“BRUTAL FRANKNESS”

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXXII, 14 April 1939, Page 6

“BRUTAL FRANKNESS”

A LADY ARCHITECT'S COMMENTS In “Pencil Points,” a section “devoted to brutal frankness” has these comment* of Alice Walton, an American archetict:— “Form plus function is the Poobah of the modernistic designer. Which follows which i s not always certain. The modi ernist has so many five starred words one loses the trail sometimes, and some of the functions following s ome of the forms, or vice versa, must be extraordinary.

“Not only does form follow function, but designer follows designer. Just as we grow more and more dependent on buttons to push for our needs, so the young designer grows more and more dependent on what his fellows are doing, whether it i 3 the latest dance step, the last slang or the most recent attack on the natural limitations of building materials.

“Nose to tail, like those deluded and trusting sheep that are led to their doom by a traitor goat, these young people trot happily along, upheld and sustained by a faith as sublime as their young faith in Santa Claus that each is being dynamic, original, dramatic, fresh, and stimulating when he designs a window going full tilt around a corner, with the wall above supported on faith in God; a flat roof in a climate where the snow piles four feet deep when it so desires; belts and bands or protruding masonry tied tight around au innocent building from top to bottom ; witless ornament that starts briskly out for some place and then stops in full career, like an idiot with a new impulse ; flat slabs of concrete supported on thin iron pipe in lieu of porch or entrance roofs; scattered plans, with the rooms iying where they fall, and with queer (or dramatic boxes and cylinders erected over groups of such far-flung rooms at strategic points, or at wholly irrational points if the designer happens to be in the mood and tense enough. “They want to see the same tiling repeated over and over again, just as they wanted their bedtime stories repeated over and over again, with not a word changed. To be sure, one ot their most persistent adjectives is ‘original,’ and of course these designs were original once, so they must still be original; nothing bus changed them.

“Sad to relate, about the only difference in the copy cats is in the precedents each school uses. The fogies turn and return, like an old garment, the charms of the Parthenon and its peers ; the newer fry turn to the cattle sheds, the sod shanties and the tar paper shacks of the Old West as source material. A picture of a western mining town of the fifties is a real find. And these masterpieces, in their purity, resemble nothing more than the straddling little houses and barns with ‘windows and smoking chimneys and everything’ that small boys used to draw for the astonished admiration of their mammas.”