Show Lost Principle le of Architecture Fortnightly Fortnightly Review t If It the visitor to Athens Athena places s his ate ha lm or other small object at the corner comer of c one of ot the steps of or the Parthenon and tries to tl sight t it from the other end he wm wili find It has us sunk beneath the delicate d curve i in the middle which the designers d eais would appear and softer 50 ter to the theeO eye eyo than if each step were shaped to 10 a line of straightness s from trem begin ning fling to end Ail Au parts pats of the great bedd id ing the floors architrave end and even The layers of stone that constitute the main ma n walls have been shown to conform to o a like Uke principle and some portions to be curved cuned both in la a vertical and In a hori hor manner Important as was this discovery it does not stand alone Mr Ruskin has found that deliberate diver of a somewhat similar tu kind i exist in the old Gothic buildings of Venice and he be considers that they toey were wera In m so as to avoid aroId a too obvious pre L i elision as does nature even e in har h most symmetrical he two sides of oe the human faco face for example Mr Ruskin wrote In ignorance oC of i Mr precise measurements and md surveys S and only uses the tle facts bets h he be I otherwise e marshals so wen well to show that Gothic architecture being alone sue st of such refinements is In superior to classical architecture He seems to be in no way aware that such suei could ibe be and d were eTO r TO applied to classical ol buildings long nS before pointed tune ture was WaB heard heaird of of though they are now BOW applied d to neither of these nor to any other Mr r Penrose being as was intend ed of by t his employers ers more snore of a and ana a mathematician than j a poet or a a theorist wanders JE no further into iao the tempting labyrinth of theory than then to gest gost gest that these irn irregularities were Br per sog per leaps Introduced because the tue designers designees I fancied a curved line would look more I straight at a distance dist than would a really reaRy straight straight one As the straight lines In our English buildings look quite it seems hard bard to suppose that the 5 old oki Greek artists formed fanned for or themselves eo w strange an illusion |