In point of fact, it is to a Minneapolitan architect that we owe the first project of an office building which bears the same relation to the ordinary elevator building of our cities that this bears to the five or six story edifice that the topographical and commercial conditions would indicate as suited to the actual needs of Minneapolis. The project remains on paper, though it is some years since it startled the architects of the country, and an interesting project it is in an architectural sense; but it is none the less representative of the local genius than if it had been executed. Evidently there could be no better places than the twin cities to study the development of Western architecture, or rather to ascertain whether there is any such thing. There seems to be among the Western lay populations a faith that there is, which is none the less firm for being a trifle vague, and this faith is shared by some of the practitioners of architecture in the West. In the inscrutable workings of our official architecture, one of these gentlemen came to be appointed a few years ago the supervising architect of the Treasury. It is a measure of the extent and intelligence of the national interest in the art that this functionary, with little more than the official status of a clerk, and with no guarantee that he has any professional status whatever, has little less than the ædiliary powers of an Augustus. To have found a city of brick and to have left a city of marble is a boast that more than one supervising architect could have paraphrased in declaring that he found the government architecture Renaissance and he left it Gothic, or that he found it Gothic and he left it nondescript, while each successive incumbent could have declared that he found it and left it without architectural traditions and without architectural restraints. The ambition of the architect immediately in question was not sectarian so much as sectional. To him it seemed that a bureau had too many traditions which to other students seemed to have none at all. Not personally addicted to swearing to the words of any master, he considered that the influence of authority in his office was much too strong. He was himself from the remote West, and in an interview setting forth his hopes and purposes, shortly after he came into the office from which he was shortly to go out, he explained that “Eastern” conventionalities had had altogether too much sway in the previous conduct of the office, and that he meant to embody “Western ideas” in the public buildings. In the brief interval before his retirement he designed many monuments from which one should be able to derive some notion of Western architectural ideas, and one of these is the government building in Minneapolis. This edifice is mainly remarkable for the multitude of ill-assorted and unadjusted features which it exhibits, especially for the “grand choice” of pediments which its