GIVING PLEASURE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIX, Issue 226, 24 September 1938, Page 19

GIVING PLEASURE.

AN ARCHITECT ON "SOUL."

LIKE CHIME OF CHURCH BELLS.

Whimsically, Mr. H. S. GoodhartRendel, president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, put "soul" into his address at the recent annual meeting of the society. "I ask any convinced materialists that may be here to do no more than take the word 'soul' as signifying what their wives or husbands presumably have and their dogs or cats presumably have not," he "Now the observed difference, whatever it may be, between wives and cats, between husbands and dogs, is very closely parallel to the difference, not always bo clearly observed, between works of architecture and works of building. The behaviour of wives and husbands is usually regulated by some conscious desire "to give pleasure, or perhaps discomfort, to their spouses; by some desire more reasoned and less instinctive than the affectionate or hostile impulses of the dog or the cat. "You will no doubt say that utilitarian building is contrived for the physical comfort of man, but I hope you will allow that it has to be architectural before it can get beyond man's body to amuse him, to inspire him, to give him mental content. Utilitarian building is like houae-pain ting; architectural building is like picture-painting. Utilitarian building is like an inventory; architectural building is like a piece of descriptive literature. Utilitarian building m like the clang of dinner bells, architectural building like a chime of church bells. These imperfect analogies from other arts are good enough to show us that architecture, while using useful things, must do with tbem something more than what is merely useful.

"How is that art faring to-day t We remember how post-war neurasthenia plunged us for a time into a tTieoretieal negation of all architectural art whatsoever. Houses wsre to be machines to live in, offices machines to work in, restaurants machines to be fed in, theatres (I suppose) machines to be amu«ed in. From this emotional condition we have two immediate legacies, one bad and one good.

"The bad legacy ie a disregard of what is emotionally appropriate.

"The good legacy is that these internal troubles have been eased, that the tight stays of Edwardian sty 1 ism have been loosened, and that planning has not been denied its full natural development. In fact, these buildings are often quite go<»d foundations for architecture; not foundations to which architecture could be applied, because architecture m not an applied art. but beginnings that might have been brought to architectural conclusions."