House and Garden 
solved the difficult problem of 
the show window very cleverly. 
By placing the glass well to 
the front of the flanking piers 
he has rendered to the Ciesar 
of Trade the things which are 
that Cjesar’s; but, mindful of 
the claims of art, he has re¬ 
cessed it again at the transom 
level, so as to leave revealed 
beautifully ornamented terra¬ 
cotta soffits and jambs, to¬ 
gether with the caps and the 
upper portions of the col¬ 
umns, which, visible through 
the show window, rise boldly 
through a shallow root of 
glass. He attains by these 
means an effect of solidity 
usually arrived at by deeply 
recessing the windows and re¬ 
ducing the glass area in the 
place of all places where the 
need for space and light is 
most imperative. 
Of the Prudential Building, 
Mr. Montgomery Schuyler 
says: “1 know of no steel 
framed building in which 
metallic construction is more 
palpably felt through the en¬ 
velope of baked clay.” In 
it, and in the Wainwright 
Building in St. Louis, built at about the 
same time and conceived in the same gen¬ 
eral spirit, Mr. Sullivan may be said to 
have “found himself,” for in them he left 
behind what he has called his “masonry 
period;” that is to say, he abandoned the 
mistaken attempt to make buildings of skele¬ 
ton construction, sustaining a protective cov¬ 
ering of stone or fire-clay, appear to be solely 
of masonry of a mass sufficient to be self- 
sustaining. This was a great step in advance, 
for every gain in expressiveness is a gain also 
in art. In the Schlesinger & Mayer store, 
his latest essay, he has carried his logic 
to extreme lengths. It is a crystal palace of 
glass and masonry, and iron overwrought 
with ornament-like flowers and frost. Here 
indeed is a new architectural art, superior to 
1 'Art Nouveau of Europe in that it is born 
of reason and not of whim. 
THE ST. NICHOLAS HOTEL, ST. LOUIS 
The St. Nicholas Hotel, in St. Louis, is a 
building of very different aspect, because 
the governing conditions were different, but 
the same principle, that form follows func¬ 
tion, has determined the disposition of its 
parts, and each part so clearly expresses its 
function that the function can be read 
through the part. The three divisions of 
the design, horizontallv, show three distinct 
changes of plan. The first two storeys, de¬ 
voted to the general uses of the hotel, are 
distinguished on the exterior from the bed¬ 
rooms above by a difference of treatment 
and a difference of material, stone being 
used instead of brick and terra-cotta. The 
bay windows which form the feature of the 
second or intermediate division give pleasant¬ 
ness of aspect to the important private 
rooms, and distinguish them from the infe¬ 
rior rooms and bath rooms. The third di- 
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