BETTER HOMES

Taranaki Daily News, 9 August 1919, Page 12

BETTER HOMES

•housed lee pigs." ENGLAND'S GREAT PROBLEM. A PLAIN-SPOKEN AUTHORITY. Mr. Harold Begbie opens a scries of articles in the Daily Chronicle by thus quoting the< Prince of Wales speaking at the Royal Academy: ''We all wish to see our fellow-coun-trymen happy, healthy, and contented, and we are agreed that this end cannot be attained without securing decent and comfortable homes for others, the blessings of which we ourselves enjoy. "The wonder is, if 1 may be allowed to say so, that only now have we been brought to realise that this pressing need must be boldly faced and boldly handled.

"Cannot this representative Society of Arts bring its powerful influence to bear upon the scheme and ensure to the new homes designs, not only utilitarian in character, but attractive to the eye? Mr. Begbie begins: We will begin with a formula which you may regard as the thesis of the new spirit now struggling- to influence our national life. It is this: — No one is an artist who is not also a practical man; and no one is a practical man who is not also an urtist. Is our modern civilisation sordid and ugly? Is our modern life full of perplexity and unrest? These things arise because our national and domestic life has for so long been almost entirely in the hands of practical men who were not artists. Man has been handled like a machine; he has not been regarded as a spirit. "THE 'PRACTICAL MAN." "They have had a long innings, these so-called practical men," says Morley Horder, one of the younger architects, who is winning great distinction, "and what a mess they have made of triings! —hut I think, at any rate I hope, that the long innings is nearing its end .The election of Sir Aston Webb as President of the Eoyal Academy is a portent. It is true that his election may be only a tribute to the man; but it'might be a turning point."

He speaks in a low voice, thinking over every word, queer little jerks and starts breaking up his sentences. He lias the nerves of an artist, but a head as hard as a manufacturer's. His work for the Housing Association of Officers' Families has recently proved that beauty of form can be combined with every device of science to provide comfort at a minimum cost. He would be a very early rising builder or sanitary engineer, able to take in this architect, who looks like a poet, and talks like a professor. A WARNING. "My travels all over the British Isles,* he says to me, "have brought home to my mind this most important political fact, that our people are housed like pigs. No language is too strong" to condemn this horrible condition of things. And no language can bo strong enough to rouse the Government, which is setting out to alter this disgraceful state of things, to a peril which may make matters even worse. We have got to be on our guard against schemes which leave out humanity. If we arc to sweep away pig-styes only to build prisons, then, the last state of our people will be worse than the first. But I hopo that Sir Aston Webb's election, which astonished so many people, may be a sign that we at last realise the true relative position of architecture and painting . "Architecture is the main thing. The wall is more important than the picture. Painting and sculpture are only the adornments of architecture. The great damage done to our national life by the Later Victorians was their incredible folly in putting the painter before the architect- It means a great boom in gilt frames, and a great fall in tho beauty of our towns and villages. llow many of the pictures which people raved about 30 years ago remain in our memories, or on the walls of those who bought them? But the horrible and monstrous and perverse and execrable buildings erected by bogus architects in those gilt-framed years remain to hurt our eyes and to make us ridiculous in the eyes of intelligent foreigners. IMPORTANCE OF FORM. "It is a serious matter, going deep down into human nature. A beautiful city is a continual education. It makes a n»an an observer of architectural forms. It teaches him to know without being told why the banqueting hall of Inigo Jones is a more beautiful thing than tho Admiralty buildings across the way. He finds himself growing in knowledge as he walks the streets, takingnew pleasure in observation, realising that form is of sovereign importance, and that decoration may often disfigure if not altogether spoil an otherwise quite beautiful thing. "And more than this. It brings home to him the need of his own human nature for beauty. He feels the rightcess of restraint and temperance, °the wrongncss of vulgarity of ex-Teas. It makes him demand from his Government not merely shorter hours and nigher wages, but a nobler ar.d a richer existence. If he will not live in a sty, neither will he live boxed up in an in human barracks. His humanity will cry out against the so-called practical mail who gosa about with a fotrule and a readyreckoner in his pocket, but with no humanity in his heart and no beantr in his mind. From such a practical mail ' we must expect no millennium; lie must be gibbeted as no practical man a I; all, but a quack and a fool, a man wn.j dues not know the alphabet of human nature. WHERE MADNESS LIES. "Such a man as this condemns' the worker for not making use of a hath fitted with a cold-water supply am! shoved into a corner of a scullery. Do we like an ice-cold bath on a winter morning? Do we like to descend, from our bedrooms to our sculleries in order to wash? What nonsense it is! The practical man persists- in thinking of the worker as belonging to another species. That's where our madness lies. The workman is at all points one with humanity; and if lie is ignorant, coarse, dirty, and brutal, it is because his life has been handled by Governments and' employers in an ignorant, course,, dirty, and. brutal, fashion.. THE REIGN OF PRETTTNESS. "Then there's the question of the- • suburbs.. Here you got the reign of "Prettinesß,' and this fatal influence of ithe jerry-builder has colored the social life of millions of clerks and merchants. It has impoverished that life, Tho life of the suburbs 1 is a' pretty life. It is ..without enthusiasms.. It in without a i social; conscience. You Tool; fir vain for noble buildings, sphemlid' monuments, ■ami beautiful 1 open spaces'. But every suburb uujeiit to. maintain a theatre, gti

the highest class, and to be a powerful influence in the art, literature, politics, and religion of England. "Prettiness is a deadly thing. It is more destructive than ugliness—just as cocaine is more deadly than ale. You enter these suburban homes, and what do you find? The walls are higgledypiggledy, wilh every conceivable garishnesj in a gilt frame; the rooms are crowded with mechanical tawdrinoss; you can hardly move without knocking down a vase that guttnralises at you its German origin; and all the hangings are full of sad distress. What a waste of money! IMPORTANCE OF BEAUTY. "I dread to think what may happen in the rebuilding of England if beauty is left out of count. But' it is not only a question of aesthetics. Pride in his material tilings contributes to the creation of the good citizen. 'Politicians do not'seem to realise that environment has a political as well as a moral value. Collective Building on a large scale is mainy a question of getting right materials, and if schemes are rushed through hecause of economic considerations, and England is peppered all over with buildings of a machine-made similarity, then we shall not only get a disfigured England, but we shall miss the chance of getting a finer type of citizen. We are really at a turning point in our history. Shall we take the right turning?" It is irue what he says, that democracy is claluorous, consciously or unconsciously, for a more spacious life. This cannot he bought with higher wagps or found in the leisure afforded by shorter hours ol" labor. It bar; two conditions —an exterior environment, an interior receptivity. We must have noble surroundings and minds educated to know the difference between right and wrong in all spheres of human existence. The mistake of the past lias been that man in his poverty has been treated as an animal. The salvation of the future lies in the recognition that ho is a spirit.