which cannot
possibly last more than a few years, was inserted about a foot from the
ground. Then the wall, being quite insufficient to stand the heavy drift
of weather to which it is exposed, was dabbled over with two coatings of
plaster on the outside, the outermost being given a primitive
picturesqueness by means of a sham surface of rough-cast pebbles and
white-wash, while within, to conceal the rough discomfort of the
surface, successive coatings of plaster, and finally, paper, were added,
with a wood-skirting at the foot thrice painted. Everything in this was
hand work, the laying of the bricks, the dabbing of the plaster, the
smoothing of the paper; it is a house built of hands--and some I saw
were bleeding hands--just as in the days of the pyramids, when the only
engines were living men. The whole confection is now undergoing
incalculable chemical reactions between its several parts. Lime, mortar,
and microscopical organisms are producing undesigned chromatic effects
in the paper and plaster; the plaster, having methods of expansion and
contraction of its own, crinkles and cracks; the skirting, having
absorbed moisture and now drying again, opens its joints; the rough-cast
coquettes with the frost and opens chinks and crannies for the humbler
creation. I fail to see the necessity of (and, accordingly, I resent
bitterly) all these coral-reef methods. Better walls than this, and
better and less life-wasting ways of making them, are surely possible.
In the wall in question, concrete would have been cheaper and better
than bricks if only "the men" had understood it. But I can dream at last
of much more revolutionary affairs, of a thing running to and fro along
a temporary rail, that will squeeze out wall as one squeezes paint from
a tube, and form its surface with a pat or two as it sets. Moreover, I
do not see at all why the walls of small dwelling-houses should be so
solid as they are. There still hangs about us the monumental traditions
of the pyramids. It ought to be possible to build sound, portable, and
habitable houses of felted wire-netting and weather-proofed paper upon a
light framework. This sort of thing is, no doubt, abominably ugly at
present, but that is because architects and designers, being for the
most part inordinately cultured and quite uneducated, are unable to cope
with its fundamentally novel problems. A few energetic men might at any
time set out to alter all this. And with the inevitable rev