The architecture of other civilizations has sometimes been the brutal emblem of the warrior, like that of the Assyrians: it has remained for the architecture of our own day in America to be fixed and stereotyped and blank, like the mind of a Robot. The age of the machine has produced an architecture fit only for lathes and dynamos to dwell in: incomplete and partial in our applications of science, we have forgotten that there is a science of humanity, as well as a science of material things. Buildings which do not answer to this general description are either aristocratic relics of the age of handicraft, enjoyed only by the rich, or they are fugitive attempts to imitate cheaply the ways and gestures of handicraft. We have attempted to live off machinery, and the host has devoured us. It is time that we ceased to play the parasite: time that we looked about us, to see what means we have for once more becoming men. The prospects of architecture are not divorced from the prospects of the community. If man is created, as the legends say, in the image of the gods, his buildings are done in the image of his own mind and institutions. CHAPTER EIGHT ARCHITECTURE AND CIVILIZATION I In the course of this survey we have seen how architecture and civilization develop hand in hand: the characteristic buildings of each period are the memorials to their dearest institutions. The essential structure of the community--the home, meeting-place, the work-place--remains; but the covering changes and passes, like the civilization itself, when new materials, new methods of work, new ideas and habits and ways of feeling, come into their own. If this interpretation of the rôle of architecture is just, there is little use in discussing the needs and promises of architecture without relating the shell itself to the informing changes that may or may not take place in the life of the community itself. To fancy that any widespread improvement of architecture lies principally with the architects is an esthetic delusion: in a barren soil the most fertile geniuses are cut off from their full growth. We have not lacked architects of boldness and originality, from Latrobe to Louis H. Sullivan: nor have we lacked men of great ability, from Thomas Jefferson to Bertram Goodhue; nor yet have we lacked men who stood outside the currents of their time and kept their own position, from Richardson to Dr. Cram. With all these capacities at our disposal, our finest efforts in building remain chaotic and undisciplined and dispersed--the reflection of our accumulated civilization.