AN ARCHITECTURE for these United States will be born “Modern,” as were all the Architectures of the peoples of all the world. Perhaps this is the deep-seated reason why the young man in Architecture grieves his parents, academic and familiar, by yielding to the fascination of creation, instead of persisting as the creature of ancient circumstance. This, his rational surrender to instinct, is known, I believe, as “rebellion.”

I am here to aid and comfort rebellion insofar as rebellion has this honorable instinct—even though purpose may not yet be clearly defined—nor any fruits, but only ists, isms or istics be in sight. Certainly we may now see the dawning of a deeper insight than has for the past thirty years characterized so-called American Architecture. By that length of time American Architecture has been neither American nor Architecture. We have had instead merely a bad form of surface-decoration.

This “dawn” is the essential concern of this moment and the occasion for this series of “lectures.” We, here at Princeton, are to guard this dawning insight and help to guide its courage, passion and patience into channels where depth and flow is adequate, instead of allowing youthful adventure to ground in shallows all there beneath the surface in the offing, ready to hinder and betray native progress.

In this effort I suppose I am to suffer disadvantage, being more accustomed to saying things with a hod of mortar and some bricks, or with a concrete mixer and a gang of workmen, than by speaking or writing. I like to write, but always dissatisfied, I, too, find myself often staring at the result with a kind of nausea . . . or is it nostalgia?

I dislike to lecture, feeling something like the rage of impotence. With a small audience hovering over my drawing-board, there would be better feeling on my part and a better chance for the audience. But a lecturer may, in fact must, make his own diversion, indulge his “malice” as he goes along, or get no entertainment at all out of the matter.

So here at my hand I have some gently malicious pamphlets or leaflets issued, as myth has it, by that mythical group to which careless reference is sometimes made, by the thoughtless, as the “New School of the Middle West.” From these rare, heretical pamphlets, from time to time as I may have occasion, I shall quote. Among them are such titles as: “Palladio turns in his grave and speaks,” another, “Groans from Phidias”: the author’s original title—it would be beside our mark to mention it—was suppressed by the group as just that much too much. One solitary “New School” scholar, himself having, under painful economic pressure, degenerated to the practice of mere Architectural surgery—blaming Vitruvius for his degradation—wrote bitterly and much under the title of “Vitruviolic Disorders.”

A number of these leaflets are given over by several and sundry of the “New School” to the ravages of the “Vignola”—an academic epidemic showing itself as a creeping paralysis of the emotional nature—creeping by way of the optic nerve.

During the course of our afternoons, from among these modestly profane references we may have occasion to hear from a rudely awakened Bramante, an indignant Sansovino, a gently aggrieved Brunelleschi, perhaps even from robustious “Duomo” Buonarotti himself, all, plucked even of their shrouds, frowning up from their graves on their pretentious despoilers . . . our own American Classicists. These time-honored Italians in these wayward and flippant leaflets, are made to speak by way of a sort of motor-car Vasari. His name deserves to be lost—and as certainly will be.

Unfortunately and sad to say, because their names and individualities are unknown to us, so close were they, as men, to the soil or to Man,—we shall be unable to hear from the ancient builders of “Le Moyen Âge,” those dreamers in cloisters, guild-masters, gardeners, worshipers of the tree, or the noble stone-craftsmen of still earlier Byzantium, who were much like the cathedral builders in spirit. No—we shall hear from them only as we, ourselves, are likewise dreamers, gardeners, or worshipers of the tree and by sympathetic nature, therefore, well qualified to understand the silence of these white men. And those human nature-cultures of the red man, lost in backward stretch of time, almost beyond our horizon—the Maya, the Indian—and of the black man, the African—we may learn mfro them. Last, but not least, come the men of bronze, the Chinese, the Japanese—profound builders of the Orient— imaginative demons, their Art of Earth winging its way to the skies: Dragons with wings—their fitting symbol. Of their Art—much. The ethnic eccentricity of their work makes it safe inspiration for the white man, who now needs, it seems, aesthetic fodder that he cannot copy nor reproduce. I am not sure but there is more for us in our modern grapple with creation, in their sense of the living thing in Art, than we can find in any other culture. Profundity of feeling the men of bronze could encourage. Their forms we should have to let alone.

