House and Garden 
philosophy, his point of view, he has em¬ 
bodied in a series of fifty-two co-related essays 
called “ Kindergarten Chats,” contributed 
some years ago to an obscure and now de¬ 
funct architectural journal, and not since 
republished. They are addressed to the 
younger generation of architectural students, 
but of these it is doubtful it they are known 
to any but a small minority, and to the laity 
they are not known at all. Their style is 
redundant and discursive, they abound in 
excesses of language and errors of taste, 
but read in sequence, in a sympathetic and 
not a critical spirit, they are perceived to be 
the vehicle of a perfectly coherent philosophy 
of architecture, positive, reasonable, inspiring. 
He defines architecture as “ the need 
and power to build.” He avers that great 
art is as possible today as ever, but that great 
art demands great men. He conceives of 
the architect as “ a poet who uses not words 
but building materials as a medium of ex¬ 
pression.” Though himself a graduate of 
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 
and later a student at the Ecole Nationale 
des Beaux Arts in Paris, he has nothing 
but contempt for the architectural colleges 
as at present conducted, holding 
that they separate young men 
from contact with the actual 
world at the most recep¬ 
tive and impressionable 
period of their lives, 
alienating their sympathies from that true 
spirit of democracy in which alone our 
national salvation lies, and preoccupying 
their minds with bookish and archeological 
lore which is worse than useless in dealing 
with the problems which confront the modern 
architect. Nature, in his opinion, is the best 
teacher, the one infallible guide. “ We in 
our art are to follow natural processes, natu¬ 
ral rythms, because these processes, these 
rythms, are vital, organic, coherent, logical 
above all book logic, and flow uninterrupt¬ 
edly from cause to effect.” Applying the 
touchstone of his philosophy to present day 
architecture in America, he finds little that is 
good, yet the future looks not unhopeful. 
“We are in that dramatic moment in our 
national life wherein we tremble evenly be¬ 
tween decay and evolution, and our archi¬ 
tecture, with strange fidelity, reflects the 
equipoise.” His final note is one of opti¬ 
mism, of faith in the future of democracy, and 
in a democratic art. 
These essays have the added interest of re¬ 
vealing the workings of an original mind as 
only the literary form can reveal it. Here is 
a man who has “alike conceived and dared,” 
at once a logician and a mystic; 
practical, executive, yet trem¬ 
ulous with sensibility,—a 
poet with a turn for af¬ 
fairs: a man of genius, 
in point of fact. 
An Example of Mr. Sullivan’s Characteristic Ornament 
(Done in TVrought Iron) 
