BOOKS OF THE DAY
Architects and Reconstruction
People's Homes. Mass Observation. (Murray. tos4 As time wears on each trade and professional pressure group turns out its impartial, non-party and wholly objective report showing that the establishment of its own prosperity is of vital importance to the nation and a necessary first step at reconstruction. The Royal Institute of British Architects enters the log-rolling game thus:
• The policy of the R.I.B.A. towards post-war planning and building is based on its long experience . . . this . . . leads conclusively to a few simple but important directives. Amongst these are the necessity (a) for policy to precede planning; (b) for planning to precede execu-. tion ; (c) for work to be both conceived and executed through the full utilisation of the trained technical skill of the professional and trade elements which comprise the building industry. . . . In common with other members of the industry the R.I.B.A. saw defects in the war-time building activities of the Government . . . professional technicians, such as architects, were almost entirely eliminated from the programme. ...
After the enactment of the Town Planning Act of 1932 the Institute organised panels of local architects to advise local authorities, "but unfortunately the local authorities are not obliged to take their advice." To remedy this evil the R.I.B.A. propose " T..at the panels be made official and that it becomes an obligation for the local authorities to act upon their advice." This would give the appointees of a trade association power to override the delegates of the local voters. The Act also made it necessary for local authorities to have planning officers, and they filled these posts with professional untouchables : " . . the less enlightened local autho- rities considered it would be quite good enough to meet the case by appointing engineers or surveyors, a class of officer with whom they were used to deal. . . ." The Royal Institute of British Architects, curiously enough, recommend that these posts be filled by architects. Certain Government spending departments and certain statutory bodies have been having their engineers and sur- veyors design buildings as part of their salaried work. The R.I.B.A. recommend that architects, surveyors and engineers should define their respective functions so that " overlapping " should cease.
Although manifestly capable of looking after their own future the architects show no great equipment for planning anyone else's. Existing legislation governing building, they contend, is old hat and a nuisance ; it should therefore be scrapped and be replaced by three codes. A Code of Living, a Code of Building, and a Financial Code: the Code of Living deals with amenity standards and health and safety provisions, and a skeleton of the section governing amenity standards is given in an entrancing form.
It then covers town, district or village, providing among other things for: (i) Acreage of green space in proportion to ground built over; (ii) allocation of churches, theatres, cinemas, shops, public houses, per thousand of the population.
The Church, the cinema, amenities to be allocated per thousand of the population. Whatever one's views of religion one cannot treat faith or those who have faith in this way ; to be capable of so doing is to be so insensible of human values as to be unfit to plan for a community. Such plans as are offered are in general a pot stew of the ideas of Gamier and Le Corbusier, and the details are in accord with the doctrinaire modernism of the Bauhaus School. Aesthetic bankruptcy and spiritual bankruptcy march, as they usually do, hand in hand.
People's Homes is the analysis of the answers to a Mass Observa- tion questionnaire concerned with the housing the working class have and the housing they would wish for. The sample taken numbered 1,too persons living in garden cities, L.C.C. estates, flats and old houses varying from sound properties to extreme slum pro- perties. The method by which these persons were selected shows that the percentages in which the results are expressed may be accepted without reserve. There is also a very useful chapter dealing with the method of the investigators, showing the technique by which answers to the ably-drafted questionnaire were obtained. These results are of interest to those planning future urban develop- ments: given absolute freedom of choice 5 per cent, of the sample would live in flats, 12 per cent, in bungalows, 49 per cent in small houses, more than 6o per cent, want their own gardens, and about 30 per cent, would like to own their houses. So far as local plans are concerned, it would be an excellent thing if local authorities made inquiries of this type to find out what the local needs are, and used the information obtained to set competitions for solutions of the local problems. Entries to competitions might be judged by a ballot of the people concerned, in order that architects should be confronted with the positive tastes of their patrons. This would prevent the fashion in architecture of the moment becoming crystallised as an " official " style (the result of giving architects the free hand the R.I.B.A. warn). The reader is invited to imagine the result of establishing as the official style the vogues of 1920; 1900, i88o and 186o, or alternatively to imagine a town entirely laid out and planned by Pugin, Scott, Waterhouse, Butterfield, Bodley and Garner, or in the early style of Norman Shaw.
ANTHONY WEST.
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