H ouse and Garden 
designs for several post-offices by the Super¬ 
vising Architect of the Treasury, J. Knox 
Taylor. One need only compare these with 
the government buildings of the middle of 
the last century, and later, to perceive how 
great the improvement has been. And it 
is more than an improvement in the indi¬ 
vidual buildings, for no one can question the 
effect they will have, spread as they are over 
the entire country, in establishing a common 
vernacular that is as necessary to architecture 
'as a common language is to literature. 
Th is tendency toward a common style is 
increasingly strong. Except West Point and 
George B. Post’s Uni¬ 
versity of New York, 
all the public buildings 
exhibited are based on 
the classic. One may 
well hesitate to affirm 
that this ascendancy is 
permanent, when he 
looks back upon the 
styles that have suc¬ 
cessively prevailed in 
America, where, in the 
course of a few years, 
the entire history of 
architecture has been 
hastily retraced, each 
change, from Greek to 
Gothic, Gothic to Ro¬ 
manesque, R o m a n - 
esque to Renaissance, 
announcing itself as 
the final one. Yet the 
present practice rests 
on a firmer foundation 
than its predecessors. There is a great, and 
rapidly increasing, number of men, who have 
spent years in strict training in the one direc¬ 
tion of the classic. They have become im¬ 
bued with the spirit of it, as it is interpreted 
today, and they could not, if they wished, 
change the modes of thought they have been 
schooled in. They may, for a time, change 
the outward expression and depart from the 
academic forms, but the principles of plan¬ 
ning and proportion that are essential will 
remain ; and to temporarily cast aside their 
vocabulary by such a departure is not the 
easy thing to them that a change in “style” 
was in the past to architects who, having 
no particular training in any one direction, 
needed only to change their draughtsman 
and revise their libraries to design equally 
well after any new fashion. 
Besides the exhibits already named, 
there are many others that might serve to 
point a moral and that should at least be 
mentioned. There are the designs by ). G. 
H oward for the School of Mines and for the 
Auditorium of the University of California. 
The latter is modeled after the theatres of 
ancient Greece, with a proscenium and seats 
set in a natural amphitheatre. The relation 
of the architecture to its surroundings, to the 
slopes of the ground, to the trees that enclose 
it, is so intimate that it exemplifies the bene¬ 
fits to be derived from the resources of na¬ 
ture. There is also the dormitory by B. W. 
Morris, and the Cathedral in Richmond by 
Joseph H. McGuire that should not be passed 
without notice, nor the group of Carnegie’s 
libraries by Lord & Hewlett. 
The number of designs for private resi¬ 
dences is small, but there are still enough, 
and of a quality to deserve more comment 
than can be given here. The city residences, 
those by Hunt & Hunt, Ernest Flagg, 
Robertson & Potter, and Lord & Hewlett, 
as examples, show the prevalence of the 
OPEN AIR AUDITORIUM FOR THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
Designed by John Galen Hozvard and shown at the Architectural League Exhibition 
i47 
