have their counterparts in the East, only there they are not referred to the geography, but to the illiteracy or insensibility of the designer, and this classification seems simpler, and, upon the whole, more satisfactory. Minneapolis has a compensation for its newness in the fact that when its public buildings came to be projected, the fashion of such edifices as these had passed away. If the work of Mr. Richardson has been much misunderstood, as I tried to point out in speaking of the domestic architecture of Chicago, if its accidents have been mistaken by admiring disciples for its essence, even if its essential and admirable qualities do not always suffice to make it available as a model, it is necessary only to consider such buildings as have just been mentioned to perceive how beneficial, upon the whole, his influence has been, for it has at least sufficed to make such buildings impossible--impossible, at least, to be done by architects who have any pretensions to be “in the movement”--and it is hard to conceive that they can be succeeded by anything so bad. The City Hall of Minneapolis, for instance, was projected but a few years later than its government building, but in the interval Richardson’s influence had been at work. That influence is betrayed both in the accepted design now in course of execution and in the other competitive designs, and it has resulted in a specific resemblance to the public building at Pittsburgh, which its author professed his hope to make “a dignified pile of rocks.” The variations which the authors of the Minneapolis City Hall have introduced in the scheme they have reproduced in its general massing, and in its most conspicuous features are not all improvements. By the introduction of grouped openings into its solid shaft the tower of Pittsburgh is shorn of much of its power; nor can the substitution be commended in its upper stage of a modification of the motive employed by Richardson in Trinity, Boston, and derived by him from Salamanca, for the simpler treatment used in the prototype of this building as the culminating feature of a stark and lofty tower. The far greater elaboration of the corner pavilions of the principal fronts, also, though in part justified by the greater tractability of the material here employed, tends rather to confusion than to enrichment. On the other hand, the more subdued treatment of the curtain wall between the tower and the pavilions gives greater value and detachment to both, and is thus an advance upon the prototype; and the central gable of the subordinate front is distinctly more successful than the corresponding feature of Pittsburgh, the archway, withdrawn between two protecting towers, of which the suggestion comes from mediæval military architecture. Observe, however, that the derivation of the general scheme of the building and of its chief features from an earlier work is by no means an impeachment of the