Another profession, architecture, is beginning to feel the influence of the dominance of business. We have good architects in America—none better—but business does not give them their chance. Buildings are built to sell, and, being built on borrowed money on speculation, must be sold as quickly as possible. No chances can be taken on not pleasing the taste of the public. Moreover, in buildings every inch of space must be made to bring in rent. In every direction the architect’s hands are tied. In many cases, partly from[Pg 27] the spread of the business ideal of life and partly perhaps from despair, the architect has come to adopt the attitude expressed by one of the well-known ones recently. “As an architect,” he writes, “I am really just a manufacturer of a commodity known as building space, and my job, as I see it, is to make as attractive a package as is physically or æsthetically possible for me in view of all the conditions imposed.” The consequence is that in architectural experiment America is falling so rapidly behind countries like Denmark, Holland, Germany, Austria, and even Russia, that after studying the new buildings, particularly the private houses in those countries, returning to America is almost like going back to the early Victorian age. I have not been to Russia, but the noted French architect Le Corbusier has recently gone there to investigate the new buildings and he reports of the Muscovites that “their works are a splendid outburst of lyrical poetry. They are poets in steel and glass.” The picture of the new “Palace of Industry” at Charkov certainly goes far to confirm this opinion. Much of the new architecture I have seen and the marvellously interesting new bloom everywhere in the countries which I have named makes the American revamping of the English, Colonial, and Spanish types seem to belong to a past world. Plagiarism is a confession of sterility. Of all the new movement and the new method of living it entails, the American public is almost totally ignorant. The business man with an eye solely to an immediate profit, and the architect who considers himself a business man, “just a manufacturer of a commodity known as building space,” are not likely to carry America far on any new road. [Pg 28] IV