Back in New York, so re-reading The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand.

The blurb on the back of my Harper Collins edition describes the book as being all about ‘ambition, power, gold and love’.

Not really. Did they read it?

This is the best book about Freedom and Communism, a rambling complex philosphical novel on a vast scale. It pits the Ultimate Individualist (Howard Roark, architect, uncompromiser) against the Ultimate Collectivist (Ellsworth Toohey, writer, collector of souls).

It is set mainly in the New York of the 1920s and 1930s. It opens with the defiant young Roark being thrown out of Architecture School for refusing to accept that the Classical idiom of pillars, mantels, grapes and other forms of such decoration and proportion is the only true one:

Your Greeks took marble and they made copies of their wooden structures out of it, because others had done it that way. Then your masters of the Renaissance came along and made copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Now here we are making copies in steel and concrete of copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Why?

The Dean of the school is aghast. He asks Roark if he intends to design buildings in the ‘modern’ style Roark advocates:

Yes

My dear fellow, who will let you?

That’s not the point. The point is, who will stop me?

Roark goes on to deride and defeat those architects who wanted to design the powerful new hotels and skscrapers of New York using all those Grecian and other classical motifs. His vision rather was sleek but finely proportioned buildings whose coherence emerged from the site and the materials used.

The architecture metaphor in the book is of course a vehicle for Ayn Rand (born a Russian) to describe the supreme ideological battle between Roark and Toohey – she was wriiting at a time when collectivist Nazis and Stalinists were enslaving and murdering millions of people across Europe.

Anyway, I conclude that although he articulates an admirably pure, unashamedly individual freedom Roark was not quite right on his architectural vision.

There is room in society for the eccentric and the misguided. The ridiculous kitschy mish-mash of styles indeed seen in many of the older New York skyscrapers gives them and the city its wonderful exotic charm now. Without all those brooding gargoyles and dazzling art deco designs poised far above the streets, Batman and Spiderman imagery would be far less potent.