main entrance relieves the arrangement from the unpleasant look of an arrangement obviously forced or arbitrary. In the Insurance Exchange the centre is signalized by a balconied projection over the entrance, extending through the architectural basement--the dado, so to speak, which is here the principal division; by a widening of the pier and a concentration of the central openings in the second division, and above by an interruption of the otherwise unbroken arcade that traverses the attic. In the Rookery it is marked by a slight projection, which above is still further projected into tall corbelled pinnacles, and the wall thus bounded is slightly bowed, and its openings diminished and multiplied. In the Phœnix Building this bowing is carried so much further as to result in a corbelled oriel, extending through four stories, and repeated on a smaller scale at each end of the principal front and in the centre of each shorter front. This feature may perhaps be excepted from the general praise the buildings deserve of a strict adherence to their utilitarian purpose. Not that even in Chicago a business man may not have occasion to look out of the window, nor that, if he does, he may not be pardoned for desiring to extend his view beyond the walls and windows of over the way. An oriel-window is not necessarily an incongruity in a “business block,” but the treatment of these oriels is a little fantastic and a little ornate for their destination, and belongs rather to domestic than to commercial architecture, and it is not in any case fortunate. This is the sole exception, however, to be made on this score. The entrances, to be sure, are enriched with a decoration beyond the mere expression of the structure which has elsewhere been the rule, but they do not appear incongruous. The entrance to a building that houses the population of a considerable village must be wide, and if its height were regulated by that of the human figure it would resemble the burrow by which the Esquimau gains access to his snow-hut, and become a manifest absurdity as the portal of a ten-story building. It must be large and conspicuous, and it should be stately, and it were a “very cynical asperity” to deny to the designer the privilege of enhancing by ornament the necessary stateliness of the one feature of his building which must arrest, for a moment at least, the attention of the most [Illustration: ORIEL, PHŒNIX BUILDING. Burnham & Root, Architects.]