the pilasters through two more stories would have made them spindle quite intolerably, but in any case they are rather superfluous and impertinent, and it would have decorated the fronts to omit them. The accentuation of vertical lines by extraneous features is not precisely what is needed in a twelve-story building of these dimensions. In these points, however, there is no departure from the spirit of commercial architecture. That occurs here, not in detail, but in the general scheme that gives the building its picturesqueness of outline. The corbelled turret at the angle makes more eligible the rooms its openings light, but the steep gabled roofs which this turret unites and dominates plainly enough fail to utilize to the utmost the spaces they enclose, and so far violate the conditions of commercial architecture. It seems ungracious to find fault with them on that account, they are so successfully studied in mass and in detail, and the group they make with the turret is so spirited and effective; but nevertheless they evidently do not belong to an office building, and, to borrow the expression of a Federal judge upon a famous occasion, their very picturesqueness is aliunde. We have been speaking, of course, of the better commercial edifices, and it is by no means to be inferred that Chicago does not contain “elevator buildings” as disunited and absurd and restless as those of any other [Illustration: CORNER OF INSURANCE EXCHANGE. Burnham & Root, Architects.] American town. About these select few, also, there is nothing especially characteristic. They might be in New York, or Boston, or Philadelphia, for any local color that they exhibit. It is otherwise with the commercial buildings designed by Messrs. Burnham & Root. With the striking exception of Mr. Richardson’s Field Building, the names of these designers connote what there is of characteristically Chicagoan in the architecture of the business streets, so that, after all, the individuality is not local, but personal. The untimely and deplorable death of John Wellborn Root makes it proper to say that the individuality was mainly his. It consists largely in a clearer perception than one finds elsewhere of the limitations and conditions of commercial architecture, or in a more austere and self-denying acting upon that perception. This is the quality that such towering structures as the Insurance Exchange, the Phœnix Building, and “The Rookery” have in common, and that clearly distinguishes them from the mass of commercial palaces in Chicago or elsewhere. There is no sacrifice to picturesqueness of the utilitarian purpose in their general form, as in the composition of the Owings Building, and no denial of it in detail, as in the irrelevant arcade of the Studebaker Building. Their flat roofs are not tormented into protuberances in order to animate their sky-lines, and those of them that are built around an interior court are frankly hypæthral. Nor is there in any of them any incongruous