"The usual process is very different. As soon as an architect decides to design a building. he first chooses a certain type of architecture; then he saturates his mind with designs that have already been done along that line. Out of the mass of suggestions that he receives he is lucky if he evolves something more or less new. Often he merely re-echoes or he actually reproduces something that he is fond of or that has happened to catch his fancy. The chances are that Mullgardt will go down into history for his daring here. It isn't often that a man takes a big biological conception and works it out in architecture with such picturesqueness. It's never intrusive and yet it's there, plain enough for anyone to see who looks close. It represented a magnificent opportunity and Mullgardt was big enough to get away with it." Then the architect told me the human story behind all this beauty as we wandered back into the center of the court and stood there. "Notice the incline," he said, "from the entrances? It reminds me that Mullgardt had originally intended to have the floor of the court like a sunken garden. And remember that the name expresses the original idea. The Court of Abundance, that it is wrongly called, would have applied much better to the Court of Four Seasons. Well, after the notion came to Mullgardt to suggest in the court the development of man from the life of the sea to his present state as a thinking being, less physical than spiritual, he planned to build a court that should be the center of the pageants for the Exposition, where art should have its living representation in the form of processions and of plays, some of them written for the purpose. In the sunken garden there should be plenty of room for the actors to move about, using it as a stage. There should also be room for the sculptured caldron that was to be an architectural feature and that later developed into Aitken's massive evolutionary fountain. For the base of the tower there was designed a gorgeous semi-circular staircase, which was to serve as an entrance for the actors. Around the court there was to run an ornamental balcony, covered with a great canopy in red and gold, making an effect of Oriental magnificence. The people were to watch the spectacles from the balcony and from between the arches. In addition to the main tower, very like the present tower, but to contain a great pipe organ, there were to be two others, in the corner at right angles, to be called echo towers. The music of the organ was to be transmitted to the echo towers by wires and the echoes were to serve as a sort of accompaniment. The effect, if it had been managed right, would have been stunning." "Mullgardt has kept the spirit of the pageant in his court," I said. "Just as it is it would make an ideal setting, particularly for pageant with music, opera, for example."