The present author can speak with all humbleness of the general
failure, on the part of the architectural profession, to appreciate
the importance of this achievement, for he pleads guilty of day after
day having passed the Prudential building, then fresh in the majesty
of its soaring lines, and in the wonder of its fire-wrought casing,
with eyes and admiration only for the false romanticism of the Erie
County Savings Bank, and the empty bombast of the gigantic Ellicott
Square. He had not at that period of his life succeeded in living down
his architectural training, and as a result the most ignorant layman
was in a better position to appraise the relative merits of these
three so different incarnations of the building impulse than was he.

Since the Prudential building there have been other tall office
buildings, by other hands, truthful in the main, less rigid, less
monotonous, more superficially pleasing, yet they somehow fail to
impart the feeling of utter sincerity and fresh originality inspired
by this building. One feels that here democracy has at last found
utterance in beauty; the American spirit speaks, the spirit of the
Long Denied. This rude, rectangular bulk is uncompromisingly practical
and utilitarian; these rows on rows of windows, regularly spaced, and
all of the same size, suggest the equality and monotony of obscure,
laborious lives; the upspringing shafts of the vertical piers stand
for their hopes and aspirations, and the unobtrusive, delicate
ornament which covers the whole with a garment of fresh beauty is like
the very texture of their dreams. The building is able to speak
thus powerfully to the imagination because its creator is a poet
and prophet of democracy. In his own chosen language he declares, as
Whitman did in verse, his faith in the people of "these states"--"A
Nation announcing itself." Others will doubtless follow who will make