AN ARCHITECT ON "SOUL"

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 78, 29 September 1938, Page 7

AN ARCHITECT ON "SOUL"

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 and cats presumably have not," he said. "Now the observed difference, whatever it may be, between wives and cats, between husbands and dogs, is very "blosely parallel to the difference, not always so 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 sppuses; by some desire more reasoned and less instinctive than the affectionate or hostile" impulses of the dog or the cat. You will no doubt saylthat 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 house painting: architectural building is like picture painting. Utilitarian, building is like an inventory; architectural building is like a piece of descriptive literature. Utilitarian building is 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 them something more than1 what is useful.

"How is that art faring today? We remember how post-war neurasthenia plunged us for a time into a: theoretical negation of all architectural art whatsoever. Houses were to be machines to live in, offices machines to work in, restaurants machines to be fed in, theatres (I suppose) machines to be amused in. From this emotional condition we have two immediate legacies, one bad and one good. The bad legacy is a disregard of what is emotionally appropriate. The good legacy is that these internal troubles have been eased, that the tight stays of Edwardian stylism have been loosened, and that planning has not been denied its full natural development. In fact, these buildings are often quite good foundations for architecture'; . not foundations to which architecture could be applied, because architecture is not an applied art, but beginnings that might have been brought to architectural conclusions."