BEAUTY IN BUILDING

Evening Post, Volume CXXVIII, Issue 29, 3 August 1939, Page 23

BEAUTY IN BUILDING

Talbot Hamlin, a distinguished American authority on architecture, continues to call for beauty in buildings. "The secret of beauty," he declares, "does not lie in engineering; and when engineering structures are beautiful architecture, as they frequently are, it is simply because, either by pure accident or because of some intuitive creative sense in their designer, they have transcended the plane of mechanics and calculation, and entered the plane of pure form.

"Architecture, whether we like it or not, is an expressive art, and the building each age produces cannot help being the product of its age. To ask the architect of today to forget that he belongs to the twentieth century is as silly as asking a farmer to produce grain by forgetting the soil in which it grows. For good or bad, we architects are necessarily contemporary. "We may not be able to state exactly what beauty is, but common sense and our own experience will tell us when it is present; for beauty in art is, above everything else, a special kind of pleasurable and healthy experience, produced by objects designed to arouse it. If our buildings do not arouse this experience, this lift, this thrill, this awareness of universal pattern, this sense of fuller, richer life, this expansion of consciousness, then they are not beautiful.

"To produce beauty in architecture is no easy task. The architect deals in pure visual abstractions; he has not the painter's, the sculptor's, nor the poet's obvious representation as an assistance. The architect is limited by his materials in a much more constrained way than the painter or the poet. Nevertheless, his task is essentially similar; basically, it is the task of actual imaginative creation."