THE CORPORATE SPIRIT.

Press, Volume LXI, Issue 18369, 30 April 1925, Page 4

THE CORPORATE SPIRIT.

ITS BEARING ON

ARCHITECTURE.

It has been well said of Plato that, though his writings embody "with such completeness the philosophy of tho Beautiful, there is little in the way of direct reference to the Pine Arts, to Poetry, or any of those things that we now comprehend under the term The explanation of what appears superficially a somewhat curious condition is a relatively simple one. It is that the Greeks were so fully in possession of the Beautiful, in both theory arid practice, that the objects of its practical expression were taken for granted in writing and in speech—that, tho process by which that people had become possessed of attractive surroundings to the elimination'of the unpleasant, the unsuitable, or the ugly, was so natural to them, so obvious, and so ordinary, that it had ceased in Plato's time to be a matter to speculate upon.

The Esthetic Atmosphere of Athens. It may. be presumed, indeed, that wo now accept that "the csthetical atmosphere which Plato and the ancient Athenians breathed, in the generations immediately succeeding Phidias, was the purest that has been known in the history of the world." In the realm of creative beauty there seemed nothing to do but to take for granted what as a matter of course was provided. In J. B. Patterson's work on the character of the Athenians ho emphasises that the Pine Arts were to them national pursuits—that architecture, sculpture, and painting were public talents, that Phidias, Ictimis, and others produced their divine creations to gratify no primitive taste, to serve the esoteric fancies of no select and lordly tribe of connoisseurs. They were the nation's Ministers, their works the nation's boast, their reward the nation's munificence —that, indeed, everything that was splendid among tho Athenians was public, their private life being as remarkable for frugality and unambitiousness as were their national manners for omphasis of national and civic greatness. Did not, indeed, Demosthenes, the Orator, speaking of Athens, say that the structures and decorations of tho city, the temples, the harbours, and similar public works were left by their ancestors in. such multitude and splendour as to render the attempt to surpass them hopeless. "Look round you," said he, "upon the propylcea, the docks, the porches, and all the other edifices with which' they have transmitted to us the city furnished and adorned. But, on tho other hand, the private houses of such as were then in power were so unambitious and suitable to republican equality that whoever among you has seen the dwellings of these illustrious men knows that they are distinguished from those around them by no superior splendour."

Roman Cities, There is much evidence to show, too, that Home, before the period of its decadence, was imbued with the same admirable spirit, whereby both its rulers and people, though less perfectly than the Greeks, always placed national and civic interests before the personal and domestic, and expressed it suitably in tho orderly regularity of their citios. Pompeii, despite its ruin and incompleteness, provides us still with an effective picture of the Grasco-Roman point of view in urban architecture two thousand years ago. In ft we see the general arrangement of an ancient town • —the orderly and stately treatment of its public spaces and buildings, the modest expression, externally, of its house architecture, combined with astonishingly beautiful examples of craftsmanship and a generous completeness and great refinement in the general design and decorative finish of its interiors. The precedence of civic over private interests is clear—the general unobtrusiveness of house facades, whatever tho wealth and importance of their owners and the richness and beauty of interiors, is equally shown. Taine, who wrote with much insight on ancient and modern Italy, said, with regard to Hcrculaneum arid Pompeii, that the city of those days was a veritable patrimony, and not, as with us moderns, a government collection of lodging-houses—that there men regarded ' their cities as a jewel and casket, and found in them a combination of all salutary, sacred, and beautiful things which they were proud to defend, love, and venerate. If ho is right, it explains why so much beauty survives in Pompeii.

Tho Appeal of the Old. In considering, therefore, as we have briofly done, the Classical conception of the building and other useful Arts, we arc forced to notice the essentially different point of view of the mechanicalindustrial ago of the last 100 years. Disturbed by so much that is complicated, unfitting, and oven positively hideous in the more modern features of our environment, we have acquired the habit of turning for relief to tho old-world town or village, or what, in a general way, we call the mediaeval city. The fascination we find in the streets and individual buildings that survive in Europe from, say, the twelfth to the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries results largely, I venture to think, from tho fact that they show, in the main, natural and simple methods of building: the attempt to meet th| practical needs of the time in direct and obvious ways: to the further fact that variety resulted from differences in the use and social or public importance of buildings without necessitating departures—which, indeed, were never thought of—from the general root principles of design and construction, fitness, suitability, and truthfulness that applied to them all; that ornament and decoration was applied in .ways inherent to the conditions, and not unnaturally and artificially introduced. Consciously or unconsciously, these circumstances led to harmonious effects in building, and ensured the quiet charm we invariably associate with periods removed by some centuries from our own. Not only were churches, public buildings, palaces, and houses, large or small, consistently well designed and constructed and homogeneous in their general effect, but internal decoration and furnishing, down to the smallest detail, appears to have been equally so, and to have' embodied the best expression of thought and workmanship.

