How to judge architecture: a popular guide to the appreciation of buildings E-Book

Russell Sturgis

• Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

In "How to Judge Architecture: A Popular Guide to the Appreciation of Buildings," Russell Sturgis deftly navigates the intricacies of architectural criticism through engaging prose and clarity. With an accessible approach, Sturgis demystifies architectural styles'—ranging from classical to modern'—while providing readers with the analytical tools necessary to appreciate the aesthetic and functional qualities of buildings. The book situates itself within the 19th-century conversation on architecture, reflecting the era's burgeoning fascination with urban development and the democratization of architectural appreciation, thus marking a significant contribution to the discourse on built environments. Russell Sturgis was an influential figure in the American architectural landscape, known not only for his critique but also for his advocacy of design education. His experiences as an architect and educator, intertwined with a passion for sharing architectural knowledge with the public, led him to pen this guide. Sturgis's background in the Arts and Crafts Movement profoundly shaped his understanding of craftsmanship, and his insights illuminate the often-overlooked relationship between form, function, and societal impact in architecture. This book is a must-read for architecture enthusiasts, students, and professionals alike, inviting them to cultivate a discerning eye for design and a deeper appreciation of the built environment. Sturgis's engaging narrative not only enhances understanding but also inspires an appreciation for the art and science of architecture in the everyday world. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.

Leseprobe

Russell Sturgis

How to judge architecture: a popular guide to the appreciation of buildings

Enriched edition. Unlocking the Secrets of Architectural Criticism and Aesthetics

In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience.

Introduction, Studies and Commentaries by Owen Bradshaw

Edited and published by Good Press, 2022

[email protected]

EAN 4057664591388

Table of Contents

Introduction

Synopsis

Historical Context

How to judge architecture: a popular guide to the appreciation of buildings

Analysis

Reflection

Memorable Quotes

Notes

Introduction

Table of Contents

This book invites you to balance personal taste with principled judgment so that buildings become legible works of art and use. How to judge architecture: a popular guide to the appreciation of buildings by Russell Sturgis addresses the everyday experience of looking at structures and asks how we might see more clearly. Written by an American architect and critic, it proposes that careful observation, coherent criteria, and informed comparison help distinguish the merely novel from the genuinely admirable. Sturgis encourages readers to move beyond impulse reactions, cultivating habits of attention that reveal intention, skill, and the cultural ambitions embodied in built form.

Situated in the tradition of nonfiction criticism and instruction, the book functions as an accessible guide to architectural appreciation. Emerging in the early twentieth century, a period of intense debate about style, urban growth, and the role of public taste, it speaks to readers who encounter buildings in cities, towns, and landscapes shaped by rapid change. Without assuming technical training, Sturgis writes for curious generalists as well as students, offering an introduction to evaluation that is grounded in observation rather than jargon. The context of its publication underscores a democratic impulse: architecture matters because it is the most public of the arts.

The premise is straightforward and inviting: anyone can learn to see architecture more fully by attending to form, structure, proportion, and purpose. The experience the book offers is methodical yet conversational, guiding readers through a series of lenses that clarify what is being looked at and why it works—or fails to. The voice is patient and judicious, avoiding dogma while proposing standards that can be tested against real buildings. The style is descriptive and comparative, encouraging readers to weigh alternatives rather than accept slogans. The mood is quietly confident, aiming to empower judgment without closing off curiosity or delight.

A central theme is the relationship between beauty and fitness—how materials, construction, and use interact to produce meaning. Sturgis presses readers to look for coherence: whether ornament enriches structure, whether plans serve movement and light, and whether scale respects both the site and the spectator. Another theme is historical awareness: the book treats past styles as sources of lessons, not templates to imitate uncritically. It values proportion, clarity, and honesty of expression, inviting readers to test these ideals against what they encounter. The result is a supple framework that supports both admiration and skepticism, and that respects the complexity of design decisions.

For contemporary readers, the book’s relevance lies in its insistence that judgment is a civic responsibility as much as a private pleasure. As debates over preservation, density, infrastructure, and sustainability shape communities, a shared vocabulary for evaluating buildings becomes vital. By modeling careful looking and reasoned argument, the text equips non-specialists to participate more confidently in public conversations. It also prompts a humane curiosity about constraints—budgets, codes, and technologies—that influence outcomes without excusing poor choices. In an era saturated with images, Sturgis’s emphasis on embodied experience—how a building feels as one approaches, enters, and moves through it—remains a bracing corrective.

