A LIVELY CONGRESS

Evening Post, Volume CXXIV, Issue 64, 13 September 1937, Page 4

A LIVELY CONGRESS

ARCHITECTS GATHER

GRIEVANCES AIRED

CRITICISMS IN MOSCOW

When the enthusiastic architects of the Soviets, gathered in Moscow lor their first All Union Congress, asked me, their invited British guest, whether I was not astonished at what had been done since my last visit in 1931, I was able to reply with substantial truth, ''Not in the least. It's what I knew you could and would do, and you've done it,"- writes Clough Wil-liams-Ellis in the "Manchester Guardian." Never was a technical congress less narrowly professional. It began with a gala feast of suitably immense proportions at the Moscow architects' Country Club, twenty miles outside the city; a dozen courses, a dozen, toasts, and all else in due proportion. The last official occasion at which I was able to be present ten days later (though by no means the last.in fact) was an even more resplendent banquet given to some 500 of us by the Moscow City Soviet in the not then formally opened terminal building of the new Moscow-Volga canal. For sheer opulence and general splendour I. have never seen a feast to touch it —whether at Guildhall, City Company dinner, or wherever.

In between these two special festivities, relieved and interspersed by nights at the ballet and the other usual diversions and gaieties of Moscow, besides visits to dozens of new buildings under the guidance of their several architects, came the real and exacting business of the long agenda conducted in the palatial old Nobles' Club, in the glittering galleries was set out an exhibition of architectural models, projects, photographs, and samples—the great white-pillared ballroom packed with a thousand Soviet delegates. A trophy of immense red velvet banners is draped behind the platform, on which at a long table sit the presedium with the chairman for the day in the centre behind the speakers' ' pulpit, which had been effectively occupied, when last I was there, by Mr. Bernard Shaw. THE RUNNING COMMENT, Loud-speakers up amongst the gold and crystal chandeliers made the speeches easily audible over the whole great hall—but not, alas! intelligible to illiterates such as 1. However, we foreign architect guests in our flanking gallery were divided into two groups according as we prefer our translations in French or English, and our several interpreters give vis efficient running commentaries. "Yes, the-woman speaking now represents the Soviet Union of Writers, author of the famous book 'Hydrocentral'—she is asking the architects what they think they are for, why don't they study their fellow-creatures and their psychologies as successful novelists need to do. She makes good fun of them." . ! , "That is Tamarina, the great actress. She pleads for better acoustics and more festive theatre decor. This woman is from the ball-bearing factory and is speaking for many thousand housewives, her fellow-women workers." "This man is a town-planner, but particularly interested in landscape gardens and parks, and he is saying some very hard things about some of his colleagues—yes, by name, of course. He says asphalt is "all very well, that you can have too much of a good thing—that robots may not need trees arid grass and flowers, but that civilised men and women do, and, above all, children." ' Amidst great applause a dozen boys and girls march iip the hall and file on to the platform. Their spokesman,' a boy of twelve or fourteen perhaps, ascends the rostrum with the utmost self-possession and delivers an eloquent and finished little speech of three or four minutes, without notes, without hesitation. Renewed and still louder applause. THE NEEDS OF CHILDREN. It seems that on behalf of all young pioneers he has been pleading for more attention by architects. to the needs of children, .especially to so planning living quarters, however smallthese may hava to be, that young students can at any rate have an adequate table decently lit by day or night at which to do their homework. Eyewash? Maybe—but how effective a way of airing a general griev^ ance, of turning the architects' attention to the things the public at large —"the consumers of architecture" — are directly concerned about. Other lay speakers make other demands, stress other shortcomings of the architects in playing their parts as specialist-citizens—hard knocks some of them, fearlessly delivered with considerable fire and eloquence. Nor are the architects themselves behindhand in oratory or in the criticism of themselves and each other (again by name) and sometimes of the public, their Clients, though for the most part they seem ready enough to admit mistakes, their own perhaps a little less willingly than those of others. Molotov, chairman of the People's Commissars Council, stresses the importance of the architectural schools; the architect-guest from Denmark generally praises the new Metro and envies Moscow its free hand in planning, unhampered by "compensation" or any private vested interests whatsoever. Then there is an exhilarating battle between the "constructivists" and the classicists (it is the latter who are very much cock of the walk just now) and some diverting backchat between those who are all for every fashionable modern gadget just for novelty's sake, and the more realistic who say, "Let us learn to provide the basic essentials generally, thoroughly, and reliably, before we launch out into elaborate contraptions. Let us first ensure that our ordinary windows are' made to open and close properly before we go in for 'air conditioning,' knowing well that the fans will soon get out of order and the ducts become choked with bats' nests." PALACE OF THE SOVIETS. Frank Lloyd Wright, the distinguished American with whom I travelled out and who has had an immense influence on the modern architecture of the Continent, especially in Holland, is given a rousing reception and speaks of the architectur.al falsity of the American skyscraper—a falsity which he bravely dares to say he also detects in the project for the vast new Palace of the Soviets with its 120 lifts and 60 escalators, designed to be the tallest building in the world and to seat 20,000 in its main hall. We had a model of it in one of the conference galleries—rather like a gigantic Gothic wedding cake with.. Lenin taking the place of the usual Cupid on the top. This colossal statue of chromium steel is' to be so large—well, I forget the statistics, but I know one could easily play badminton in its boots. It is a magnificent gesture of reverence and affection, but I doubt if it is architecture. French. Scandinavian, Czechoslovakian, Turkish, Spanish, Dutch, and other foreign architects all make their scv- ■ eral contributions, applauding the as- j tonishing Russian renaissance in general, but making their individual helpful criticisms. Broadly spcakng, I would soy that

they are everywhere—these Russians —doing the right thing, though not always very well. We, it would seem are too often doing the wrong thing, but with the greatest skill and finish. Their mistakes in detail can for the most part be put to rights whenever they have the time to attend to (hem, whilst ours can' only be removed by dynamite;—or by a new and greater faith.