In order that we may not foregather here in this dignified atmosphere of Princeton without due reference to authority, we will go far back for our text on this, our first afternoon together. Go so far back that we need fear no contradiction. Go without hesitation, to Raineses the Great, to find that: “All great Architecture”—Rameses might have used the hieroglyph for Art instead of the one for Architecture—“All great Architecture is true to its Architects’ immediate present,” and seal it with the regal symbol. And in this connection comes the title of our discourse—the “MACHINERY, MATERIALS AND MEN” of our immediate present.

Long ago,—yes, so long ago that the memory of it seems to join with recent echoes from Tut-Ank-Amen’s ancient tomb,—I passionately swore that the Machine was no less, rather more, an artist’s tool than any he had ever had or heard of, if only he would do himself the honor to learn to use it. Twentyseven years old now, the then offensive heresy has been translated and published, I am told, in seven or more foreign languages, English excepted, which means said in seven or more different ways. But just what the seven different ways each exactly mean, I can have no idea. At the time, I knew no better than to make the declaration—it seemed so sensibly obvious in the vast cinderfield in which I then stood—our enormous industrial Middle West.

Today, twenty-seven years later, the heresy is become truism, at least “truistic,” therefore sufficiently trite to arouse no hostility even if said in several or even seven different ways. And yet: a Pompeian recently come back and struggling for nourishment on French soil has reiterated one-quarter of the matter, made more stark, with signs of success right here in our own country. The reiteration reaches us across the Atlantic—more Machine-made than the erstwhile cry in the cinderfield, but with several important omissions—most important, at least, to us. Or perhaps, who knows, they may not really be omissions but evasions. First among these probable evasions is the Nature of Materials; Second, is that characteristic architectural element, the Third Dimension; and Third, there is Integral Ornament. This neglected Trinity, it seems to me, constitutes the beating heart of the whole matter of Architecture so far as Art is concerned.

Surface and Mass, relatively superficial, however Machine-made or however much resembling Machinery, are subordinate to this great Trinity. Surface and Mass are a by-product, or will be when Architecture arises out of the matter. If proof is needed we shall find it as we go along together. . . .

MACHINERY, MATERIALS AND MEN—yes—these are the stuffs by means of which the so-called American Architect will get his Architecture, if there is any such Architect and America ever gets any Architecture of her own. Only by the strength of his spirit’s grasp upon all three—Machinery, Materials and Men—will the Architect be able so to build that his work may be worthy the great name “Architecture.” A great Architecture is greatest proof of human greatness.

The difference, to the Architect and his fellow Artists, between our era and others, lies simply enough in the substitution of automatic machinery for tools, and (more confusing), instead of hereditary aristocracy for patron, the Artist now relies upon automatic industrialism, conditioned upon the automatic acquiescence of Men, and conditioned not at all upon their individual handicraftsmanship.

At first blush an appalling difference, and the more it is studied, the more important the difference becomes. And were we now to be left without prophet —that is, without interpretation—and should we among ourselves, be unable to arouse the leadership of supreme human imagination—yes, then we should be at the beginning of the end of all the great qualities we are foregathered here to cherish: namely, the Arts which are those great qualities in any civilization. This Republic has already gone far with very little of any single one of these great saving qualities, yet it goes further, faster and safer; eats more, and eats more regularly; goes softer, safer, is more comfortable and egotistic in a more universal mediocrity than ever existed on Earth before. But who knows where it is going? In this very connection, among the more flippant references referred to as at hand, there is also heavy matter and I have here serious original matter, saved several years ago from the flames by a miracle. The first pages were blackened and charred by fire, of this original manuscript, first read to a group of professors, artists, architects and manufacturers at Hull House, Chicago. To show you how it all seemed to me, back there, twenty-seven years ago in Chicago, I shall read into the record, once more, from its pages. Should its clumsy earnestness bore you—remember that the young man who wrote, should, in that earlier day, as now, have confined himself to a hod of mortar and some bricks. But passionately he was trying to write—making ready to do battle for the life of the thing he loved. And I would remind you, too, that in consequence he has been engaged in eventually mortal combat ever since.

