In every field of industry, new problems have presented themselves and new tools have been created capable of resolving them. If this new fact be set against the past, then you have revolution.
In building and construction, mass-production had already been begun; in face of new economic needs, mass-production units have been created both in mass and detail, and definite results have been achieved both in detail and in mass.
If this fact be set against the past, then you have revolution, both in the method employed and in the large scale on which it has been carried out.
The history of Architecture unfolds itself slowly across the centuries as a modification of structure and ornament, but in the last fifty years steel and concrete have brought new conquests, which are the index of greater capacity for construction, and of an architecture in which the old codes have been overturned. If we challenge the past, we shall learn that "styles" no longer exist for us, that a style belonging to our own period has come about; and there has been a revolution.
Our minds have consciously or unconsciously apprehended these events and new needs have arisen, consciously or unconsciously. The machinery of Society, profoundly out of gear, oscillates between an amelioration, of historical importance, and a catastrophe.
The primordial instinct of every human being is to assure himself of a shelter.
The various classes of workers in society to-day no longer have dwellings adapted to their needs; neither the artisan nor the intellectual.
It is a question of building which is at the root of the social unrest of to-day; architecture or revolution.
