It has been a genuine misfortune in America that, as Mr. Sullivan bitterly pointed out in The Autobiography of an Idea, the growth of imperialism burked the development of a consonant modern style. In Europe, particularly in Finland, Germany, and the Netherlands, the best American work has been appreciated and followed up, and as so often happens, exaggerated; so that the esthetic appreciation of the machine has been carried across the Atlantic and back again, very much in the way that Emerson’s individualism was transformed by Nietzsche and became the mystic doctrine of the Superman. Some of the results of this movement are interesting and valid: the work of the Dutch architects, for example, in the garden suburbs around Amsterdam: but what pleases one in these new compositions is not the mechanical rigor of form but the playfulness of spirit--they are good architecture precisely because they are something more than mere engineering. Except for a handful of good precedents, our mechanical work in America does not express this vitality. The machine has stamped us; and we have not reacted. Moreover, in the building of separate houses in the city and its suburbs, where the demands of mechanical efficiency are not so drastic as they are in the office building, the effect of the machine process has been to narrow the scope of individual taste and personality. The designer, whether he is the architect, the owner, or the working contractor, works within a tradition whose bearing lies beyond him. Outside this mechanical tradition we have had many examples of good individual work, like the stone houses that have been erected around Philadelphia, and the more or less native cement and adobe houses in New Mexico and California: but the great mass of modern houses are no longer framed for some definite site and some definite occupants: they are manufactured for a blind market. The boards are cut to length in the sawmill, the roofing is fabricated in a roofing plant, the window frames are cut in standard sizes and put together in the framing factory, the balustrade is done in a turning mill, the very internal fittings like china closets and chests are made in a distant plant, after one of a dozen patterns fixed and exemplified in the catalog. The business of the building worker is reduced to a mere assemblage of parts; and except for the more expensive grades of work, the architect is all but eliminated. The charming designs that the European modernists make testify to the strength of their long architectural tradition even in the face of machinery; the truth is that they fit our modern methods of house-production scarcely much better than the thatched cottage of clay and wattle. The nemesis of mechanism is that it inexorably eliminates the architect--even the architect who worships its achievements!