By shouldering ever upward for air and light, we have too often made of the "downtown" districts cliff-bound canyons--"granite deeps opening into granite deeps." This has been the result of no inherent necessity, but of that competitive greed whose nemesis is ever to miss the very thing it seeks. By intelligent co-operation, backed by legislation, the roads and sidewalks might be made to share the sunlight with the roofs. This could be achieved in two ways: by stepping back the façades in successive stages--giving top lighting, terraces, and wonderful incidental effects of light and shade--or by adjusting the height of the buildings to the width of their interspaces, making rows of tall buildings alternate with rows of low ones, with occasional fully isolated "skyscrapers" giving variety to the sky-line. These and similar problems of city planning have been worked out theoretically with much minuteness of detail, and are known to every student of the science of cities, but very little of it all has been realized in a practical way--certainly not on this side of the water, where individual rights are held so sacred that a property owner may commit any kind of an architectural nuisance so long as he confines it to his own front yard. The strength of IS, the weakness of _should be_, conflicting interests and legislative cowardice are responsible for the highly irrational manner in which our cities have grown great. The search for spiritual light in the midst of materialism finds unconscious symbolization in a way other than this seeking for the sun. It is in the amazing development of artificial illumination. From a purely utilitarian standpoint there is almost nothing that cannot now be accomplished with light, short of making the ether itself luminiferous. The æsthetic development of this field, however, can be said to have scarcely begun. The so recent San Francisco Exposition witnessed the first successful effort of any importance to enhance the effect of architecture by artificial illumination, and to use colored light with a view to its purely pictorial value. Though certain buildings have since been illuminated with excellent effect, it remains true that the corset, chewing-gum, beer and automobile sky signs of our Great White Ways indicate the height to which our imagination has risen in utilizing this Promethean gift in any but necessary ways. Interior lighting, except negatively, has not been dealt with from the standpoint of beauty, but of efficiency; the engineer has preempted this field to the exclusion of the artist.