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   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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© 2001 for the NEGenWeb Project by Pam Rietsch & Ted & Carole Miller