Sir: As an architect I have tried to show the
public that most of the criticism and a lot of the control of architecture is in the hands of literary men, politicians and other than its practitioners. Your correspondent, Malcolm McEwen (retiring Director of Public Affairs, RIBA) muddles with his dialectic, but I apologise for one fact I got wrong: he was Assistant Editor of The Architects Journal since 1956 — I misread Who's Who. However, the progress from the Daily Worker, the Architects Journal the RIBA Journal to Director of Public Affairs is interesting. In fact it involves Mr McEwen even more, for the Architectural Press has formed architectural taste since the 'thirties and with the censorship of all style, but " csientific modernism " helped to ostracise the promising Modern Movement: and Mr McEwen moved to the RIBA to help its establishment. And in recognition the RIBA, last year gave its Gold Medal to the Chairman of the Architectural Press and J. M. Richards was recently knighted — and both "for services to architecture," though in March the latter called the assembled establishment of the RIBA, "polluters of the environment," for doing little more than imitating the prototyes he recommended. Since last June Mr McEwen has called me "ignorant, arrogant," and "absurd " and "weak on facts," but he neither neither anyone has contradicted the facts and
figures of the economic fallacy that I have concentrated on. I do not detest the Modern Movement— only what has been made of it and consider, with others of The 2,000 Group, a return to classical principles as a solution of the dilemma of modernism and conservation; and the antidote to anarchy, And incidentally, though Mr McEwen offered to " thrash the issues out on BBC or ITA or anywhere," the BBC claim that our discussion with Sir Jim Richards and Mr McEwen would become a heated argument (it need not be heated but the public are entitled to it): and now Mr McEwen is not interested in persuading the BBC to implement his undertaking!
Mr McEwen writes finally that I would like to see Piccadilly Circus designed in the traditional manner. Quite so! But he adds. "if it were possible." It is. Traditional or classical architecture is no more expensive than " modernist" and often even les-, so. At least the public should know that it is still feasible. And he ends — " style is almost entirely irrelevant " — and that from the Director of Public Affairs of the RIBA! No wonder we are in a muddle. The 2,000 Group's basic aim is Style. It is Mr McEwen who is arrogant, ignorant, absurd and weak on facts, and as a solicitor he will know that to write the truth, in the public interest, is not libel.
He also notes that I see " reds under the beds." 1 did not mention them, but there is something nasty under the national bed — and it is not jerries this time!
Derrick Oxley 72 Oakley Street, London SW3
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