PLANNING FOR HEALTH

Evening Star, Issue 23381, 26 September 1939, Page 3

PLANNING FOR HEALTH

, ARCHITECT AND DOCTOR DEPENDENT ON ONE ANOTHER BAD INFLUENCE OF UNHEALTHY HOUSES In a paper read to the Architectural Society at the University of Witwatersrand. South Africa, Dr C. Aiming. Medical Officer of Health, showed the need of close co-opcration of the meoical and architectural professions for public welfare. “It is doubtful if there are any two professions more closely dependent the one upon the other than the architect and the doctor practising preventive medicine in these days when ■we begin to realise how great a permanent effect his surroundings may have upon the health, welfare, and happiness of man,” he said. “ let our contacts have been regrettably few in the past. “ The health officer, _ all too often, has been content to sit, in his office writing rude comments across the virginal freshness of plans fresh from the arohitect’-s desk and brain; the architect himself, may be, has looked upon the health officer as just another irritant, domiciled with the building inspector, the drainage inspector, the town engineer, and the framer of municipal by-laws in those municipal offices which, he sometimes feels, were largely erected ,to house petty officials whose main task is to delay the completion of his task, the ultimate erection of his houses PSYCHOLOGICAL EFFECTS. “ To-day we are beginning to recognise that no person should live in an unhealthy house, and that no landlord has a right to take rent from one who lives in such a house. The mental effect of insanitary and ugly dwellings is' as important as the physical effect. Much of the stunted and degenerate mental outlook of the slum dweller is duo to tho absence of pleasant surroundings to his dwellings. “ Rousseau may cynically have cried that towns are the sinik of the human race, but modern thought has come to realise that town life means civilisation, its purpose always to produce higher types of that civilisation.

" Greek culture built itself out in lovely cities, beautifully planned, tind these cities became the objects it the passionate regard of their inhabitants. Town dwellers to-day will find that with a growing pride in their native town, an increased appreciation" that the town should be built in such, a way that it may V ‘ clearly shape the minds of their children, will" come an increasing desire to make of it a thing of beauty.

“ Children should be taught to revere their town; they should learn to do it service by such simple actions as pickmg up the waste paper left by litter hogs, for without orderliness and tidiness in the town will never come the orderliness of mind and the efficiency that should mark the citizen of no mean city. A town means something much more than a mere collection of buildings on a valuation roll. It should ,'be a happy town to which its citizens are proud to bring to the common fund of experience their contribution to beauty. A COMMENDABLE IDEA, “ Has not the time come in each of our towns when a local committee, a body of opinion as capable of intelligent criticism as possessed of good taste, might keep a watchful _eye on the future developments of building and planning-in the town —an amateur extension to our present technical townplanning committees—as in France, where on such' committees there are representatives of architecture,, art. history, archaeology, agriculture, commerce, industry, and sport, as well as civic and health officials. They had power to guide every aspect of the growth of their town along one line—that' when men build it shall be such work as their descendants will look upon with gratitude. In a pleasing town there are pleasing people, and' such people will be healthy.”