FUTURE HOUSES

Wairarapa Times-Age, 30 May 1939, Page 6

FUTURE HOUSES

INTERESTING POSSIBILITIES. Already, in New Zealand, the changing conditions of life, in which the home —in many cases —may be rather a place foi\. sleep and meals than a real family home, are having some influence in the designing of homes. This matter was brightly touched on by Mr Henry Saylor at a recent meeting of the Ontario Association of Architects. After a reference to the* traditional “concept of the house as something that might grow up to be a home and a shelter for a man’s and a woman’s lifelong affections, a framework of dignity, something that they can have and hold against the world,” he remarked: “That thing is in danger of going, and the answer means a lot to architecture.

“Many of these housing theories that we hear of seem to me to be founded on shifting sands, largely. Take the model villages that we build. We build a model village lying around a nice new shiny industrial plant —decentralise it. Fine! Yet immediately around the corner of tomorrow undoubtedly is the jitney aeroplane. There seems not much doubt of that, that a man will be flying from his home to his work 30 or 40 miles as easily as he goes round the block. What is that goin,% to mean to this whole conception of' city planning—town plannings? Some of you gentlemen are connected with the educational work of the universities, so I will except you from the following question:—Who knows anything about the younger generation? Has any dependable data been obtained as to how these people think, how they want to live, what sort of houses they want rather than the sort that we might be willing to impose upon them? So far as I know there is not very much evidence on that subject “Take the kitchen. I suppose we have done more in a shorter time to the kitchen than any phase of the house in history. Really it is perfectly marvellous what we have done to the kitchen in the last few years; all based on the assumption that man is going to live in a house and eat, a woman is going to live there with him and cook for him. Well, is she? It sometimes seems as if we hadn’t even started asking ourselves the right questions about some of these things. For three centuries Western civilisation has had a fundamental belief. Whether you were conservative, progressive, traditional, or modern, didn't make much difference; you believed in progress. That was a fundamental, has been a fundamental creed in Western civilisation for three centuries. Is it so .now? Is it possible that we have forsaken that creed for a belief in crises? Some of the indications seem to point that way.”