a thing unprecedented; the engineer cannot hark back to the past for help, even if he would.  The case is different with the architectural designer; he is taught that all of the best songs have been sung, all of the true words spoken.  The Glory that was Greece, and the Grandeur that was Rome, the romantic exuberance of Gothic, and the ordered restraint of Renaissance are so drummed into him during his years of training, and exercise so tyrannical a spell over his imagination that he loses the power of clear and logical thought, 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.  The keen blade of Mr. Sullivan’s mind cut through this contradiction, and in the Prudential building he carried out the idea of a protective casing so successfully that Montgomery Schuyler said of it, “I know of no steel framed building in which the metallic construction is more palpably felt through the envelope of baked clay.”