so long as they understand one another, and are in ideal agreement,
but there is in general all too little understanding, and a
confusion of ideas and aims. To the average structural engineer the
architectural designer is a mere milliner in stone, informed in those
prevailing architectural fashions of which he himself knows little and
cares less. Preoccupied as he is with the building's strength, safety,
economy; solving new and staggeringly difficult problems with address
and daring, he has scant sympathy with such inconsequent matters as
the stylistic purity of a façade, or the profile of a moulding. To the
designer, on the other hand, the engineer appears in the light of a
subordinate to be used for the promotion of his own ends, or an evil
to be endured as an interference with those ends.

As a result of this lack of sympathy and co-ordination, success crowns
only those efforts in which, on the one hand, the stylist has been
completely subordinated to engineering necessity, as in the case of
the East River bridges, where the architect was called upon only to
add a final grace to the strictly structural towers; or on the other
hand, in which the structure is of the old-fashioned masonry sort, and
faced with a familiar problem the architect has found it easy to be
frank; as in the case of the Manhattan Storage Warehouse, on 42nd
Street, New York, or in the Bryant Park façade on the New York
Library. The Woolworth building is a notable example of the complete
co-ordination between the structural framework and its envelope, and
falls short of ideal success only in the employment of an archaic and
alien ornamental language, used, however, let it be said, with a fine
understanding of the function of ornament.

For the most part though, there is a difference of intention between
the engineer and the designer; they look two ways, and the result of