a true democracy, founded on love and mutual service, beauty would
inevitably shine forth; its absence convicts us of a maladjustment in
our social and economic life. A skyscraper shouldering itself aloft at
the expense of its more humble neighbors, stealing their air and
their sunlight, is a symbol, written large against the sky, of
the will-to-power of a man or a group of men--of that ruthless and
tireless aggression on the part of the cunning and the strong so
characteristic of the period which produced the skyscraper. One of
our streets made up of buildings of diverse styles and shapes and
sizes--like a jaw with some teeth whole, some broken, some rotten,
and some gone--is a symbol of our unkempt individualism, now happily
becoming curbed and chastened by a common danger, a common devotion.

Some people hold the view that our insensitiveness to formal beauty is
no disgrace. Such argue that our accomplishments and our interests are
in other fields, where we more than match the accomplishments of older
civilizations. They forget that every achievement not registered in
terms of beauty has failed of its final and enduring transmutation. It
is because the achievements of older civilizations attained to their
apotheoses in art that they interest us, and unless we are able
to effect a corresponding transmutation we are destined to perish
unhonoured on our rubbish heap. That we shall effect it, through
knowledge and suffering, is certain, but before attempting the
more genial and rewarding task of tracing, in our life and in our
architecture, those forces and powers which make for righteousness,
for beauty, let us look our failures squarely in the face, and
discover if we can why they are failures.

Confining this examination to the particular matter under discussion,
the neo-feudal architecture of our city streets, we find it to lack