Thus far we have been speaking of the respectable and conservative element in the new departure, of the Extreme Right, so to speak, and generally of works which were seriously designed, and so are entitled to be seriously considered. It is not so pleasant to turn to the Extreme Left, a frantic and vociferous mob, who welcome the “new departure” as the disestablishment of all standards, whether of authority or of reason, and as an emancipation from all restraints, even those of public decency, and who avail themselves of the remission of them from academic restraints to those imposed by their own sense of propriety by promptly showing that they haven’t any. The tame decorum of one phase of the new departure is supplemented by the violent indecorum of another. Sometimes the same designers march now with one wing and now with the other of the divergent host. Messrs. McKim, Mead, & White, for example, have consoled themselves for what now almost seems to have been the enforced sedateness of the houses we have noticed, by a mad orgy of bad architecture in East Fifty-fifth Street. The scene of this excess almost immediately adjoins the dignified and respectable dwelling designed by Mr. Haight, and almost frights that edifice from its propriety, and the designers seem to have been led into it by the baleful example of older persons who ought to have known better, and who committed the maddest freaks in the artistic quarter of the London suburb of Chelsea while in a condition of total irresponsibility alike to any convictions and to any conventions of architectural art. The present indecorum has been committed in the design of two dwellings which consist of a ferociously rugged basement and parapeted cornice in granite, with two or three irregularly disposed tin dormers emerging above, and with a flat and shallow screen of brick wall inserted between them, as between the upper and the nether millstone, and having its thinness emphasized at all the angles by shallow incisions forming a series of brick weather-strips, as it were, a square reticulation of which traverses the plane surfaces also. It is quite conceivable that rugged simplicity may have suggested itself to a designer as a desirable character for a city house, but it seems scarcely possible that squareness and flatness and thinness should have appeared desirable, and quite impossible that beauty should have seemed to dwell in a building the top and bottom of which were characterized by rugged simplicity, and the middle by squareness and flatness and thinness. The details, whether in brick or granite or tin, are as preposterous as the conception of a building with its parts thus swearing at each other. The round-headed doorway is surmounted with the imitation in granite of a metal flap secured to the rest of the block from which it is cut by similitudes in granite of iron bolt-heads. In the basement respectable blocks of granite are subjected to the