Readers can expect practical habits that travel well from landmark monuments to ordinary streetscapes. The book encourages comparative seeing: noticing how two facades handle rhythm, how entrances announce welcome, how roofs meet sky, or how windows mediate light and privacy. It values proportions that read clearly from a distance and details that reward close inspection. The guidance favors questions over prescriptions—what purpose does this element serve, and how well?—while still sketching criteria that sharpen perception. Though informed by its time, the approach is adaptable, inviting dialogue with newer materials and typologies without abandoning the disciplined attention that makes judgment credible.

Approached in this spirit, How to judge architecture offers companionship more than commandment, and a method rather than a manifesto. Sturgis proposes that informed pleasure is richer than reflexive approval or disdain, and that better seeing leads to better choices as citizens and patrons. The book’s promise is simple: to make buildings more interesting by making them more intelligible. It honors the emotional charge of a first impression yet tests that response against evidence, context, and purpose. Readers who accept the invitation will come away with a steadier eye, a more generous patience, and a renewed appetite for the built world.

Synopsis

Table of Contents

How to Judge Architecture introduces a practical method for lay readers to evaluate buildings. Sturgis distinguishes casual liking from informed judgment, arguing that appreciation rests on understanding purpose, structure, and beauty. He proposes observation guided by questions: what is the building for, how is it made, and how does it express itself? Without prescribing formulas, he frames criteria that balance use, stability, and appearance. He underscores that judgment proceeds from the whole to the parts, beginning with mass and plan before details. The opening chapters set expectations: the book offers principles, examples, and vocabulary to help readers see architecture more clearly.

The discussion begins with plan and fitness for purpose, because design quality rests on how well a building serves its occupants and activities. Sturgis explains how to read plans, noting relations among rooms, entrances, stairs, and corridors. He stresses convenience of movement, light and air, orientation, and the economical use of space. The plan should reveal hierarchy, privacy, and service arrangements suited to type—domestic, civic, sacred, or commercial. Exterior effect, he notes, should grow from interior order. Successful planning also anticipates maintenance and future change, so judgment includes adaptability and clarity. Plan faults, even in handsome façades, undermine architectural merit.

From plan the book turns to construction, asking how the building stands and whether structure is intelligible. Sturgis outlines elementary principles of support and thrust in walls, posts, beams, arches, vaults, and trusses. He urges attention to spans, supports, joints, and the frank display of how loads are carried. Craftsmanship and sound materials are part of judgment, as are economy and adequacy of methods. Newer systems—iron, steel, and reinforced concrete—are introduced as extensions of structural logic, not excuses for disguise. The critic observes whether façades mask or express the framework, and whether imitative veneers claim a solidity that the building does not possess.

Having established purpose and structure, the guide considers form and composition. Sturgis directs attention to massing—the silhouette, the relation of main volumes, and the skyline against the sky. He explains proportion as measured relation among parts and between parts and whole, perceivable at a distance as well as near. Composition may be symmetrical or balanced asymmetry, but should cohere and present a clear center of interest. The ordering of openings, wall surfaces, and projections creates rhythm and repose. The approach, corner treatment, and roof forms affect the first impression as much as detail, so the judge assesses the building’s outline before examining the façade’s minor features.

Ornament is addressed as enrichment subordinate to form and structure. Sturgis discusses the uses of mouldings, carving, metalwork, and pattern to articulate joints, edges, and transitions. Details should be scaled to the viewing distance and the size of the whole; over-enlarged or diminutive ornament disturbs proportion. He notes that carving should reinforce construction by emphasizing supports and terminations, not conceal them. Ornament may convey meaning or local character but should avoid empty symbolism. Imitated materials and over-elaboration are cautioned against, especially where budget or exposure will not sustain them. The highest finish is often restraint, letting good masses and honest surfaces carry the effect.

A chapter on materials and surface examines how stone, brick, wood, plaster, metals, and glass contribute to expression. Sturgis considers texture, jointing, and workmanship, treating color as an outcome of material and as a possible applied finish. He emphasizes the role of light and shadow—how mouldings and relief catch sun and sky—to produce legible surfaces. Weathering is part of judgment: some materials improve with age, others stain or decay, so selection should suit climate and exposure. Interior finishes extend the same logic, aligning floors, walls, and ceilings with use, light, and acoustics. The book links exterior truthfulness with interior comfort and durability.

