Cameron is an important secondary character in the story. In the 1880s, he was the most successful architect in the country, personally designing every structure that came from his office, and building as he pleased. Clients took what he gave them without complaint. Although Cameron's work was ahead of its time, he proceeded in the full confidence of his own genius. His buildings were different, but this difference was not enough to frighten anybody. Other architects, in deference to tradition, attempted every visual trick to make their buildings look small and conventional. But Henry Cameron dispensed with all horizontal devices and flaunted his structure's lean vertical lines, erecting the first skyscrapers, buildings proud of their height. By 1892, his radical new designs began to win support, but the following year saw the opening of the Columbian Exposition of Chicago, a major turning point in Cameron's career.
The Exposition was a glorification of Classical architecture. Its designers copied every style of the Greeks and Romans, and all subsequent schools of history, eschewing all originality. The American public gaped at the Exposition and, in its architectural ignorance, was impressed. The Exposition's influence lent fuel to people's willingness to continue with the traditional things they were used to and to avoid the new and untried. Cameron refused to work for such an undertaking and called it names that were unprintable. When potential clients came to him with requests for banks or office buildings designed as copies of Classical structures, he became enraged; and even went so far as to throw an inkstand at a distinguished banker who had asked for a railroad station in the form of the temple of Diana at Ephesus.
The effect of the Columbian Exposition was to close the door on Henry Cameron's future in American architecture. When design became a matter of merely copying Classical structures, there was no room for the bold originality of Cameron's work. By the time Roark meets him thirty years later, Cameron is an embittered, hard-drinking, commercial failure. But Roark reveres him because of his unbetrayed architectural vision and chooses to work for him, knowing that this is the one man who can teach him what he needs to learn. Roark learns from Cameron the means to develop his brilliant architectural ability. Keating, on the other hand, learns from Francon how to polish his method of pandering to others.
