differences, but by canceling them. Its standards do not inhere in the building, but are laid on outside of it. When the purpose of the structure happens to conform to the style, the result may be admirable in every way. When it does not happen to conform the result is tedious and banal; and, to tell the truth, a great deal of the architecture of the early republic is tedious and banal. IV One further effect of the classic mode has still to be noted: the introduction of formal city design, by the French engineer, Major L’Enfant, in the laying out of Washington. Stirred by the memory of the grand design of Paris under Louis XIV, with its radiating avenues that cut through the city in the way that riding lanes cut through the hunting forest, L’Enfant sought to superimpose a dignified pattern upon the rectangular plan provided by the commissioners of Washington. By putting the major public buildings in key positions, by providing for a proper physical relation between the various departments of the government, by planning spacious avenues of approach, culminating in squares, triangles, and round-points, Major L’Enfant gave great dignity to the new capital city, and even though in the years that followed his plan was often ignored and overridden, it still maintained a monumental framework for the administrative buildings of the American State. Unfortunately, if Washington has the coherence of a formal plan, it also has its abstractness: contrived to set off and serve the buildings of the government, it exercised no control over domestic building, over business, over the manifold economic functions of the developing city. The framework was excellent, if cities could live by government alone. By laying too much stress on formal order, the exponents of classic taste paved the way for the all too formal order of the gridiron plan, and since the gridiron development was suited to hasty commercial exploitation, while the mode of Washington was not, it was in this mold that the architecture of the nineteenth century was cast. Within a short while after its introduction in New York in 1811 the effects of the rectangular streets and rectangular lots became evident; whereas the prints of New York before 1825 show a constant variety in the elevation and layout of houses, those after this date resemble more and more standardized boxes. Long monotonous streets that terminated nowhere, filled by rows of monotonous houses--this was the net contribution of the formal plan. Classical taste was not responsible for these enormities--but on the whole it did nothing to check them, and since the thrifty merchants of New York could not understand L’Enfant’s plan for Washington, they seized upon that part of it which was intelligible: its regularity, its appearance of order.