Romanticism met its great defeat in the office-building. By the use of the passenger elevator, first designed for an exhibition-tower adjacent to the Crystal Palace in 1853, it had become possible to raise the height of buildings to seven stories: the desire for ground-rents presently increased the height to ten. Beyond this, mere masonry could not go without thickening the supporting piers to such an extent that on a twenty-foot lot more than a quarter of the width would be lost on the lower floors. Richardson’s Marshall Field Building in Chicago was seven stories high; and that was about as far as solid stone or brick could climb without becoming undignified and futile by its bulk. The possibilities of masonry and the possibilities of commercial gain through ground-rents were at loggerheads, and by 1888 masonry was defeated. Richardson, fortunately, did not live to see the undermining of the tradition he had founded and almost established. Within a decade of his death, however, only the empty forms of architecture remained, for the steel-cage of the engineer had become the new structural reality. By 1890 the ground-landlord had discovered, in the language of the pioneer’s favorite game, that “the roof’s the limit.” If that was so, why limit the roof? With this canny perception the skyscraper sprang into being. During this Gilded Age the standard of the best building had risen almost as high as it had been in America in any earlier period; but the mass of good building had relatively decreased; and the domestic dwellings in both city and country lost those final touches of craftsmanship that had lingered, here and there, up to the Civil War. In the awkward country villas that began to fill the still-remote suburbs of the larger cities, all sense of style and proportion were lost: the plan was marked by meaningless irregularities; a dingy, muddy color spread over the wooden façades. There exists a huge and beautifully printed volume, of which, I believe, there are not more than a hundred copies, on the villas of Newport in 1876: the compiler thereof sought to satisfy the vanity of the original owners and the curiosity of a later generation; yet mid all these examples of the “novel” and the “unique,” there is not a single mansion that would satisfy any conceivable line of descendants.