slow-burning construction, as it is called, in which the floors are formed of thick planks laid flat and close without air-spaces between, and are supported on solid wooden beams a square foot or so in section—is coining into favor in classes of large buildings, and has even been used in private dwellings. This mode of construction, necessitating the division of ceilings into compartments, is necessarily productive of changes in the internal finish of the structures in which it is employed.
" Free will be evident from what has been said, the present " Free Classic " is very free indeed. It varies from the cinque cenla of the Italians—that beautiful free style which added delicate detail of classical origin to a round-arched style which in its main features, since the orders were absent, is Romanesque—to the stiff late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth century style of England and the "old colonial" of con temporary America on the one hand, and on the other to the half-timbered manner, full of queer gables and oriels, that has little of Gothic except the name. Two other styles—the one truly architectural, the other more purely decorative—are at the present time exercising considerable ence in this country: these are the " Romanesque " and the "Japanese." round-arched styles—those which had entirely thrown away the orders and substituted therefor the pier and the buttress of small projection; those which used columns only where they were necessary, and then with a freedom unknown during the Roman Empire —have never attained to that delicacy of detail which characterized the pure Grecian or its opposite, the pointed-arch style. The style of the later Roman Empire and that of Italian and French Renaissance after the transitional period are attempts to combine the orders with the round arch, and, notwithstanding the almost universality they have attained, are really but compromises. As was shown by Dr. Essenwein (p. 29o), Germany re vived the Romanesque or round-arched style early in this century; Eng land has at various times experimented with it, though the popularity of Gothic kept it in the background; but, although occasionally attempted, it has only recently been popularized in America. Its champion here was the talented H. H. Richardson, and he has been followed by others.
The Romanesque or Byzantine employed by Richardson was, however, peculiarly his own. His use of blocks of rough stone strongly contrasted with bands, capitals, etc., of most delicate detail is as far from any pre vious phase of the round-arched styles as modern " Oueen Anne" is from that of the days from which it takes its name. But it is a round-arched style—a style with massive walls and heavy piers alternating with slender shafts and with sculptured capitals; a style for the display of the resources of constructive and decorative material—and it is becoming popular, though likely to mingle with the Free Classic which surrounds it.
has previously been made (p. 311) of the intro duction of Japanese ornament. Though the Japanese have no Architec ture worthy of the name, and though their conceptions, unaided by external influences, have never risen to the monumental, the grand, nor even to the chastely and symmetrically beautiful, as ornamentalists they are unexcelled; and in playful fancy, quaint prettiness, and the art of "making out of small things mid inexpensive structures objects of beauty upon which the educated eye can rest contentedly the Japanese are our masters. In these matters there is no doubt that we already owe much to them. From them we are learning, not to make the objects that sur round us in our homes in the form of debased imitations of grand works of art, but to treat each as an individual object for decoration and in accordance with its purpose; from them we are learning, not to make our small houses and ordinary street-structures sham copies of sections of grand palaces, but to consider each as an entity worthy of study in itself. It must be remembered that this was precisely what was done by the European peoples during the Romanesque, Gothic, and Early Renaissance periods—until, in fact, the Vignolan and Palladian orders froze the life out of art. But the opening up of Japan and the study of the fanciful Japanese decoration have had the effect of calling attcu tion to the free phases of European art, and have thus influenced toward originality and freedom of design many artists who have never adopted a single purely Japanese motive.