The monograph on the work of Charles A. Platt, which has just been issued by the Architectural Book Publishing Co., is a very remarkable publication. The fact that any publisher should find it a promise of profit in preparing so handsome, elaborate and costly a record of the work of a living architect is both a clear indication of the popularity and permanent value of certain phases of contemporary American architecture and an extraordinary tribute to the particular architect who has been first selected for this work of distinction. Numerous monographs on contemporary architects have been printed both in architectural and other periodicals; but this is the first book devoted exclusively to the work of any one designer. It is a compliment and recognition of which Mr. Platt may well be proud; and which every careful reader of the book must feel to have been fully justified.

In their prefatory note the publishers are modest in their promises. They expressly disclaim the idea that the book contains either an exhaustive compilation of Mr. Platt's work or the portrayal of any single building in all its interesting aspects. Neither has an attempt been made to arrange the illustrations of the different buildings according to the time of their erection or on any other systematic plan. On the other hand this particular compilation has certain advantages over any previous attempts to illustrate Mr. Platt's work. While by no means complete, it is, we believe, sufficiently complete for all practical purposes. It exhibits Mr. Platt's gifts and accomplishments as a designer in all their varied phases and from every really significant point of view. Many examples of his earlier and more tentative designs are

given, as well as many examples of his later and more finished product. A sufficient amount of space has also been devoted to some of the very small country houses which he designed early in his career. In the case of most all of these buildings, not only have a generous number of photographs been printed, but a sufficient supply of house and ground plans and working drawings. The book consequently, while it is intended primarily for the architect and will help his professional brethren to inderstand and interpret Mr. Platt's work better than ever before, should make an equally lively appeal to the intelligent layman. All of Mr. Platt's work has the quality of being convincing to any person of taste. Its rare distinction and beauty can be immediately felt, even if its admirer is not capable of analyzing and understanding the technical means, which the architect has adopted in order to create the effect.

In only one respect do we feel disposed to criticize the plan and makeup of the book. It is a real defect and a real loss that Mr. Platt's work has not been arranged chronologically, or that no data have been given which will assist a reader to discover the sequence in which these various houses have been built. The work of every eminent artist, like the work of a great statesman or a great country cannot be understood apart from its history. In the case of Mr. Platt the development of his gifts as an architectural designer is of peculiar importance because he is, if you please, a self-made architect. His early technical training was that of a painter and an etcher. Never in his life did he take a lesson in architectural design. Not only can certain distinguishing traits of his work

be clearly traced to the fact that in his case a born architect happened to have his eye trained as a landscape painter, but his architectural gift received was unfolded gradually and as the result of concrete practical necessity rather than of predetermined plan. The different phases of the process whereby the amateur architect became a professional and the professional gathered an increasing mastery over his own means of expression and an increasingly clear consciousness of his own scale of architectural values would constitute a peculiarly fascinating and helpful essay in architectural criticism.

The introduction which has been written in a spirit of warm but discriminating appreciation by Mr. Royal Cortissoz, constitutes a really illuminating interpretation of Mr. Platt as an architect. Mr. Cortissoz has had the advantage not only of a genuine enthusiasm for Mr. Platt's work, and the trained eye of an experienced critic, but also of an intimate and long continued familiarity with his subject. No matter how well acquainted the reader may be with Mr. Platt's designs, he cannot fail to obtain a juster and finer understanding of Mr. Platt's achievement from a careful perusal of Mr. Cortissoz's introduction. The final criticism of Mr. Platt as an architect cannot, of course, be written at present, because Mr. Platt is still practising, and is far from having exhausted either his possible architectural opportunities or his own latent powers as a designer. An artist, such as he, who is so incorruptibly true to his own standards and so relentlessly but so imperturbably critical of his own achievement, is certain to make the end add something to the total value of his work.

But

when the time comes for the final criticism of Mr. Platt as an architect the essay of Mr. Cortissoz will be found to constitute an essential and substantial contribution thereto.

The keynote of the introduction is contained in the statement made in the first paragraph that "Mr. Platt's work strongly urges the critic to subordinate the question of tradition to that of personality. By this the critic does not mean, of course, that traditional influences have not made peculiarly important facts in the formation of Mr. Platt's personal style. He recognizes fully that Mr. Platt has more than anything else been seeking to reproduce the architectural and domestic qualities of the Italian Renaissance villas. But he recognizes also that the "old Italian ideal is so tactfully and with such sincerity adjusted to local conditions that the completed work becomes part and parcel of a veritable characteristic American home." It would be idle, Mr. Cortissoz says, to question Mr. Platt's indebtedness to the past or what he owes more especially to the Italian precedent, both in his buildings and in his gardens. "Tradition of a sort is in his blood and he could not do without it. Yet his originality, his essential independence, remains untinged. There is nothing factitious about his work, nothing that is done from the outside. All proceeds from a central inspiration, from the creative instinct craving the outlet of beauty, which has made him etch and paint and build as with an imperious force. He makes a work of art, because he cannot help himself. The constructive nature of the artist must out. It is this fact which has made him such a commanding figure in the field of archi

tecture as a designer of houses. He was born to design them. He could not but make them beautiful. .. Beauty, the reality of his dream, reveals itself to him today as it did years ago, when he was painting pictures, which is to say in nature's clear fragrant paths. He is at peace with his art in the 'green silence' of the poet, in the light and color of gardens, in the quietude of houses where one dwells with finely wrought possessions, symbols of the things of the mind. Under such conditions his ideas expand and he puts forth noble energies. You know when you follow his footsteps that an artist has passed that way."

That is the scent of the great impression which has been and is still being made by Mr. Platt. There are few architects in the country whose personal clientele is more loyal and whose popular reputation is greater; but warmly as his work is appreciated by his clients, many of his most cordial admirers are to be found among his personal associates. He is useful to them. He has the originality, not of a mere experimentalist, but of a man who, as his

critic says, cannot help seeing things under the form of beauty. Hence it is that his work is so intensely personal in spite of its high impersonality and so thoroughly impersonal in spite of profoundly personal inspiration. He is of use to his professional associates because he is so completely himself and yet so emphatically more than himself.

His success in giving such a very individual and contemporary version of the noblest phase of domestic architecture in the past is the secret of his formative influence on others. He can give because he has really appropriated. And we feel sure that great as his influence hitherto, it will as a consequence of the publication of this book be still more considerable. The total effect made upon any sympathetic and considerate observer by the careful scrutiny of its pages is extraordinary, and those who have delighted in his work as it has been published in parcels will most assuredly feel as the result of this completer exposition that they have under rather than overestimated the distinction of his achievement.

rare

H. C.