The survey then turns to historical styles as sources of tested solutions rather than patterns to copy. Sturgis sketches Classical architecture’s orders, proportion, and entablature, Gothic’s structural articulation and vertical emphasis, and the Renaissance and Baroque search for composed grandeur. Romanesque and Byzantine traditions supply alternate vocabularies of mass and surface. The text explains how each style arises from materials, structure, and social purpose, and how borrowings should be adapted to modern needs. Eclectic design is judged by coherence and fitness, not by pedigree. Knowing the grammar of styles equips the observer to recognize intelligent use, careless mixture, or mere costume.

Applying these principles, the book reviews common building types and their urban settings. Sacred buildings, courts, museums, schools, houses, and offices each require distinct planning, structure, and expression. Sturgis evaluates street frontages, setbacks, and entries as parts of a civic composition, noting how neighboring buildings, trees, and topography shape a design’s effect. Grouped monuments and campuses are judged for unity and variety. Tall commercial buildings raise questions of base, shaft, and crown, as well as scale and light on the street. The site’s approaches, vistas, and service access belong to the architectural problem, so judgment extends beyond a single façade to the ensemble.

The concluding chapters summarize a method for judging: begin with use and plan, continue with structure and materials, then assess massing, composition, and detail. Sturgis urges repeated, comparative looking, aided by drawings and measured studies, to train perception and temper quick preferences. He cautions against rigid rules and fashionable verdicts, proposing consistent principles—fitness, soundness, and beauty—applied case by case. The book closes by affirming architecture as a cooperative art involving client, builder, craftsman, and designer. Informed appreciation, it argues, supports better practice and public taste. The reader is left with practical criteria and a clearer way to enjoy buildings.

Historical Context

Table of Contents

How to Judge Architecture: A Popular Guide to the Appreciation of Buildings appeared in New York in 1903, at the high tide of the American Progressive Era and amid the consolidation of Beaux-Arts taste in public and commercial design. Its author, Russell Sturgis (1836–1909), an American architect and influential critic, had just issued his multi-volume Dictionary of Architecture and Building (1901–1902), signaling a turn toward systematic public education in architectural knowledge. The book addresses a readership formed in rapidly expanding cities—New York, Chicago, Boston—where steel-frame construction, mass immigration, and municipal reform were reshaping streetscapes. It thus inhabits a transatlantic milieu linking U.S. practice to European precedents while speaking to lay civic audiences.

A defining context for the book was the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, which crystallized the City Beautiful impulse. The fair opened on 1 May 1893 and closed on 30 October 1893, under Director of Works Daniel H. Burnham, with Frederick Law Olmsted directing landscape design. Its Court of Honor gathered major architects—McKim, Mead and White; George B. Post; and others—around monumental classical facades finished in white staff, earning the name White City. The Electricity Building displayed new illumination, while George Ferris’s wheel on the Midway Plaisance dramatized modern engineering. The fair fostered a renewed public appetite for ordered urban grandeur, axial planning, and a classical vocabulary for civic virtue. It also triggered debates over historical imitation versus structural honesty, especially after the sudden death of John Root in 1891 and the subsequent shift in the fair’s architectural leadership to Charles B. Atwood. Sturgis’s guide mirrors this discourse by teaching readers to discriminate between surface effect and compositional integrity, proportion, and material truth. His emphasis on informed judgment rather than fashion aligns with the post-fair campaigns for boulevards, civic centers, and coherent public building programs in cities from Cleveland to Washington, D.C. The Columbian precedent transformed municipal policy, financing, and public taste; Sturgis’s popular handbook equips non-specialists to evaluate such monumental projects, connecting aesthetic criteria to the civic responsibilities that the fair had dramatically staged.

The professionalization of American architecture formed another crucial backdrop. The American Institute of Architects was founded in New York in 1857 under Richard Upjohn, formalizing ethical standards and credentials. University programs emerged: MIT opened the first U.S. architecture curriculum in 1865; the University of Pennsylvania followed in 1868; Columbia established instruction in 1881. Many leading figures, including Richard Morris Hunt and H. H. Richardson, trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, importing atelier methods. Sturgis’s 1901–1902 Dictionary and his 1903 guide embody this drive to codify knowledge, offering lay readers access to criteria that professionals used to assess plans, elevations, and tectonics.

Technological transformation after the Great Chicago Fire of 8–10 October 1871 accelerated fireproof construction and high-rise innovation. The Home Insurance Building in Chicago, completed in 1885 under engineer William Le Baron Jenney, pioneered metal-framed structure; the Monadnock Building (north half 1889–1891 by Burnham and Root; south half 1891–1893 by Holabird and Roche) tested load-bearing masonry limits. New York’s Flatiron Building rose in 1902 under Daniel H. Burnham, dramatizing wind bracing and urban spectacle. Sturgis’s book teaches readers to judge such buildings beyond novelty, stressing structure, proportion, and street impact, and thereby participates in debates over height, daylight, and the evolving metropolitan skyline.

