THE ARCHITECTURAL SCHOOL.

The Architectural Department is now in its fourth year as a distinct department in the Lawrence Scientific School and has 64 students, some fifty of whom are regular members of the Scientific School, ten of the Academic Department, and four men who received A. B. degrees. Next year in addition to the requirements of the Scientific School, those who intend to study architecture will be obliged to pass in both the History of Greece and Rome and the History of the United States and England, as well as in Freehand Drawing, and in the following year the new requirements for admission to the Scientific School going into effect, the standard of entrance will in the course of five years be gradually raised to an equality with that of the College.

The fundamental principles of the Department differ to some extent from those of most architectural schools in this country, with the possible exception of Columbia, in laying stress primarily on the importance of an accurate and thorough knowledge of the history of art as an essential foundation for work in design, and with this end the Department has the great advantage of being closely allied to the Department of Fine Arts in Harvard College. In addition to the courses offered by the College on the history of art those in the Department occupy three years. The practical training upon which the study of architecture as a profession must rest is not forgotten however.

To deal more minutely with the somewhat different methods in use at the Harvard School, we find that most other institutions of architectural training base their ideas almost exclusively on the example set by the Paris Ecole des Beaux Arts. At Harvard the strong points of the French School in plan and composition are profited by as far as possible, but instead of following the tradition of the Ecole in the working out of designs and especially in the treatment of detail which are often of questionable taste, the student is encouraged to found his work on a study of the noblest precedents of the past,- sources indeed upon which in the first place the work of the School at Paris is itself founded. To this end, in the school at Harvard the student is constantly surrounded by photographs and drawings of the best works of Greece and Rome and the Renaissance in Italy, with which he is required to make himself thoroughly familiar. Thus he gains the best possible training of taste, while he is becoming familiar with architectural motives and details. The carefully selected working library of the Department, which adjoins the draughting room, affords ample facilities for this purpose, and in addition are, of course, the collections of photographs in the Fogg Museum, and the very large collection of works in architecture in Gore Hall.

While it is recognized that Architecture is essentially a Fine Art to be studied as such, thorough knowledge of construction is not forgotten, and great stress is laid on continued practice in

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