American architects are doing some excellent work, and this sot
of lectures, delivered at the Chicago Art Institute, shows that they are full of ideas. We like Mr. Hastings's lecture on " Modern Architecture," with its insistence on the folly of trying to copy the past. " We are still living to-day in the period of the Renaissance," he says bravely. " Whatever we now build, whether church or dwelling, the law of historical development requires that it be Renaissance, and if we encourage the true principles of composition, it will involuntarily be a modern Renaissance ; with a view to continuity we should take the eighteenth century as our starting-point, because hero practically ended the historic progression and entered the modern confusion." Another good lecture is Mr. Bragdon's " Language of Form," with its curious suggestions for evolving patterns from figures conceived in the fourth dimension and from " magic squares." The book is well illustrated ; one plate shows Reima as it was.
Previous page
