THE ARCHITECT’S PLACE

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXX, 18 June 1936, Page 5

THE ARCHITECT’S PLACE

COMMUNITY VIEWPOINT Now that New Zealand is having a revival of building, public and private, many people in the Dominion may be interested in some remarks of Charles Marriott on the subject of “The Place of the Architect in the Community,” published in a recent issue of the “Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects.” “If I were asked,” he stated, “to say briefly what is the place of the architect in the community I might say ‘everywhere,’ and let it go at that; but that, I suppose, would be too much like evading my obligations. Therefore I shall make my answer rather more explicit, and say that the place of the architect is on the grouno floor of the community. That is to say, so far from being regarded as the man who puts on the ‘pretties,’ the architect should be regarded as the person who decides the layout, plan, scale and proportions of the social fabric, and the relation of one of its parts to another, in so far as the social fabric is material and visible. “In deciding these questions he is guided by a sense of form and order which has been properly trained. It is true that the architect also designs what are called ‘elevations,’ that is to say, the faces visible to the eye of the buildings which' have arisen from the layout and plan, but if he .s a good architect, he will treat them as arising from the circumstances, and not as something conceived beforehand, and adapted to the plan as a sort of trimming in relief. So strongly do I feel this that I would almost say that if the architect were always called in to decide the layout, plan, scale and proportions of the social fabric, the designing of elevations might be left to amateurs. “As a matter of history, the first professional architects, as distinct from master builders, that is to say, men like Wren and Vanbrugh, were amateurs, and the greatness of their works should not blind us to the fact that the circumstances that they were amateurs, enamoured of the pictorial effect, has greatly confused the subsequent history of architecture. It cannot bo too often repeated that four elevations and a plan do not make an architectural composition. There must, be between them the organic relationship of one thing growing out of another and determined in form by its character, very much as harmonies and melodies may be derived from a figured bass or the physical geography of a district is expressed in the contour tines upon the map. Briefly then, the place of the architect in the community in its material aspect is that of the divinity who shapes omends.”