The enormous importance of ceramics in its relation to architecture thus becomes apparent.  They minister to an architectural need instead of gratifying an architectural whim.  Ours is a period of Incrusted architecture—­one which demands the encasement, rather than the exposure of structure, and therefore logically admits of the enrichment of surfaces by means of “veneers” of materials more precious and beautiful than those employed in the structure, which becomes, as it were, the canvas of the picture, and not the picture itself.  For these purposes there are no materials more apt, more adaptable, more enduring, richer in potentialities of beauty than the products of ceramic art.  They are easily and inexpensively produced of any desired shape, color, texture; their hard, dense surface resists the action of the elements, is not easily soiled, and is readily cleaned; being fashioned by fire they are fire resistant.

So much then for the practical demands, in modern architecture, met by the products of ceramic art.  The aesthetic demand is not less admirably met—­or rather might be.

When, in the sixteenth century, the Renaissance spread from south to north, color was practically eliminated from architecture.  The Egyptians had had it, hot and bright as the sun on the desert; we know that the Greeks made their Parian marble glow in rainbow tints; Moorish architecture was nothing if not colorful, and the Venice Ruskin loved was fairly iridescent—­a thing of fire-opal and pearl.  In Italian Renaissance architecture up to its latest phase, the color element was always present; but it was snuffed out under the leaden colored northern skies.  Paris is grey, London is brown, New York is white, and Chicago the color of cinders.  We have only to compare them to yellow Rome, red Siena, and pearl-tinted Venice, to realize how much we have lost in the elimination of color from architecture.  We are coming to realize it.  Color played an important part in the Pan-American Exposition, and again in the San Francisco Exposition, where, wedded to light, it became the dominant note of the whole architectural concert.  Now these great expositions in which the architects and artists are given a free hand, are in the nature of preliminary studies in which these functionaries sketch in transitory form the things they desire to do in more permanent form.  They are forecasts of the future, a future which in certain quarters is already beginning to realize itself.  It is therefore probable that architectural art will become increasingly colorful.

The author remembers the day and the hour when this became his personal conviction—­his personal desire.  It happened years ago in the Albright Gallery in Buffalo—­a building then newly completed, of a severely classic type.  In the central hall was a single doorway, whose white marble architrave had been stained with different colored pigments by Francis Bacon; after the manner of the