CITIES OF THE FUTURE
Sta,—In a country in which nearly all the principal towns have some history behind them, a city is apt to be regarded as something static. Most of them have a nucleus of more or less venerable buildings of a conspicuously permanent type, which probably stand in our minds for the cities themselves, and until a generation or so ago we were not far wrong in thus identifying the form with the spirit, for the predominant aspects of a civilisation were almost bound to be crystallised in its major architecture. Its chief activities and its most cherished ideals were recorded in grand and permanent buildings, while lesser or little esteemed ones were tem- porarily and perfunctorily housed. Yet today the situation is trans- formed, for the great majority of our immensely diverse pursuits are best served by buildings which can be scrapped at fairly frequent intervals, and wherever wholesale reconstruction becomes necessary we shall be faced with this fact. Hitherto it has been somewhat obscured, because the building and scrapping and rebuilding which is going on all the time in any live town is usually so piecemeal that the old lay-out of the city is rarely altered radically, and neither is our conception of it.
If, however, we had to start now to rebuild a town from the ground, we should at once see that we do not really want a large number of buildings intended to last for centuries, and that it will be mainly by other means than by bricks and mortar that the inimitable flavour- of our age will be transmitted to posterity. Cer- tainly we shall still want to set up some virtually indestructible build- ings, to put into them the forest material and craftsmanship avail- able, and add to them as the years go on ; but we shall do so because certain activities demand and are best served by buildings of this sort, and not because permanence is in itself an inescapable architectural ideal. Churches, a nucleus of civic buildings, and those connected with schools and universities round which loyalties will gather, almost exhaust the list, and we shall prefer to house ourselves, our scientific, professional, and commercial activities in structures that will never be allowed to grow out of date.
Such a theory may seem to have the drawback that it excludes the artist, traditionally associated as he is with the idea of per- manence, from all but a small part in the creation of modern cities, but nothing could have been worse for him than our failure fully to accept a development implicit in our way of life. If we had faced
it squarely we might have been spared such monstrosities as churches " functionally " streamlined as though to convey us physi- cally to heaven, libraries like power-houses, and department stores that would have enraptured the more vulgar of the Roman emperors. The designers of buildings justifiably intended to be peirnanent have coquetted with effects only relevant to highly specialised indus- trial functions, while, from pure snobbery, commercial houses have been adorned with all the trappings of the bogus monumental, botched up in the most repulsive of composite materials. So the artist has been ousted both ways, but it is hard to believe that in a regenerated civilisation, by some development as unforeseeable as all great artistic movements, he will not regain his place among the pioneers of intellectual and spiritual progress.
Our task now is only to prepare the ground for the cities of the
future. We cannot tell what we scale of reconstruction will be, or the resources available, but we can see enough of the main require- ments to clear a way for them as opportunity arises. Starting with the idea of towns in which most of the buildings will not be designed to last more than a few decades, there is obviously much to be done on the technical and artistic side to develop types of structure which will be good to use and look at, which will not be shoddy although they are relatively temporary, and which will evolve their own standards of excellence. In planning the ideal must be to keep the whole conception as fluid as possible until the time comes for rebuilding, and it seems advisable, therefore, to make war 'damage a chance to get town sites gathered into larger units in the hands of public authorities. At the rate at which the Government is spending, the difference between the cost of compensation and -acquisition could not seem great. and even if it were advisable after the war to re-sell properties to private buyers, the whole system of ownership could be simplified and adapted to a society which no longer thinks in terms of perpetuities or periods of ninety-nine years. Socially there is need for collaboration between the bodies which will require buildings of a lasting type, and facilities for them to acquire at reasonable prices sites, such as certain riversides, which are obviously too good for ordinary domestic or industrial purposes. And, lastly, there is the more negative requirement of clearing great thoroughfares to link cities with the countrysides they serve and live by, and to bind together the separate parts of a city into an organic whole. For the cities of the future will be just that, and, far more freely and consciously than hitherto, must be able to discard atrophied cells, evolve and differentiate others, reproducing in mate- rial form the constant process of dissolution and integration which goes on within society itself.—Yours, &c.,
LESLEY LAWRENCE, Registrar.
City and Guilds of London Art School, 124 Kennington Park Road, S.E.
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