Urban reform shaped architectural mandates in New York and other industrial cities. Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890) catalyzed action; Governor Theodore Roosevelt convened the New York State Tenement House Commission in 1900, leading to the Tenement House Act of 1901. That law required interior toilets, improved light and ventilation, and safer stairways, and created the Tenement House Department in 1902. Earlier municipal codes, including a New York building code of 1899, had laid groundwork. Sturgis’s guidance connects aesthetics to health and morality, treating plan efficiency, air, and light as criteria for judgment, not mere technicalities, thus echoing Progressive commitments to public welfare.

The Arts and Crafts movement carried social as well as aesthetic force. In Britain, William Morris founded Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Company in 1861; C. R. Ashbee established the Guild and School of Handicraft in 1888. In the United States, Gustav Stickley launched The Craftsman in 1901, and Elbert Hubbard’s Roycroft community began in East Aurora, New York, in 1895. These efforts linked labor reform, honest materials, and domestic architecture. Settlement houses such as Hull House in Chicago, founded in 1889 by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr, applied design to social services. Sturgis reflects this atmosphere by evaluating workmanship, materials, and utility as ethical measures of buildings.

National civic planning advanced in 1901–1902 with the McMillan Plan for Washington, D.C. The Senate Park Commission, including Daniel H. Burnham, Charles F. McKim, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., and Augustus Saint-Gaudens, proposed a classical reordering of the Mall, Union Station environs, and memorial sites, published in 1902. The Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in 1901, powered by Niagara electricity, showcased spectacle architecture such as John Galen Howard’s Electric Tower and framed President William McKinley’s assassination on 6 September 1901. Concurrently, Andrew Carnegie’s philanthropy funded over a thousand U.S. public libraries by 1908. Sturgis’s manual equips citizens to assess such monumental and civic architecture with disciplined criteria.

The book functions as social and political critique by insisting that beauty cannot excuse unhealthy plans, deceptive materials, or plutocratic display. In an era of speculative tenements and ostentatious commercial facades, Sturgis treats proportion, light, workmanship, and structural candor as public obligations rather than private tastes. He implicitly challenges class divides: civic grandeur modeled after expositions must serve the everyday street as much as the ceremonial avenue. By teaching lay readers how to evaluate buildings, he democratizes judgment, contests the monopoly of taste by elites, and aligns architectural appraisal with Progressive goals of sanitation, access to daylight, and equitable civic improvement.

How to judge architecture: a popular guide to the appreciation of buildings

Main Table of Contents

How to Judge Architecture

CHAPTER I EARLY GREEK DESIGN

CHAPTER II LATER GREEK AND ROMAN DESIGN

CHAPTER III EARLY MEDIÆVAL DESIGN

CHAPTER IV CENTRAL MEDIÆVAL DESIGN

CHAPTER V LATE MEDIÆVAL DESIGN

CHAPTER VI REVIVED CLASSIC DESIGN

CHAPTER VII LATER REVIVED CLASSIC DESIGN

CHAPTER VIII EIGHTEENTH CENTURY DESIGN

CHAPTER IX NINETEENTH CENTURY: IMITATIVE DESIGN

CHAPTER X NINETEENTH CENTURY: ORIGINAL DESIGN

Index.

How to Judge Architecture

Table of Contents

CHAPTER IEARLY GREEK DESIGN

Table of Contents

IN trying to train the mind to judge of works of architecture, one can never be too patient. It is very easy to hinder one’s growth in knowledge by being too ready to decide. The student of art who is much under the influence of one teacher, one writer, or one body of fellow-students, is hampered by that influence just so far as it is exclusive. And most teachers, most writers, most groups or classes of students are exclusive, admiring one set of principles or the practice of one epoch, to the partial exclusion of others.

The reader must feel assured that there are no authorities at all in the matter of architectural appreciation: and that the only opinions, or impressions, or comparative appreciations that are worth anything to him are those which he will form gradually for himself. He will form them slowly, if he be wise: indeed, if he have the gift of artistic appreciation at all, he will soon learn to form them slowly. He will, moreover, hold them lightly even when formed; remembering that in a subject on which opinions differ so very widely at any one time, and have differed so much more widely if one epoch be compared with another, there can be no such thing as a final judgment.

