In this inquiry we are taking smaller buildings as more likely to express the general thought of the community than are those exceptional monuments which form landmarks in history. We are compelled, of course, to select the designs of men who are famous, however unknown they may have been when the buildings we select were put into shape: but even the work of such renowned architects as Charles Garnier shows and explains the general trend of thought, especially when seen in their earlier tasks. Thus, the building shown in Plate LXIII, the Club-house of the Cercle de la Librairie, which was completed about 1880, shows the exceptional merit (exceptional in modern cities) of the Paris fronts, together with their comparative lack of significance, at least in detail. The entrance on the corner and the round tower forming a vestibule below and an admirable card-room above, are characteristic of Paris streets. Straight from this doorway, and, therefore, diagonally to both the fronts, goes a passageway into a staircase which forms another round tower-like structure. In the upper story, the large room at the left is a billiard room, that on the right, a salon of reception and entertainment, the “conversation room” of the club. All this is perfectly well expressed in the external design: and that credit--the credit of that sort of realism always restrained and always
[Illustration: CLUB HOUSE, CERCLE DE LA LIBRAIRIE, PARIS.]
[Illustration: BUILDING OF NEW YORK LIFE INSURANCE COMPANY, ST. PAUL, MINNESOTA.]
guided by good taste, is to be given without reserve to the French designers of the long years beginning with 1860. Good taste is visible everywhere, not in an exceptional measure in this building; on the contrary, it is to be thought by a careful student of the street fronts of Paris that there is a relative clumsiness which other and less noticeable buildings have escaped: but there is everywhere the visible presence of thought--of matured study of the problem, and that is a thing so rare in the modern architecture of other lands that we are never brought face to face with the French instances of its active presence without a new thrill of admiration.
In the United States, some of the most thoughtful buildings have been those inspired by the semi-Spanish style of the provinces torn from Mexico in 1848; the missions of California and New Mexico. Inspired by those blessings of a temperate region, a steady warmth, a brilliant sun, they are most assuredly: and yet there is originality, so much as to cause the student almost to forget the origin of their design in such work of the not very famous past. Such buildings are the hotels built in Saint Augustine about 1885--the Ponce de Leon, in which the architecture of old Spain has been studied more carefully, the Alcazar, where the simpler appliances of Western America are more in evidence.