Nineteenth-Century Ugliness. If we turn from this to conditions in the modern town, wo need no emphasis of an all-too obvious change. If

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wo place responsibility upon the latter half of the nineteenth century for the horrors we see in the shape of street or town architecture, to what can we assign the reason? We may surmise that tho conflict and confusion, the lack of unity or harmony, in our streets is due to the fact that with the rise of commercial life in tho last century and its concentration on inhuman machine-made prodifction, building—including what we call the industrial arts —lost connexion with native traditions; that in its place was put an unintelligent imitation—tho attempt to reproduce ornamental features characteristic of the art of other times and countries as a sort of surface treatment removed more or less entirely from the reasons, purpose, or use that originally brought them into being. We see, accordingly, artificial faces to buildings, reproducing stock architectural ornaments, and conveying impressions that they in nowise ariso from the practical necessities of the case; that instead the designer started oft with a preconceived notion to do a Gothic, Queen Anne, Egyptian, Louis Quatorzc, or Moonsn facade (quite commonly merely a facade), and did so regardless of the merits of the problem that faced lum. Paper architecture and draughtsmen s tricks had, in fact, taken the place of natural building, and their blighting effects on the older conception of a sincere creative art survives in the spurious and unnatural features that still disguise the structures of to-day.

Modem Advertising. To our usual medley of conflicting houso fronts, showing no regard for general environment or for one another, have been more recently added advertising signs of all kinds, including the hideous trappings of the illuminated variety that go to make what is already confusion worse confoundod. In the countryside the same disregard for fitness makes itself apparent, and it is somewhat useless to seek improvement in the architectural effect of towns and cities if advertising methods pay no regard to the amenities, whether urban or rural. • A perambulation of our business streets is often so painful a process, the more extreme forms of advertising methods so blatant and horrible, that I am constantly surprised that those to whom the appearanco of streets is a matter of concern, architects particularly, arc content to acquiesce in such disorder. One may instance Piccadilly Circus and the junctions of Tottenham Court road with Oxford street and .the Hampstcad road as showing present-day contempt for order and fitness.

Not only, moreover, are we continually, shocked by the ruin of the appear.unco of beautiful villages and landscapes through crude advertising methods, but also —as yet another evil of recent times —the placing of the hideous and vulgar dwellings of the town villa type in an environment where their presence is entirely inappropriate. Many old villages and hamlets made up of the simple houses of bygone ages have been spoilt by the intrusion of structures whose characteristics are- ostentation and vulgarity. In contrast with this is the common vernacular building of Europe, particularly, perhaps, of Italy —the town and rural architecture that consists of cubical brick boxes, usually plastered, with simple rectangular holes for windows and doors and plain flat pyramid roofs with projecting caves, in their simplicity constantly quite beautiful, both individually and in mass effect. One of the main distresses, indeed, caused by individualism in'architecture is that" vernacular building has gone—or almost so—and that with this has disappeared the sense of order and unity in streets and homogeneity in towns. I suppose one .hardly dare mention old Regent street—tho one really orderly and distinguished thoroughfare that we one time knew—or even guess at the ultimate effect of its reconstruction. But I am convinced that an acknowledgment of unity, harmony, and order in street architecture is essential, and that Nash revealed in a very remarkable way the working out of a valuable principle iu his treatment of Regent street.

From being a sleepy Jiocr town of 1800 inhabitants, two hotels, threo garages, and a ievr stores, Lydenourg has become tho crazy centre of the new "platinum rush " It is crowded v.itb unanciers, speculators, traders, and those "hard cases'' and piobpeetors who are the white nomads of Africa from tho Cape to Katanga aiid Bcira to Boma. Boers from tho backveldt who havo scarcely handled caMi in their lives now come into Lydenburg to spend money received for oplions on their farms. Instead of tho £lO or £ls usually paid by prospectors, options have reached £IOOO.