In the late 1920s, at the height of American Art Deco, the New York architect Ralph Walker (1889-1973) began to craft a polemical theory of modern design. His theory, based in the “New Humanism” occupying American literary and philosophical circles during the roaring twenties, proposed a new way of thinking about the making of buildings, and particularly the making of skyscrapers in cities. The key to making modern buildings—which rejected Beaux-Arts academicism on the one hand and European functionalism on the other—was, in his view, to discover a modern language of cladding, a way of treating the now ubiquitous curtain wall to carry a humanistic rather than a historic or a mechanistic message. As the internal structure and systems of buildings became more and more complex, Walker turned to their surfaces, their skins, as a medium that gave focus and order to the human experience of the otherwise chaotic city. While the intensely ornamented surfaces of 1920s skyscrapers are now traditionally described as Art Deco, a term that implies a certain decadence and frivolity, for Walker the term “humanist” more aptly captured his intent. Re-examining his work and the approach of his firm Voorhees, Gmelin, and Walker to the design of skyscrapers in the 1920s shows that the integration of the decorative arts with architecture was an essential component of this modernist-humanist polemic.