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

22 страница из 28

Hereafter, architecture lives by the book. First it is Palladio and Vignola; then it is Burlington and Chambers; then, after the middle of the eighteenth century, the brothers Adam and Stuart’s Antiquities of Athens. Simpler works with detailed prescriptions for building in the fashionable mode made their way in the late seventeenth century among the smaller fry of carpenters and builders; and they were widely used in America, as a guide to taste and technique, right down to the middle of the nineteenth century. It was by means of the book that the architecture of the eighteenth century from St. Petersburg to Philadelphia seemed cast by a single mind. We call the mode Georgian because vast quantities of such building was done in England, as a result of the general commercial prosperity of that country; but it was common wherever European civilization had any fresh architectural effort to make, and if we call this style “colonial” in America it is not to mark any particular lapse or lack of distinction.