“More Progress Here”

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 983, 28 May 1930, Page 6

“More Progress Here”

ARCHITECT’S IMPRESSIONS Comparison With Glasgow TAKING everything into consideration, the architects here, are more progressive than in the Old Country. Over there they are too conservative. If a traveller should come in with a new wall board, say, or some other new idea they would look at the article with a certain amount of distrust, and would want somebody else to try it before they did. In many cases, their fathers were architects before them, and they take the attitude that what was good enough for their fathers is good enough for them.” So Mr. F. McDonald, a native of Glasgow, who has recently joined a firm of New Zealand architects, as a draughtsman, told a Sun reporter.

There were exceptions, of course, said Mr. McDonald, but this tendency was very noticeable. Over there they were still adhering more or less to the old classical style of building. Though a native of Glasgow, Mr. McDonald has had a good deal of experience outside that city, and in 1926 he visited America to study cinema design. He came to New Zealand last September. At Home, he said, they went in extensively for steel frame construction, but reinforced concrete was not used a great deal for external work, though It was much used for internal work. In cinema theatres, for instance, balconies were being put in as an ordinary concrete floor spanning between steel rakers; then balcony degrees were built on the sloping floor with two-inch slab concrete. Electric welding was used very little in Great Britain. Skyscrapers, in the American style, were not regarded with much favour in Great Britain; many experts said that the American skyscrapers would be unsafe after 40 years, this opinion being held by Professor Riley, of London University. “Though I cannot say that X agree with it entirely,” said Mr. McDonald. In any case, it was impossible to build skyscrapers in England, because of the restrictions imposed by the building by-laws. In many towns the height of a building was limited to double the width of the street it fronted on; moreover, streets there were narrow, a 40ft street being a main street.

In wood finishing, such as panelling and dadoes, he thought they got a better finish in Great Britain than over here, though over there it was

all mock finish. They used heavy mouldings, giving an appearance of depth. Speaking of his experience in America in cinema work, Mr. McDonald said that one had to “hand it” to the Americans for their originality in cinema design. They went in extensively for the atmospheric type of theatre.

Housing architecture in New Zealand was ideal compared with that he had seen in Great Britain, but this was largely due to the congestion in the big cities there. If people hsre had to live in the Glasgow ‘ houses they would appreciate their own houses more. Sixty per cent, of the houses in Glasgow were of the tenement type, three or four stories high, with dark, “dungeony” stairs. Though the population of Glasgow was 2,000,000, the city was no larger than Christchurch. In internal finish and labour-saving devices, too, the houses could not compare with those here; such a thing as a meat-safe was unknown in a tenement house.

Over there they were doing a lot of “slum clearance”; that was to say, they were pulling down the slum houses and erecting new dwellings out in the suburbs, on the outskirts of the city, with a bit of garden in the back and front. These houses, however, were not very attractive. There were four separate which was a novelty to the inmates, dwellings in the one block, two upstairs and two down, and the rooms were only 9ft high. In America, though many of the commercial buildings were magnificent, house architecture showed a tendency toward standardisation, and the average middle-class house was not as nice as here.