Week 10 – The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

I, I will be king
And you, you will be queen
Though nothing, will drive them away
We can beat them, just for one day
We can be heroes, just for one day.


One man against the world. One man unwilling to compromise. Rourke the hero. The Marvel Architect.

Ayn Rand’s ‘The Fountainhead’ a genre defining piece of Neo-liberal propaganda which would begin to define a generation of political thinking within the United States. It may be somewhat surprising then to find a creative at the centre of the story however there is very little comment trough out the piece on the quality of the architecture. Modernism is used to represent an uncompromising new age. One of the very rare moments of nuance or attempts of subtlety in book (or subsequent film) permits the true reveal of comparisons between modernism and the economic model in favour. In a curious moment when editors at ‘The Banner’ (the newspaper which had previously lead to the destitution of Rourke’s mentor) meet to discuss the subject of their next crusade, before deciding to target Rourke’s international style, there is a throw away comment mentioning how the last ‘crusade’ was targeted at Wall Street. Wall Street, the symbol of free market capitalism, thrown as a direct bedfellow of modernist architecture.

The clumsy metaphor of modernism representing the neo-liberal ideal seems to rather juxtapose many of what would become the manifestos of the movement. Projects, probably encapsulated by Le Corbusier’s Unite d’Habitation, were led by social agendas, driven to find solutions for as many people as possible.
To not consider the underlying politics of the book for a second, 20 years after Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Decline and Fall’, Rand has presented a new vision of the modernist Architect. Mr Howard Rourke. There are many moments in which the character chimes with the architecture student. Whether near the beginning when his professor is berating his designs or the want not to compromise, to expel nothing but the purity of the work. This would be why throughout the Architectural world, Rourke can embody either the fictional hero or anti-hero. Maybe people just like a moment of success for the idealist… even if he is completely fictional.


So to paraphrase the words of my hero, the best an Architect can hope for is to be a hero, just for one day. Maybe the odd moment of triumph scattered around the points of tragedy. So in concept Rand was right? Being a modern architect is like wild unadulterated neo-liberalism. There have been moments of boom and triumph, yet funelled through what has become to manifest itself as a cyclical tragedy. A loose and serendipitous argument yet both adjectives which would fit the history of the book itself.

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