The short answer is no. The long answer is this letter.

In December 1943, architect Amancio Williams wrote to his brother Mario to explain why he wasn’t going to build him the house he wanted. It wasn’t easy to say to a brother. But Williams found the nerve, and what he wrote remains, eighty years later, one of the most honest explanations of what architecture is, and what it isn’t.

We’re not going to paraphrase it. We’re reproducing it in full, because there’s no better way to say it.

Buenos Aires, December 9th., 1943

Mr. Mario Williams

Buenos Aires

My dear Mario,

I think it fitting, and quite necessary, to send you, along with our work for your house, some explanations about the project and about our position. Having them in writing, you can return to whatever interests you as many times as you like, think it all through carefully, and arrive at a reasoned view, and for my part, I will have the advantage of leaving everything fully clarified.

Clarity often calls for a somewhat didactic tone; don’t read pedantry or professorial airs into this, I will try to explain myself as simply as I can.

Architecture is one of the most complete forms in which an age can manifest itself, because it is the result of two great forces: the spirit of the age, and the resources available to it. An age with a great spirit builds great works even with poor resources, so long as those resources are well used. Take the great architectures of antiquity, which had only stone, brick, or wood, and elementary calculation, to work with. An age with a mistaken spirit, even with enormous material and scientific resources, produces rubbish. Take the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, which, with iron and reinforced concrete at hand, failed to produce an architecture that expressed them (honorable, misunderstood exceptions aside).

This was due to the spirit of imitation, opposed to the spirit of creation, which has reigned over the architecture of the entire world since the Renaissance, and which is only now beginning to be shaken off.

If you trace the history of architecture, even in broad strokes, you will see in every great age an extraordinary effort of creation. In all of them, one invents, one does not copy. No Greek architect built in the Egyptian or Assyrian style; no Byzantine in the Roman, Greek, or Persian style; no thirteenth-century Frenchman in the Byzantine or Romanesque style. Why? Because in great ages, and in great artists, the spirit of copying is absent. The concern is to create. If Greece, Byzantium, medieval France had given up on creation, as the whole world gave up on it last century, in architecture, and had devoted themselves instead to copying, to styling, we would still be building as the Egyptians did, admirably for their time, but not in a form good for ours today.

A great architecture must be created now, because on one hand we have unlimited resources, extraordinary materials and means of construction, the universality of science, and so on, and on the other, the spirit proper to our age is already taking shape, beginning to surface, still inaccessible to the masses, but already recognized by those who know how to see. Every thinking person, philosophers of history and of politics, great critics, and so on, agrees that a new age is beginning. A new age with its new art and its new mentality. And those who today reject its first manifestations, clinging to the prejudices of the decadence of the previous age, are as blind, and (consciously or not) as criminal, as those who booed Wagner, exiled Dostoevsky to Siberia, or condemned Rembrandt to poverty. The philistine, the one who does not understand, is the worst obstacle to the movement that advances, but since he lacks sufficient force, he ends up run over. Where are the learned gentlemen now who condemned Impressionism? Their names have died, their works never lived, and if anyone remembers them at all, it is with contempt. And the pompous critics who called the Ninth Symphony chaotic? And the uncomprehending bourgeois who mocked Debussy?

The spirit of the age will triumph in the end. And it is better to have been among the first, to have contributed rather than obstructed, to have understood rather than mocked or been outraged, to have accompanied and encouraged the precursors rather than tried to crush them under the dreadful weight of the bourgeois mass.

To deny creation is to close off the path to progress. To wish to go backward, imitating this or that style, is to contribute to degeneration and chaos, it is to cut off the possibility of arriving at great art.

That is why no architect who holds an elevated concept of his function, who feels his age deeply, who feels the need to express its spirit, who wants to make the fullest use of its resources, can honestly build, at a client’s request, in a given style.

Another architect may do it out of commercial cunning, or because he stands so far outside his age that he cannot glimpse its problems. But the ignorance of the latter and the self-interest of the former are both at odds with art.

Style, true Style with a capital S to distinguish it from mere “styles,” is born on its own, is the result of clarity and beauty expressed through particular means. It is a distinctive happenstance, the mark a work of art bears of the personality that created it, whether that personality belongs to an individual, a country, or an age. Its very definition shows how absurd and dishonest it is to imitate a style. The musician who writes “in the style of Bach,” the painter who paints “in the style of Leonardo,” is not only a forger but proves he has no style of his own. Each person must create as best he can. He should not worry about whether his works have style, nor go looking for it. Style is born according to the spirit.

The so-called “styles” (Basque, Breton, Tudor, and so on) are the expression, in a given country and age, of certain climates, ways of living, local resources, and so forth. That is to say, they are the negation of universality. They are essentially local. They have charm, not all of them, and each in its own place and time, but imitating them is as absurd as trying to imitate the climate, the landscape, or the way of life that gave rise to them. It is as incongruous as wanting to travel by gondola across the Pampas, or by sleigh through the hills of Córdoba.

“Doing styles,” “doing houses,” is the simplest thing there is. A bit of common sense for the layout, a bit of culture to know the chosen “style,” a bit of taste to apply it. That’s all there is to it.

And art? And architecture? What do they have in common with that? Against this trade, now picture instead the true architect, that Greek architect who did not build “in the Egyptian style” or “the Assyrian style,” but architecture, modern in his own time, and who, little by little, working with the resources of his age, superior to those before it, and the admirable spirit of his people, elaborated that purest beauty that would culminate in the Parthenon; or that twelfth-century architect who did not build “in the Byzantine style” or “the Romanesque style,” but honestly sought the best construction in stone to solve his problem, and the greatest beauty to honor God, and created those marvelous Gothic cathedrals.

Those architects made architecture, and created a “style.”

Do architects like them exist today? From the Renaissance until now, it can be said that they disappeared.

Creation was replaced by imitation. Apart from the outburst of the Baroque, which, in any case, only played with distorted classical elements, everything followed a single line, creation was reduced to moldings, stucco, or details of arrangement. One “Louis” is told apart from another “Louis” by things that have nothing to do with architecture. It is no longer a matter of advancing construction, or of creating beauty, the rule is whim, fashion, whole facades made symmetrical or asymmetrical, a chair leg used straight or curved, on nothing more than that.

There was later another outburst that, thank God, did not take hold: Art Nouveau, which represented at least an attempt at liberation, but which rested on nothing serious, pure whim, and a rather poor one at that.

And now, the new architecture. The true architect considers the degenerate age, in which art consisted of imitating earlier works, to be over. An age begins in which one must create again, and in which construction has, to express itself, magnificent means at its disposal (until 1850, wood, brick, and stone were the fundamental elements of construction; from then on, iron appears, and later reinforced concrete, some two thousand alloys, a great quantity of metalloids, and plastic materials).