100 DISCUSSION. 



to his building before it leaves his hands. The street awning can 

 have no place whatsoever in a beautiful city; and yet under the 

 special conditions under which a new city may come into existence 

 it would be an easy matter to supply its place, and at the same 

 time add new possibilities to the beauty of our street architecture. 

 To this end I would so regulate the conditions of land tenure that 

 there would be two building lines to the side of each street, one 

 line would lie, say, one third the width of the footpath from the 

 kerb thereof, and the other or near line would be back at the full 

 distance of the footpath. An invariable condition of building in 

 certain streets would result in two-thirds of the footpath being 

 under cover and one-third open. Instances of this class of con- 

 struction in this city, though not so applied, are afforded by 

 Victoria House in Pitt Street, and the General Post Office. Such 

 construction is conformable to every recognised style of architecture 

 and would undoubtedly lend itself to fine effects hitherto impossible. 



Mr. Norman Selfe, m. inst. o.e. — To discuss within reasonable 

 limits such a lengthy and masterly paper as that which Mr. Knibbs 

 has contributed to this important subject, is very difficult. I 

 therefore propose to supplement rather than to criticise; and to 

 make a few prosaic remarks on some of the commonplace aspects of 

 the question, hardly touched by Mr. Knibbs, but which naturally 

 occur to those who are in daily contact with the practical rather 

 than the theoretical side of such matters. 



It seems to me to be entirely premature for any one to 

 dogmatise on the subject of the Federal Capital, before certain 

 definite and important premises have been thoroughly settled. As 

 a result of having looked upon fifty or sixty of the principal cities 

 of the world — from Stockholm to Naples, and from Boston to 

 St. Louis, it has been forced upon me that those cities are all 

 the results of special series of combinations of conditions — unique 

 in every case. Prague and Chicago, London and Christiania, . 

 what have they in common 1 Philadelphia, one of the largest 

 cities of the world, appears to be one of the least self-assertive;. 



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