Harry W. Jones, Architect.
natural causes. The best examples of commercial architecture in Minneapolis, such as the Bank of Commerce and the Lumber Exchange, before its partial destruction by fire, have the same straightforward and severely business-like character as the buildings designed by Mr. Root in Chicago, and, indeed, they seem to owe not a little to suggestions derived from him. The treatment of the Lumber Exchange, in particular, indicates an admiring study of his work. Here the centre of the front is signalized by projecting shallow oriels carried through the five central stories of the building on each side of the ample opening in each story directly over the entrance, and by flanking this central bay in the upper division with narrow and solid turrets, corbelled and pinnacled. The scheme is not so effectively wrought out as it deserves to be, and as it might be. The central feature is not developed into predominance, and the main divisions of the building are no more emphasized in treatment than the divisions between the intermediate stories. The observer may recur to the Vicar of Wakefield to express his regret that the promise of so promising a scheme should not have been fulfilled, although, in spite of its shortcomings, the result is a respectable “business block.” These remarks apply to the original building, and not to the building as it has since been reconstructed by the addition of two stories which throw out the relations of its parts, and make it difficult to decipher the original scheme. The Bank of Commerce is as frankly utilitarian as the Lumber Exchange, the designer having relaxed the restraint imposed upon him by the prosaic and pedestrian character of his problem only in the design of the scholarly and rather ornate entrances. For the rest, the architecture is but the expression of the structure, which is expressed clearly and with vigor. The longer front shows the odd notion of emphasizing the centre by withdrawing it, a procedure apparently irrational, which has, however, the compensation of giving value and detachment to the entrance at its base. The problem was much more promising than that of the Lumber Exchange, seeing that here, with an ample area, there are but six stories against ten, and it is out of all comparison better solved. The four central stories are grouped by piers continued through them and connected by round arches above the fifth, while the first and sixth are sharply separated
CORNER OF BANK OF COMMERCE, MINNEAPOLIS.
in treatment, the former as an unmistakable basement, with a plain segment-headed opening in each bay, and the latter as an unmistakable attic, with a triplet of lintelled and shafted openings aligned over each of the round arches. The fronts are, moreover, distinguished, without in the least compromising the utilitarian purpose of the structure, by the use of the architectural devices the lack of which one deplores in the other building, insomuch that the difference between the two is the difference between a building merely
THE “GLOBE” BUILDING, MINNEAPOLIS.
E. Townsend Mix, Architect.