FINE OF £50

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLVIII, Issue 21816, 20 November 1940, Page 4

FINE OF £50

A BOOKMAKER’S AGENT By Telegraph—Press Association TE AROHA, November 19. Before Mr W. H. Freeman, S.M., Antony Nikolovich, charged with carrying on a bookmaking business, was fined £5O and costs. The Magistrate said that, although defendant was only an agent, he would be treated as if he were the principal. N.Z. BUILDINGS SOME UGLY LEGACIES In a Centennial Survey of buildings in New Zealand Mr Paul Pascoe gives a reminder of some ugly legacies. The Victorian tradition of the 1840 settlers was expressed in their first public buildings (he writes). But the tradition itself lacked unity since it combined those opposites, the Gothic of the romantic revival led by Pugin and Ruskin, and the plainer classical syie which had contributed so much to eight-eenth-century and Regency England. Gothic copied the pointed arch of the medieval church and cloister. The classical style, revived at the time of the Renaissance, was derived through Rome from the massive, many-pillared temples of the ancient Greeks. It was full of weight and dignity and relied on the justness of proportions for its effect. Later in the Victorian period the formless drift of the architecture of the day in England was all too faithfullj' reflected in New Zealand buildings. A few New Zealand architects, influenced by the enlightened ideas of William Morris and his group, produced buildings that compared well with their models. But the individualism that allows every building in a street to have its own dissenting style was even more acute in New Zealand than overseas. This gave to our towns the amazing contrasts of dignity and ostentation, of style and trash, or restraint and ornament, which mar the individual achievement of a single good building. It is this confusion of standards which makes New Zealand, even more than contemporary England, aesthetically unsatisfying, especially as there is the added contrast of buildings in variously painted wood and in stone, brick, or concrete. But to-day New Zealanders are aware of new standards in architecture, and they are shedding their dislike of novelty enough to put up buildings which are clearly functional. But buildings are usually so permanent that it will be many years before the streets of the larger towns achieve any real unity.