It would be foolish to quarrel with the style that was chosen for these exposition buildings, or to deny its propriety. Messrs. McKim, White, Hunt, and Burnham divined that they were fated to serve Renaissance despots and emperors with more than Roman power, and unerringly they chose the proper form for their activities. Whereas Rome had cast its spell over the architects of the early Renaissance because they wished once more to enter into its life, the life of its sages and poets and artists, it attracted the architects of the White City because of its external features--because of its stereotyped canons and rules--because of the relatively small number of choices it offered for a lapse in taste--because of its skill in conspicuous waste, and because of that very noncommittal quality in its massive forms which permitted the basilica to become a church, or the temple to become a modern bank. Of all the Renaissance architects, their impulses and interests were nearest, perhaps, to Robert Adam, whose church at West Wycombe could be turned into a ballroom by the simple act of removing the pews, and permitting the gay walls and decorations to speak for themselves. Behind the white staff façade of the World’s Fair buildings was the steel and glass structure of the engineer: the building spoke one language and the “architecture” another. If the coming of the skyscraper had turned masonry into veneer, here was a mode of architecture which was little but veneer. In their place, at the Fair, these classic buildings were all that could be demanded: Mr. Geoffrey Scott’s defense of the Baroque, in The Architecture of Humanism, applies particularly to its essential manifestations in the Garden and the Theater--and why not in the Fair? Form and function, ornament and design, have no inherent relation, one with the other, when the mood of the architect is merely playful: there is no use in discussing the anatomy of architecture when its only aim is fancy dress. As a mask, as a caprice, the classic orders are as justifiable as the icing on a birthday cake: they divert the eye without damaging the structure that they conceal. Unfortunately, the architecture of the Renaissance has a tendency to imitate the haughty queen who advised the commons to eat cake. Logically, it demands that a Wall Street clerk shall live like a Lombardy prince, that a factory should be subordinated to esthetic contemplation; and since these things are impossible, it permits “mere building” to become illiterate and vulgar below the standards of the most debased vernacular. Correct in proportion, elegant in detail, courteous in relation to each other, the buildings of the World’s Fair were, nevertheless, only the simulacra of a living architecture: they were the concentrated expression of an age which sought to produce “values” rather than goods. In comparison with this new style, the romanticism of the Victorian Age, with its avid respect for the medieval building