432. line 5., for BC, read DC. 432. line 4. from bottom, for 14207=119 ft. 2 in., read √14207=119 ft. 2 in. ENCYCLOPÆDIA OF ARCHITECTURE. BOOK I. HISTORY OF ARCHITECTURE. CHAP. I. ON THE ORIGIN OF ARCHITECTURE. SECT. I. WANTS OF MAN, AND FIRST BUILDINGS. 1. PROTECTION from the inclemency of the seasons was the mother of architecture. Of little account at its birth, it rose into light and life with the civilisation of mankind; and, proportionately as security, peace, and good order were established, it became, not less than its sisters, painting and sculpture, one method of transmitting te posterity the degree of importance to which a nation had attained, and the moral value of that nation amongst the kingdoms of the earth. If the art, however, be considered strictly in respect of its actual utility, its principles are restricted within very narrow limits; for the mere art, or rather science, of construction, has no title to a place among the fine arts. Such is in various degrees to be found among people of savage and uncivilised habits; and until it is brought into a system founded upon certain laws of proportion, and upon rules based on a refined analysis of what is suitable in the highest degree to the end proposed, it can pretend to no rank of a high class. It is only when a nation has arrived at a certain degree of opulence and luxury that architecture can be said to exist in it. Hence it is that architecture, in its origin, took the varied forms which have impressed it with such singular differences in different countries; differences which, though modified as each country advanced in civilisation, were, in each, so stamped, that the type was permanent, being refined only in a higher degree in their most important examples. 2. The ages that have elapsed, and the distance by which we are separated from the nations among whom the art was first practised, deprive us of the means of examining the shades of difference resulting from climate, productions of the soil, the precise spots upon which the earliest societies of man were fixed, with their origin, number, mode of life, and social institutions; all of which influenced them in the selection of one form in preference to another. We may, however, easily trace in the architecture of nations, the types of three distinct states of life, which are clearly discoverable at the present time; though in some cases the types may be thought doubtful. B SECT. II. ORIGIN AND PROGRESS OF BUILDING. 3. The original classes into which mankind were divided were, we may safely assume, those of hunters, of shepherds, and of those occupied in agriculture; and the buildings for protection which each would require, must have been characterised by their several occupations. The hunter and fisher found all the accommodation they required in the clefts Fig. 1. RUINS OF PETRA. and caverns of rocks; and the indolence which those states of life induced, made them insensible or indifferent to greater comfort than such naturally-formed habitations afforded. We are certain that thus lived such tribes. Jeremiah (chap. xlix. 16.), speaking of the judgment upon Edom, says, "O thou that dwellest in the clefts of the rock, that holdest the height of the hill;" a text which of late has received ample illustration from travellers, and especially from the labours of Messrs. Leon de Laborde and Linant, in the splendid engravings of the ruins of Petra (fig. 1.). To the shepherd, the inhabitant of the plains wandering from one spot to another, as pasture became inadequate to the support of his flocks, another species of dwelling was more appropriate; one which he could remove with him in his wanderings: this was the tent, the type of the architecture of China, whose people were, like all the Tartar races, nomades or scenites, that is, shepherds or dwellers in tents. Where a portion of the race fixed its abode for the purposes of agriculture, a very different species of dwelling was necessary. Solidity was required as well for the personal comfort of the husbandman as for preserving, from one season to another, the fruits of the earth, upon which he and his family were to exist. Hence, doubtless, the hut, which most authors have assumed to be the type of Grecian architecture. 4. Authors, says the writer in the Encyc. Methodique, in their search after the origin of architecture, have generally confined their views to a single type, without considering the modification which would be necessary for a mixture of two or more of the states of mankind; for it is evident that any two or three of them may co-exist, a point upon which more will be said in speaking of Egyptian architecture. Hence have arisen the most discordant and contradictory systems, formed without sufficient acquaintance with the customs of different people, their origin, and first state of existence. 5. The earliest habitations which were constructed after the dispersion of mankind from the plains of Sennaar (for there, certainly, as we shall hereafter see, even without the evidence of Scripture, was a great multitude gathered together), were, of course, proportioned to the means which the spot afforded, and to the nature of the climate to which they were to be adapted. Reeds, canes, the branches, bark, and leaves of trees, clay, and similar materials would be first used. The first houses of the Egyptians and of the people of Palestine were of reeds and canes interwoven. At the present day the same materials serve to form the houses of the Peruvians. According to Pliny (1. vii.), the first houses of the Greeks were only of clay; for it was a considerable time before that nation was acquainted with the process of hardening it into bricks. The Abyssinians still build with clay and reeds. Wood, however, offers such facilities of construction, that still, as of old, where it abounds, its adoption prevails. At first, the natural order seems to be that which Vitruvius describes in the first chapter of his second book. "The first attempt," says our author, "was the mere erection of a few spars, united together with twigs, and covered with mud. Others built their walls of dried lumps of turf, connected these walls together by means of timbers laid across horizontally, and covered the erections with reeds and boughs, for the purpose of sheltering themselves from the inclemency of the seasons. Finding, however, that flat coverings of this sort would not effectually shelter them in the winter season, they made their roofs of two inclined planes, meeting each other in a ridge at the summit, the whole of which they covered with clay, and thus carried off the rain." The same author |