...And interesting remarks still appropriate at least in the USA from the book's text, in its "Upon House-Building in the Twentieth Century" by Edward S. Prior:
THE god of Commerce...has been mis-worshipped.... To Victorian art he appeared an oracle which for ever gave out that the sale-worth is the real worth, and production at a marketable price always the test of quality. This has seemed such clear common sense that our houses have been built for the most part with nothing in view but their saleable quality. In this
way the fashions of what everybody has, but nobody can be accused of wanting, have driven out of the market, as being too expensive, the individual dwelling-house, built to the taste of the inhabitant. It was only in the old house that individuality found root in a congenial home where it could grow at its ease ; in the new house of the nineteenth century we have had to live all alike, our personalities numbered but not defined, as in hotel apartments. In the twentieth century it is to be hoped that the exercise of a little common sense will lead to houses being built for the taste and individuality of their occupiers, even though the initial cost should be greater. For the principles of commerce have surely been misunderstood when only the average in art can survive, and taste can no longer get what it
most looks for.
MOREOVER, see how the utility of workmanship has suffered by this custom of rating its value by the price paid for it. Competition, having crushed the special excellence, has turned its weapon on its own
productions, and established everywhere the cheap substitute in place of the genuine article. We have to take not what does not onlysuit us, but what is not the real thing at all -- fatty compounds for butter, glucose for sugar, chemicals for beer: and just as certainly the sham house for the real building, its style a counterfeit, its construction a saleable make-believe, its carved wood a pressing from machinery, its panelling linoleum, its plaster some pulp or other, its
metal work a composition, its painted glass only paper -- everything charmingly commercial and charmingly cheap. We have lots of beer ; we have lots of ornament in our houses ; arsenic in the one, and sheer humbug in the other. Let the twentieth century contrive at least to get its goods wholesome, and its ornaments hand-made.
