New Houses for a New World
. GOOD deal of space in this issue has been devoted to a problem to which most of our readers will not yet have given much thought. It will in fact seem to some readers that we are creating a problem that does not yet exist; and up to a point that is the truth. It is not the kind of house they will live in after the war that is now troubling househungry people, but whether any house at all will be available -to them at a price they will be able to pay. We do not ask, when we wish to get out of the rain, whether the shelter we enter has tiles on the roof or thatch. But no one lives for ever in a state of emergency. The war will end, the wreckage disappear, and then, as our contributor "New Order" points out, we shall have to remove the stresses and strains that lead to war if we wish to live long at peace. And peace begins at home. The liberties we are fighting for will be dust in our mouths if while science is setting us free from drudgery we are not learning how to live richer lives in the hours that it is making wholly our own. Those hours we shall spend normally in some kind of house. The question is: Will that house be the right kind of home? "New Order" asks some of the special questions such a general question raises. What people do depends on what they are, and what they are depends far more than any one realises on the intelligence with which they adjust their environment in the progress of knowledge. A shelter from the elements is no longet enough. Our houses often shelter us too completely — shut us out of the sun and the view and destroy our sense of oneness with nature. That is why we have asked two architects to tell us how to build houses that are not prisons. But the problem is far more complex than that. It is religious, educational, political, social-and then a good deal more. The sooner we begin thinking about it the sooner we shall begin to see how much more a good house is than a place in which we eat, sleep, and hide, .
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 8, Issue 195, 19 March 1943, Page 2
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390New Houses for a New World New Zealand Listener, Volume 8, Issue 195, 19 March 1943, Page 2
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