In Chap­ter 6 of “The Ways of Men,” titled “Mod­ern Archi­tec­ture,” the nar­ra­tive opens with a for­eign tourist’s hypo­thet­i­cal first encounter with New York’s sky­line, described as both chaot­ic and enchant­i­ng­ly wild at twi­light yet dis­heart­en­ing­ly grace­less by day­light. This dichoto­my under­scores the broad­er cri­tique of the city’s con­tem­po­rary archi­tec­tur­al ethos, con­trast­ing sharply with the clas­si­cal beau­ty and pro­por­tion­al­i­ty revered by past crit­ics and archi­tects. The author employs vivid analo­gies, liken­ing the archi­tec­tur­al hodge­podge of down­town build­ings to a dis­or­ga­nized, mis­matched book­shelf where struc­tures com­pete rather than cohere, betray­ing a lack of har­mo­ny and aes­thet­ic prin­ci­ple in their design.

The nar­ra­tive metic­u­lous­ly dis­sects var­i­ous archi­tec­tur­al ele­ments and trends preva­lent in New York, high­light­ing an obses­sion with com­pet­i­tive height and super­fi­cial adorn­ment over func­tion­al beau­ty and struc­tur­al integri­ty. The text cri­tiques the ten­den­cy for mod­ern build­ings to aban­don the artis­tic restraint and pur­pose of clas­si­cal archi­tec­ture, instead adopt­ing an ad hoc approach to design that pri­or­i­tizes osten­ta­tion. Exam­ples of this include the incon­sis­tent use of clas­si­cal motifs, arbi­trary dec­o­ra­tion, and a propen­si­ty for adding incon­gru­ous ele­ments to rooftops, which, while poten­tial­ly impres­sive from a bal­loon­ing van­tage, con­tribute to the city’s archi­tec­tur­al dis­so­nance when viewed from the street lev­el.

Spe­cif­ic build­ings are cri­tiqued for their unnec­es­sary and often bizarre embell­ish­ments, such as mis­placed por­ti­cos, gra­tu­itous­ly elab­o­rate cor­nices, and the whim­si­cal addi­tion of clas­si­cal fig­ures and struc­tures atop mod­ern edi­fices, which serve more as a tes­ta­ment to the archi­tects’ and own­ers’ van­i­ty than to any coher­ent aes­thet­ic vision. The chap­ter ulti­mate­ly argues for a return to sim­plic­i­ty, func­tion­al­i­ty, and archi­tec­tur­al hon­esty, where build­ings are designed with a mind­ful con­sid­er­a­tion of their urban con­text and the col­lec­tive visu­al har­mo­ny of the cityscape. It calls for archi­tects to resist the allure of super­fi­cial embell­ish­ment in favor of designs that respect the prin­ci­ples of clas­si­cal beau­ty, pro­por­tion­al­i­ty, and the func­tion­al demands of moder­ni­ty, sug­gest­ing that such an approach can indeed sat­is­fy con­tem­po­rary needs with­out sac­ri­fic­ing archi­tec­tur­al integri­ty.