side, and that it supports itself from the inside.
When the mass in the centre has been finished, an ornamental stone
facing of great individuals will be built around it and supported by it,
and the work will be considered done.

The modern spirit has much to boast of in its mechanical arts, and in
its fine arts almost nothing, because the mechanical arts are studying
what men are needing to-day, and the fine arts are studying what the
Greeks needed three thousand years ago. To be a real classic is, first,
to be a contemporary of one's own time; second, to be a contemporary of
one's own time so deeply and widely as to be a contemporary of all time.
The true Greek is a man who is doing with his own age what the Greeks
did with theirs, bringing all ages to bear upon it, and interpreting it.
As long as the fine arts miss the fundamental principle of this present
age--the crowd principle, and the mechanical arts do not, the mechanical
arts are bound to have their way with us. And it were vastly better that
they should. Sincere and straightforward mechanical arts are not only
more beautiful than affected fine ones, but they are more to the point:
they are the one sure sign we have of where we are going to be beautiful
next. It is impossible to love the fine arts in the year 1913 without
studying the mechanical ones; without finding one's self looking for
artistic material in the things that people are using, and that they are
obliged to use. The determining law of a thing of beauty being, in the
nature of things, what it is for, the very essence of the classic
attitude in a utilitarian age is to make the beautiful follow the useful
and inspire the useful with its spirit. The fine art of the next
thousand years shall be the transfiguring of the mechanical arts. The
modern hotel, having been made necessary by great natural forces in
modern life, and having been made possible by new mechanical arts, now
puts itself forward as the next great opportunity of the fine arts. One
of the characteristic achievements of the immediate future shall be the
twentieth-century Parthenon--a Parthenon not of the great and of the few
and of the gods, but of the great many, where, through mighty corridors,
day and night, democracy wanders and sleeps and chatters and is sad and
lives and dies, streets rumbling below. The hotel--the crowd
fireside--being more than any other one thing, perhaps, the thing that
this civilization is about, the token of