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Show ings and hangings are easily made to conform. But chairs and tables and informal articles of use are still at large in most cases, although designed in feeling with the building, There are no decorations, nor is there place for them as such. no place on the walls. The easel picture has It is regarded as music might be, suited to a mood, and provided for in a recess of the wall if desired, where a door like the cover of a portfolio might be drop- ped and the particular thing desired studied for a time: left exposed for days, perhaps, to give place to another, or entirely put away by simply closing the wooden portfolio. Great pic- tures should have their gallery, Oratorio is not performed in a drawing-room. The piano, where possible, should and does disappear in the structure, its key-board or open-work or tracery necessary for sound its only visible feature. managed in the architecture of the building. The dining table and chairs are easily So far this development has progressed. Alternate extremes of heat and cold, of sun and storm, have also to be considered. The frost goes four feet into the ground in winter: almost tropical heat in summer: the sun beats fiercely on the roof with an umbrageous architecture is almost a necessity, both to shade the building from the sun and protect the walls from freezing and thawing moisture, the most rapidly destructive to buildings of all natural causes. The overhanging eaves, how- ever, leave the house in winter without necessary sun, and this is overcome by the way in which the window groups in certain rooms and exposures are pushed out to the gutter line. The gently sloping roofs grateful to the prairie do not leave large air spaces above the rooms: and so the chimney has grown in dimensions and importance, and in hot weather ventilates at the high parts the circulating-air spaces beneath the roofs, fresh air entering beneath the eaves through openings easily closed in winter. Conductor pipes, disfiguring down-spouts, particularly where eaves overhang, in this climate freeze and become useless in winter, or burst with results disastrous to the walls; so concrete rain basins are built in the ground beneath the angles of the eaves, and the water drops through open spouts into their concave surfaces, to be conducted to the cistern by underground drain tiles. NOTHER modern opportunity is afforded by our effective system of hot water heating. By this means the forms of buildings may be more completely articulated, with light and air on several sides. By keeping the ceilings low, the walls may be opened with series of windows to the outer air, the flowers.and trees, the prospects, and one may live as comfortably as formerly, less shut in. Many of the structures carry this principle of articulation of various arts to the point where each has its own individuality completely recognized in plan. The dining-room and kitchen and sleeping-rooms thus be- come in themselves small buildings, and are grouped together as a whole, as in the Coonley house, It is also possible to spread the buildings, which once in our climate of extremes were a compact box cut into compartments, into a more organic expression, making a house in a garden or in the country the delightful thing in relation to either or both that imagin- ation would have it. |
