional skill, and if the architect is to be more than a master mason or boss concrete-mixer it must be by the possession of these at attributes. And looking about one can not but realise that art did not die with the Gothic nor perish with the Romanesque.”