MILLIONS SPENT ON CURVES THAT FOOL THE EYE
Straight Dotted Lines, Above. Show the Amount of Curve in Two Walls of the Philadelphia Art Museum; Below Is a View of the Vast Building as It Appears from a Distance
A vast stone building, to be used as an art museum, costing $11,000,000 and spreading over a hilltop in Philadelphia, is nearing completion—without a single straight line in it. Every wall bows in or bulges out, the roof has an artful hump, and the massive columns of the porticoes lean at the top toward each other and also toward the building. Yet so carefully out of the straight and plumb has each piece of stone been cut and fitted that, to the eye, the building is perfect, whereas if it really were as straight as it seems, the eye would be convinced that the columns were too thin in the middle, that the roof sagged and the walls were bent. There are forty great stone columns, each eighty feet high, in the porticoes. Each column
