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Page 3
* * * * *
We have before called attention to the great and rapidly increasing
importance of the South American Republics, and, while there seems to be
no prospect that our proximity to them will be of any commercial
advantage to us, some of our young architects and skilled mechanics, who
speak Spanish, might perhaps find profitable employment there. At
present, the most prosperous city is Buenos Ayres, which, from one
hundred and sixty thousand inhabitants in 1870, increased to four
hundred and sixty thousand in 1888, and has gained very rapidly within
the last year. We must confess that our own ideas of Buenos Ayres still
retain a reminiscence of gauchos and lassoes and buffalo, but this grows
fainter as we find illustrations in the foreign papers of the newer
buildings going up in the city. The last we have seen is of an enormous
dry-goods store, after the model of the "Bon March�" or the "Printemps"
in Paris, which is known as the "Bon March� Argentin," and covers at
present ninety thousand square feet of land, while thirty-five thousand
feet adjoining have been secured, and are to be used for the enlargement
of the present building which will soon become necessary. There are said
to be a good many architects already in Buenos Ayres, but first-rate
mechanics are, or were not long ago, so scarce that the municipality
imported plumbers under contract from London to do work on public
buildings.
CIVIL AND DOMESTIC ARCHITECTURE.--I.[1]
The term Civil and Domestic Architecture includes all public and private
edifices, that is to say: honorary monuments, such as triumphal arches
and tombs; buildings for the instruction of the public, such as museums,
libraries and schools; houses for public amusements, as theatres,
amphitheatres and circuses; structures for public service, as
city-halls, court-houses, prisons, hospitals, therm�, markets,
warehouses, slaughter-houses, railway-stations, light-houses, bridges
and aqueducts; finally, private dwellings, as palaces, mansions, city
and country residences, ch�teaux and villas.
[Illustration: Memorial to the Heroes of the Franco Prussian War,
Berlin.]
The first care of all social organizations, at their inception, must
have been to provide shelter against inclement weather. In primitive
times society was composed of shepherds, or agriculturists, or hunters,
and it is presumable that each of these groups adopted a shelter suited
to its nomadic or sedentary tastes. For this reason to shepherds is
attributed the invention of the tent, a portable habitation which they
could take with them from valley to valley, wherever they led their
flocks to pasture; agriculturists fixed to the soil which they tilled,
dwelling in the plains and along the river banks, must have found the
hut better adapted to their wants, while the hunters, stealing through
the forests, ambushed in the mountains, or stationed on the seashore,
naturally took safety in caves, or dug holes for themselves in the
earth, or hollowed out grottos in the rocks.
An imitation of the tent is found later on in the form of the Chinese
and Japanese structures; the principle of the cave appears developed in
the subterranean dwellings of the people of India and Nubia; while the
hut is the point of departure for all Greek and Roman architecture.
As soon as man had contrived a shelter for himself, before considering
improvements that might be made in it, he turned his thoughts toward the
divine being of his worship, and the first steps in art were taken in
the monuments which he raised to his gods. Then, confounding kings with
deities, he reared palaces like unto temples. But civil architecture,
properly so called, came into existence only with an already advanced
state of civilization, when cities were forming and peoples were
organizing. After having satisfied the demands of the moral nature,
after having erected temples to their gods and palaces to their kings,
the people began to group together and surround themselves with
fortifications. Next the material needs of society made themselves felt;
aqueducts were constructed to supply water; bridges established
communication between the opposite banks of streams; dikes confined the
rivers within certain bounds; streets were laid out along which houses
were built in orderly fashion, public squares were marked off where the
products of industry could be exchanged, where justice was dispensed and
where the great affairs of State were treated; then came mental and
physical demands, a felt need for the training of body and mind, and out
of this want grew theatres, stadia, gymnasia and therm�. In time we find
the history of a single people developing; and with this development a
necessity arising for lasting monuments to commemorate its various
stages; public services rendered by certain illustrious men called for
some enduring memorial; and relatives and friends, with whom one had
lived and whom the dread enemy had snatched away could not be left
without sepulture. Is there nothing after death? And so honorary
monuments, triumphal columns, statues and tombs sprang into being.
Again, with the growth of a people, wealth increases, and every new
victory assuring an added degree of ease introduces at the same time
extravagant tastes; a people after enduring suffering cries out for its
portion of pleasure; it was to satisfy this demand that circuses were
built, and amphitheatres where the eyes could feast on imposing
spectacles; private houses became more comfortable, they were improved
in arrangement, they were enlarged and embellished; at length an
extraordinary display of sumptuousness began to appear in the dwellings
of the great,--that luxury of decadence which marks the close of ancient
civilization.
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