The Fountainhead: Peter Keating: 3

A detail I overlooked previously: The action is taking place in 1922, which means Howard Roark was born in 1900 or thereabouts. A new and superior man for the new and superior century!

Peter Keating reports for work at Francon & Heyer and learns that Guy Francon hasn't designed anything in years. An architect named Stengel gives Keating a large watercolor drawing of an elaborate mansion to carry up to Francon's office for approval. Once there, it's clear that Francon has no idea how to critique the design. Keating boldly suggests a modification. The two size one another up and reach an unspoken understanding; Francon adopts Keating's change.

A fine passage describing a New York landmark is worth quoting at length:

... The Frink National Bank Building displayed the entire history of Roman art in well-chosen specimens; for a long time it had been considered the best building of the city, because no other structure could boast a single Classical item which it did not possess. It offered so many columns, pediments, friezes, tripods, gladiators, urns and volutes that it looked as if it has not been built of white marble, but squeezed out of a pastry tube. It was, however, built of white marble. No one knew that but the owners who had paid for it. It was now of a streaked, blotched, leprous color, neither brown nor green but the worst tones of both, the color of slow rot, the color of smoke, gas fumes and acids eating into a delicate stone intended for clean air and open country. The Frink National Bank Building, however, was a great success. It had been so great a success that it was the last structure Guy Francon ever designed; its prestige spared him the bother from then on.

Howard Roark makes his way to the offices of Henry Cameron, who had been a promising and original architect before he dared to scoff at the Columbian Exposition of Chicago in 1893. The Exposition marked the enshrinement of Classical forms; anyone who varied from slavish imitation of the old forms, who insisted on form following function, became a pariah. Cameron's decline was helped along by his imperious personality, openly disdainful of his clientele. The man oozed superiority, and if the skittering multitudes didn't like it, they could take a hike.

Now sixty-nine, the gruff genius greets the young upstart gruffly. He looks over Roark's portfolio and lambastes him mercilessly. Roark explains himself: He doesn't believe in God, and he feels called to become an architect in order to remake the earth in forms that please himself. Cameron offers our young hero a job, of course. The chapter ends without any smooching, but anyone can see these two were made for each other.