tead of honestly constructing what we
want, and then decorating it with a style of ornament that should
assist, explain, and intensify it, we go wandering off to the ends of
the earth, building Grecian temples and Veronese palaces, some entire
and some in slices, dreary, indefinite-looking objects, devoid of all
constructive principles within, and ornamented with falsified gewgaws
without, stuck on in the hope of hiding rather than helping out the
flimsy design. Our 'national style' we are sure can never be born of any
such travesties. Borrowed architecture never fits well.

The fact is, we ignore the first great principle--the essence and _sine
qua non_, of the art--DECORATED CONSTRUCTION. By construction is meant
that mechanical arrangement of parts which is best suited to convenience
and most conducive to stability. It is what the French would call the
_motif_, the end in view, while decoration is only the means. And the
moment we lose sight of it, in our anxiety to make room for some pet
ornament, that very ornament becomes an eyesore, and will persist in
spoiling the design, for the simple reason that the end is sacrificed to
the means. Set it down, then, at the start, that ornament must be
dependent upon construction, and not construction upon ornament. The
useful begets the beautiful, and the order cannot be reversed.

But before proceeding to what American architecture might be, we must,
in all fairness, examine it as it is.

Our great cities, of course, claim our attention first, for these
centres of wealth and intellect must necessarily be centres of art, and
there, if at all, are we to discover our prospects for a national style.
As a single example of what it has attained to so far, nothing can be
better suited to our purpose than Broadway, New York, our best-known and
most essentially American thoroughfare. But what to compare it to we
know not. Neither history nor geography affords a parallel. It resembles
neither the London Strand nor the Parisian Boulevard, nor is it like the
Ludwig Strasse of Munich, nor the Grand Canal of Venice; and yet it has
something or other in common with all of these. There is all the
incongruity of the English thoroughfare and the brilliancy of the
French, while the frequent succession of vast palatial structures allies
it still closer to the last-named examples. Perhaps, after all, the
Grand Canal--the silent highway of the City of the Sea--is more like it
in general effect