MODERN ARCHITECTURE

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXIV, 12 March 1930, Page 7

MODERN ARCHITECTURE

EFFECT OF ENFORCED ECONOMY

The effect of enforced economy upon architectural design was, discussed by Sir Banister Fletcher ini the president’s annual address to students before the Royal Institute of British Architects. In these days, lie says, there were special aspects of great importance which called upon architects lo exercise ingenuity in plan, elevation and general detail. ’ lie mentioned, tor one thing, tpe serious increase in the cost of labour. This would appear lo be a new condition which had come to stay, if not to grow. Therefore, architects must decide what was the best use to which they could assign the hinds at their disposal. They' could allow this limitation to hamper style, or turn it into an aid to inventiveness. They were not left without a signpost from the past,’ for the great Sir Christopher Wren was faced with this same difficulty in an aggravated form when, with very restricted outlay, he had to rebuild the city churches after the Great Fire. They could study each church and notice how he apportioned the money at his disposal to that part of the design which would be most effective—one of the great lessons to be learned from this past-master in their art. Triumph over new difficulties was the test of power to turn untoward conditions to inventiveness in design. They might even he thankful that superfluous ornament and meaningless features and dust-collecting mouldings were being eliminated in the search for reduction of cost. In designing modern buildings, however, they should not he led astray into thinking that they wore better able to produce something original without a. study of the best examples of what had gono before. There was real value in. tradition, and the architect thoroughly conversant with it was more likely do exercise originality in his designs than one who had not been trained in the tradition of the past. Forced originality was not to he encouraged, for natural originality should result from new conditions arid new materials. Nowhere perhaps was there more originality than in American architecture, and yet many of the most prominent American architects had been trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where tradition was most rigidly adhered to in the curriculum.