The museum is a manifestation of our curiosity, our acquisitiveness, our essentially predatory culture; and these qualities were copiously exhibited in the architecture of imperialism. It would be foolish to reproach the great run of architects for exploiting the characteristics of their age; for even those who in belief and design have remained outside the age--such resolute advocates of a medieval polity as Dr. Ralph Adams Cram--have not been able to divert its currents. In so far as we have learned to care more for empire than for a community of freemen, living the good life, more for dominion over palm and pine than for the humane discipline of ourselves, the architect has but enshrined our desires. The opulence, the waste of resources and energies, the perversion of human effort represented in this architecture are but the outcome of our general scheme of working and living. Architecture, like government, is about as good as a community deserves. The shell that we create for ourselves marks our spiritual development as plainly as that of a snail denotes its species. If sometimes architecture becomes frozen music, we have ourselves to thank when it is a pompous blare of meaningless sounds. CHAPTER SEVEN THE AGE OF THE MACHINE I Since 1910 the momentum of the Imperial Age seems to have slackened a little: at any rate, in architecture it has lost much of the original energy which had been given to it by the success of the Chicago Exposition. It may be, as Henry Adams hinted, that the rate of change in the modern world has altered, so that processes which required centuries for their consummation before the coming of the dynamo have been accelerated into decades. With events and buildings so close to us, it is almost impossible to rate their relative importance; all that I can do in the present chapter is to single out one or two of the more important threads which, it seems to me, are bound to give the predominant color to the fabric of our architecture. It is fairly easy to see, however, why the imperial order has not stamped every aspect of our building: for one thing, eclecticism has not merely persisted, but the new familiarity that the American architect has gained with authentic European and Asiatic work outside the province of the classic has increased the range of eclecticism. So the baroque architecture of Spain, which flourished so well in Mexico, and the ecclesiastical architecture of Byzantium and Syria, have added a new charm to our motlied wardrobe: from the first came new lessons in ornament and color, applied with great success by Mr. Bertram Goodhue in the Panama-Pacific Exposition, and now budding lustily in southern villas and gardens; and from the second the architect is learning the importance of mass and outline--the essentials in monolithic construction.