...

I'm No Expert

I am no expert on architecture, and honestly I know close to nothing about it. It's hard for me to judge where I stand as far as modernism or goth, but I'll try my best to make sense of descriptions provided in the readings.

I found it amusing that George Washington Littlefield built his "home as a testimony to [the] importance he placed on material wealth."(190) Though I am not sure if the Littlefield house was built on antimodernist sentiments, this notion would be contradictory to my understanding of antimodernism as well as certain elements of gothic ideals. The importance of material assets is very much a modernist tendency. I would connect the advent of the industrial revolution and technology as a new emphasis on material wealth, and "antimodernism is typically backward-looking" and "grew primarily out of the disillusionment with Europe's industrial revolution in the 19^th century." (191) Since Gothic architecture is a style from the past, the building of the Littlefield House is as an example of historicism, and therefore it would seem to be built out of some adherence to antimodernism. However, Ruskin says that "no pleasure is taken anywhere in modern buildings, and we find all men of true feeling delighting to escape out of modern cities into natural scenery. (216) Even though it wasn't constructed in the same style of modern buildings, Littlefield plopped his house in the middle of a budding town, and the wealth that was infused into every detail of the house, including the bricks, seemed to align with modernist sentiments.

The purpose of building the Littlefield House seems to oppose the foundations of Gothicism. The gothic "tendency to delight in fantastic and ludicrous, as well as in sublime images" doesn't much up with a preoccupation with material, tangible wealth. (222) "Pointed arches do not constitute Gothic," but rather the attitude behind the creation as well as the various physical elements that are built off of each other define a legitimate Gothic construction. (207) There is a "fancifulness, love of variety, love of richness," and a "rude and wild" aspect of Gothicism that defines it as a practical architecture. (218) The ornamentation, while it may have been formed out of a desire to create art, is not created merely for show, but added to the overall practicality of a building's construction. The emphasis placed on Naturalism within the Gothic realm continues to contradict Littlefield's purpose in building the Littlefield house and makes me wonder if we would be able to define the construction as truly Gothic in the purist sense of the term.

As for myself, I would have to unhappily admit to an adherence to the Modern form of architecture that Ruskin criticizes. I really like structure, although I completely agree with him Ruskin on almost all of his points. "We take no pleasure in the building provided for us, resembling that which we take in a new book or a new picture." (215) Buildings constructed on the strictest laws of architectural aesthetics are often boring and merely functional, and I revel in daring constructions that can simultaneously please my practical sensibilities while appealing to an artistic appreciation. Though I little about Gothic architecture, I really appreciate the impromptu designs that arise out of function, and I place the greatest importance to the cohesion between these ideals. Art, whether it be literary, architectural, or textile, really irritates me when it is excessively ornamental without an understandable purpose. In a way I feel like efforts to out design and out art other creations is a futile goal and turns me completely off to the entirety of the work. Effusive displays of wealth and technical abilities are a waste of time as far as art is concerned, and therefore I question the underlying beauty of the Littlefield House.