ABSTRACT
The American sculptor Horatio Greenough is best known for his theories and observations that were published in his 1852 work The Travels, Observations, and Experience of a Yankee Stonecutter. An interesting point among many, coming from Greenough’s analysis of architecture, was his idea that buildings intended for people to use, may be classified as machines based on type-forms associated with the users’ needs and wants. Greenough then critiques contemporary obsessions with fashion, by noting how ‘The domination of arbitrary rules of taste has produced the very counterpart of the wisdom thus displayed in every object around us’. The great principles of Architecture being once abandoned, correctness gave way to novelty, economy and vainglory associated produced meanness and pretension. The edifices, in whose construction the principles of architecture are developed, may be classed as organic, formed to meet the wants of their occupants, or monumental, addressed to the sympathies, the faith or the taste of a people.
