y will
produce an effect which will raise their buildings to the dignity of
humanity, and out of the range of the dog-kennel and rabbit-hutch type,
and will not exhibit ugliness, disproportion, or vulgarity. We see
plenty of examples where the designs have sunk much below this level; no
building of dead walls, with holes in it for doors and windows, could
cause us such disgust. Let me here say, by way of a parenthesis, that
if you candidly consider that your design is more offensive than a dead
wall, do not waste money and materials in making the wall more
repulsive, but let it alone."

"Any one can be original if he be only impudent enough; any one can be
graceful if he is servile enough to copy: but to be both original and
graceful requires deep study, much striving, and natural talent."

"I have also to remind you that architecture cannot be brought into
vigorous life again, so long as architects insist on using old forms for
beauty that are inseparable from a construction that has been abandoned;
so long as this practice persists, so long will architecture be a kind
of potted art; to be vigorous it must learn how to take the materials,
and construction that would be ordinarily used in buildings for purely
practical purposes, and give to these materials and this construction
forms that will excite the proper emotions. You must not suppose that I
mean that if you have a vast hall, or what not, that because you can put
an iron trussed roof over it from wall to wall, that this will make it
into a hall that will raise emotions. You will only get a rail-way
platform or a coal shed. You have got to set your wits to work to see
how it can be properly brought within the pale of aesthetics, and not
only as to the shapes and proportions of the parts, but the dividing of
the whole by supports. It is probable that if you were obliged to vault
a cathedral in stone, with no more money than was necessary, and to have
a clearstory to it, that you could not do it cheaper, and perhaps not
better, than the Gothic architects did it; but to vault such a building
in stone when you could do it much cheaper and better with iron ribs and
concrete is, in my opinion, _dilettante_ art. Groins are not beautiful
things, but, on the contrary, are ugly, and we should wish to obviate
their ugliness if we could; but when they were merely unavoidable
methods of cheap construction, we admire them for the invention and
skill of their architects, and we