ection of
most people to everything that is original enough to violate tradition!
I, on the contrary, as a convinced modernist, would applaud the
unusualness of the sky-scraper. Nevertheless, I cannot possibly share
the feelings of patriotic New-Yorkers who discover architectural
grandeur in, say, the Flat Iron Building or the Metropolitan Life
Insurance Building. To me they confuse the poetical idea of these
buildings with the buildings themselves. I eagerly admit that the bold,
prow-like notion of the Flat Iron cutting northward is a splendid
notion, an inspiring notion; it thrills. But the building itself is
ugly--nay, it is adverbially ugly; and no reading of poetry _into_ it
will make it otherwise.

[Illustration: A WELL-KNOWN WALL STREET CHARACTER]

Similarly, the Metropolitan Building is tremendous. It is a grand sight,
but it is an ugly sight. The men who thought of it, who first conceived
the notion of it, were poets. They said, "We will cause to be
constructed the highest building in the world; we will bring into
existence the most amazing advertisement that an insurance company
ever had." That is good; it is superb; it is a proof of heroic
imagination. But the actual designers of the building did not rise to
the height of it; and if any poetry is left in it, it is not their
fault. Think what McKim might have accomplished on that site, and in
those dimensions!

Certain architects, feeling the lack of imagination in the execution of
these enormous buildings, have set their imagination to work, but in a
perverse way and without candidly recognizing the conditions imposed
upon them by the sky-scraper form: and the result here and there has
been worse than dull; it has been distressing. But here and there, too,
one sees the evidence of real understanding and taste. If every tenant
of a sky-scraper demands--as I am informed he does--the same windows,
and radiators under every window, then the architect had better begin by
accepting that demand openly, with no fanciful or pseudo-imaginative
pretense that things are not what they are. The Ashland Building, on
Fourth Avenue, where the architectural imagination has exercised itself
soberly, honestly, and obediently, appeared to me to be a satisfactory
and agreeable sky-scraper; and it does not stand alone as the promise
that a new style will ultimately be evolved.

In any case, a great deal of the poetry of New York is due to the
sky-scraper. At dusk the effect of