Architecture Books

This handbook is intended to give such an outline of the Architecture of the Ancient World, and of that of Christendom down to the period of the Crusades, as, without attempting to supply the minute information required by the professional student, may give a general idea of the works of the great building nations of Antiquity and the Early Christian times. Its chief object has been to place... more...

The Architecture & Landscape Gardening When San Francisco was destroyed by fire in 1906, many people predicted that the city would never be rebuilt. A great number of men and women packed their goods and chattels and hastily bade farewell to the still smoking ruins of a City That Was, firmly believing that destiny had determined that it should remain forever buried in its own ashes. There was... more...

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I I know of nothing more significant than the awakening of men and women throughout our country to the desire to improve their houses. Call it what you will—awakening, development, American Renaissance—it is a most startling and promising condition of affairs. It is no longer possible, even to people of only faintly æsthetic tastes, to buy chairs merely to sit upon or a clock merely that it should... more...

GLOSSARY OF TECHNICAL WORDS. Abacus.—The upper portion of the capital of a column, upon which the weight to be carried rests. Aisle (Lat. ala).—The side subdivision in a church; occasionally all the subdivisions, including the nave, are called aisles. Apse.—A semicircular or polygonal termination to, or projection from, a church or other public building. Arcade.—A range of arches, supported on... more...

INTRODUCTORY. For the investigation of art in its early stages and in its widest sense—there is probably no fairer field than that afforded by aboriginal America, ancient and modern. At the period of discovery, art at a number of places on the American continent seems to have been developing surely and steadily, through the force of the innate genius of the race, and the more advanced nations were... more...

Whatever is good in interior decoration is the result of consistent relationship between Light, Color, Form, Proportion and Dimensions. The choice of Color should be guided by the conditions of Light. The beauty of Form and the symmetry of Proportion can exist only by a balance with Dimensions. Therefore, apart from any knowledge of historic or period decoration, effective or successful work must... more...

I THE ART OF ARCHITECTURE One of the advantages of a thorough assimilation of what may be called the theosophic idea is that it can be applied with advantage to every department of knowledge and of human activity: like the key to a cryptogram it renders clear and simple that which before seemed intricate and obscure. Let us apply this key to the subject of art, and to the art of architecture in... more...

Preface "A thousand years ago, by the rim of a tiny spring, a monk who had avowed himself to the cult of Saint Saturnin, robed, cowled and sandalled, knelt down to say a prayer to his beloved patron saint. Again he came, this time followed by more of his kind, and a wooden cross was planted by the side of the "Fontaine Belle Eau," by this time become a place of pious pilgrimage. After the... more...

PREFACE This volume is a sequel to the work I published, several years ago, under the title, Byzantine Constantinople: the Walls of the City, and adjoining Historical Sites. In that work the city was viewed, mainly, as the citadel of the Roman Empire in the East, and the bulwark of civilization for more than a thousand years. But the city of Constantine was not only a mighty fortress. It was, moreover,... more...