Author: John Nolen

Publisher: Forgotten Books

Published: 2017-11-29

Total Pages: 28

ISBN-13: 9780332246574

Excerpt from The Place of the Beautiful in the City Plan What is the test of Beauty? In an address on this subject before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard University delivered a year ago, Ralph Adams Cram said, Bring up to the Courts of Beauty any one of the things that offend us today, no matter what this may be, and abide by the verdict rendered. For the sake of impersonality let it be a modern city, anything, from Somerville to Chicago, and what has beauty to say in the premises? Before beauty's austere regard the bold pleading of business efficiency, of plausible economic law, of material progress, of a mechan istic philosophy of evolution - of Modernism, in a word falls thin and unconvincing. Dead cities rise up before us in vision, cities now marred and degraded yet beautiful still in their delicate vestiges: Venice and Palermo, Le Puy and Carcassonne, Rothenburg and Prague, Bruges and Hildesheim, Oxford and Winchester - and with them beauty calls on us to match Leeds and Birmingham and Essen and Pittsburgh and St. Louis, or as a matter of fact any other city in either hemisphere created or dominated by indus trial civilization. Is the change worth the price, is the criticism lightly to be cast aside as sentimental or efl'emi mate? About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.