equalization of temperatures—­and might easily result in buildings of an entirely novel type, the approach to which is seen in the “pier and grill” style of exterior.  This is being adopted not only for commercial buildings, but for others of widely different function, on account of its manifest advantages.  Cass Gilbert’s admirable studio apartment at 200 West Fifty-Seventh Street, New York, is a building of this type.

In this seeking for sunlight in our cities, we will come to live on the roofs more and more—­in summer in the free air, in winter under variformed shelters of glass.  This tendency is already manifesting itself in those newest hotels whose roofs are gardens, convertible into skating ponds, with glazed belvideres for eating in all weathers.  Nothing but ignorance and inanition stand in the way of utilization of waste roof spaces.  People have lived on the roofs in the past, often enough, and will again.

[Illustration:  PLATE X. RODIN STUDIOS, 200 WEST 57TH STREET, NEW YORK]

By shouldering ever upward for air and light, we have too often made of the “downtown” districts cliff-bound canyons—­“granite deeps opening into granite deeps.”  This has been the result of no inherent necessity, but of that competitive greed whose nemesis is ever to miss the very thing it seeks.  By intelligent co-operation, backed by legislation, the roads and sidewalks might be made to share the sunlight with the roofs.

This could be achieved in two ways:  by stepping back the facades in successive stages—­giving top lighting, terraces, and wonderful incidental effects of light and shade—­or by adjusting the height of the buildings to the width of their interspaces, making rows of tall buildings alternate with rows of low ones, with occasional fully isolated “skyscrapers” giving variety to the sky-line.

These and similar problems of city planning have been worked out theoretically with much minuteness of detail, and are known to every student of the science of cities, but very little of it all has been realized in a practical way—­certainly not on this side of the water, where individual rights are held so sacred that a property owner may commit any kind of an architectural nuisance so long as he confines it to his own front yard.  The strength of IS, the weakness of should be, conflicting interests and legislative cowardice are responsible for the highly irrational manner in which our cities have grown great.

The search for spiritual light in the midst of materialism finds unconscious symbolization in a way other than this seeking for the sun.  It is in the amazing development of artificial illumination.  From a purely utilitarian standpoint there is almost nothing that cannot now be accomplished with light, short of making the ether itself luminiferous.  The aesthetic development of this field, however, can be said to have scarcely begun.  The so recent San Francisco Exposition witnessed the first successful