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Dana Building were not numerous; no prominent man wished his business to be

located in a building that looked "like a warehouse."

The Dana Building had been designed by Henry Cameron.

In the eighteen-eighties, the architects of New York fought one another for

second place in their profession. No one aspired to the first. The first was

held by Henry Cameron. Henry Cameron was hard to get in those days. He had a

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waiting list two years in advance; he designed personally every structure that

left his office. He chose what he wished to build. When he built, a client kept

his mouth shut. He demanded of all people the one thing he had never granted

anybody: obedience. He went through the years of his fame like a projectile

flying to a goal no one could guess. People called him crazy. But they took what

he gave them, whether they understood it or not, because it was a building "by

Henry Cameron."

At first, his buildings were merely a little different, not enough to frighten

anyone. He made startling experiments, once in a while, but people expected it

and one did not argue with Henry Cameron. Something was growing in him with each

new building, struggling, taking shape, rising dangerously to an explosion. The

explosion came with the birth of the skyscraper. When structures began to rise

not in tier on ponderous tier of masonry, but as arrows of steel shooting upward

without weight or limit, Henry Cameron was among the first to understand this

new miracle and to give it form. He was among the first and the few who accepted

the truth that a tall building must look tall. While architects cursed,

wondering how to make a twenty-story building look like an old brick mansion,

while they used every horizontal device available in order to cheat it of its

height, shrink it down to tradition, hide the shame of its steel, make it small,

safe and ancient--Henry Cameron designed skyscrapers in straight, vertical

lines, flaunting their steel and height. While architects drew friezes and

pediments, Henry Cameron decided that the skyscraper must not copy the Greeks.

Henry Cameron decided that no building must copy any other.

He was thirty-nine years old then, short, stocky, unkempt; he worked like a dog,

missed his sleep and meals, drank seldom but then brutally, called his clients

unprintable names, laughed at hatred and fanned it deliberately, behaved like a

feudal lord and a longshoreman, and lived in a passionate tension that stung men

in any room he entered, a fire neither they nor he could endure much longer. It

was the year 1892.

The Columbian Exposition of Chicago opened in the year 1893.

The Rome of two thousand years ago rose on the shores of Lake Michigan, a Rome

improved by pieces of France, Spain, Athens and every style that followed it. It

was a "Dream City" of columns, triumphal arches, blue lagoons, crystal fountains

and popcorn. Its architects competed on who could steal best, from the oldest

source and from the most sources at once. It spread before the eyes of a new

country every structural crime ever committed in all the old ones. It was white

as a plague, and it spread as such.

People came, looked, were astounded, and carried away with them, to the cities

of America, the seeds of what they had seen. The seeds sprouted into weeds; into

shingled post offices with Doric porticos, brick mansions with iron pediments,

lofts made of twelve Parthenons piled on top of one another. The weeds grew and

choked everything else.

Henry Cameron had refused to work for the Columbian Exposition, and had called

it names that were unprintable, but repeatable, though not in mixed company.

They were repeated. It was repeated also that he had thrown an inkstand at the

face of a distinguished banker who had asked him to design a railroad station in

the shape of the temple of Diana at Ephesus. The banker never came back. There

were others who never came back.

Just as he reached the goal of long, struggling years, just as he gave shape to

the truth he had sought--the last barrier fell closed before him. A young

country had watched him on his way, had wondered, had begun to accept the new

grandeur of his work. A country flung two thousand years back in an orgy of

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Classicism could find no place for him and no use.

It was not necessary to design buildings any longer, only to photograph them;

the architect with the best library was the best architect Imitators copied

imitations. To sanction it there was Culture; there were twenty centuries

unrolling in moldering ruins; there was the great Exposition; there was every

European post card in every family album.

Henry Cameron had nothing to offer against this; nothing but a faith he held

merely because it was his own. He had nobody to quote and nothing of importance

to say. He said only that the form of a building must follow its function; that

the structure of a building is the key to its beauty; that new methods of

construction demand new forms; that he wished to build as he wished and for that

reason only. But people could not listen to him when they were discussing

Vitruvius, Michelangelo and Sir Christopher Wren.

Men hate passion, any great passion. Henry Cameron made a mistake: he loved his

work. That was why he fought. That was why he lost.

People said he never knew that he had lost. If he did, he never let them see it.

As his clients became rarer, his manner to them grew more overbearing. The less

the prestige of his name, the more arrogant the sound of his voice pronouncing

it. He had had an astute business manager, a mild, self-effacing little man of

iron who, in the days of his glory, faced quietly the storms of Cameron’s temper

and brought him clients; Cameron insulted the clients, but the little man made

them accept it and come back. The little man died.

Cameron had never known how to face people. They did not matter to him, as his

own life did not matter, as nothing mattered but buildings. He had never learned

to give explanations, only orders. He had never been liked. He had been feared.

No one feared him any longer.

He was allowed to live. He lived to loathe the streets of the city he had

dreamed of rebuilding. He lived to sit at the desk in his empty office,

motionless, idle, waiting. He lived to read in a well-meaning newspaper account

a reference to "the late Henry Cameron." He lived to begin drinking, quietly,

steadily, terribly, for days and nights at a time; and to hear those who had

driven him to it say, when his name was mentioned for a commission: "Cameron? I

should say not. He drinks like a fish. That’s why he never gets any work." He

lived to move from the offices that occupied three floors of a famous building

to one floor on a less expensive street, then to a suite farther downtown, then

to three rooms facing an air shaft, near the Battery. He chose these rooms

because, by pressing his face to the window of his office, he could see, over a

brick wall, the top of the Dana Building.

