ought, and never becomes
truly creative. Free of this incubus the engineer has succeeded in
being straightforward and sensible, to say the least; subject to it
the man with a so-called architectural education is too often tortuous
and absurd.

The architect without any training in the essentials of design
produces horrors as a matter of course, for the reason that sin is the
result of ignorance; the architect trained in the false manner of the
current schools becomes a reconstructive archaeologist, handicapped by
conditions with which he can deal only imperfectly, and imperfectly
control. Once in a blue moon a man arises who, with all the advantages
inherent in education, pierces through the past to the present, and
is able to use his brain as the architects of the past used theirs--to
deal simply and directly with his immediate problem.

Such a man is Louis Sullivan, though it must be admitted that not
always has he achieved success. That success was so marked, however,
in his treatment of the problem of the tall building, and exercised
subconsciously such a spell upon the minds even of his critics and
detractors, that it resulted in the emancipation of this type of
building from an absurd and impossible convention--the practice,
common before his time, of piling order upon order, like a house
of cards, or by a succession of strongly marked string courses
emphasizing the horizontal dimension of a vertical edifice, thus
vitiating the finest effect of which such a building is capable.

The problem of the tall building, with which his predecessors dealt
always with trepidation and equivocation, Mr. Sullivan approached
with confidence and joy. "What," he asked himself, "is the chief
characteristic of the tall office building? It is lofty. This
loftiness is to the artist-nature its thrilling aspect. It must be
tall. The force of altitude must be in it. It must be every inch a
proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation that from bottom
to top it is a unit without a dissenting line." The Prudential
(Guaranty) building in Buffalo represents the finest concrete
embodiment of his idea achieved by Mr. Sullivan. It marks his
emancipation from what he calls his "masonry" period, during which
he tried, like so many other architects before and since, to make a
steel-framed structure look as though it were nothing but a masonry
wall perforated with openings--openings too many and too great not
to endanger its stability. T