"IT PAYS TO LOOK AHEAD"

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 80, Issue 132, 7 June 1938, Page 9

"IT PAYS TO LOOK AHEAD"

AN ARCHITECT’S VIEW. Mr. H. S. Goodhart-Rendcl, president of the Royal British Institute of Architects gave some good advice about planning at a recent social ! gathering of the ins.’tute. ‘'During I the years since the last war,” he said j “many Englishmen have made < momentous discovery; they have discovered that as in private so in public affairs it pays to look ahead—to lool< ahead even further, perhaps, than the probable date of thn next general election. To this novel, hazardous enterprise of looking before one leaps the name “planning” has been given a name that naturally makes architects sit up and take notice. Now planning is a very particular faculty which every student thinks he has by nature until he learns that he has not, and its cultivation is the special province of architectural education. Byvirtue of its possession, the young trained architect may sometimes be

tempted to claim a little larger scope than should logically be accorded to his; he may claim to set himself up not only as an expert necessary in social reform but also as :’. social reformer himself. Such occasional presumption, however, must not be allowed to divert attention from the very wide usefulness in social work of minds trained to planning. A man who can successfully correlate what are now called the “services” in a large building—the water, the electricity, the gas—and can direct and make easy its internal traffic is not likely to make heavy weather of trifles like good supplies or munitions or the local distribution of labour. “Apart from all such grand capabilities, the ordinary services of an architect are continuously necessary in civilised life, and it is inevitable that there should rest upon our institute a great and constant task of professional organisation. This the institute pursues for the advantage of the architect in so far as that advantage is also the advantage of our national architecture, but no further. It repudiates, and I trust always will repudiate, any desire to hold up the outside public for sectional or professional ends. “The 'education of the public’ is a nasty phrase used by those whose educational aim is that of inducing other people to buy what they themselves want to sell. Such people, speaking of ‘the public,’ generally do not include themselves in it; in fact, they probably buy something quite different. The object of any learned society, however, must be the education of the public, its own members included; and in this sense the architectural education of the public is the primary object of the Royal Institute of British Architects.” A tribute to the architectural profession was paid b; Sir Eric Maclagan, Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum. "Nothing could testify more clearly to the integrity and 'public spirit shown by architects than the fact that they continually support societies whose avowed aim is to take the bread out of their mouths,” he remarked. “We have heard a great deal lately about the Georgian Group, whose most laudable aim it is to preserve for us the remains of Georgian architecture. But you cannot fail to be conscious of the fact that every Georgian building which is preserved prevents an architect of to-day from obtaining a commission of which he may stand in considerable need.”