From the Vault

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Time was when the hand wrought. Time is here when the process fabricates instead. Why make the fabrication a lie or allow it to become one when we try to make it “beautiful”?

PLAN! There is something elemental in the word itself. A pregnant plan has logic – is the logic of the building squarely stated. Unless it is the plan for a foolish Fair.

In what is now to arise from the plan as conceived and held in the mind of the architect, the matter of style may be considered as of elemental importance.

The country between Madison and Janesville, Wisconsin, is the old bed of an ancient glacier-drift. Vast, busy gravel-pits abound there, exposing heaps of yellow aggregate, once, and everywhere else, sleeping beneath the green fields. Great heaps, clean and golden, are always waiting there in the sun. And I never pass without emotion – without a vision of the long dust-whitened stretches of the cement-mills grinding to impalpable fineness the magic-powder that would “set” it all to shape and wish, both, endlessly subjects to my will.

From the fantastic totem of the Alaskan – erected for its own sake as a great sculptured pole, seen in its primitive colors far above the snows – to the resilient bow of the American Indian, and from the enormous solid polished tree-trunks upholding the famous great temple-roofs of Japan to the delicate spreading veneers of rare, exotic woods on the surfaces of continental furniture, wood is allowed to be wood.

Perhaps the greatest difference eventually between ancient and modern buildings will be due to our modern machine-made glass. Glass, in any wide utilitarian sense, is new.

Cement may be, here as elsewhere, the secret stamina of the physical body of our new world.

The machine is at its best when rolling, cutting, stamping or folding whatever may be fed into it.