!ESTHETIC MAJOR-GENERALS
By LIONEL BRETT
ON the Appointed Day, said to be the first of July, 1948, the mysterious powers the resultant of innumerable divergent ambi- tions, by which towns and villages have coalesced and grown and undergone their various mutations, will cease to operate in this coun- try. From that date the location and appearance of every new building in Britain comes under the control of . . . whom? Legally the respon- sible authorities are to be the elected councils of the larger towns and counties, acting with the advice of planning officers who will them- selves receive directives from the Minister of Town and Country Planning. Effectually the amount of work involved, both on the positive side of building up the new development plans and on the negative side of dealing with building applications, will be so enormous that the only people in a position to comprehend and control. the situation will be these same planning officers. These hundred and fifty-odd men, with their staffs, will wield a power over the landscape of this country such as we have not experienced and perhaps hardly visualised.
Few people just now with any experience of planlessness feel like arguing against physical planning as such. The machinery which we have set up in this island for establishing and enforcing the best use of our limited land is probably the best currently available. What ought to be worrying us is whether we have done right in confiding to officials trained primarily to deal with questions of land use this absolute-- authority in questions of aesthetics. The,argtunents, for controlling the external appearance of buildings are well known. Everybody has his pet examples of the crashing visual discord, the cheery solecism, the desolation of what was smart the day before yesterday. Chromium plate in the Regency terrace, pink tiles in the Cotswolds, leaded casements opening on the Great West Road—we know all about it. So we roll out the deus ex machina of the hungry 'forties, State control, hardly noticing that what we are controlling this time is not a process but an art.
The first result is naturally the survival of the safest. In other words, with the bath water of vulgarity (and there are arguments for vulgarity)- we throw out the baby, the sickly, struggling infant, creative design. This, of course, went on in a small way between the wars. To have had your modern house rejected as an eyesore by the rural district council, to have appealed in vain to the local Bench, and after many weeks to have won the last round with the Ministry of Health—this experience became almost the proficiency badge of the young architect. But it only occurred in the more self-consciously unspoilt parts of rural England. No such procedure was available for the defence of Portland Place or the Adelphi.
The obstruction of imaginative design is not the only result of controlling the appearance of buildings. Perhaps more dangerous because less conspicuous is the ban on the element of surprise, con- trast or the picturesque (the words are equivalent) in urban land- scape. One of the inexhaustible pleasures of architecture lies in listening to the conversation of the oddly assorted parties of buildings that one finds in city streets. The chatter is often noisy, argument often violent ; but lovers are to be found quietly talking in corners, wits holding forth to small circles of admirers. Attempts have been made by architects with only moderate success to inculcate good manners. Others say we must go back to education. Are we now finally to impose a censorship?
Two recent cases show in a small way what it involves. In one, residents of a council estate were forbidden to paint their doorsteps red—or forced to scrape the paint off again. In another, residents of a prefab colony were forbidden to plant flowers which might interrupt the " pleasing uniformity " of the official lawns around their dwellings. Trivial matters, but it is easy to visualise the cumulative effect of such imposed gentilities. No more beery lettering, no more tin posters ; dark green paint in the country, cream in the town ; brick walls and tiled roofs for ever (stone in the Cotswolds), and, above all, no surprises. This is not a criticism of Silkin's Major-Generals in their proper function as controllers of the use of land, an obviously necessary job, for which many of them are highly qualified. Nor is it any improvement to push forward in their place those panels of architects which were so freely advocated between the wars. Censor- ship is not made more tolerable by being done by a panel of poets.
In this matter, as in others, there is something to be said on both sides. To sacrifice order to freedom would be as unwise as to sacrifice freedom to order. Hence three rules which are intended to secure, as far as rules can, the best of both worlds.
I. All buildings or groups of buildings costing more than. say, £3,000 to be designed by architects.
2. All buildings not so designed to be subject to elevational approval by the planning authority.
3. Surviving terraces or unified groups of buildings of ex- ceptional importance to be classified as " protected groups " and placed under the supervision of a special department of the Ministry of Town and Country Planning (presumably the department which is at present engaged on a survey of ancient buildings).
The architectural anarchist will not, of course, approve of rule number 3. He will maintain that its question-begging vagueness makes it a typical politician's escape clause. This is, in fact, one of those cases where the artist's integrity conflicts with the architect's social conscience. The latter must for ever sit on the fence between art, which makes no compromises, and politics, which survive by compromise. In this case it might be consistent, but it would be silly, to make no provision for the protection of Carlton House Terrace from another Blomfield. That is too heavy a responsibility to leave on the shoulders of voluntary societies, gallantly though they have tried to sustain it in the past. What must be made clear is that rule 3 exists to protect Lansdowne Crescent and Bedford Square, but not the village street at Broadway, which will be all the better and more masculine for having to fight its own battles unaided.
You cannot create great architecture by Act of Parliament. A bad period is a bad period, and control merely has the effect of making it dull as well—a fact of which the new Regent Street is the best known example. Standards will only rise if architects are subjected to ruthless criticism by a public educated to use its eyes. Meanwhile, since nothing much is likely to be built for the next few years, we have time to think again about this particular control before it starts to operate.
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