the main justification for honky-tonk elements in architectural order is their very existence. They are what we have. Architects can bemoan or try to ignore or even try to abolish them, but they will not go away. Or they will not go away for a long time because architects do not have the power to replace them (nor do they know what to replace them with) and because these commonplace elements accommodate existing needs for variety and communication. The old cliches involving both banality and messwill still be the context of our new architecture significantly will be the context for them. I am taking the limited view I admit but the limited view which architects have tended to belittle is as important as the visionary view which the have tended to glorify but have not brought about. The short-term plan which expediently combines the old and the new must accompany the Long-term plan. Architecture is evolutionary as well as revolutionary. As an art it will acknowledge what is and what ought to be the immediate and the speculative. historians have shown how architects in the mid-nineteenth century tended to ignore or reject developments in technology when related to structures and methods as unconnected with architecture and unworthy fo it they substituted in turn Gothic Revivalism, Academic revivalism or the Handicraft Movement. Are we today proclaiming advanced technology, while excluding the immediate, vital if vulgar elements which are common to our architecture and landscape? The architect should accept the methods and the elements he already has. He often fails when he attempts per se the search for form hopefully new, and theresearch for techniques hopefully advanced. Technical innovations require investments in time and skills and money beyond the architect's reach, at least in our kind of society. The trouble with nineteenth century architects was not so much that they left innovation to the engineers as that they ignored the technical revolution developed by others. Present- day architects, in their visionary compulsion to invent
new techniques, have neglected their obligation to be experts in existing conventions. The architect, of course, is responsible for the how as well as the what in his building, but his innovating role is primarily in the what; his experimentation is limited more to his organization of the whole than to technique in the parts. The architect selects as much as creates.