Howard Roark stands on the edge of a cliff in the coastal township of Stanton, Massachusetts, watching the granite around him and the water below. He dives into the water, then gets out, gets dressed, and returns to his boarding house at the Architectural School of the Stanton Institute of Technology. His boarding house mother, Mrs. Keating, tells him the Dean wants to see him; he has been expelled this morning.
Roark goes to see the Dean. They talk about why he has been expelled; it is because he refuses to look to the classics in his architecture. The Dean says that only the past architecture has merit, and that anything new must draw on the past. Roark disagrees (but doesn't really care to make the Dean agree) and says that he doesn't care about what has been done in the past; he wants to do new and better things for the sake of building, not for the sake of getting clients. The Dean thinks he is dangerous and will never become an architect. Roark leaves and envisions one of his building plans, glass and concrete, with his signature on the edge of the paper.
