644 MODERN ARCHITECTURE 



itself. But there can be no doubt regarding the pernicious influence 

 of another phase of modern commercialism, that which imposes 

 upon everything a valuation by dollars and cents; an influence 

 always disastrous in art, and in no art more disastrous than in archi- 

 tecture. The financial criterion is fundamentally hostile to the 

 artistic. Applied to buildings, it wipes out massive supports and deep 

 shadows by paring down the walls to the last extreme of thinness; it 

 excludes sculpture and mural painting from a building in order to 

 pile an extra story upon it; it demands pretentious luxury in the place 

 of artistic beauty. With this spirit every architect has to contend, in 

 large works as well as small. 



These, then, are the peculiar conditions of modern architecture, 

 briefly and broadly stated. What are the really vital problems of 

 modern architecture to which they have given or must give rise? 



The fundamental problem of all architecture is to harmonize the 

 demands of utility and beauty in structural design; in other words, 

 to express utilitarian functions in terms of plastic art. It is this 

 problem which differentiates architecture from engineering, in which 

 utilitarian functions are expressed solely in terms of scientific exact- 

 itude. This problem is as truly the problem of to-day as it was of the 

 Middle Ages or of antiquity. The utilitarian requirements of archi- 

 tecture have multiplied enormously in the past hundred years, but 

 so have also the artistic resources at the architect's disposal. There is 

 no excuse for ugly buildings to-day; if the conditions of design are 

 more difficult, what is this but a call to forsake deep-worn ruts, to 

 bring ourselves into harmony with our environment, to recognize 

 our conditions instead of trying to evade them to triumph over 

 difficulties and obstacles by making them the very occasion of new 

 successes, as did the medieval architects who extracted such con- 

 summate beauty out of the very limitations under which they worked? 

 There seems to me to be no counsel demanding more urgent repetition 

 and more earnest heeding, in this time of intense intellectual and 

 social activity, than to make beauty the supreme aim of architectural 

 effort. 



Tradition and the archaeological spirit clamor for the reproduction 

 of obsolete forms; commercialism seeks to suppress whatever does not 

 appear readily convertible into cash dividends; literary critics cry 

 out for originality at all costs as the crowning virtue; multiplying 

 utilitarian requirements insist upon recognition by the architect, and 

 threaten to deprive architecture of its place among the fine arts. 

 Amid tins din the architect who is a true artist keeps his eye and 

 heart fixed upon the pole-star of pure beauty, which has guided the 

 course of true art by its clear and steady ray through all the ages. 

 Beauty in architecture is above and beyond all questions of tradition 

 and historic style and passing fashion; it is a question of mass and 



