SHIPS AND HOUSES.

Auckland Star, Volume LXXI, Issue 165, 13 July 1940, Page 16

SHIPS AND HOUSES.

CONTRASTS IN BUILDING.

SEQUENCE OF FUNCTIONS

In an article on "Architects and the Future of Industry," Mr. George Hicks, chairman of the Wartime Committee of the British Building Industries National Committee, shows that the ordinary building industry has much to learn from shipbuilding. a "Functionally the building industry has always been a loosely knit group of industries and interests," he writes. "I do not meaji that its products are or have necessarily been inefficient, but that its method of production has been so in many respects. I think that perhaps the main reason for this is that in the past the industry has never had

a sufficiently widely reoognised organisational head or focal point to give it an effective sense of corporate achievement. It has functioned as a process of sequential operations rather than as a responsible collective effort, and its sense of process has smacked of separatism rather than of collectivism, a cardinal error in any organism having a common aim or end.

"A brief comparison with the shipbuilding industry will, perhaps, show a little more clearly what I mean. The naval architect is recognised by all parties as having the control of and accepting the responsibility for the ship's final and complete production. He is, in short, a naval town-planner as well as a ship-planner. Shipbuilding under the superintendence of the architect in relation to his design has now become a recognised and standard procedure and its working has become so systematised that, value for value and trade for trade, shipbuilding in Great Britain is probably one of the quickest, if not the quickest, of industrial processes. "The production of buildings, which historically is perhaps slightly older than the production of boats or ships, has never developed in quite such a close sequence of functions as in the case of shipbuilding. The probable reason for that is that the architect, as an entirely separate functionary, came into building at a later stage than in the case of shipbuilding. Moreover, the architect in building has never reached the same stage of recognition. Ho is still only a part functionary and wo are still faced with the rather tragic position in which the architect does not function to anything like the extent he should in that very wide field—housing." * |