SKILFUL DESIGNING

Evening Star, Issue 23369, 12 September 1939, Page 3

SKILFUL DESIGNING

KEY TO UNIVERSAL ABILITY DUTIES OF THE ARCHITECT STRESSED TIDY MIND AND AN ORDERLY OUTLOOK The supreme importance of skill in designing was emphasised by Mr 11. S. (loodhart-Rendel, president of the Royal institute of British Architects, in an address to students. “ Skill in design,” he said, “is in a category entirely different from that of an architect’s other aptitudes his scientific knowledge, his engineering knowledge, his business experience, in all of those he would be surpassed by scientific, by engineering, by commercial specialists, were it not that his own architectural, orderly outlook gives him a power in those especial provinces that the specialist has not. Skill in design gives universal ability. Learn it first and you thereby learn how to learn everything else. The modern architect claims, and I think justifiably, that his proper contribution to human welfare includes the planning of many other things beside buildings. His claim, however, is justified oiuy by his mastery of his own job, and without that mastery he will he only a presumptuous and unauthorised meddler in other people's affairs. MISPLACED SKILL. This necessary skill is possessed by different- architects in different degrees—that goes almost without saying. It is usually not possessed in a very high degree by those who are most anxious to convince you that other things are equally important. By the uneducated doctrinaire—and J am afraid that doctrinaires are very likely to be essentially uneducated—architectural skill is regarded as an extra in architectural education like music and dancing in a school for young ladies. Yet it is, in reality, only such skill and the mental power witn which it endows its possessor that gives an architect any right at all to meddle with the affairs that the doctrinaire prefers to discuss and handle. Without that skill an architect is not a person having any real claim to be heard on matters of town and regional planning, of preparation for national defence, of setting the stage for social amelioration; he is merely an outsider butting into other people’s special provinces and making a fool of himself. “ The eventual union between the professions of architecture and of civil engineering is a long-distance hope ol mine, but one of which I set groat store. A partnership between two friends, one of either profession, is perfectly possible already, and is an arrangement 1 would gladly see becoming usual.”-