"Many sincere workers in the field of art have realized the aesthetic poverty into which the modern world has fallen. Designers are reduced either to dig in the bone yard of dead civilizations, or to develop a purely personal style and method. The latter is rarely successful: city dwellers that we are for the most part, and self-divorced from Nature, she withholds her intimate secrets from us. Our ignorance stands pitifully revealed...In contemplating the surviving relics of any period in which the soul of a people achieved aesthetic utterance through the arts...it is clear that in their architecture and in their ornament they had a form language as distinctive and adequate as any spoken language. Today we have no such language. This is equivalent to saying that we have not attained to aesthetic utterance through the arts of space. That we shall attain to it, that we shall develop a new form language, it is impossible to doubt; but not until after we realize our need, and set about supplying it." (Claude Bragdon).