“INTELLECTUAL UGLINESS”

Grey River Argus, 28 August 1937, Page 3

“INTELLECTUAL UGLINESS”

AN ARCHITECT’S PROTEST.

Controversies continue to rage in the United States of America on some aspects of architecture. One side scoffs at traditional beauty of outline and fiercely contends that everything must be subordinated to “functional-ism”—-the creed of use, without ornament. The other side decries the cuit of “stark stodge.” “The spare grace of line” (a phrase used by John P. Marquand in a re-cently-published book) served as a text for Ralph Walker (a well-known American architect) in an article in "Pencil Points.” Here is a passage which should interest many New Zealanders: " ‘The spare line of grace’— an unusual and haunting phrase, and full of suggestions as to what design should be. It does mean simplicity, but it does not mean poverty of thought; it does mean refinement and not brutality. In that phrase lie the fundamental possibilities of a beautiful architecture. No architecture can continue with an utter disregard of grace or depend wholly on spareness. The so-called international style, with its frank ugly approach of materialism, stems irom the same disregard for human sensibilities that is found in Nazi Germany. They are evidently blood brothers.

“The castor oil of materialism has been thoroughly sugar-coated with propaganda, but the castor oil is still there, and this materialism has reached a sterility based on a dogma of intellectualised ugliness.

“To state that a belief in the desirability of beauty is just sentimental nonsense, that our whole job is to bring material welfare to our people, has the familiar ring of the constant high-pitched oratory of povertystricken Europe. “New materials and new methods do not necessarily aid the creation of beauty. It is very evident, as one motors through New England, that they have more recently aided in the creation of ugliness and squalor, that fundamentally the loss of a desire for beauty dates from the conception of an overwhelming materialism.”