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The National Character of English Architecture
The National Character of English Architecture Author:Geoffrey Scott Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE NATIONAL CHARACTER OF ENGLISH ARCHITECTURE The nature of architecture, and the standards which may be applied to it, are threefold. It can be appraised as... more » an art. It can be set forth as a science. It can be interpreted—like all else that has a place in history—as the symbol of the human forces which produced it, the visible and enduring record of the environment from which it sprang. Art, it is true, claims to be judged in the categories of beauty ; but the imagination is restless, and, rarely standing content with these, seeks in a technical curiosity, in literary fancy or historical suggestion, new grounds of interest and more familiar admirations. If it finds for the qualities of the work of art some counterpart in the age which produced it, this discovery, though assigning no cause to the beauty we criticize, assists us, perhaps, to its interpretation. And architecture, held by its practical purpose so closely to life's general current, so linked with common occupation, and never, like the fine arts in their decadence, an irrelevant or secluded activity, lends itself to such inquiry with a special appropriateness. It is a focus of preferences, of instincts, and national capacities, which find elsewhere, perhaps, more momentous issues, but here, at any rate, a visible form. A work of utility architecture consciously is ; a work of beauty it should be ; of religion, after the ideal of Ruskin, it may be ; but a symbol it must be. Climate, and the nature of mountain or plain surrounding them, are the 187767 large conditions alike of a people's architecture and of their character, creating between the two some necessary correspondence. Government, and ideals of civilization or beauty, mould them both through countless adjustments ; the forts and temples of a nation are...« less