BUILDING DESIGN

Wairarapa Times-Age, 29 July 1939, Page 4

BUILDING DESIGN

MODERN TRENDS IN U.S.A. SOME RECENT INFLUENCES. In a recent review of building in the United States of America, a wellknown New York architect, Mr Ely Jacques Kahn, made some very interesting comments on the trend of designs. “It can be stated rather safely, I believe, that the following are facts not to be disputed,” he declared. “(1) Urban work consisting of stores, mercantile buildings of every description, interior of theatres, hotels, banks, new apartment structures, including practically all housing developments of large scale, even structures for governI mental use, are in large measure of the variety of design that no longer rests on Renaissance and classical prototypes for inspiration. There is a broad variety, to be sure. Some buildings are strange incursions into the abhorrent modernistic, but the fact remains that we seldom find straight historic inspiration such as was normal a few decades ago. For good or evil, that is the mode, and we make the best of it. "(2) In the schools a project in purely classical mood would be startling. The students, as evidenced in recent competitive work, are eager to learn how to design in the modern style. They have learned what new lighting is, for example, and no longer put symbols on their drawings to indicate that eventually some lighting fixture manufacturer will be let loose to suggest his version of the decorations that will so largely mark the character of his room. The students are no longer willing to absorb their classics as we did, nor, I am told, are they drilled in the moulding memory tests that we went through. Perhaps they get but a surface conception of a new mood, but, what is important is that the students who in our day made meticulous drawings of Rome, Florence and Paris, today would not dream of answering a problem in the spirit that we, as students, approached it.

“(3) Domestic work is, in large measure, based on traditional forms. No matter what the rest of our architec-* tute may be, the moment you strike the fringe beyond the suburbs, a modern building looks strange, for the whole mass of houses one sees are colonial of every type that our history has produced; Norman, English, or the mongrel varieties Jhat have just enough of known detail to please the home buyer. The very up-to-date, mass production steel or synthetic material buildings still boast their colonial trim in steel, clapboard siding of asbestos board or other translations of contemporary material, forced into familiar shapes. Just try to have the builder think in terms of a purely modern house and discover first the horror of his prospective neighbours, the concern of the wife, the cold stare of the mortgage institution. We have, therefore, two curiously distinct and opposing movements, side by side. “The experiments by the timorous souls who would try to marry the opposing elements have not been happy, for they have neither warranted the respect of the classicists nor the approval of the modernists.”