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It is printing Let the reader make no mistake; architecture is dead; irretrievably slain by the printed book,--slain because it endures for a shorter time,--slain because it costs more Every cathedral represents ine what an investment of funds it would require to rewrite the architectural book; to cause thousands of edifices to swarm onceofto the statement of an eye witness, "that one would have said that the world in shaking itself, had cast off its old garments in order to cover itself with a white vesture of churches" ~Erat enim ut si mundus, ipse excutiendo semet, rejecta vetustate, candida ecclesiarum vestem indueret~ (GLABER RADOLPHUS) A book is so soon o so far! How can it surprise us that all huht flows in this channel? This does not mean that architecture will not still have a fine monument, an isolated masterpiece, here and there We , a column made I suppose, by a whole arn of architecture, Iliads and Roen Lieds, made by a whole people, with rhapsodies piled up and enius may happen in the twentieth century, like that of Dante in the thirteenth But architecture will no longer be the social art, the collective art, the dorand work of huer be built: it will be printed
And henceforth, if architecture should arise again accidentally, it will no longer be mistress It will be subservient to the law of literature, which formerly received the law from it The respective positions of the two arts will be inverted It is certain that in architectural epochs, the poems, rare it is true, resee, iyptian Orient, poetry has like the edifices, grandeur and tranquillity of line; in antique Greece, beauty, serenity, calm; in Christian Europe, the Catholic etation of an epoch of renewal The Bible resembles the Pyramids; the Iliad, the Parthenon; Homer, Phidias Dante in the thirteenth century is the last Romanesque church; Shakespeare in the sixteenth, the last Gothic cathedral
Thus, to sum up e have hitherto said, in a fashion which is necessarily incoisters, two testa; the Bible of stone and the Bible of paper No doubt, when one contemplates these two Bibles, laid so broadly open in the centuries, it is perranite, those gigantic alphabets formulated in colonnades, in pylons, in obelisks, those sorts of human mountains which cover the world and the past, fro The past es of marble This book, written by architecture, randeur of the edifice which printing erects in its turn must not be denied