Practising Architect’s View Of Architecture Exhibition

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29932, 20 September 1962, Page 7

Practising Architect’s View Of Architecture Exhibition

Practising architecture and visionary architecture were quite different ideas, said Mr P, J. Beaven, a practising architect, in the fourth and final lunch-hour lecture at the Visionary Architecture Exhibition yesterday. “All theie people may have been quite wrong, and we shall never know,” he said. “Some of these things are quite horrible and we should draw a veil over them, or lose them while packing,” Mr Beaven said, indicating the exhibits. “Each of these exhibits originally appeared in a context, but when they have been yanked out and plonked in an exhibition I question whether this is just confusing us. As a example of great magnitude and extraordinary diversity I have never seen better.” Mr Beaven said that the exhibition should be treated with great care. The exhibits indicated a need for about three engineers and one architect.

“At present the desire to create cities in the world in which people want to live and not escape from has left us. Modern town designing is being left more and more to engineering experts and not to the people and tradition.” Mr Beaven said that New Zealand should create warm and pleasant town planning. It had the time to do it and did not have to pile people up in tall buildings. A study should be made of the good things about us instead of concentrating on motorways, zones, and services, he said. "At the moment we can do

this best by seeing that we do not lose the good things that we have, but hold on to them and expand them.” Indicating the interior of the University Hall, Mr Beaven said that halls built recently in Christchurch did not have a fraction of its magnificence, "but anyone can make a motorway.” Mr Beaven said that most of what he saw before him was severe, unreal, and technological. A quarter of the exhibits were by Amer San engineering specialists who drove straight across the history of town planning while cloistered in their draughting rooms.

“The architecture in these drawings is falling into a series of patterns of megalomania. They were produced by draughtsmen of technical excellence, but the level and the message are bigger than the people.” The exhibition, organised b the Museum of Modern Art. New York, and circulated under the auspices of the museum’s international council. is at Canterbury University.