ertain, but before attempting the
more genial and rewarding task of tracing, in our life and in our
architecture, those forces and powers which make for righteousness,
for beauty, let us look our failures squarely in the face, and
discover if we can why they are failures.

Confining this examination to the particular matter under discussion,
the neo-feudal architecture of our city streets, we find it to lack
unity, and the reason for this lack of unity dwells in a _divided
consciousness_. The tall office building is the product of many
forces, or perhaps we should say one force, that of necessity; but its
concrete embodiment is the result of two different orders of talent,
that of the structural engineer and of the architectural designer.
These are usually incarnate in two different individuals, working
more or less at cross purposes. It is the business of the engineer
to preoccupy himself solely with ideas of efficiency and economy,
and over his efficient and economical structure the designer smears
a frosting of beauty in the form of architectural style, in the
archaeological sense. This is a foolish practice, and cannot but result
in failure. In the case of a Greek temple or a mediaeval cathedral
structure and style were not twain, but one; the structure determined
the style, the style expressed the structure; but with us so divorced
have the two things become that in a case known to the author, the
structural framework of a great office building was determined and
fabricated and then architects were invited to "submit designs"
for the exterior. This is of course an extreme example and does not
represent the usual practice, but it brings sharply to consciousness
the well known fact that for these buildings we have substantially one
method of construction--that of the vertical strut, and the horizontal
"fill"--while in style they appear as Grecian, Roman, Renaissance,
Gothic, Modern French and what not, according to the whim of the
designer.

[Illustration: PLATE II. THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY]

With the modern tendency toward specialization, the natural outgrowth
of necessity, there is no inherent reason why the bones of a building
should not be devised by one man and its fleshly clothing by another,
so long as they understand one another, and are in ideal agreement,
but there is in general all too little understanding, and a
confusion of ideas and aims. To the average structural engineer the
architectural desig