What happened to housing?
Eric Lyons
Evolution of the House Stephen Gardiner (Constable £4.95)
Stephen Gardiner's book is about the history of the House a story that "starts with a hut in Mesopotamia from which man began his extraordinary journeys to the west and east", and it is a concentrated study covering the enormous span of time since the cave dwellers, about man's most basic need, shelter. You may well think th*at it has taken a long period of cultivation for the final flowering of our rows of semi-d's and bleak municipal estates. The book is not really about our modern social and environmental problems. Stephen Gardiner effectively confines himself to his subject and avoids temptations to stray too far into social or political fields. He is most readable, unpretentiously scholarly, and he moves through time with confidence and sound architectural judgement. He is consistently interested in the quality of the product, and he is fascinated, as we must all be, by the strands of influence, the cross-currents of our history and man's insatiable appetite for innovation.
I know there are some who think that we could do with a lot less innovation in architecture today, and how nice it would be if we could settle down to some comfortable compromise architectural style which is nice and cheap, and quick to build, and durable, and as lovable as good Georgian houses are to us all. Life isn't like that. In fact the real trouble with the design of our houses now is the lack of opportunities for real innovation the frustration of experiment and any spirit of creative adventure that could bring about more satisfying urban environments and beautiful buildings for all to live in and to admire.
In Stephen Gardiner's judgement the finest domestic architectural achievements were our Georgian house and the Japanese house; with their diametrically opposed philosophies and influences each attained, he believes, a state of near perfection. The comparison is interesting: each had its aesthetic uniform, but whereas the Japanese house looked to the modular internal organisation of the house itself, the Georgian idea was related to a community scale. And of course it was the marvellous flexibility of the Georgian style that provided the component for our urban design adventures and created that English urban tradition. (I hope that our spec-builders won't read this in case they are encouraged to further pathetic imitations and more of those nasty near-Georgian trimmings which currently produce those architectural parodies you would think the town-planning controllers would protect us from but I mustn't get bitter.) Gardiner takes us (at some pace) through Greek and Roman developments and picks up the separated threads in China and Japan and reveals the ideas and the men who have shaped this aspect of our culture. He quotes from a nice letter from Cicero to his brother (Diphilus is the architect!):
At your Manilian place I found Diphilus going slow even for Diphilus. Still, he had finished everything except the baths, the cloister, and the aviary. I liked the house enormously for the dignity of its paved colonnade which I only realised when I saw the whole length open and the columns polished. It will all depend on the stucco harmonizing and I will see to that. The pavement seems to be getting well laid. I did not care for some of the ceilings, and ordered them to be changed . . . In the baths I have moved the hot chamber to the other corner of the dressing room, because it was so placed that the steam pipe would be under the bedrooms Diphilus had got the columns neither perpendicular nor opposite each other. He'll have to take them down, of course. Perhaps some day he'll learn how to use a plumb line and a measuring tape . .
As an architect I twitched a little, but then I wondered whether Architect Diphilus was really using Cicero to give his client not what he said he wanted but what he didn't know he needed you see how an architect's mind works nowadays.
It is a book about change and the varying pace of change (it took two centuries for the marvels of the Renaissance to cross the Alps and reach our far-away islands) and the men that forced the pace; Gardiner talks of the great Palladio with his "lovely vision of human dignity" and our extraordinary Inigo Jones who domesticated Palladio's ideas so brilliantly and how, through Inigo Jones, his contemporaries and his followers, a great architecture was created. In a rare, but justified, outburst he writes "it was not possible then for schemes to fall into the bleak hands of materialists of the kind who are in key positions to control the direction of building today".
I enjoyed the book, and I think it is valuable because the enormous range of information is presented so lucidly that the story line is never lost, and the sketches (sometimes too sketchy?) and photographs provide an important link between the author and the reader, Gardiner concludes with a philosophical epilogue in which he dwells on the important influences in this century of Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, and finally (and for me, too briefly) he broods on the outcome of our Modern Movement in architecture, what we must now call the Universal Style. Disliked by all, this Universal Style has of course little to do with the heroic explorations of the 'twenties, but we cannot escape from acknowledging its source. It is the easy way out for the tower block and system building and production short-cuts all over the world it suits State bureaucracies and commercial developers alike, because it is predictable and technologically controllable. The awful thought is that perhaps this is the most appropriate style for our time; in other words, do we deserve any better? I can tell you that there are architects who have much more to give than these sterile banalities. We can, and we still do, produce fine housing in this country, but I am tempted to say that this is almost in spite of the controls and legislation and absurdly clumsy methods of promoting housing.
Gardiner's analysis is intensely humanistic in the widest sense and he well understands the threat as well as the liberation of the machine. Today we face the task of housing an enormous population to the best possible standards, and it is the sheer numbers that have intimidated and misled us all into absurd organisational and technological solutions regardless of the environmental consequences. The loss of respect for the human being is the threat and we must find better ways of promoting our enormous housing programme so that architects can be effectively engaged to make their creative contribution. 1975 is European Architectural Heritage Year and in the welter of respect for our past architectural glories we have to remember that we are building tomorrow's heritage.
Eric Lyons is President-elect of the Royal Institute of British Architects
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