Here is the manuscript. We will begin, twenty-seven years later, again, at the beginning of—

No one, I hope, has come here tonight for a Sociological prescription for the cure of evils peculiar to this Machine Age. For I come to you as an Architect to say my word for the right use upon such new materials as we have, of our great substitute for tools—Machines. There is no thrift in any craft until the tools are mastered; nor will there be a worthy social order in America until the elements by which America does its work are mastered by American society. Nor can there be an Art worth the man or the name until these elements are grasped and truthfully idealized in whatever we as a people try to make. Although these elemental truths should be commonplace enough by now, as a people we do not understand them nor do we see the way to apply them. We are probably richer in raw materials for our use as workmen, citizens or artists than any other nation,—but outside mechanical genius for mere contrivance we are not good workmen, nor, beyond adventitious or propitious respect for property, are we as good citizens as we should be, nor are we artists at all. We are one and all, consciously or unconsciously, mastered by our fascinating automatic “implements,” using them as substitutes for tools. To make this assertion clear I offer you evidence I have found in the field of Architecture. It is still a field in which the pulse of the age throbs beneath much shabby finery and one broad enough (God knows) to represent the errors and possibilities common to our time-serving Time.

Architects in the past have embodied the spirit common to their own life and to the life of the society in which they lived in the most noble of all noble records—Buildings. They wrought these valuable records with the primitive tools at their command and whatever these records have to say to us today would be utterly insignificant if not wholly illegible were tools suited to another and different condition stupidly forced to work upon them; blindly compelled to do work to which they were not fitted, work which they could only spoil.

In this age of steel and steam the tools with which civilization’s true record will be written are scientific thoughts made operative in iron and bronze and steel and in the plastic processes which characterize this age, all of which we call Machines. The Electric Lamp is in this sense a Machine. New materials in the man-Machines have made the physical body of this age what it is as distinguished from former ages. They have made our era the Machine Age— wherein locomotive engines, engines of industry, engines of light or engines of war or steamships take the place works of Art took in previous history. Today we have a Scientist or an Inventor in place of a Shakespeare or a Dante. Captains of Industry are modern substitutes, not only for Kings and Potentates, but, I am afraid, for great Artists as well. And yet—man-made environment is the truest, most characteristic of all human records. Let a man build and you have him. You may not have all he is, but certainly he is what you have. Usually you will have his outline. Though the elements may be in him to enable him to grow out of his present self-made characterization, few men are ever belied by self-made environment. Certainly no historical period was ever so misrepresented. Chicago in its ugliness today becomes as true an expression of the life lived here as is any center on earth where men come together closely to live it out or fight it out. Man is a selecting principle, gathering his like to him wherever he goes. The intensifying of his existence by close contact, too, flashes out the human record vividly in his background and his surroundings. But somewhere—somehow—in our age, although signs of the times are not wanting, beauty in this expression is forfeited—the record is illegible when not ignoble. We must walk blindfolded through the streets of this, or any great modern American city, to fail to see that all this magnificent resource of machine-power and superior material has brought to us, so far, is degradation. All of the Art forms sacred to The Art of Old are, by us, prostitute.

