Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 167, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 July 1918 — Home Town Helps [ARTICLE]

Home Town Helps

BUILT ON LINES OF BEAUTY Structures for Industrial Establishments Need No Longer Constitute Blots oq Landscape. Recent years have seen a marked advance in the architectural treatment of office buildings, shops and even “loft” buildings—the last built essen-tially-for commercial purposes. “Architecture,” indeed, as applied to building, has been proved a beneficial asset rather than an esthetic ideal. Several architects of Chicago and the middle West have attained remarkable success In distinctly architectural renderings of factory buildings; and architecural ideals are by no means Incompatible with a type of building usually regarded by most of us as “hopelessly" utilitarian—buildings for power houses and pumping stations. A Pacific coast architect, however, has distinguished himself for years by his unusual rendering of this type of building. “Plants,” which in most instances have been accepted as irremediable blots upon their immediate localities, have been given the architectural dignity and grace which are commonly regarded as the special requisites of “architectural’ buildings, such as libraries and the like. Perhaps the spell has been broken—perhaps those people who need most to dream dreams and see visions of architectural beauty have been and are being gradually awakened, by the patient endeavors of a few earnest and inspired architects, to a realization that there may be ideals. In everyday architecture —that a garage may be a beautiful building, a storage warehouse a structure of fine dignity aad strength, and that a factory may he clothed in an architectural mobility of concept which will be commensurate, in terms of the better and final ideal, with the commercial significance of the great Industry which it houses.