Building
Groups

Texture Rela-
tions of

Buildings and
Landscape
Surroundings

the setting. This knowledge of form will be an abstract one, not based on knowledge of architectural detail and material, and therefore limited, when applied to architectural forms, and subject to practical correction by the architect's greater knowledge of what can be built and how the economic and esthetic ends of the building itself should be served.

These same general considerations apply to the design of groups of buildings in their relation to the landscape, but since the separation of the units makes the whole scheme more flexible, it is possible to adapt the form of a group of buildings to its surroundings more completely than can be done with the form of a single building. The esthetic conception of the whole group may be absolutely formal, a formal harmony of size, shape, position, and orientation of the buildings. If this conception is chosen for a scheme, the buildings must be large enough and close enough together, and in general their formal relation strong enough, to leave no doubt of its dominance. Formally-related college buildings surrounding a large and irregular open space, large formal designs for civic centers carried out in diminutive buildings, can be found as examples of ineffective design of this sort. In other cases, the relation of the buildings in a group to each other and to the landscape may be one of mass and texture and color harmony rather than one of axial relation and orientation. In such groups the shapes of the buildings themselves are likely to be more irregular, and the influence of the topography more directly recognized. Trees and other vegetation may play a part less subordinate to the architecture than they do in a more formal design. If the effect of a group is desired, however, the relations of size and position of buildings are to be studied no less than in a symmetrically balanced scheme. This matter of building grouping is one in which the landscape architect may well have a hand, but, at the scale at which this book is written, it can hardly be treated in more detail here.*

The texture and the color of the surface of buildings are often determined by the choice of material of construction; and the necessary relation of texture to form, and of form to architectural style and use, will in many cases make the choice of material and texture the un* See articles by A. M. Githens: The Group-Plan, in the Brickbuilder, July, Sept. 1906, v. 15, p. 134-138, 179–182.

avoidable result of the choice of style or of the recognition of use by form. In masonry the available stone and the way in which it can best be laid may determine the texture produced. As objects in landscape design, architectural structures are considerably dependent upon their texture for their compositional effect in conjunction with other objects. Smoothness of texture, and consequent possibility of definite pattern in small detail, enables an object most completely to express a manimposed style, and so to differentiate itself from the landscape; whereas a rough texture, that is, a certain fortuitous arrangement of the smaller parts of the surface, makes a structure more nearly similar to the trees and rocks of a natural landscape. Particularly in the smaller structures, the designer should be on his guard as to this definiteness and perhaps stiffness of form produced by fine texture. A fountain, a sundial, the curb of a fountain basin, any such object which must have definite form in small size, may well be made of some smooth-textured material; on the other hand, many mistakes are made in the choice of a texture too fine, and so of too rigid a surface and too definite an outline, for things like steps and walks and walls which are not designed to be themselves the dominant objects in the scene, but which are to form part of an outdoor composition with trees and flowers. Such structures should have some pleasing irregularity of form and color in their surface and some possibility of accumulating moss and lichens, and growing old gracefully with the rest of the design.

Relation to

The choice of local material in stonework may give harmony of Color of color, as well as harmony of texture, between the stonework and any Buildings in natural ledge which may appear in the composition. For the most Landscape part, however, the color of our structures is determined by our choice of brick, by our choice of a stain for cement and stucco, and by our choice of color in paint. Fortunately for the American landscape, the colors which are usual in brick and stucco and cement are on the whole the more subdued colors. No such restriction, however, is set upon house-painters, and, although the worst period of incongruity of violent color between each house and its neighbor and every house and the landscape is now passing, there are still sins enough of this kind committed to make it desirable that every landscape designer should bear his witness against them. In the color which can be so readily

Shelters and
Pavilions

obtained from paint, the designer has actually a very powerful meansof unifying his design, of concealing defects, of accenting excellences. Every architect knows that, in a wooden house, good forms in his building mass, good arrangements in fenestration, may be emphasized by appropriate painting, and that to some extent unfortunate arrangements forced upon him by the use of the building may be rendered less noticeable in the same way. As an object in the landscape, a large and ugly but unimportant building may be subdued by being painted to match its background; a small building, intended to serve as a point of interest but hardly large enough for its task, may be painted white. A group of buildings may be unified and shown to belong to the same scheme, to the same owner, by being painted with the same colors. The repetition of the main architectural mass of the house by outlying buildings in the scheme may be in this way very successfully enhanced. Under the blazing sun of California or Florida, these colors may be brilliant as they often are in Spain and in Italy; under the grayer sky of New England, cream white, or gray white, or gray, or brown, or gray green, would be colors in paint likely to be more congruous with the rest of the scene, but even there a tile roof of a fairly brilliant red may make a pleasant spot in the landscape.

The smaller architectural structures, being, more commonly than the larger buildings, subordinate objects in the landscape, come more completely in the field of the landscape architect. Their essence and individuality are usually architectural, however, and this should be considered even if the structure is made solely for its effect in a landscape design. The structures which we discuss as examples are only a few out of many, and the considerations brought up are merely some of the broad relations of such structures considered as units in landscape composition.*

Besides the larger architectural structures which are commonly made primarily for some economic use, and smaller buildings for service purposes only, there are a number of lesser structures built primarily for enjoyment, such as pavilions, shelters, gazebos, pergolas.

These structures may have certain specific functions of pleasurable * Cf. also discussions of structures in the garden, the estate, and in landscape parks, in Chapter XI.