Only now did he see the center of the town and the structures that were being constructed there. The evening electricity had already been lit on the scaffolding, but a field light of silence and the fading smell of sleep had approached out of general, shared space and were hanging intact in the air. Separate from nature, in a bright place of electricity, people were laboring with a will, erecting brick partitions, striding with burdens of weight in the timber delirium of the scaffolding. For a long time Voshchev observed the construction of a tower that was unknown to him; he could see that the workers were moving about evenly, without abrupt force, yet something had come about in the site and was drawing the building towards completion.
“Man puts up a building – and falls apart himself. Who’ll be left to live then?” doubted Voshchev, lost in his passing thoughtfulness.  – pg. 9, The Foundation Pit

Prushevsky took his head away from the planks and thought. Far away a nighttime factory construction site was shining with electricity, but Prushevsky knew that there was nothing there except dead building material and tired unthinking people. It was he who had thought up a single all-proletarian home in place of the old town where to this day people lived by fencing themselves off into households; in a year’s time the entire local class of the proletariat would leave the petty-proprietorial town and take possession of life of this monumental new home. And after ten or twenty years, another engineer would construct a tower in the middle of the world, and the laborers of the entire terrestrial globe would be settled there for a happy eternity. With regard to both art and expediency, Prushevsky could already foresee what kind of composition of static mechanics would be required in the center of the world, but he could not fore-sense the psychic structure of the people who would settle the shared home amid this plain – and still less could he imagine the inhabitants of the future tower amid the universal earth. What kind of body would youth have then? What agitating force would set the heart beating and the mind thinking?
Prushevsky wanted to know this now, so that the walls of his architecture should not be built in vain; the building would have to be inhabited by people, and people were filled by that surplus warmth of life that had been termed the soul. He was afraid of erecting empty buildings – buildings where people lived only because of bad weather. – pg. 19, The Foundation Pit