On every side we see evidence of inglorious quarrel between things as they were and things as they must be and are. This shame a certain merciful ignorance on our part mistakes for glorious achievement. We believe in our greatness when we have tossed up a Pantheon to the god of money in a night or two, like the Illinois Trust Building or the Chicago National Bank. And it is our glory to get together a mammoth aggregation of Roman monuments, sarcophagi and temples for a Post Office in a year or two. On Michigan Avenue Montgomery Ward presents us with a nondescript Florentine Palace with a grand campanile for a “Farmer Grocery” and it is as common with us as it is elsewhere to find the giant stone Palladian “orders” overhanging plate glass shop fronts. Show windows beneath Gothic office buildings, the officemiddle topped by Parthenons, or models of any old sacrificial temple, are a common sight. Every commercial interest in any American town, in fact, is scurrying for respectability by seeking some advertising connection, at least, with the “Classic.” A commercial Renaissance is here; the Renaissance of “the ass in the lion’s skin.” This much, at least, we owe to the late Columbian Fair—that triumph of modern civilization in 1893 will go down in American Architectural history, when it is properly recorded, as a mortgage upon posterity that posterity must repudiate not only as usurious but as forged.

In our so-called “Sky-Scrapers” (latest and most famous business-building triumph), good granite or Bedford stone is cut into the fashion of the Italian followers of Phidias and his Greek slaves. Blocks so cut are cunningly arranged about a structure of steel beams and shafts (which structure secretly robs them of any real meaning), in order to make the finished building resemble the architecture bepictured by Palladio and Vitruvius—in the schoolbooks. It is quite as feasible to begin putting on this Italian trimming at the cornice, and come on down to the base as it is to work, as the less fortunate Italians were forced to do, from the base upward. Yes, “from the top down” is often the actual method employed. The keystone of a Roman or Gothic arch may now be “set”-—that is to say “hung”—and the voussoirs stuck alongside or “hung” on downward to the haunches. Finally this mask, completed, takes on the features of the pure “Classic,” or any variety of “Renaissance” or whatever catches the fancy or fixes the “convictions” of the designer. Most likely, an education in Art has “fixed” both. Our Chicago University, “a seat of learning,” is just as far removed from truth. If environment is significant and indicative, what does this highly reactionary, extensive and expensive scene-painting by means of hybrid Collegiate Gothic signify? Because of Oxford it seems to be generally accepted as “appropriate for scholastic purposes.” Yet, why should an American University in a land of Democratic ideals in a Machine Age be characterized by second-hand adaptation of Gothic forms, themselves adapted previously to our own adoption by a feudalistic age with tools to use and conditions to face totally different from anything we can call our own? The Public Library is again Asinine Renaissance, bones sticking through the flesh because the interior was planned by a shrewd Library Board—while an “Art-Architect” (the term is Chicago’s, not mine) was “hired” to “put the architecture on it.” The “classical” aspect of the sham-front must be preserved at any cost to sense. Nine out of ten public buildings in almost any American city are the same.

On Michigan Avenue, too, we pass another pretentious structure, this time fashioned as inculcated by the Ecole des Beaux Arts after the ideals and methods of a Graeco-Roman, inartistic, grandly brutal civilization, a civilization that borrowed everything but its jurisprudence. Its essential tool was the slave. Here at the top of our Culture is the Chicago Art Institute, and very like other Art Institutes. Between lions—realistic—Kemyss would have them so because Barye did—we come beneath some stone millinery into the grandly useless lobby. Here French’s noble statue of the Republic confronts us—she too, Imperial. The grand introduction over, we go further on to find amid plaster casts of antiquity, earnest students patiently gleaning a half-acre or more of archaeological dry-bones, arming here for industrial conquest, in other words to go out and try to make a living by making some valuable impression upon the Machine Age in which they live. Their fundamental tool in this business about which they will know just this much less than nothing, is—the Machine. In this acre or more not one relic has any vital relation to things as they are for these students, except for the blessed circumstance that they are more or less beautiful things in themselves— bodying forth the beauty of “once upon a time.” These students at best are to concoct from a study of the aspect of these blind reverences an extrac...