“FEELERS” & “THINKERS”

Grey River Argus, 16 October 1936, Page 4

“FEELERS” & “THINKERS”

IN ARCHITECT. A distinguished British architect, Sir Giles Scott, spoke some shrewd conimonseuse at a recent meeting ot members of his profession. “In architecture,” he said, “there are usually two main schools of thought, and as these 'two schools are in constant conflict this provides great fun for the writing and word merchants. Jf one tries to analyse the cause of this dissension it seems to me to be due, fundementally, to fhe importance attached by different individuals to two qualities latent in every human being, the intellect and the emotion. . . . derived, I suppose, from the conscious and the subconscious mind. In many of us one or other of these dominates; in one person you find the cold intellectual; in another the temperamental romanticist.

“The extremists being more vocal form around them schools of thought, which 1 might broadly dub ‘The Thinkers’ and ‘The Feelers,’ the ‘Thinkers’ being those who favour the seient.fie, logical, and practical approach to architecture. and the ‘Feelers’, those who are guided more by their instinctive feelings, emotions, and reactions. We find architectural issues fiercely contested by protagonists who are swayed either by thought or by feeling. The old battle of the styles has existed with us ever since a live tradition in architecture ceased to exist. .. . atf, fur instance, the Classic versus Gothic struggle of my grandfather’s •time, which may be quite broadly regarded as a struggle between the •Thinkers’ and the ‘Feelers’, the Classic School of the Victorian epoch being the exponents of the conscious, thinking mind, coldly intellectual and scholarly, and the Gothic, the subconscious, romantic, emotional mind.

“The present controversy of Modernism versus Traditionalism is the same issue under other names. Modernism, by its attempt to approach architecture purely from the functional and miate'rialistic point, of view, appeals to the scientific or thinking side of our minds, and by its extremism" has made, by contrast, all Traditionalists appear Romantics. The two schools have certain characteristics' that dijfferentiate them. 'The “Thinkers,’ who pride themselves on being scientific, are essentially urban-minded; they have developed a town mentality, and this is combined with an enthusiasm" for machinery and' its characteristics of smooth, hard finish, more in keeping with the character of a large town.

“The ‘Peelers’ are more rural-mind-ed and have a preference for the work of man, with its characteristics of roughness' of Nature. They feel that extreme modern architecture is not at home in rural surroundings; its hard, mechanical smoothness seems ill at ease with the roughness of the earth, hills and rocks. In the same way that a shining motor car looks better in the streets of a town than on the grass of a country meadow; and though the extreme Modernists might like to chisel and enamel the chalk cliffs o’f England to make them smooth and shiry and' render them more in keeping with the slick machinery ideal of their dream's, their opponents aim rather at blending their work/ with rough Nature, as was so successfully

— -—— — ■ — - i done in the architecture of the past, ! and so well exemplified by the old f grey castles of Scotland that blend so r well with their surroundings.” .