FOR ARCHITECTURAL FAME

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXXII, 14 March 1939, Page 8

FOR ARCHITECTURAL FAME

NEED FOR PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY A good indication of the wide range of study that must be taken by the modern architect was given recently by Mr Kingsley Henderson, chairman of the Architects’ Registration Board of Victoria. “It has been said that genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains,” he stated. “In applying that description to architects and the arrival of the future genius, I think something should be added. Intensely hard work and the taking of pains are essential all through one’s practising life. The cultivation of a photographic memory is also essential, and the feeding, with classical study and reading, of that inherent spark of talent which made the call to architecture, is essential. Above all, the development of the power to visualise is essential. To be able to look at any site in city or suburb, or forest or plain and close one’s eyes and think and then see clearly the building with which one would grace a particular site is an enormously important power—in every project to be able to walk around and walk through your building and turn down a corridor and know what you will see, to open a door and know what will greet you in the apartment and from its windows. “I believe that the power of clear visualisation, plus talent and cultural training, is the greatest asset a student can possess and develop. “The varying economic positions of architectural students render necessary a wide selection in the schools of training available to the aspiring architect. Equally so do the varied commissions entdusted to any large architectural establishment make a specialised course of training desirable. From these schools will graduate (1) the talented seer, with the gift of being able tc transfer his visions to paper by means of colour or pencil or chalk, (2) the excellent draughtsman. (3) the skilful planner, (4) the skilful meticulous scientist whose life’s work is in steel and concrete and pipes, tubes, ducts, wires and equipment of all sorts, and (5) the occasional captain of them all, the great practitioner who knows instinctively all of the secrets of the planner. of the designer, of the constructor, of the equipper and of the economist in cost and return—the man who combines all their secrets and blends and moulds them and produces the extraordinarily intriguing, beautiful, and economically sound modern building. Truly, any large architectural staff to-day furnishes a mosaic of various fields of architectural competence.”