To return to architecture. A further effect of the machine process on the internal economy of the modern building is that it lends itself to rapid production and quick turnover. This has been very well put by Mr. Bassett Jones, in an article in The American Architect, which is either a hymn of praise to the machine, or a cool parade of its defects, according to the position one may take. “As the building more and more takes on the character of the machine,” says Mr. Jones, “so does its design, construction, and operation become subject to the same rules that govern ... a locomotive. Our grandfathers built for succeeding generations. The rate of development was slow, and a building which would satisfy the demands made upon it for a century would necessarily be of a substantial nature. But with us in a single generation even the best we can do with all the data and facilities at our command is out of date almost before it shows signs of appreciable wear. So a building erected today is outclassed tomorrow. The writer well remembers the late Douglas Robinson, when outlining the location and property to be improved by the construction of a building some twenty years ago, ending his directions with the proviso that it must be ‘the cheapest thing that will hold together for fifteen years’! When the amortization charges must be based on so short a period as this, and with land taxes constantly increasing, it becomes obvious that construction must be based upon a cubic foot valuation that prohibits the use of any but the cheapest materials and methods.... Even the cost of carrying the required capital inactive during the period of production has its effect in speeding up production to the point where every part of the building that, by any ingenuity of man, can be machine-made must be so made.” Since the features that govern the construction of modern buildings are conditioned by external canons of mechanism, purpose and adaptation to need play a small part in the design, and the esthetic element itself enters largely by accident. The plan of the modern building is not fundamental to its treatment; it derives automatically from the methods and materials employed. The skyscraper is inevitably a honeycomb of cubes, draped with a fireproof material: as mechanically conceived, it is readily convertible: the floors are of uniform height and the windows of uniform spacing, and with no great difficulty the hotel becomes an office building, the office building a loft; and I confidently look forward to seeing the tower floors become apartments--indeed this conversion has already taken place on a small scale. Where the need of spanning a great space without using pillars exists, as in a theater or an auditorium, structural steel has given the architect great freedom; and in these departments he has learned to use his material well; for here steel can do economically and esthetically what masonry can do only at an unseemly cost, or not at all.