“STYLELESS STYLISM"

Grey River Argus, 5 December 1938, Page 9

“STYLELESS STYLISM"

STARK ARCHITECTURE CRITICISED. Recent comments of several leading architects in London support the impressions of a veteran hew Zealand architect, Mr F. de J. Clcre, who remarked on his return from a xisit to England that 1 he had noticed a trend away from the fashion for severity of outline —the “stark style. At a me°ting of the Royal Institute of British Architects, the president, Mr H. S. Goodhart-Rendel, referred to the recent “break in the traditional competence of .architects to produce architecture.” “Some of the exaggeratedly utilitarian designing in all countries has been done by men who know a great deal more than they have chosen to show in it,” he 'said. "On the othei hand, much of it has been produced by a new generation whose powers are limited by the crudities it has never got beyond. In the genera’ movement back to architecture which is taking place on the Continent of Europe, very many men must lag behind who, if their architectural sensitiveness had been sharpened by any proper training, should have been able to acquit themselves well.

“Unfortunately, their attitude of revolt from the past (in itself as good an attitude for an artist as any other) has been made ineffective by their ignorance of the past from which they are revolting. They have not so much fallen into new errors as'into old errors of whose previous commission they have been ignorant. In condemning styles they have seen no deeper than style, and have become inconscient slave’s of their own styleless stylism. If any candid and unprejudiced person will look through the pages of the old building papers, he will see that, alike in the work that is good, that which is indifferent, and in that which is bad, a great deal of human zest has lately gone out of architecture.

“Not that against this loss we may not balance a great and an encouraging gain. Before the war, the plans of British buildings, other than domestic, were a by-word for vagueness and unskilfulness, whereas now our planning is little if at all inferior to that of any other European nation excepting France. "Planning, as. everyone knows, is controlled as much by the needs ot structure as by those of spatial arrangement, and until our engineering becomes more elastic and resourceful than it is at present,' our new skill in the disposition of space can hardly make its full effect. This is one of the unhappy consequences of the separa- •' tion between engineering and architecture that in England is barely two centuries old,”' < £ ’ '