looking for Festival Hall wander over to the Horticultural Palace,
attracted by the very joyousness of its scheme.

Good rococo ornamentation is rare abroad and even rarer in this country,
which is essentially opposed in its tendencies and in its civilization
to those luxurious days of the French kings who created the conditions
under which this very delightful style could flourish.

The Horticultural Palace is a great success as an interpretation of a
style which rarely finds a sympathetic expression in this country. I do
not feel at all that it ought, but in a case of this kind where a
temporary purpose existed, it was happily chosen.

Of all isolated units, none causes greater admiration than the Fine Arts
Palace. It presents the astounding spectacle of a building which
violates the architectural conventions on more than one occasion, and in
spite of it, or possibly for that very reason, it has a note of
originality that is most conspicuous. Everybody admits that it is most
beautiful, and very few seem to know just how this was accomplished.
Many of the "small fry" of the architectural profession enjoy themselves
in picking out its faults, which are really, as suggested above, the
reason for its supreme beauty. Save for Mullgardt's court, it is the
only building that seems to be based on the realization of a dream of a
true artistic conception. With many other of the buildings one feels the
process of their creation in the time-honored, pedantic way. They are
paper-designed by the mechanical application of the "T" square and the
triangle. They do not show the advantage of having been experienced as a
vision.

With Bernard Maybeck's Palace of Fine Arts, one has the feeling that