Architecture and Democracy | Page 3

The view of our pre-war architecture thus sketchily presented is sure to
be sharply challenged in certain quarters, but unfortunately for us all
this is no mere matter of opinion, it is a matter of fact. The buildings
are there, open to observation; rooted to the spot, they cannot run away.
Like criminals "caught with the goods" they stand, self-convicted, dirty
with the soot of a thousand chimneys, heavy with the spoils of vanished
civilizations; graft and greed stare at us out of their glazed
windows--eyes behind which no soul can be discerned. There are
doubtless extenuating circumstances; they want to be clean, they want
to be honest, these "monsters of the mere market," but they are
nevertheless the unconscious victims of evils inherent in our
transitional social state.
Let us examine these strange creatures, doomed, it is hoped, to
extinction in favor of more intelligent and gracious forms of life. They
are big, powerful, "necessitous," and have therefore an impressiveness,
even an æsthetic appeal, not to be denied. So subtle and sensitive an
old-world consciousness as that of M. Paul Bourget was set vibrating
by them like a violin to the concussion of a trip-hammer, and to the
following tune:
The portals of the basements, usually arched as if crushed beneath the
weight of the mountains which they support, look like dens of a
primitive race, continually receiving and pouring forth a stream of
people. You lift your eyes, and you feel that up there behind the
perpendicular wall, with its innumerable windows, is a multitude
coming and going,--crowding the offices that perforate these cliffs of
brick and iron, dizzied with the speed of the elevators. You divine, you
feel the hot breath of speculation quivering behind these windows. This
it is which has fecundated these thousands of square feet of earth, in
order that from them may spring up this appalling growth of business

palaces, that hide the sun from you and almost shut out the light of day.
"The simple power of necessity is to a certain degree a principle of
beauty," says M. Bourget, and to these structures this order of beauty
cannot be denied, but even this is vitiated by a failure to press the
advantage home: the ornate façades are notably less impressive than
those whose grim and stark geometry is unmitigated by the
grave-clothes of dead styles. Instances there are of strivings toward a
beauty that is fresh and living, but they are so unsuccessful and
infrequent as to be negligible. However impressive these buildings may
be by reason of their ordered geometry, their weight and magnitude,
and as a manifestation of irrepressible power, they have the
unloveliness of things ignoble being the product neither of praise, nor
joy, nor worship, but enclosures for the transaction of sharp
bargains--gold bringing jinn of our modern Aladdins, who love them
not but only use them. That is the reason they are ugly; no one has
loved them for themselves alone.
For beauty is ever the very face of love. From the architecture of a true
democracy, founded on love and mutual service, beauty would
inevitably shine forth; its absence convicts us of a maladjustment in our
social and economic life. A skyscraper shouldering itself aloft at the
expense of its more humble neighbors, stealing their air and their
sunlight, is a symbol, written large against the sky, of the will-to-power
of a man or a group of men--of that ruthless and tireless aggression on
the part of the cunning and the strong so characteristic of the period
which produced the skyscraper. One of our streets made up of buildings
of diverse styles and shapes and sizes--like a jaw with some teeth
whole, some broken, some rotten, and some gone--is a symbol of our
unkempt individualism, now happily becoming curbed and chastened
by a common danger, a common devotion.
Some people hold the view that our insensitiveness to formal beauty is
no disgrace. Such argue that our accomplishments and our interests are
in other fields, where we more than match the accomplishments of
older civilizations. They forget that every achievement not registered in
terms of beauty has failed of its final and enduring transmutation. It is
because the achievements of older civilizations attained to their
apotheoses in art that they interest us, and unless we are able to effect a
corresponding transmutation we are destined to perish unhonoured on

our rubbish heap. That we shall effect it, through knowledge and
suffering, is certain, but before attempting the more genial and
rewarding task of tracing, in our life and in our architecture, those
forces and powers which make for righteousness, for beauty, let us look
our failures squarely in the face, and discover if we can why they are
failures.
Confining this examination to the particular matter under discussion,