"ARTIFICIALITY"

Yale's seven million dollar library may have to be lighted and aired artificially, the clock may be obscured by a dust-collecting rood screen, and massive pillars may occupy most of the floor space, but that it "inculcates the lie in the young student" or makes it impossible for him "ever to learn a true thing in any institution such as this" are declarations which show more naive fancy than common sense. These are only a few of the bitter condemnations of the Yale library's architecture made in the current issue of the "Nation."

It would doubtless be difficult to defend every aspect of the library from either a practical or an aesthetic point of view. But in attacking the artificiality in the building, the author of the "Nation" article becomes involved himself in a labyrinth of purely artificial distinctions. It certainly is only a diseased sort of academic mind which could object violently to inclusions in the same structure of rooms in Gothic, Renaissance, and Colonial styles per se. Certain juxtapositions could be aesthetically bad. But it is absurd to suppose that decorations of the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries are necessarily inharmonious.

The expense of the "meretricious medievalsm and stale iconography" of the ornament on the library cannot perhaps be justified, but it hardly "monumentalizes the vulgarity of the American educator's mind." If the lighting and ventilating systems cost more than windows, at least the mighty walls shut out some of the din of Elm Street. If steel girders can be used to advantage in supporting stone, "architectural falsity" need not prevent it. And there are probably many who would welcome the conversion of more telephone booths into fourteenth century confessionals.