So much of the detail of a building is established by factory standards and patterns that even the patron himself has precious little scope for giving vent to his impulses in the design or execution of the work; for every divergence from a standardized design represents an additional expense. In fact, the only opportunity for expressing his taste and personality is in choosing the mode in which the house is to be built: he must find his requirements in Italy, Colonial America, France, Tudor England, or Spain--woe to him if he wants to find them in twentieth-century America! Thus the machine process has created a standardized conception of style: of itself it can no more invent a new style than a mummy can beget children. If one wishes a house of red brick it will be Georgian or Colonial; that is to say, the trimming will be white, the woodwork will have classic moldings, and the electric-light fixtures will be pseudo-candlesticks in silvered metal. If one builds a stucco house, one is doomed by similar mechanical canons to rather heavy furniture in the early Renaissance forms, properly duplicated by the furniture makers of Grand Rapids--and so on. The notion of an American stucco house is so foreign to the conception of the machine mode that only the very poor, and the very rich, can afford it. Need I add that Colonial or Italian, when it falls from the mouth of the “realtor” has nothing to do with authentic Colonial or Italian work? Commercial concentration and the national market waste resources by neglect, as in the case of the Appalachian forests they squandered them by pillage. Standardized materials and patterns and plans and elevations--here are the ingredients of the architecture of the machine age: by escaping it we get our superficially vivacious suburbs; by accepting it, those vast acres of nondescript monotony that, call them West Philadelphia or Long Island City or what you will, are but the anonymous districts of Coketown. The chief thing needful for the full enjoyment of this architecture is a standardized people. Here our various educational institutions, from the advertising columns of the five-cent magazine to the higher centers of learning, from the movie to the radio, have not perhaps altogether failed the architect.