MODERN ARCHITECTURE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 5 July 1941, Page 5

MODERN ARCHITECTURE

REFLECTION OE MAN'S TASTES. “Architecture, as most people recognise today, is a social art reflecting the habits, tastes and ambitions of mankind more faithfully perhaps than any other," said Mr C. H. Reilly in a recent broadcast talk. “It is also a very I practical art based on such building materials as are available and the skill there is to use them. When, therefore, there is a change in the habits and tastes of a. people, and particularly when that change coincides with the discovery of an important new building material or method of building, the architecture of a people will undergo a radical change. All over the world such a change is taking place at the moment. It is a very exciting one producing strange-looking, and even to some people alarming-looking, buildings. To others these buildings are already the symbol of a new and better way of life because they are. a simpler, franker and more truthful expression of what they stand for and of their construction. They are no longer decked out in the fancy dress of long-past styles and there is no secret diplomacy about their construction. That the new manner is an international one. occurring in all civilised countries at the same time, though with local variations owing chiefly to climate, is one of the most striking and interesting things about it. It is indeed as international as truth itself, so that it is not wholly surprising that Germany, though a leader in the movement before the rise of her present regime, has now gone back upon it and has prohibited its use. To one of her buildings, historically important in the movement, the Bauhaus at Dessau, she has indeed childishly added, so its architect Walter Gropius tells me, an old-fashioned gabled roof by way of insult.”