STANDARDS IN BUILDING

Evening Star, Issue 23511, 27 February 1940, Page 3

STANDARDS IN BUILDING

DUTY TO THE PUBLIC STRESSED NOFEUIONAL PMK IEFWf Ml A distinguished British architect, Mr H. S. Goodhart-Rendel, past* pfesitfsnt of the Royal institute of British Architects, spoke recently oh the question of standards in hfcHdiWgs. “ I am not denying,” he .stli'd, ” that in many kinds of buildings standardisation of design , would be desirable.. Things that •ugply universal and unvarying wants may be best and most atiapply made by the thousand to a uthrersal and unvarying pattern. Tot? will be made by machinery and .in the futiwe will probably be • designed by. machinery also. There ir nothing tendentious in this—it is Merely a . rational application of ittans to ends. The levellers, however, go much further. * For what , we spipply,’ they say, ’ a want can be by appropriate educattlgnal means: we will do what e«dms good in our eyes and then after otmr people’s, eyes until it seems good to them also.’ MORAL OBLIGATIONS. " Architects as citizens may approve or'disapprove this policy, and, if as architects it is no business of theirs to promote it, it must equally as architects be no business of theirs to oppose it. As architects, however, they must supply good architecture, and all good architecture is rooted deep in real rather than in ideal requirements, is made to the measure of something that already - exists. Ready-made buildings must not be produced by ready-made thought; however general the instructions given to him the architect in in{eapreting them must supply an adaptation to particular conditions that his employers have probably been too busy to observe. /Many public bodies employ human designers only because the robot designer, has not yet been perfected. The-human designer, the architect, must take care always to do what no robot could ever compass, and must teach his masters its value. /‘ The upholding of a high professional standard both in conduct and In proficiency is the prime duty of our societies, and it is to our success in doing this that we owe the passing of. the Architects Registration Act. If architects hpd not proved generally worthy of public confidence they, .would not have.hee'n legally distinguished from impostenVas that Act intends that they ■bould he';”