Now no architect and no artist
in all the long history of art and its development ever
succeeded in creating a new form, nor will they in the
future ever succeed in so doing. They have discovered the
beauty of form and have adapted it to our uses and our
tastes and our comfort. For instance, it has been said
that a Greek workman some centuries before the beginning
of the Christian era, carelessly placed a hollow tile
cylinder upon the ground over a sprouting Acanthus plant
and that in due time the plant grew up inside the tile
and out of the top thereof and a builder passing by noted
the beauty of the combination the tile and the Acanthus
plant growing out of it. This became the motif of the
capitol of the Corinthian column that has been reproduced
to this day in our most artistic structures.
Again, we suppose that a gable roof
is the simplest possible form of construction, the
purpose of which is to keep the rain out of a building
and the form was used by primitive builders for that
purpose alone and without consciousness that it would one
day be the form that should be used as a covering of the
Parthenon, the most beautiful building of all times, nor
that it would become the motif of the great Gothic
cathedrals of the middle ages.
Again, after the same method, there
seems to he developing in this country of ours a new
theme, Or motif, in architecture that, like the others I
have mentioned, seems to be the result of chance or
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