All the current praise of the skyscraper boils down to the fact that the more recent buildings have ceased to be as bad as their prototypes. Granted. The uneasy hemming and hawing of ornament, which once agitated the whole façade, has now been reduced to a concentrated gesture; and the zoning ordinances that have been established in many large American cities have transformed the older, top-heavy building into a tower or a pyramid. That this is something of an advance is beyond dispute; in New York one need only compare the Fisk Tire Building with the United States Tire Building, representing respectively the later and the earlier work of the same architects, to see what a virtue can be made of legal necessity. A great architecture, however, is something to be seen and felt and lived in. By this criterion most of our pretentious buildings are rather pathetic. When one approaches Manhattan Island, for instance, from the Staten Island Ferry or the Brooklyn Bridge, the great towers on the tip of the island sometimes look like the fairy stalagmites of an opened grotto; and from an occasional vantage point on the twentieth floor of an office building one may now and again recapture this impression. But need I point out that one can count on one’s fingers the number of buildings in New York or Chicago that one can approach from the street in similar fashion? For the millions who fill the pavements and shuttle back and forth in tubes, the skyscraper as a tall, cloudward building does not exist. Its esthetic features are the entrance, the elevator, and the window-pocked wall; and if there has been any unique efflorescence of a fresh style at these points, I have been unable to discover it. What our critics have learned to admire in our great buildings is their photographs--and that is another story. In an article chiefly devoted to praise of the skyscraper, in a number of The Arts, the majority of the illustrations were taken from a point that the man in the street never reaches. In short, it is an architecture, not for men, but for angels and aviators! If buildings are to be experienced directly, and not through the vicarious agency of the photograph, the skyscraper defeats its own ends; for a city built so that tall buildings could be approached and appreciated would have avenues ten times the width of the present ones; and a city so generously planned would have no need for the sort of building whose sole economic purpose is to make the most of monopoly and congestion. In order to accommodate the office-dwellers in the Chicago Loop, for example, if a minimum of twenty stories were the restriction, the streets would have to be 241 feet wide, according to a calculation of Mr. Raymond Unwin, in the Journal of the American Institute of Architects.