accomplished designer like Richardson, the deficiency must be set down merely as an unlucky caprice. We have been speaking exclusively of the longer front, since it is manifest that the shorter shares its incompleteness, without the partial compensation of a strong and striking composition, which would carry off much unsuccessful detail, though it is not strong enough to carry off the lack of detail, even with the powerful and simple roof that covers the whole--in itself an admirable and entirely satisfactory piece of work. [Illustration: DWELLING IN PRAIRIE AVENUE. H. H. Richardson, Architect.] Capriciousness may with as much justice be charged upon the only other example of Richardson’s domestic architecture in Chicago, which, even more than the house we have been considering, arrests attention and prevents apathy, but which also seems even more from the purpose of domestic architecture. Upon the longer though less conspicuous front it lacks any central and controlling motive; and on the shorter and more conspicuous, this motive, about which the architect so seldom leaves the beholder in any doubt, is obscured by the addition at one end of a series of openings irrelevant to it, having no counterpart upon the other, and serving to weaken at a critical point the wall, the emphasis of whose massiveness and lateral expanse may be said to be the whole purport of the design, to which everything else is quite ruthlessly sacrificed. For this the building is kept as low as possible, insomuch that the ridge of its rather steep roof only reaches the level of the third story of the adjoining house. For this the openings are diminished in size upon both sides, insomuch that they become mere orifices for the admission of light, and in number upon the long side, insomuch that the designer seems to regard them as annoying interruptions to his essay in the treatment of blank wall. A granite wall over a hundred and fifty feet long, as in the side of this dwelling, almost unbroken, and with its structure clearly exhibited, is sure enough to arrest and strike the beholder; and so is the shorter front, in which the same treatment prevails, with a little more of ungracious concession to practical needs in the more numerous openings; but the beholder can scarcely accept the result as an eligible residence. The treatment is, even more strictly than in the house on the north side, an exposition of masonry. There is here, to be sure, some decorative detail in the filling; of the head of the doorway and in the sill above it, but this detail is so minute, in the case of the egg-and-dart that adorns the sill, so microscopic, that it does not count at all in the general effect. A moulding that does count in the general effect, and that vindicates itself at the expense of the structural features not thus developed, is the main cornice, an emphatic and appropriate profile. In this building there seems to be a