and the International Exhibitions, do they not convince us that architects are inhuman creatures, outside the common order, removed from our own nature and labouring perhaps for some other planet?
It is because they have been taught a strange calling which consists in making other people—masons, carpenters and joiners—perform miracles of perseverance, care and skill in order to erect and stick together elements (roofs, walls, windows, doors, etc.) which have nothing in common and which have in truth for aim and consequence that of being designed for no useful purpose whatever.
***
For this reason, the world is unanimous in considering as dangerous gas-bags, shirkers, incapables, dull and hidebound characters, the one or two people who have grasped the lesson of primitive man in his glade, and who claim that there do exist such things as regulating lines: "With your regulating lines you kill imagination, you make a god of a recipe."
"But all earlier epochs have employed this necessary instrument."
"It is not true, you have invented it; you are a maniac."
"But the past has left us proofs, iconographical documents, steles, slabs, incised stones, parchments, manuscripts, printed matter...."
***
Architecture is the first manifestation of man creating his own universe, creating it in the image of nature, submitting to the laws of nature, the laws which govern our own nature,
