ENVOI
The aristocracies of the world have never doubted the supremacy of the home and garden and temple over all the baser mechanisms of existence, and the folk-civilizations out of which aristocracies have so often risen have never strayed far from these realities. In the Norse fables, the dwarfs are regarded as queer monsters, because they are always “busy people” who have no pride or joy except in the work they perform and the mischief they cause.
The great heresy of the modern world is that it ceased to worship the Lords of Life, who made the rivers flow, caused the animals to mate, and brought forth the yearly miracle of vegetation: it prostrated itself, on the contrary, before the dwarfs, with their mechanical ingenuity, and the giants, with their imbecile power. Today our lives are perpetually menaced by these “busy people”; we are surrounded by their machines, and for worship, we turn their prayer wheels of red-tape.
It will not always be so; that would be monstrous. Sooner or later we will learn to pick our way out of the débris that the dwarfs, the gnomes, and the giants have created; eventually, to use Henry Adams’ figure, the sacred mother will supplant the dynamo. The prospects for our architecture are bound up with a new orientation towards the things that are symbolized in the home, the garden and the temple; for architecture sums up the civilization it enshrines, and the mass of our buildings can never be better or worse than the institutions that have shaped them.