What would be your opinion of a book that opens with the line, “Howard Roark laughed.” then proceeds to describe a man standing at the edge of a sunlit cliff, surveying a dynamite explosion spraying granite across the water? It’s fitting, somehow, to begin Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. A seven hundred-page novel that, like its first scene, is strange, explosive, and centered around the young architect Howard Roark.
Chances are, you’ve heard of this novel but not quite read it, and for good reason—it’s intimidating, bizarre, and shrouded in a cloud of controversy. Idealistic. Self-centered. Unrealistic. Romanticizes rape. Undermines altruism. Dangerous political allusions. Yet The Fountainhead has become one of my favorite books, and here’s why: it’s provocative. The term “fountainhead” indicates the origin of a stream. The mainspring and the principal source of everything. This novel was the fountainhead of the creative and stimulating journey I embarked on as soon as I first read the words, “Howard Roark laughed.” I do not agree with all of Rand’s philosophies in the book, yet it is intellectually stimulating to meditate on her arguments.
Roark is, obviously, the man on the cliff watching granite when The Fountainhead begins. Tall, orange-haired, and angular, he has been expelled from the Architectural School of the Stanton Institute of Technology (a university that vaguely resembles MIT) that morning, and we soon see why. Twenty-two-year-old Roark walks through the town of Stanton in that quiet morning of 1922 and sits in conversation with the Dean of the Institute. In response to the Dean’s ingratiating attempts to wind Roark back to the school as a docile student, Roark points to a photo of the Parthenon—the revered architectural phenomenon—and strip it down to its fluted columns and wooden triglyphs, questioning every element of it and claiming that it lacks a central idea, a soul, that he believes all buildings should have. When the Dean tells him that he’ll outgrow his aberrant philosophy, Roark answers simply, “I inherit nothing. I stand at the end of no tradition. I may, perhaps, stand at the beginning of one.”
It’s just a conversation in the chapel-like office of the Dean, light filtering through the red and purple stained glass to hit the fireplace in the room. Yet it is also the first of many conversations to come, Roark against another person, Roark against architectural conventions, Roark against society, and against the world. Through this conversation, the basics of Roark’s philosophy is etched clearly for the reader to see. The philosophy that gives Roark a stone core, that expresses itself through his rigid body, polite words, and unbothered demeanor.
It’s the philosophy that leads Roark, soon, to leave to find Henry Cameron, an old and depraved former architect regarded as a failure. A hermit that lives alone after a lost battle with the rest of the world. Roark approaches Cameron and asks to work for him. Meanwhile, Peter Keating is the adored son of the world: friendly, pleasant, and a reasonably talented architect. After graduating the Stanton Institute with highest honors, he begins work at the renowned architectural firm of Francon & Heyer. And so each of the two contrasting architects embarks on his own path, yet their paths will cross again and again.
– TO BE CONTINUED –
