have similar buildings in their own home towns.

[Illustration: PLATE VII. INTERIOR OF THE CAMP SHERMAN COMMUNITY
HOUSE]

Beyond the oasis of the Community Club House at Camp Sherman stretch
the cantonments--a Euclidian nightmare of bare boards, black roofs
and ditches, making grim vistas of straight lines. This is the
architecture of Need in contradistinction to the architecture of
Greed, symbolized in the shop-window prettiness of those sanitary
suburbs of our cities created by the real estate agent and the
speculative builder. Neither contain any enduring element of beauty.

But the love of beauty in one form or another exists in every human
heart, and if too long or too rigorously denied it finds its own
channels of fulfilment. This desire for self-expression through beauty
is an important, though little remarked phenomenon of these mid-war
times. At the camps it shows itself in the efforts of men of
specialized tastes and talents to get together and form dramatic
organizations, glee clubs, and orchestras; and more generally by the
disposition of the soldiers to sing together at work and play and on
the march. The renascence of poetry can be interpreted as a revulsion
against the prevailing prosiness; the amateur theatre is equally a
protest against the inanity and conventionality of the commercial
stage; while the Community Chorus movement is an evidence of a desire
to escape a narrow professionalism in music. A similar situation
has arisen in the field of domestic architecture, in the form of
an unorganized, but wide-spread reaction against the cheap and ugly
commercialism which has dominated house construction and decoration of
the more unpretentious class. This became articulate a few years ago