. The Civil engineer and architect's journal, scientific and railway gazette. Architecture; Civil engineering; Science. 282 THE CIVIL ENGINEER AND ARCHITECT'S JOURNAL. [August, he can at all satisfactorily accomplish. If architects are so pinched by their employers that they cannot finish up their buildings consist- ently, why, in the name of common sense, do they squander away so great a part of their pecuniary resources upon such extraneous common places as columns and pilasters, dragged in for the nonce, as if for the express purpose of making the poverty of the rest of the building all the
. The Civil engineer and architect's journal, scientific and railway gazette. Architecture; Civil engineering; Science. 282 THE CIVIL ENGINEER AND ARCHITECT'S JOURNAL. [August, he can at all satisfactorily accomplish. If architects are so pinched by their employers that they cannot finish up their buildings consist- ently, why, in the name of common sense, do they squander away so great a part of their pecuniary resources upon such extraneous common places as columns and pilasters, dragged in for the nonce, as if for the express purpose of making the poverty of the rest of the building all the more apparent and offensive; and in such manner as to bring columns and porticos now almost into disrepute? Such a system is no less at variance with economy than with good taste ; and has served only to fill the land with buildings in a pseudo-Grecian style, marked by an offensive mixture of showiness and poverty—with what is, in fact, hardly worthy of the name of style at all, it amounting to DO more than feeble, mechanical mannerism. Private speculation has, on the other hand, occasionally encouraged architectural design on a scale of liberality that contrasts forcibly with the petty parsimony observable in buildings of a higher grade, and where it becomes posi- tively offensive. The shop architecture of the metropolis has im- proved, although by no means in the degree that could be wished; since, for the greater part, it exhibits more of expensive showiness than of either good taste or invention. The individual architectural specimens of this class, which deserve to be pointed out, are com- paratively few ; for when we have mentioned one at the corner of the Quadrant, opposite the County Fire Office, at the corner of Oxford Street and Berners Street, another by Mr. Inwood, in Old Bond Street, a fourth in Tavistock Place, by Mr. Maddox, and one just opened m Aldgate—which last is a more striking facade of its kind than, perhaps, any other in town—we have enumerated ne
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