Promise and Danger in Methods of Design 
tecture, and made it necessary for three 
designers to cooperate in producing a work 
of art which once might have been created 
by an individual. And while the necessity 
seems to be growing lor the individual to 
concentrate if he would attain the thorough 
mastery of any one subject without which 
an artist becomes a mere dilettante, at the 
same time the field for artistic effort is 
widening, man is putting more and more of 
nature under his control, and the beauty of 
the world is becoming more and more com¬ 
pletely what man’s deliberate actions make it. 
If we are to meet the problems of the 
future, there must be men of high artistic 
capacity and training whose highest useful¬ 
ness will center upon other portions of this 
great field than those which primarily and 
chiefly concern most who now bear the name 
of architect. 
The dwelling is at the very heart of human 
civilization, and in the old sense in which 
architecture is the parent of all the arts, it 
might not be amiss to call the work of these 
other constructive artists by the all-embrac¬ 
ing name of architecture. But in doing so 
one should not be misled by the magic of 
the name into forgetting that in the result it 
is individual fitness to deal with the problem 
in hand that really tells, and that the man 
who has earnestly concentrated himself upon 
the solution of a certain class of problems, 
such as those of modeling sculpture, or 
those of laying out parks, or those of design¬ 
ing urban palaces, is apt to find himself more 
and more approaching the position of a taste¬ 
ful but superficial dilettante as he attempts 
to deal with problems further and further 
from his main center of interest and training. 
Since, then, in all except the simplest prob¬ 
lems of constructional art there must be co¬ 
operation between men of different knowledge, 
training and point of view, it is worth while 
to consider some of the methods by which 
this cooperation is brought about and certain 
tendencies which are now apparent. 
On the one hand we find permanent co¬ 
operative arrangements, very well organized, 
in those firms where the partners and their 
chief assistants actually cooperate on all com¬ 
plex problems. They are able not only to 
supplement each other’s deficiencies, but to 
do so with a cordial good will and absence 
of jealousy. By a judicious combination of 
individuals admirable results are to be thus 
secured, and if the range of talent and ex¬ 
perience were to become great enough, the 
range of problems which could be success¬ 
fully dealt with would be unlimited. This 
might be called the department store ideal 
of constructive design, and certainly much 
is to be said for it. But ordinarily at the 
present day a firm or company, while having 
a greater latitude of successful practice than 
an individual designer, is still a good deal 
limited in the class of problems with which 
it can deal sympathetically and masterfully. 
Another method of cooperation is fre¬ 
quently used to supplement the foregoing, and 
it is a method which seems to me freer from 
the danger of commercialism and normally 
capable of securing better artistic results. It 
is the special temporary cooperation of several 
men chosen with a view to their peculiar fit¬ 
ness for dealing with a given problem. Such 
temporary partnerships are those between 
architects and landscape architects, architects 
and mural painters, sculptors and land¬ 
scape architects. Except where a narrow 
vanity or the commercial spirit, grasping for 
commissions, comes into play ; wherever, in 
other words, sincere and broad artists come 
together, such cooperation is apt to be cordial 
and its results excellent. It often happens 
that a client is unable to select such a com¬ 
bination judiciously, but if he selects one 
member of it and gets the advice of that 
member about the man or men with whose 
cooperation he can best deal with the problem 
in hand, the combination is far more likely 
to be well matched for the work than a per¬ 
manent combination that stands ready with¬ 
out change or outside help to do anything 
that offers. 
Moreover there is a development which 
would be almost certain to result from the 
application of sound principles of business 
organization to the department store type 
of designing company, a development of 
which there are too many suggestions already, 
and one which cannot be contemplated with¬ 
out anxiety by those who look upon art in 
our civilization as anything more than a 
superficial veneer. I mean the separate em¬ 
bodiment of the artistic impulse and the 
practical knowledge; the resolution of the 
