MODERN ARCHITECTURE

Evening Star, Issue 22723, 10 August 1937, Page 2

MODERN ARCHITECTURE

UNKNOWN TO THE PUBLIC “ It is one of the sad handicaps of the modern movement in architecture that the ordinary person, on whose understanding of it the satisfactory progress of the movement depends, has probably never once seen an example of modern architecture,” states a reviewer. “ The public does not at the moment even know modereu architecture when it sees it, and is therefore not in a position to hold out to the modern architectural movement the support that it needs to enable it to make the transition from its adolescent stage as tho conscious cult of an intelligentsia to its mature stage as tho unconscious expression of a culture. “ To-day the aristocracy, such of it as remains, is philistine; the commercial aristocracy that has in part replaced it is also philistine. There is no pervading influence or patronage that will convert a cultured taste into a widespread habit of _ application. Today in our democratic or bureaucratic state we must substitute a thousand committeemen, councillors, Civil servants, and private builders for each single aristocratic patron. It is these whose patronage’ the modern architect needs, and who represent the public whom he must educate to serve as his patrons. This may involve an undesirable intellectualisation of tho architect’s art, but only thus can sufficient cooperation be obtained to give modern architecture the same opportunities of civic application that tho great landlords gave it in the past. And only civic opportunities, buildings for public »ervices and public works on a large scale, can enable the architect to exploit the modem qualities of standardisation and mass production, and to make full us© of the characteristically modern industrial organisations. “ But architecture is an aft, it might again he said, whose mysteries canfaot be understood by all; the spiritual as well as the formal qualities that make the difference between good art arid bad art are matters of feelirig and not of fact; the vital element in architecture, that is, is not subject to exposition and analysis. It might be said, let the architect prosecute his art and let the public accept it as simply and as unanalytically as it has always accepted great art. But hero again we come up against the complexity of our social, orgonisation, the confusion of purpose that makes the public querulous of change, but at the same time uncertain of relative values and easily attracted by novelty. Educational efforts, therefore, towards the establishment of an understanding of modern architecture must he pursued as a kind of tactic, as the only way of simplifying the issue' in preparation for a, state of affairs more analagous to the Georgian. Wo must go back first to the building up in the public mind of a simple sense of function, in the way of rightness and orderliness as well as of efficiency, using the easily demonstrable practical virtues of modern architecture to gain a degree of public co-operation, trusting later to see that architecture accepted,for its own sake as art.”