The object of this book is to help the reader to acquire, little by little, such an independent knowledge of the essential characteristics of good buildings, and also such a sense of the possible differences of opinion concerning inessentials, that he will always enjoy the sight, the memory, or the study of a noble structure without undue anxiety as to whether he is right or wrong. Rightness is relative: to have a trained observation, knowledge of principles, and a sound judgment as to proprieties of construction and design is to be able to form your opinions for yourself; and to understand that you come nearer, month by month, to a really complete knowledge of the subject, seeing clearly what is good and the causes of its goodness, and also the not-so-good which is there, inevitably there, as a part of the goodness itself.

It will be well, therefore, to take for our first study some buildings of that class about which there is the smallest difference of opinion among modern lovers of art, namely, the early Greek temples. There is no serious dispute as to the standing of the Greek architecture previous to the year 300 B. C., as the most perfect thing that decorative art[1] has produced. It is extremely simple: a fact which makes it the more fit for our present purpose: but this simplicity is to be taken as not having led to bareness, lack of incident, lack of charm: it has merely served to give the Greek artist such an easy control over the different details and their organization into a complete whole, that the admiration of all subsequent ages has been given to his productions.

It must be noted, however, that nothing of this complete beauty is now to be seen above ground. Plate I shows the famous temple at Pæstum on the west coast of Campania, southeast of Naples: the temple called that of Poseidon, to which god (called by the Romans, Neptune) the ancient town which stood on this site was dedicated. This is the most nearly well preserved of the Doric[2] temples, with the single exception of the small building in Athens called the Theseion[2], or Theseum, see Plate III, and it is larger and more interesting than that.Plate II gives the Parthenon at Athens from the northwest

PLATE I.

HEXASTYLE DORIC TEMPLE, PAESTUM, SOUTHERN ITALY, CALLED “TEMPLE OF NEPTUNE.”

PLATE II.

PARTHENON, ATHENS, FROM THE NORTHWEST.

PARTHENON, ATHENS, FROM THE NORTHEAST.

and from the northeast. This building by common agreement of modern students was the most perfect in design and the most highly elaborated in detail of all the Doric temples[1] of early time. The Parthenon as we see it now in its decay, dominating the town of Athens from the top of its rock or looked at close at hand, lighted by the Grecian sun or by the moon for those who are romantically inclined, is unquestionably a most picturesque and charming ruin; it is imposing in its mass, interesting still in its details, and invested, of course, with an immeasurably great tradition, historical and poetic. That fact must not be forgotten for a moment: but, on the other hand, it must not be forgotten that this admiration, this enthusiasm, is not given to the work of art. It is not at all to produce such a ruin as we now see that the Grecian artist thought and toiled. Admire the ruin to your heart’s content: but be careful that you do not allow too much of this romantic association to enter into your love of the artistic entity, of the lost Parthenon, which we have to create out of the air, as it were. And beware of the admiration of ruins as you would of the “tone” given to a picture by time: it is not that which the artist proposed to himself or even thought of, and it is the artist’s purpose that you must ask for, always. That is the first thing. Until you are sure you know that purpose, fully, it will not do to find fault with the work of art, or even to praise it too unreservedly.

On the other hand, it is extremely important to consider the probable ancient surroundings of the building in question. The upper figure of Plate III may show, not only the interesting building itself from a good point of view and with its peculiarities strongly accentuated (as is pointed out below), but also as showing how, except for its coloring, the temple must have been seen by the Athenians in the days of Conon. The modern houses are very like what the ancient houses must have been, for, although the ancient houses had even less door and window-opening upon the street and more upon a court or yard, yet we may imagine ourselves in such a yard of antiquity, and the red-tiled roofs, the homemade chimney, the humble and unkempt aspect of the whole may be assumed to stand very well for the humbler quarters of Athens in antiquity. This temple also is a ruin: but the fact that, as seen in Plate III, there are still visible the sculptures of the metopes,[3] and the fact that the roof of the pteroma[4] is still in place, so that there is no sunshine coming down behind the columns where sunshine was never meant to be—these conditions go far to give us a peep at the building as it stood in those great days. No other photograph can give a better idea of how the columns are set closer near the corner; nor a better idea of the reasons for this peculiarity; for the sky is seen between the columns at the right hand; and the dark wall of the naos[5] in the same relative position on the left hand, and the chief cause for the smaller intercolumniation at the corners is obvious enough, as shown below in connection with the model Plate IV.

