t beyond this passenger concourse, where the
elevators and stairways descend to the tracks, necessity demanded the
construction of a great enclosure, supported only on slender columns
and far-flung trusses roofed with glass. Now latticed columns, steel
trusses, and wire glass are inventions of the modern world too useful
to be dispensed with. Rome could not help the architect here. The mode
to which he was inexorably self-committed in the rest of the building
demanded massive masonry, cornices, mouldings; a tribute to Caesar
which could be paid everywhere but in this place. The architect's
problem then became to reconcile two diametrically different systems.
But between the west wall of the ancient Roman baths and the modern
skeleton construction of the roof of the human greenhouse there is
no attempt at fusion. The slender latticed columns cut unpleasantly
through the granite cornices and mouldings; the first century A.D. and
the twentieth are here in incongruous juxtaposition--a little thing,
easily overlooked, yet how revealing! How reassuring of the fact "God
is not mocked!"

The New York Central terminal speaks to the eye in a modern tongue,
with however French an accent. Its facade suggests a portal, reminding
the beholder that a railway station is in a very literal sense a city
gate placed just as appropriately in the center of the municipality as
in ancient times it was placed in the circuit of the outer walls.

Neither edifice will stand the acid test of Mr. Sullivan's formula,
that a building is an organism and should follow the law of organisms,
which decrees that the form must everywhere follow and express the
function, the function determining and creating its appropriate form.
Here are two eminent examples of "arranged" architecture. Before
organic architecture can come into being our inchoate national life
must itself become organic. Arranged architecture, of the sort we
see everywhere, despite its falsity, is a true expression of the
conditions which gave it birth.

[Illustration: PLATE V. THE NEW YORK CENTRAL TERMINAL]

The grandeur of Rome, the splendour of Paris--what just and adequate
expression do they give of modern American life? Then shall we find in
our great hotels, say, such expression? Truly they represent, in the
phrase of Henry James, "a realized ideal" and a study of them should
reveal that ideal. From such a study we can only conclude that it
is life without effort or responsibility,