If the circumstances which hedge in our architecture are to be transformed, it is not sufficient, with Mr. Louis Sullivan, to say that we must accept and enthrone the virtues of democracy; still less is there any meaning in the attempt of the Educational Committee of the American Institute of Architects to educate public taste in the arts. Nor is there any genuine esthetic salvation in the demand of the modernists that we embrace in more whole-hearted fashion the machine. Our architecture has been full of false starts and unfulfilled promises, precisely because the ground has not been worked enough beforehand to receive the new seeds. If we are to have a fine architecture, we must begin at the other end from that where our sumptuously illustrated magazines on home-building and architecture begin--not with the building itself, but with the whole complex out of which architect, builder, and patron spring, and into which the finished building, whether it be a cottage or a skyscraper, is set. Once the conditions are ripe for a good architecture, the plant will flower by itself: it did so in the Middle Ages, as a hundred little towns and villages between Budapest and Glastonbury still testify; it did so again within a limited area among the swells of the Renaissance; and it is springing forth lustily today in the garden cities of England, the Netherlands, and the Baltic countries. The notion that our architecture will be improved by courses of appreciation in our museums and colleges is, to put it quite mildly, one of the decadent deceits of snobbery. It is only paper flowers that grow in this fashion. II In order to get our bearings, we shall pull apart, one by one, the principal elements in our heritage of civilization in the United States, and examine them separately. This is a dangerous convenience, however, and I must emphasize that these strands are tightly intertwined and bound up. It is only in thought that one can take them apart. No one has ever encountered man, save on the earth; no one has ever seen the earth, save through the eyes of a man. There is no logical priority in place, work, and people. In discussing the community one either deals with it as a whole, or one’s discussion is incomplete and faulty. III