LEISURE HOURS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 205, 29 August 1936, Page 10

LEISURE HOURS.

SEASIDE DEVELOPMENTS

PLANNING FOR ARCHITECTS.

It is anticipated in England that the new leisure resulting from the reorganisation .of industrial and commercial life will call for better provision of facilities for recreation, just as it will in New Zealand. The principal feature in a recent issue of the English "Architectural Review" is titled "Leisure at the Seaside"—a series of special articles, elaborately illustrated. "The architect of to-day," states the writer of the foreword, "is concerned with the metropolitan situation, but that term must be made to cover not only the immediate problems of urban life, but the non-metropolitan activities the pursuit of which a properly balanced urban life demands. These non-metro-politan activities, with which in leisure hours we utilise the country, our lakes and rivers and our sea coasts, require forethought and control as much as the town life thoy supplement. The more rapidly our working population becomes concentrated in towns —that is to say, the more the town becomes the normal habitat of the majority of people—the less can wo afford to leave any kind of development to accidental opportunity. All the alternatives in the way of backgrounds for existence—town and country and all the varieties of each—must be regarded as forming a syntliesised whole.

"Planning for the profitable utilisation of ieisure is therefor one of the architect's special contributions to the metropolitan situation; profitable and special in the sense that the present-day concentrated urban existence is only made tolerable by the contrasting characteristics of leisure hours, and these characteristics must bo preserved and cultivated if they are not, with constant use, to become indistinguishable from the same characteristics that the town dweller normally has about him.

"The architect must understand the special necessities and virtues of each leisure activity for which he has to plan. In these summer months the seaside provides the opportunity for all sorts of special leisure activities whose purpose is to provide change, amusement and recuperation. It provides activities, moreover, of a nature that agrees with contemporary preferences in the waj' of leisure conditions; the seaside scene has its primary virtue in the light air we are only now learning to appreciate; the seaside architecture has the maximum opportunity, for similar reasons, of achieving a characteristic expression. Seaside resorts, it should be added, present a special problem in planning because of their inherent tendency to organic growth; it is especially true of them that, because of the mere fact that many people go, more are attracted."

One of the contributors mentions a "depressing uniformity" in English seaside resorts. "It is the architect's initiative which may bring about a longdesired change," he declares. "If the majority of such seaside development is not architects' work it may prove to be a national misfortune. Architects whose most serious and immediate problem should be reforming housing, can nevertheless regard with some seriousness the problem in the shape of our seaside, where lies much of the architectural prestige of this country for the holidaymaker from abroad to appreciate."

In seaside development New Zealand has still much to learn.