Builders eventually took advantage of the look of modernism to build cheaply and carelessly.

Does an architecture to assuage the spirit have a place in all this? Unfortunately we are no longer the interpreters of our culture's myths but the followers of that dubious client, the developer, who has little patience with the art of architecture, the fine detail and obscure promise, which can upset his financial activity.

We settled this continent without art. So it was easy for us to treat it as an imported luxury, not a necessity.

Our engineering departments build freeways which destroy a city or a landscape, in the process.

After 1980, you never heard reference to space again. Surface, the most convincing evidence of the descent into materialism, became the focus of design. Space disappeared.

The innovative spirit was America's strongest attribute, transforming everything into a brave new world, but there lingered an insecurity about the arts.

We have today a fairly thorough knowledge of the early Greco-Roman period because our motivations are the same.