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

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Besides giving more light, this innovation surely indicates that chimney flues had become more satisfactory. Paint was no doubt introduced to keep the torrid summer sun from charring the exposed clapboards; and white paint was used, despite the expense of white lead, for the reason that it accorded with the chaste effect which was inseparable in the eighteenth-century mind from classic precedent.

Indeed, the whiteness of our colonial architecture is an essential characteristic; it dazzled Dickens on his first visit to America, and made him think that all the houses had been built only yesterday. The esthetic reason for delighting in these white colonial farmhouses is simple: white and white alone fully reflects the surrounding lights; white and white alone gives a pure blue or lavender shadow against the sunlight. At dawn, a white house is pale pink and turquoise; at high noon it is clear yellow and lavender-blue; in a ripe sunset it is orange and purple; in short, except on a gray day it is anything but white. These old white houses, if they seem a little sudden and sharp in the landscape, are at least part of the sky: one finds them stretched on a slight rise above the highroad like a seagull with poised wings, or a cloud above the treetops. Were anything needed to make visible the deterioration of American life which the nineteenth century brought with it, the habit of painting both wood and brick gray should perhaps be sufficient.