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Show Gridley, Millard, Tomek, Coonley and Westcott houses, the Hillside Home School and the Pettit Memorial Chapel are typical. and Dana houses are typical, Of the second type, the Bradley, Hickox, Davenport Of the third, Atelier for Richard Bock, Unity Church, the con- crete house of the Ladies' Home Journal, and other designs in process of execution, The Larkin Building is a simple, dignified utterance of a plain, utilitarian type, with sheer brick walls and simple stone copings. The studio is merely an early experiment in """"articulation."""" A type of structure especially suited to the prairie will be found in the Coonley, Thomas, Heurtley, Tomek and Robie houses, which are virtually one floor arrangements, raised a low story height above the level of the ground. Sleeping-rooms are added where necessary in another story. There is no excavation for this type except for heating purposes. The ground floor provides all necessary room of this nature, and billiard-rooms, or play-rooms for the children, This plan raises the living-rooms well off the ground, which is often damp, avoids the ordi- nary damp basement, which, if made a feature of the house, sets it so high above the sur- face, if it is to be made dry, that, in proportion to the ordinary building operation, it rises like a menace to the peace of the prairie. It is of course necessary that mural decoration and sculpture in these structures should again take their places as architectural developments conceived to conform to their fabric. T 0 thus make of a dwelling place a complete work of art, in itself as expressive and beautiful and more intimately related to life than anything of detached sculpture or painting, lending itself freely and suitably to the individual needs of the dwellers, an harmonious entity, fitting in color, pattern and nature the utilities, and in itself really an expression of them in character ,--this is the modern American opportunity. Once founded, this will become a tradition, a vast step in advance of the day when a dwelling was an arrangement of separate rooms, mere chambers to contain aggregations of furniture, the utility comforts not present. An organic entity this, as contrasted with that aggregation: surely a higher ideal of unity, a higher and more intimate working out of the expression of one's life in one's environment. of a collection of smaller ones. One thing instead of many things; a great thing instead T HE drawings, by means of which these buildings are presented here, have been made expressly for this work from colored drawings which were made from time to time as the projects were presented for solution. Th ey merely aim to render the compo- sition in outline and form, and suggest the sentiment of the environment. They are in no sense attempts to treat the subject pictorially, and in some cases fail to convey the idea of the actual building. A cer t ain quality of familiar homelikeness is thus sacrificed in these presentments to a graceful decorative rendering of an idea of an arrangement suggesting, in the originals, a color scheme. Their debt to Japanese ideals, these renderings themselves sufficiently acknowledge. |