Читать книгу Sticks and Stones: A Study of American Architecture and Civilization онлайн

12 страница из 28

Let us take a brief look at one of these seventeenth-century buildings; let us say, the John Ward house in Salem which still survives as a relic. As one approaches the village on some November day, when the leaves are no longer on the trees to obscure the vista, one feels the dynamic quality of medieval architecture—a quality altogether different from the prudent regularities of the later Georgian mode. It is not merely a matter of painted gables, leaded, diamond-paned windows, overhanging second stories, much as these would perhaps remind us of a medieval European town. What would attract one is the feeling, not of formal abstract design, but of growth: the house has developed as the family within it has prospered, and brought forth children; as sons and daughters have married, as children have become more numerous, there have been additions: by a lean-to at one end the kitchen has achieved a separate existence, for instance; and these unpainted, weathered oaken masses pile up with a cumulative richness of effect.