ner 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 facade, 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 facade 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
their collaboration is a flat and confused image of the thing that
should be, not such as is produced by truly binocular vision. This
difference of aim is largely the result of a difference of education.
Engineering science of the sort which the use of steel has required is
a thing unprecedented; the engineer cannot hark back to the past for
help, even if he would. The case is different with the architectural
designer; he is taught that all of the best songs have been sung, all
of the true words spoken. The Glory that was Greece, and the Grandeur
that was Rome, the romantic exuberance of Gothic, and the ordered
restraint of Renaissance are so drummed into him during his years of
training, and exercise so tyrannical a spell over his imagination that
he loses the power of clear and logical th