All this would perhaps seem a little fantastic, were it not for the fact that we have step by step approached the reality. Except for our old-fashioned prejudice in favor of windows, which holds over from a time when one could see a green field or a passing neighbor by sitting at one, the transformation favored by the engineers has already been accomplished. Just because of the ease in installing fans, lights, and radiators in a modern building, a good part of the interiors of our skyscrapers are fed day and night with artificial light and ventilation. The margin of misuse under this method of construction is necessarily great; the province of design, limited. Instead of the architect’s paying attention to exposure, natural circulation, and direct daylight, and making a layout which will achieve these necessary ends, he is forced to center his efforts on the maximum exploitation of land. Where the natural factors are flouted or neglected, the engineer is always ready to provide a mechanical substitute--“just as good as the original” and much more expensive. By systematically neglecting the simplest elements of city planning, we have provided a large and profitable field for all the palliative devices of engineering: where we eliminate sunlight we introduce electric light; where we congest business, we build skyscrapers; where we overcrowd the thoroughfares with traffic we burrow subways; where we permit the city to become congested with a population whose density would not be tolerated in a well-designed community, we conduct water hundreds of miles by aqueducts to bathe them and slake their thirst; where we rob them of the faintest trace of vegetation or fresh air, we build metalled roads which will take a small portion of them, once a week, out into the countryside. It is all a very profitable business for the companies that supply light and rapid transit and motor cars, and the rest of it; but the underlying population pays for its improvements both ways--that is, it stands the gratuitous loss, and it pays “through the nose” for the remedy. These mechanical improvements, these labyrinths of subways, these audacious towers, these endless miles of asphalted streets, do not represent a triumph of human effort: they stand for its comprehensive misapplication. Where an inventive age follows methods which have no relation to an intelligent and humane existence, an imaginative one would not be caught by the necessity. By turning our environment over to the machine we have robbed the machine of the one promise it held out--that of enabling us to humanize more thoroughly the details of our existence. III