Excerpt from Inexpensive Homes of Individuality: Being a Collection of Photographs and Floor Plans Illustrating Certain of America's Best Country and Suburban Homes of Moderate Size
One is sometimes asked whether there are not some fundamental principles which should control the choice of style for any given building, and especially of a dwelling house, in which fashion rather than reason so often dominates.
Without attempting to beg the question, the first thing that occurs to me is that a deliberate choice of style is by no means essential, and is, indeed, often a grave hindrance to a right, reasonable, and beautiful solution of the problem of building. And by style, I here mean what is ordinarily meant by that word; that is to say, a well defined mode of building prevalent in some certain place and at some certain time. Normally, style of this sort originates from the needs of a people, from the materials at hand and from a desire to build with beauty; but in the course of its evolution it is always modified and held in control by the builder's knowledge of what has gone before or what is going on at his own time. Until the revival of learning, the age of the conscious, passionate striving to resurrect the glory of the classic ages, there were but few, if any, deliberate attempts to hark back to an earlier manner of building. The ancients had done that sort of thing in sculpture when they had imitated the early work of their forbears in a way which, strive as it might, could not seize the real archaic spirit, the way we now call archaistic. But in architecture it is hard to put one's finger on that sort of thing earlier than the time of the Renaissance.
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