New materials and methods of construction, increased attention to detail, a growing sense of monumental requirements, even the development of the elevator as a substitute for the grand staircase, are leaving their mark on the planning, the proportions, and the artistic composition of American buildings, irrespective of the styles used. The art is with us in a state of transition, and open to criticism in many respects; but it appears to be full of life and promise for the future. [Illustration: FIG. 224.--“TIMES” BUILDING, NEW YORK.] +COMMERCIAL BUILDINGS.+ This class of edifices has in our great cities developed wholly new types, which have taken shape under four imperative influences. These are the demand for fire-proof construction, the demand for well-lighted offices, the introduction of elevators, and the concentration of business into limited areas, within which land has become inordinately costly. These causes have led to the erection of buildings of excessive height (Fig. 224); the more recent among them constructed with a framework of iron or steel columns and beams, the visible walls being a mere filling-in. To render a building of twenty stories attractive to the eye, especially when built on an irregular site, is a difficult problem, of which a wholly satisfactory solution has yet to be found. There have been, however, some notable achievements in this line, in most of which the principle has been clearly recognized that a lofty building should have a well-marked basement or pedestal and a somewhat ornate crowning portion or capital, the intervening stories serving as a die or shaft and being treated with comparative simplicity. The difficulties of scale and of handling one hundred and fifty to three hundred windows of uniform style have been surmounted with conspicuous skill (+American Surety Building+ and Broadway Chambers, New York; Ames Building, Boston; Carnegie Building, Pittsburgh; Union Trust, St. Louis). In some cases, especially in Chicago and the Middle West, the metallic framework is suggested by slender piers between the windows, rising uninterrupted from the basement to the top story. In others, especially in New York and the East, the walls are treated as in ordinary masonry buildings. The Chicago school is marked by a more utilitarian and unconventional treatment, with results which are often extremely bold and effective, but rarely as pleasing to the eye as those attained by the more conservative Eastern school. In the details of American office-buildings every variety of style is to be met with; but the Romanesque and the Renaissance, freely modified, predominate. The tendency towards two or three well-marked types in the external composition of these buildings, as above suggested, promises, however, the evolution of a style in which the historic origin of the details will be a secondary matter. Certain Chicago architects have developed an original treatment of architectural forms by exaggerating some of the