The Mentor: Beautiful Buildings of the World, Serial no. 33 — Reading Companion

Between Fact and Folklore

The catalog subject “Architecture” might suggest a dry technical manual, but Ward frequently lets local legend and emotional appeal take precedence. In describing the Alhambra, he reports that “the people about Granada have always held that the Palace of the Alhambra was built under a magic spell,” and he repeats this folk belief without correction. Similarly, the Taj Mahal is called a “veritable translation into stone of human remembrance and affection,” a phrase that prioritizes sentiment over structural analysis. Ward does include concrete details—the Alhambra’s “slim pillars of the rarest white marble,” the Taj’s twenty-two-year construction period—but these are woven into a narrative that treats buildings as vessels of romance. A reader expecting floor plans or engineering data will find instead a travel writer’s enthusiasm.

Catastrophe and Persistence at Amiens

Ward’s account of Amiens Cathedral is built around a sequence of disasters: the wooden cathedral burned by Norsemen in 881, a replacement destroyed by lightning in 1019, another burned in 1107, and yet another struck by lightning in 1218. The present structure, begun in 1220, emerges as a monument less to architectural innovation than to communal perseverance. Ward emphasizes the “patience and zeal” of the citizens who rebuilt four times, framing the cathedral as a testament to human endurance. Notably, he does not describe the cathedral’s famous sculptural program or its soaring nave in the excerpts; instead, the drama of repeated destruction and reconstruction becomes the story. This choice reveals how Ward uses historical anecdote to make architecture legible to a general audience.

The Mentor’s Selective Gaze

Ward’s selection of six buildings—Taj Mahal, Alhambra, Amiens, Salisbury, Chambord, and New York City Hall—spans continents and centuries, but the excerpts treat them with uneven depth. The Taj Mahal and Alhambra receive the most lyrical treatment, while the later sections on Salisbury, Chambord, and City Hall are not included in the provided text. This imbalance suggests that the Mentor series aimed for variety rather than exhaustive coverage. Ward’s professorial title (“Professor of Architecture, Rutgers College”) lends authority, yet his method is closer to that of a popular lecturer: he generalizes about “every age, and every nation” leaving “crowning achievements,” and he avoids technical jargon. The result is an introduction that invites curiosity but does not equip a reader to analyze buildings critically.

Ward’s text is best approached as a period piece that reveals early twentieth-century attitudes toward world architecture. Readers interested in the buildings themselves may wish to supplement this account with more recent scholarship, particularly for the Alhambra and Taj Mahal, where Ward’s romanticism sometimes overshadows historical complexity. The volume’s value lies in its snapshot of how architectural beauty was presented to a popular audience a century ago.

There’s something about Ward’s old book—how he lingers on a building’s story, not just its stones—that made me think of another quiet volume, The model village and its cottages — Reading Notes. Both left me with a tender ache, the way a place can feel like a memory you haven’t lived yet.