Everyone likes Howard Roark, Not many become one!

There are a lot of my friends who have read Fountain Head by Ayn Rand. Howard Roark, the architecht and an original thinker is an inspiration. The character makes a lot of people lose sleep for days together, making them rethink what they were doing with their life. It did for me. But now its a memory - the book and the feeling. Life goes on. People choose to do things that were done, ocassionally reminding themselves that they are either too helpless to change the state of affairs or pretending to be too happy with the status quo. As life moves on, the very people who read the classic Fountain Head would longingly look back and say "It was a nice book" and just move on.

It doesnt take much to read about Howard Roark but it takes a life time to be one.

From “The FountainHead” by Ayn Rand:

"Look," said Roark evenly, and pointed at the window. "Can you see the campus and the town? Do you see how many men are walking and living down there? Well, I don't give a damn what any or all of them think about architecture -- or about anything else, for that matter. Why should I consider what their grandfathers thought of it?"

"That is our sacred tradition."
"Why?"
"For heaven's sake, can't you stop being so naive about it?"
"But I don't understand. Why do you want me to think that this is great architecture?" He pointed to the picture of the Parthenon.
"That," said the Dean, "is the Parthenon."
"So it is."
"I haven't the time to waste on silly questions."
"All right, then." Roark got up, he took a long ruler from the desk, he walked to the picture. "Shall I tell you what's rotten about it?"
"It's the Parthenon!" said the Dean.
"Yes, God damn it, the Parthenon!" The ruler struck the glass over the picture.

"Look," said Roark. "The famous flutings on the famous columns -- what are they there for? To hide the joints in wood -- when columns were made of wood, only these aren't, they're marble. The triglyphs, what are they? Wood. Wooden beams, the way they had to be laid when people began to build wooden shacks. Your Greeks took marble and they made copies of their wooden structures out of it, because others had done it that way. Then your masters of the Renaissance came along and made copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Now here we are, making copies in steel and concrete of copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Why?"

The Dean sat watching him curiously. Something puzzled him, not in the words, but in Roark's manner of saying them.

"Rules?" said Roark. "Here are my rules: what can be done with one substance must never be done with another. No two materials are alike. No two sites on earth are alike. No two buildings have the same purpose. The purpose, the site, the material determine the shape. Nothing can be reasonable or beautiful unless it's made by one central idea, and the idea sets every detail. A building is alive, like a man. Its integrity is to follow its own truth, its one single theme, and to serve its own single purpose. A man doesn't borrow pieces of his body. A building doesn't borrow hunks of its soul. Its maker gives it the soul and every wall, window and stairway to express it."

"But all the proper forms of expression have been discovered long ago."

"Expression -- of what? The Parthenon did not serve the same purpose as its wooden ancestor. An airline terminal does not serve the same purpose as the Parthenon. Every form has its own meaning. Every man creates his meaning and form and goal. Why is it so important -- what others have done? Why does it become sacred by the mere fact of not being your own? Why is anyone and everyone right -- so long as it's not yourself? Why does the number of those others take the place of truth? Why is truth made a mere matter of arithmetic -- and only of addition at that? Why is everything twisted out of all sense to fit everything else? There must be some reason. I don't know. I've never known it. I'd like to understand."

"For heaven's sake," said the Dean. "Sit down....That's better....Would you mind very much putting that ruler down?...Thank you....Now listen to me. No one has ever denied the importance of modern technique to an architect. We must learn to adapt the beauty of the past to the needs of the present. The voice of the past is the voice of the people. Nothing has ever been invented by one man in architecture. The proper creative process is a slow, gradual, anonymous, collective one, in which each man collaborates with all the others and subordinates himself to the standards of the majority."

"But you see," said Roark quietly, "I have, let's say, sixty years to live. Most of that time will be spent working. I've chosen the work I want to do. If I find no joy in it, then I'm only condemning myself to sixty years of torture. And I can find the joy only if I do my work in the best way possible to me. But the best is a matter of standards -- and I set my own standards. I inherit nothing. I stand at the end of no tradition. I may, perhaps, stand at the beginning of one."