Howard Roark looked at the Dana Building beyond the windows, stopping at each

landing, as he mounted the six flights of stairs to Henry Cameron’s office; the

elevator was out of order. The stairs had been painted a dirty file-green a long

time ago; a little of the paint remained to grate under shoe soles in crumbling

patches. Roark went up swiftly, as if he had an appointment, a folder of his

drawings under his arm, his eyes on the Dana Building. He collided once with a

man descending the stairs; this had happened to him often in the last two days;

he had walked through the streets of the city, his head thrown back, noticing

nothing but the buildings of New York.

In the dark cubbyhole of Cameron’s anteroom stood a desk with a telephone and a

typewriter. A gray-haired skeleton of a man sat at the desk, in his shirt

sleeves, with a pair of limp suspenders over his shoulders. He was typing

specifications intently, with two fingers and incredible speed. The light from a

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feeble bulb made a pool of yellow on his back, where the damp shirt stuck to his

shoulder blades.

The man raised his head slowly, when Roark entered. He looked at Roark, said

nothing and waited, his old eyes weary, unquestioning, incurious.

"I should like to see Mr. Cameron," said Roark.

"Yeah?" said the man, without challenge, offense or meaning. "About what?"

"About a job."

"What job?"

"Drafting."

The man sat looking at him blankly. It was a request that had not confronted him

for a long time. He rose at last, without a word, shuffled to a door behind him

and went in.

He left the door half open. Roark heard him drawling:

"Mr. Cameron, there’s a fellow outside says he’s looking for a job here."

Then a voice answered, a strong, clear voice that held no tones of age:

"Why, the damn fool! Throw him out...Wait! Send him in!"

The old man returned, held the door open and jerked his head at it silently.

Roark went in. The door closed behind him.

Henry Cameron sat at his desk at the end of a long, bare room. He sat bent

forward, his forearms on the desk, his two hands closed before him. His hair and

his beard were coal black, with coarse threads of white. The muscles of his

short, thick neck bulged like ropes. He wore a white shirt with the sleeves

rolled above the elbows; the bare arms were hard, heavy and brown. The flesh of

his broad face was rigid, as if it had aged by compression. The eyes were dark,

young, living.

Roark stood on the threshold and they looked at each other across the long room.

The light from the air shaft was gray, and the dust on the drafting table, on

the few green files, looked like fuzzy crystals deposited by the light. But on

the wall, between the windows, Roark saw a picture. It was the only picture in

the room. It was the drawing of a skyscraper that had never been erected.

Roark’s eyes moved first and they moved to the drawing. He walked across the

office, stopped before it and stood looking at it. Cameron’s eyes followed him,

a heavy glance, like a long, thin needle held fast at one end, describing a slow

circle, its point piercing Roark’s body, keeping it pinned firmly. Cameron

looked at the orange hair, at the hand hanging by his side, its palm to the

drawing, the fingers bent slightly, forgotten not in a gesture but in the

overture to a gesture of asking or seizing something.

"Well?" said Cameron at last. "Did you come to see me or did you come to look at

pictures?"

Roark turned to him.

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"Both," said Roark.

He walked to the desk. People had always lost their sense of existence in

Roark’s presence; but Cameron felt suddenly that he had never been as real as in

the awareness of the eyes now looking at him.

"What do you want?" snapped Cameron. "I should like to work for you," said Roark

quietly. The voice said: "I should like to work for you." The tone of the voice

said: "I’m going to work for you."

"Are you?" said Cameron, not realizing that he answered the unpronounced

sentence. "What’s the matter? None of the bigger and better fellows will have

you?"

"I have not applied to anyone else."

"Why not? Do you think this is the easiest place to begin? Think anybody can

walk in here without trouble? Do you know who I am?"

"Yes. That’s why I’m here."

"Who sent you?"

"No one."

"Why the hell should you pick me?"

"I think you know that."

"What infernal impudence made you presume that I’d want you? Have you decided

that I’m so hard up that I’d throw the gates open for any punk who’d do me the

honor? ’Old Cameron,’ you’ve said to yourself, ’is a has-been, a drunken..."

come on, you’ve said it!...’a drunken failure who can’t be particular!’ Is that

it?...Come on, answer me! Answer me, damn you! What are you staring at? Is that

it? Go on! Deny it!"

"It’s not necessary."

"Where have you worked before?"

"I’m just beginning."

"What have you done?"

"I’ve had three years at Stanton."

"Oh? The gentleman was too lazy to finish?"

"I have been expelled."

"Great!" Cameron slapped the desk with his fist and laughed. "Splendid! You’re

not good enough for the lice nest at Stanton, but you’ll work for Henry Cameron!

You’ve decided this is the place for refuse! What did they kick you out for?

Drink? Women? What?"

"These," said Roark, and extended his drawings. Cameron looked at the first one,

then at the next, then at every one of them to the bottom. Roark heard the paper

rustling as Cameron slipped one sheet behind another. Then Cameron raised his

head. "Sit down."

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Roark obeyed. Cameron stared at him, his thick fingers drumming against the pile

of drawings.

"So you think they’re good?’ said Cameron. "Well, they’re awful. It’s

unspeakable. It’s a crime. Look," he shoved a drawing at Roark’s face, "look at

that. What in Christ’s name was your idea? What possessed you to indent that

plan here? Did you just want to make it pretty, because you had to patch

something together? Who do you think you are? Guy Francon, God help you?...Look

at this building, you fool! You get an idea like this and you don’t know what to

do with it! You stumble on a magnificent thing and you have to ruin it! Do you

know how much you’ve got to learn?"

"Yes. That’s why I’m here."

"And look at that one! I wish I’d done that at your age! But why did you have to

botch it? Do you know what I’d do with that? Look, to hell with your stairways

and to hell with your furnace room! When you lay the foundations..."

He spoke furiously for a long time. He cursed. He did not find one sketch to

satisfy him. But Roark noticed that he spoke as of buildings that were in