It is urgent today to find means of hurdling the barriers of existing languages, for language has structured our thought and conditioned our perception so that we can only understand and deal with those concepts which have given rise to the verbal language or have resulted from the language. Words have been the conservators of culture because they are slow to change, although their meanings continually alter. A “door” once was a solid hinged barrier in an entrance. Now, it connotes a sliding, folding, hinging partition, not too different from a wall, which can also be a sliding, folding, hinging partition. Socialism and democracy are used as powerful symbols but no longer clearly define existing social systems. Words, except in the hands of the poet, obscure the truth. Words also protect us from other cultures: our minds cannot grasp a concept for which we have no word. They bind us to our culture and blind us to the culture of others. Shibui, wabi, and sabi represent important states of feeling in Japanese architecture that are difficult for us to understand, for there is no equivalent meaning in our language. Nootka has no nouns or adjectives: everything is in a state of action and must be so expressed. To them, our statement “a light flashed on” is absurd because the light and the flash are one and the same thing.

Architecture is a kind of language. It, too, binds us to a system. As the poet surcharges words with life, the architect infuses meaning into forms, which then become symbols, like words, units of meaning which, put together, make sense out of previous confusion. The miracle of architecture is that of forms made articulate. The roof becomes the essence of sheltering; the column doesn’t just hold up but becomes the potent symbol of support. Thus, they speak to us, and their particular meaning stays with us until another architect adds a different inflection to the forms.

It takes courage to accept the face of truth. And too often today, the architect turns away to prettier distractions. He cannot bear to deal with the matter at hand—the ugly but vital aspects of the American city. Though he has taken advantage of new techniques, he has not answered the problem of the mobility of modern man. […] The realities of the present city—the feedlines of power, the trafficways, the communication systems, the bravado of advertising, and the issue of housing—are, too often, desiccated and diluted when in the hands of the architect. The power pole and the street sign are more important potential symbols of the American city than the church steeple—the traffic interchange than the pedestrian square. The sense, the context to be given to the chaos of the contemporary city has not come through. I don’t believe that it will come through in the creation of Italian plazas, or the tidying up in an environment whose only excitement is in its disorder. The sculptor who is presenting to us fragments of smashed up automobiles is at least trying to make something from the stuff of the present. […] The context is there, the meaning in the forms already only to be found and illuminated. The forms of the city are waiting to be discovered and transformed. […]

There are few, if any, old forms that have vitality for us, so that when we use them, the sense is false. We must seek elsewhere for the basis of language. […]

In architecture, I don’t believe there is a more poignant source of meaning than the act of setting a structure in its environment. Architectural form is eloquent only in context. […] The source of particular meaning can still be due to climate and terrain, those aspects of nature which stubbornly refuse to change. The design solution to climate is not simply an answer to needs of comfort but to the question of the visual effectiveness of form in the climate.

The task that the architect faces now that we are through (and I hope finished) with the technological period, which corresponds to primitive tools in any culture, when the mastery of tools is all important, is one of language, I feel. We know how to spell but not to speak. Before we can have eloquence, we need a vocabulary, forms that have meaning in the context of the environment, both the environment of the social complex, the city and the regional complex, the climate and terrain. […]

We have come to the critical point where we see that, except for the rare and scattered cases, the heritage of modern architecture is as bad (if not worse) as the eclectic atmosphere it replaced, where it is empty of the little pleasantries that excused previous architecture. It is not only shallow but graceless. All styles offend when they are in the hands of the clumsy amateur, but the heritage of this in the hands of the speculative builder and developer is awful to see. Previous styles at least had rules to fill the copy books. We seem to have given only license for limbo. As architects, we must find the solution to this—or what little self-respect is left in the human being will be lost when they wake up to see the terrible desolation they have created of their habitat, their cities, and their land.