ABSTRACT
Architecture has nothing to do with the various "styles". Louis XIV, XV, XVI, and Gothic are to architecture what feathers are to a woman's head; they are pretty sometimes, but not always, and nothing more. Architecture has graver ends; capable of sublimity, it touches the most brutal instincts through its objectivity; it appeals to the highest of the faculties, through its very abstraction. Architecture is the masterful, correct, and magnificent play of volumes brought together in light. Egyptian, Greek, and Roman architecture is an architecture of prisms, cubes, and cylinders, of trihedrons and spheres: the Pyramids, the Temple of Luxor, the Parthenon, the Colosseum, Hadrian's Villa. Architectural abstraction has the distinctive and magnificent quality that, while being rooted in brute fact, it spiritualizes it. Brute fact is amenable to ideas only through the order that is projected onto it. Volume and surface are the elements through which architecture manifests itself.
