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

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Nowadays we have begun to talk about garden cities, and we realize that the essential elements in a garden-city are the common holding of land by the community, and the coöperative ownership and direction of the community itself. We refer to all these things as if they represented a distinct achievement of modern thought; but the fact of the matter is that the New England village up to the middle of the eighteenth century was a garden-city in every sense that we now apply to that term, and happily its gardens and its harmonious framework have frequently lingered on, even though the economic foundations have long been overthrown.

This is a medieval tradition in American architecture which should be of some use to our architects and city planners; for it is a much more substantial matter than the building of perpendicular churches or Tudor country-houses in painfully archæological adaptations. If we wish to tie up with our colonial tradition we must recover more than the architectural forms: we must recover the interests, the standards, the institutions that gave to the villages and buildings of early times their appropriate shapes. To do much less than this is merely to bring back a fad which might as well be Egyptian as “colonial” for all the sincerity that it exhibits.