We are gathered here together on this most auspicious occasion to do honor to one whom it is to a delight to honor; the president of your college -- a hard worker, and believe me, a wise one in the vineyard of the Lord.

Incidentally, we are here to honor architecture and I think it time we make some gesture, at least, in that direction. God is not something in a book -- we're beginning to learn the highest and finest kind of morality is a beauty, that there is no culture for a Democracy and there is none for America until it has one of its own!

You can't live your entire life on borrowed ideas and borrowed knowledge -- borrowed culture. We must evolve something within ourselves. What you see in the good doctor's effort here, and the aid that I've given him, is really a sincere effort to realize this thing you call the word of God; from within ourselves and for ourselves -- and of course building is the natural way to do it.

I don't see how we consider ourselves as civilized, cultured people if we live ignorant of the nature of our environment; if we do not understand what we do to make it. Where the buildings that we live in are false, where they do not represent truth and beauty in any sense, where they are merely stupid or merely copying something that's not understood, we have no true culture.

Believe me, when you understand a thing you will not copy it. A copycat is a copycat because he does not understand. Understanding is love. If you don't understand, you don't love.

Out of an understanding of the piece of nature, using the word Nature of the capital N in its true sense; not just out of doors, but the nature of a book, of this hand, of anything at all. Study Nature in that sense and you'll find there the greatest and highest form of ethics is aesthetics.

Of course, morality in its present form has very little to do with ethics. Morality is seldom ethical -- but Beauty is always ethical -- a high and fine kind of ethics. So is good Architecture.

That's my message to you here today -- that these buildings on this campus are not extraneous to the thought of God, to the thought of good, to this thing you call religion in this chapel.

We need a new religion in this nation -- or at least not a new one -- we need one, and we're going to get it by practicing what we call the love of Beauty. We don't find it, (can't find it) outside ourselves. We've got to find it coming out from within ourselves to an outside that we've learned to understand as harmonious: true to the nature of materials, true to the methods of our day, true to the life of our time and true to the best of our sense of ourselves.

Now as you must know, most of us have never even met ourselves. We can meet almost everyone else on their own terms or perhaps on our terms, but mighty few of us have ever had a good look at ourselves.

The type of architecture that you see standing around you can't mean much to you until you have a good look at yourselves. Until you have tried to find within yourself what these buildings quite naturally represent; the laws of harmony, of good construction, of inner rhythm, of all this poetic and true and best in human nature at all that adds up to a great repose.

Well... that's the new architecture! That's what we're learning to call organic architecture today.

It's quite proper that we should confess to you that the world has seen very little of it as yet ... (even when the time when architecture was greatest and highest and most important in human life) ... very little of it. It's like a little green shoot in concrete pavement trying to take root, trying to be, and depending on the people who are also trying to be, for its existence.

I don't believe we can build beautiful buildings, that an edifice can arise, except that it comes from a worthy source -- and that source is inevitably the human soul ... the human heart.

In all America today, especially in educational institutions, you won't find that architecture is coming from the soul of man. You won't find an architecture with a soul, no, nor one with a heart. In other words you won't find a genuine expression of that thing we talk about so glibly and think that we love to think that we have -- which is Democracy.

Democracy needs a new gentleman; new definition of what makes a gentleman. It needs a new alignment of ethics and it can best get it by way of architecture because Organic-architecture has in it the principles ... is the very center line of this thing which we would love to feel, had we a Democracy.

Democracy ceases to talk or feel much concerning the life of the common man. As a matter of fact, is there a common man? Have you ever met one? And as for a common woman -- no. There is you -- there is me and there is the other fellow, but I believe there is no common man, nor do I believe there is what we call a "public" either.

I think we've wasted in all our efforts of great deal on this "common man" and a great deal on what we call "the public." We've not been sufficiently meticulous concerning this fellow that is ourselves. We haven't been willing to take a good look at ourselves so how can we have an architecture that grows from within the individual for the individual as a genuine creative act.

You see, the cosmic-ray hasn't yet reached us. The creative ray we don't yet know in our country, and until we do get in touch with it, and learned understand its significance as we see it around us -- by way of nature study, by way of getting inside, first ourselves, and then what is around us, we aren't going to have a Culture, we're not going to have an Architecture -- and without an Architecture there is no culture.

How can you have a true culture living in squalid, on true because unbeautiful living conditions? You can't. So here, on this little campus, Dr. Spivey has planted a little green shoot in the realm of the spirit: Something that is true to itself; something that is true to mankind; something that insists upon integrity throughout. It's not sufficient that it should stand up. Anybody can put two sticks together and make a pile of building material that will stand up.

But, that which will stand there in accord with the nature of the circumstances which put it there and with all a grace of rhythm, of truth such as you see in your trees, fruits and flowers. That is organic architecture.

And that is what this campus is going to proclaim more and more to those who want to understand it. I think he will be regarded in years to come as a missionary, as a thought along the line of a culture which we narrowly missed. We have missed it to date. It is not found in our great universities, it is not in our great churches. It is something that was lost long ago -- at least 500 years ago.

Now it is being brought again to the front -- for a free people, in a free nation. I don't see any smiling faces when make those two references. Are we free people? Is this a free country? Can it be said to be so when it can't build anything for itself of its own? I don't think so. If we are free and we haven't built -- well, the, there's something very serious in the way of an indictment that can be brought against us, of free people -- Isn't there?

It is perhaps that we're all asleep -- that we have never waked up to these things that we declare and that these things that we profess and boast to possess -- we never really had were we to take a good look at ourselves as a free people?

We had a foolish president not so long ago boasted of the four freedoms... Well, the very boasts is in itself a confession that we are not free. When the begin to count freedoms on the fingers of the hand, one, two, three, four, you are confessing the you are not free... That went around the world and no one challenged it. So it is -- We are not free and we have no free architecture and so we have no true culture of our own.

You can go into the homes of this land from coast to coast -- from border to border and find so little manifestation of the truth of our own being -- outside of the shops, outside of buying and selling, outside of eating and sleeping -- that it is all -- well -- just pitiful.

Look upon these buildings and upon this little college and look upon the wise doctor here as engaging in an adventure. The greatest, most important of all adventures: an adventure in the realm of the human spirit, searching for greater truth of being and with it comes, God knows, a more blessed, richer life.