Overview

This work by an Honorary and Corresponding Member, Professor Ware, has been compiled by him to serve as an elementary text-book for the use of architectural students in the United States, and is the outcome of long experience in the classrooms of the schools of architecture which Professor Ware inaugurated in Boston and New York. Vignola's orders have always been regarded in the French school as embodying the best interpretation of the Roman orders, not only in their general proportions, but in their refinement of mouldings and detail, and we gather from the preface-first, that these orders have also generally been accepted as the standard in the United States, in preference to those of Alberti, Scamozzi, Serlio, Palladio, and Sir William Chambers, of which those by the last two have been followed in England; and, secondly, that when the late Mr. Richard Hunt (the first American student who entered the Ecole des Beans-Arts in Paris, viz. in 1846) returned to Boston he started a studio in Tenth Street to impart to his younger confreres what he had learnt in Paris, and, as Professor Ware says, setting aside the whole apparatus of modules and minutes, he showed me how to divide the height of my capitals into thirds, and those into thirds, thus getting the sixths, ninths, &c., of a diameter which the rules required without employing any larger divisor than two or three. In the French school, at all events, for sixty years, all the proportions are based on the diameter of the column; and the principal features, such as the architrave, frieze. and cornice, having been set up, they are divided and subdivided by divisors of two or three until the smallest fillet or head has been calculated, it being found easier to recollect, for instance, that the fillet above the cyma in the Doric cornice should be one-third of the cyma than two minutes of the module. The work is illustrated by eighteen plates, which have been specially redrawn; of these thirteen are devoted to Vignola's orders (unless when otherwise stated), two to the Greek Doric and Ionic orders, and three others to pedestals, pilasters, pediments, superposition of columns and intercolumniation. We note that the employment of the orders with arcades between, which formed, perhaps, the only invention of the Roman architects, has been omitted, and with it, of course, the pedestals which have always been a stumbling block to students, and which really constituted no part of the order as employed by the Romans; and there is no loss in their omission; but we think, on the other hand, that it would have been safer to give plates of the Roman orders (on which Vignola based his own interpretation) instead of those of the Greek Doric and Ionic, reserving these for Part II. of the work. The proportions and principles found in the latter are so widely different from those of Vignola that the student may become confused between the two. It is evident that in the American glossary there are architectural terms which are different from those current in England: The terms scrolls and filberts are applied to those features which we call volutes and bead and reel. The analysis and description of Vignola's orders should be of great value to the student, as it furnishes a complete glossary of all the architectural terms employed, with numerous illustrations of every feature. The perspective view given of each order in which two columns coupled together will respond behind them conveys to the student a clear idea of the actual effect of the column and entablature complete, though we should prefer to have seen the angle of a portico given instead, as the American student may imagine that these perspective views represent architectural features which may be stuck on as ornament to his building. - Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects [1903]

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