An able architect, who had given much thought to a plan of a large building of this kind, said to me, in showing me his plan, with a justifiable gratification in it, “It has cost me endless trouble, but it is a satisfaction to feel that you have got a plan with backbone in it.”  That is a very good expression of what is required in planning a complicated building, but few outsiders have any notion of the amount of thought and contrivance which goes to the production of a plan “with backbone;” a plan in which all the subordinate and merely practical departments shall be in the most convenient position in regard to each other, and yet shall all appear as if symmetrically and naturally subordinate to the central and leading feature; and if the public had a little more idea what is the difficulty of producing such a plan, they would perhaps do a little more justice to the labors of the man who contrives the plan, which they think such an easy business; and no doubt it may appear an easy business, because the very characteristic of a really good plan is that it should appear as if it were quite a natural and almost inevitable arrangement.

Just as it is said in regard to literature that easy writing is hard reading, so, in regard to planning, it is the complicated and rabbit warren plans that are the easiest to make, because it is just doing what you please; it is the apparently perfectly simple and natural plan which springs from thought and contrivance.  Then there is the next step of raising the walls on the plan, and giving them architectural expression.  This must not be thought of as an entirely separate problem, for no truly architectural intellect will ever arrange a plan without seeing generally, in his mind’s eye, the superstructure which he intends to rear upon it; but the detailed treatment of this forms a separate branch of the design.  Then comes the third and very important problem—­the covering in of the space.  Next to the plan, this is the most important.  All building is the covering over of a space, and the method of covering it over must be foreseen and provided for from the outset.  It largely influences the arrangement of the plan.  If there were no roofing, you could arrange the walls and carry them up pretty much as you chose, but the roofing of a large space is another matter.  It requires extra strength at certain points, where the weight of the roof is concentrated, and it has to be determined whether you will employ a method of roofing which exercises only a vertical pressure on the walls, like the lid of a box, or one which, like an arch, or a vault, or a dome, is abutting against the walls, and requires counterforts to resist the outward thrust of the roof.  We shall come upon this subject of the influence of the roof on the design of the substructure more in detail later on.  Then, if the plan is convenient and effective, the walls carried up with the architectural expression arising from the placing and grouping of the openings,