GREAT TRADITION.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 160, 8 July 1937, Page 25

GREAT TRADITION.

ENGLISH ARCHITECTURE.

"BUILDIXG BRILLIANTLY."

Some bright comment was mnde by the Hon. Vincent Maesey, High Corn* missioner for Canada, at a dinner of the Royal Institute of British Architects. "It is always a very genuine pleasure to me to rind myself in the company of architects," he said. "It has been my good fortune all my life to be very closely associated with your profession. I have been lucky in finding myself very often a member of those interesting, if temperamental, bodies known as building committees, and some of the happiest hours which I have ever spent have been in the workshops of architect friends.

'"On returning to England a few months ago, after an absence of some years, I have been enormously struck by what is happening in the realm of activity represented here this evening. If I am permitted to say something about it, it would be in words of very sincere admiration. I should like to say many things about the contemporary building I have seen in all parts of the British Isles. That which I have seen shows that the architect reveals in a very distinguished way that spirit of true ipiiaissance which every department of life has reVealed ill the last few years in the United Kingdom. "You are building brilliantly on a very great tradition, which you skilfully adapt to new purposes and new needs when occasion demands such changes* I came across in my commonplace book a remark of Inigo Jones, which is probably well to you* 'Architecture should be solid, masculine and unaffected. . These three adjectives are probably true <if nil that is best ill English aichitectine, particularly the 'unaffected.' Perliaps there is something else—moderation. Modernism can never be very extreme or traditionalism very pedantic in a country so happily given to moderation as this."