+OTHER BUILDINGS.+ American architects have generally been less successful in public, administrative, and ecclesiastical architecture than in commercial and domestic work. The preference for small parish churches, treated as audience-rooms rather than as places of worship, has interfered with the development of noble types of church-buildings. Yet there are signs of improvement; and the new +Cathedral+ of +St. John the Divine+ at New York, in a modified Romanesque style, promises to be a worthy and monumental building. In semi-public architecture, such as hotels, theatres, clubs, and libraries, there are many notable examples of successful design. The +Ponce de Leon Hotel+ at St. Augustine, a sumptuous and imposing pile in a free version of the Spanish Plateresco; the Auditorium Theatre at Chicago, the Madison Square Garden and the Casino at New York, may be cited as excellent in general conception and well carried out in detail, externally and internally. The Century and Metropolitan Clubs at New York, the +Boston Public Library+, the Carnegie Library at Pittsburgh, the +Congressional Library+ at Washington, and the recently completed Minnesota +State Capitol+ at St. Paul, exemplify in varying degrees of excellence the increasing capacity of American architects for monumental design. This was further shown in the buildings of the +Columbian Exposition+ at Chicago in 1893. These, in spite of many faults of detail, constituted an aggregate of architectural splendor such as had never before been seen or been possible on this side the Atlantic. They further brought architecture into closer union with the allied arts and formed an object lesson in the value of appropriate landscape gardening as a setting to monumental structures. It should be said, in conclusion, that with the advances of recent years in artistic design in the United States there has been at least as great improvement in scientific construction. The sham and flimsiness of the Civil War period are passing away, and solid and durable building is becoming more general throughout the country, but especially in the Northeast and in some of the great Western cities, notably in Chicago. In this onward movement the Federal buildings--post-offices, custom-houses, and other governmental edifices--have not, till lately, taken high rank. Although solidly and carefully constructed, those built during the period 1875-1895 were generally inferior to the best work produced by private enterprise, or by State and municipal governments. This was in large part due to enactments devolving upon the supervising architect at Washington the planning of all Federal buildings, as well as a burden of supervisory and clerical duties incompatible with the highest artistic results. Since 1898, however, a more enlightened policy has prevailed, and a number of notable designs for Federal buildings have been secured by carefully-conducted competitions. CHAPTER XXVIII. ORIENTAL ARCHITECTURE.