Look back at Plate I, and Plate III, upper figure, and note that these buildings have six columns on the front instead of eight and, therefore, according to the general proportions of Greek temples, should have a greater height relatively to width than the Parthenon, Plate II. Note, farther, that the columns are very much higher and more slender in the octastyle[6] Parthenon than in the Italian hexastyle[7] building, and the relative height of the entablature[8] greater, or as one to two and a half in Pæstum, one to three in Athens. The Doric Order[9] is capable of just about as much diversity in relative heights and other dimensions as is shown here.

The comparatively short and thick columns of the Italian temple are characteristic of an earlier and less developed style than that denoted by the higher and more slender columns of the Parthenon. In like manner the comparatively great thickness of the superstructure in the Pæstum temple, giving a very broad architrave,[10] and a still broader frieze[11] is also suggestive of an earlier date. Now it is agreed that the more lofty and slender proportions of the Order of the Parthenon must have given to the original building a charm beyond that given by the stumpy proportions of the Pæstum temple: but it is also undeniable that many lovers of architecture, of this as of other epochs and styles, love especially the early work, that which is commonly known as archaic. It is exactly like the great enthusiasm excited in many students of Italian art by the earliest paintings, those of the primitifs: in each case the very single-minded and diligent work of the early men has a charm peculiarly its own.

Although the Parthenon is, as mentioned above, a ruin and nothing else, there are still to be found in the shattered stones of that ruin a certain part of that theoretical beauty, that imagined glory of the destroyed work of art, which we are gradually building up in our thoughts. Thus it is in the existing ruins that there have been discovered those curious curves where straight lines had been supposed to exist. If you stand at one end of the stylobate[12] and look along it towards the other end, you will see that it curves upward in the middle with a decided convex sweep. (See Plate III.) If you raise yourself on a scaffolding and look along the underside of the architrave you will find that that also rises in a curve, not exactly parallel or concentric to that of the stylobate, but nearly so. Furthermore you will notice, if you walk about the temple and examine it closely, that the two outer-most columns of the front are much nearer together than the others, as noted above in Plate III: or that, in other words, the three columns which form the corner are grouped much more closely than are the others. Furthermore, it has been discovered by minute measurements that these columns slope inward a very little. Of course, it has always been known that the very visible diminution of the shaft in thickness from the bottom to the top is not according to straight lines (that is to say, that the shafts are not conical) but is according to a very slow and hardly perceptible curve which we call the entasis[3]. Great folios of carefully drawn plates have been devoted to the exact curvature of the entasis and to the more recently discovered irregularities: and a minute series of measurements have been made, by which the whole amount of the irregularity in any one case is now easily ascertainable. This is one of the many elements out of which we have to make up our general appreciation of the building, our appreciation of the existence and the character of these slopes, curves, risings, sinkings, slopings: all of them, it is clear, planned in the most careful and elaborate way, and as the result of many previous experiments. Their object is, of course, to add to the charm of the building, to give it in one case the effect of being very broad in the base and therefore very secure and permanent—in another case, to prevent any possible appearance of sagging or depression in the middle of the long horizontal lines; in another case still, to substitute the subtile grace of a slight and almost imperceptible curve for the harshness of a straight line. Still another thing is traceable in these ruins: the unceasing care with which the work was done, the way in which the separate drums or solid blocks, of which the shafts of the columns are made up, were ground together, one upon another, until they fitted with but the slightest visible or tangible separation. The channeling or grooving of the shafts was evidently done after the drums had been put into place, and it is highly probable that the bells[13] of the capitals were also finished, or received their final very delicate curvature, after the blocks out of which they had been cut had been set, and indeed after the superincumbent block, the abacus, had been lowered upon each one of them.

Another feature in this remarkable design is to be traced in the ruins, and was much more plainly discoverable at an earlier, though still recorded and well-known, date: namely, the original painted adornment of the building, in strong primary colors. In the temples built of soft and rough stone, like that in Plate I, there is known to have been a thin coat of fine plastering spread over the whole surface, and the final delicacy of curve and sharpness of edge must have been wrought in that plaster even more accurately than in the stone beneath. But in the Parthenon, built entirely of fine-grained and hard marble, no such coating was necessary, and the paint was applied directly to the crystalline surface itself. This painting covered very large parts of the exterior, nor is it probable that any single foot of the

PLATE III.

THESEUM (THESEION) ATHENS.

CURVATURE OF STYLOBATE OF PARTHENON.

PLATE IV.

RESTORED MODEL OF THE PARTHENON, METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, NEW YORK.