--than versatile
architects; and yet Mr. Pennell, who would appear to assume, in
his book on drawing, that the point of view of the architect is
normally pictorial, seems at a loss to explain why Mr. Robert Blum,
for instance, can illustrate an architectural subject more artistically
than any of the draughtsmen in the profession. Without accepting
his premises, it is remarkably creditable to architecture that
it counts among its members in this country such men as Mr. B.
G. Goodhue and Mr. Wilson Eyre, Jr., and in England such thorough
artists as Mr. Prentice and Mr. Ernest George--men known even to
distinction for their skill along lines of purely architectural
practice, yet any one of whom would, I venture to say, cause
considerable displacement did he invade the ranks of magazine
illustrators. Moreover (and the suggestion is not unkindly offered),
were the architects and the illustrators to change places architecture
would suffer most by the process.

[Side note: _The Architects' Case_]

That the average architect should be incapable of artistically
illustrating his own design, ought, I think, to be less an occasion
for surprise than that few painters, whose point of view is essentially
pictorial, can make even a tolerable interpretation in line of their
own paintings. Be it remembered that the pictures made by the architect
are seldom the records of actualities. The buildings themselves
are merely contemplated, and the illustrations are worked up from
geometrical elevations in the office, very, very far from Nature.
Moreover, the subjects are not infrequently such as lend themselves
with an ill grace to picturesque illustration. The structure to be
depicted may, for instance, be a heavy cubical mass with a bald
uninteresting sky-line; or it may be a tall office building, impossible
to reconcile with natural accessories either in pictorial scale or
in composition. These natural accessories, too, the draughtsman
must, with an occasional recourse to his photograph album, evolve
out of his inner consciousness. When it is further considered that
such structures, even when actualities, are uncompromisingly stiff
and immaculate in their newness, presenting absolutely none of
those interesting accidents so dear to the artist, and perhaps with
nothing whatever about them of picturesque suggestion, we have a
problem presented which is somewhat analogous to that presented by
the sculpturesque possibilities of "fashionable t