s are in our souls thirty-one-story blocks will be our
masterpieces, whether we like it or not. They will be our masterpieces
because they tell the truth about us; and while truth may not be
beautiful, it is the thing that must be told first before beauty can
begin. The beauty we are to have shall only be worked out from the truth
we have. Living as we do in a new era, not to see that the
thirty-one-story block is the expression of a new truth is to turn
ourselves away from the one way that beauty can ever be found by men, in
this era or in any other.

What is it that the thirty-one-story block is trying to say about us?
The thirty-one-story block is the masterpiece of mass, of immensity, of
numbers; with its 2427 windows and its 779 offices, and its crowds of
lives piled upon lives, it is expressing the one supreme and
characteristic thing that is taking place in the era in which we live.
The city is the main fact that modern civilization stands for, and
crowding is the logical architectural form of the city idea. The
thirty-one-story block is the statue of a crowd. It stands for a
spiritual fact, and it will never be beautiful until that fact is
beautiful. The only way to make the thirty-one-story block beautiful
(the crowd expressed by the crowd) is to make the crowd beautiful. The
most artistic, the only artistic, thing the world can do next is to make
the crowd beautiful.

The typical city blocks, with their garrets in the lower stories of the
sky, were not possible in the ancient world, because steel had not been
invented; and the invention of steel, which is not the least of our
triumphs in the mechanical arts, is in many ways the most
characteristic. Steel is republican for stone. Putting whole quarries
into a single girder, it makes room for crowds; and what is more
significant than this, inasmuch as the steel pillar is an invention that
makes it possible to put floors up first, and build the walls around the
floors, instead of putting the walls up first and supporting the floors
upon the walls, as in the ancient world, it has come to pass that the
modern world being the ancient world turned upside down, modern
architecture is ancient architecture turned inside out, a symbol of many
things. The ancient world was a wall of individuals, supporting floor
after floor and stage after stage of society, from the lowest to the
highest; and it is a typical fact in this modern democratic world that
it grows from the in