26 DECEMBER 1958, Page 10

Design

The Did-Gooders of 1958

By KENNETH J. ROBINSON THIS business of looking back at the year can be painful as well as difficult. Unlike the film or theatre critic, I can't make a short list of the good things and wipe the rest out of my mind.

like the successes. If we get excited about some- thing new—such as the proposed Coventry . University building, designed by Arthur Ling and Stewart Johnson—we still have to walk or ride through the dreariness of badly-planned streets. It is rather like being forced to sit through Getting Genie's Garter every time you go to a new play at the Royal Court.

If you take a rail trip to see one of the best buildings of the year, Gatwick Airport (archi- tects : Yorke, Rosenberg and Mardall), you will also get a good railside view of dull office blocks, hideous little houses and badly sited or badly designed (or both) street furniture. If you go through Richmond, Surrey, to have a look at the country's showpiece of modern living—low 'Span' fiats grouped round well-landscaped gardens and courtyards at Ham Common (architect : Eric Lyons)—you will find that slabs of plate glass have now taken the place of the old Maids of Honour shopfront, and that a really comical period dwelling has closed the riverside end of Old Palace Yard. If you drive to Norfolk to see Britain's most pleasant rural housing, which Loddon RDC has built in multi-coloured, land- scape-hugging clumps (architects : Tayler and Green), you will pass countless charming villages sandwiched between ragged post-war housing. And if you go on a window-shopping search for some, of the best-designed products of the year —such as the portable Ekco television set (de- signers : J. K. White and F. W. Wilson), the `Flamingo' chair (by Ernest Race), the Prestcold refrigerator (by Wilkes and Ashmore) or the Palladian `Treescape' wallpaper (by Audrey Levy)—you will have to fight your way past acres of two-toned bedroom suites (the latest thing) on ebonised legs with brass ferrules, miles of fabrics designed for Cromwell Road Third Floor Backs and 'Continente-style radio sets.

There's no escape from bad design. You need never revisit a bad film or play, but you have to live in a world of eyesores—sometimes the work of qualified architects or designers, but more often the result of the pigheadedness of firms that won't use designers, or laymen on planning committees who object, in principle, to any building that makes use of new materials in a new way. Fortunately, there are a good many do-gooders who exist to eliminate and suppress bad design, and perhaps it is more useful to record their doings here than to list buildings and products in order of merit.

Least, and by no means first, is the Royal Insti- tute of British Architects—more of a learned society than a do-good body, but a society that is learning more and more of the right things now that a few Angry Young Architects are filtering through to its, committees. Some of these, with the help of the distinguished new president, Basil Spence (how did he manage to succeed such fuddy-duddy precedents?), may help to break down the anomalies of the Planning Act, which allow butchers and bakers on lay committees to reject good designs in favour of olde-worlde imitations.

Then there is the Civic Trust. 'Of course,' you will say. But you will be wrong. There is no 'of course' about it. The ,Civic Trust sounds like a long-established, mayor-bedecked and worthy body. It is worthy, but it was formed little over a year ago. Its founder, Duncan Sandys, helped it to build up funds of nearly ÂŁ40,000 a year in the form of seven-year covenants from large com- mercial and industrial firms. This money is used for research, education and propaganda in a campaign to improve 'the appearance of towns and cities.

If you have complaints that need the attention of the Civic Trust, you should also fire them at the Architectural Press, in Queen Anne's Gate. Here live the editors of the Architectural Review and the Architects' Journal, both of which have pub- licised that new word `Subtopia,' which describes the worst elements of urban living. The word has even reached the theatre. You may remember the tragic line in N. C. Hunter's A Touch of the Sun. `Subtopia,' says Leatherhead's Ivan Ivano- vitch, 'is closing in.' Anyway, the word and its meaning are now very much with us, and the Architectural Press is always glad to help you if its meaning is becoming painfully clear in your part of the world.

Last, and by all means most, is the Design Centre, Haymarket, which continues to be the best short cut to shopping. A lot of people seem to think it is simply a permanent (though changing) exhjbition of goods in the round. But behind the scenes, in a room called Design Index, the public can—at certain times—do their window-shopping by flicking through photo- graphic files of mast of the well-designed house- hold and office goods made in this country : some ten thousand of them. Manufacturers can hardly afford not to be selected by the Council of In- dustrial Design for this index. Its very existence is an incentive to firms to choose designers care- fully when they are starting to make a new product. And, firms who are in doubt frequently make use of the Record of Designers, which is available in the offices of the ColD above the Design Centre.

You can't choose the films and plays you want to see in 1959. But you can do a lot to influence the appearance of things around you. You can help to thwart the Subtopian intentions of your local council, the proposed spoliation of the land- scape by private developers and the spread of bad design in the home. You can support all the design bodies you can find and seek their support when you need it. And if you have a good design cause to fight for, tell the Civic Trust. They will help you to form a local society, and if your cause is a good one they' may even give you some money. That is one of the things they exist to do.

If you have a little time and anger on your hands, remember the Anti-Uglies. This fifty- strong team of students from the Royal College of Art recently staged a march of love and hate among London's new buildings—a demonstration that went down well with public and press. If you don't happen to have forty-nine people with you, there's no need to be shy. Not so long ago a distinguished architectural critic was seen in Holborn, drumming with his fists on a new office block and wailing : 'You horrible building; why don't you fall down?' It didn't, of course, but with a few more people like him about it might never have gone tip at all.