 ppeals to the Young: It is curious to note how young people rise hungrily to the bait of this new art while the older world of convention looks slightly frightened. This is so marked that the exhibition may be used as a test for your mental age. According to your elation or depression at sight of the items on display you may gauge exactly how you stand in relation to the intellectual streams of the day.
One young lady visitor, not of my acquaintance, was so carried away by her enthusiasm that she said to me, a stranger, indicating the Frank Lloyd Wright model for a “House on the Mesa” at Denver, Col.: “Is it not wonderful? Would it not be wonderful to live in a house like that?” and, I could only reply, “It certainly would,” though I was not at all sure that I understood half the implications of the model. Mr. Wright, as usual, contributes the most amazing example of the new architecture. His “House on the Mesa” is a collection of long horizontal lines on slightly different levels, so immense that it seems like a group of houses rather than a single glorified bungalow. It faces a large artificial swimming pool and has an endless series of novelties, such as perforated screens suspended lightly in cantilever fashion to protect certain terraces from the molten Colorado sun. It looks tremendously ostentatious, but the announced cost, $125,000, will not, after all, seem so much to millionaires accustomed to paying much more for their villas at Newport.
|
