CAMP SHERMAN, OHIO]

The author has in mind one child of such a happy union brought about
by the war; the building is the Red Cross Community Club House at Camp
Sherman, which, in the pursuit of his destiny, and for the furtherance
of his education, he inhabited for two memorable weeks. He learned
there more lessons than a few, and encountered more tangled skeins of
destiny than he is ever likely to unravel. The matter has so direct a
bearing, both on the subject of architecture and of democracy, that it
is worth discussing at some length.

This club house stands, surrounded by its tributary dormitories, on a
government reservation, immediately adjacent to the camp itself,
the whole constituting what is known as the Community Center. By the
payment of a dollar any soldier is free to entertain his relatives
and friends there, and it is open to all the soldiers at all times.
Because the iron discipline of the army is relaxed as soon as the
limits of the camp are overpassed, the atmosphere is favourable to
social life.

The building occupies its acre of ground invitingly, though exteriorly
of no particular distinction. It is the interior that entitles it to
consideration as a contribution to an architecture of that new-born
democracy of which our army camps have been the cradle. The plan of
this interior is cruciform, two hundred feet in each dimension. Built
by the Red Cross of the state of Ohio, and dedicated to the larger
uses of that organization, the symbolic appropriateness of this
particular geometrical figure should not pass unremarked. The cross
is divided into side aisles, nave, and crossing, with galleries and
mezzanines so arranged as to shorten the arms of the cross in its