Art, in fact, is one of the main ways in which we escape the vicious circle of economic activity. According to the conventional economist, our economic life has but three phases: production, distribution, and consumption. We work to eat so that we may eat to work. This is a fairly accurate portrait of life in an early industrial town; but it does not apply to the economic processes of a civilized community. Everywhere, even in regions of difficulty, something more comes out of production than the current income and the current saving of capital: sometimes it is leisure and play, sometimes it is religion, philosophy, and science, and sometimes it is art. In the creation of any permanent work of art the processes of dissipation and consumption are stayed: hence the only civilized criterion of a community’s economic life is not the amount of things produced, but the durability of things created. A community with a low rate of production and a high standard of creation will in the long run be physically richer than a modern city in which the gains of industry are frittered away in evanescent, uncreative expenditures. What matters is the ratio of production to creation. Here lies the justification of the modern architect. Cut off though he is from the actual processes of building, he nevertheless remains the sole surviving craftsman who maintains the relation towards the whole structure that the old handicraft workers used to enjoy in connection with their particular job. The architect can still leave his imprint, and even in the severely utilitarian factory he can take the simple forms of the engineer and turn them into a superb structure like Messrs. Helmle and Corbett’s Fletcher Building in New York. To the extent that honest engineering is better than fake architecture, genuine architecture is better than engineering: for it strikes the same esthetic and humane chord that painting and sculpture appeal to by themselves. The freedom to depart from arbitrary and mechanical precedent, the freedom to project new forms which will more adequately meet his problem are essential to the architect. Up to the present he has been able, for the most part, to exercise this freedom only on traditional buildings, like churches and libraries and auditoriums, which are outside the reaches of the present commercial regime and have therefore some prospect of durability.