Man His Own Priest

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 419, 4 July 1947, Page 8

Man His Own Priest

D E. BARRY MARTIN, giving the " first of his series of talks on architecture from 2YA last Friday, took a firm line right from the start by announcing that good architecture was as important to mankind as the atomic bomb or the question of ‘peace or war. Um-m-m. I do not think I am exceptional in preferring to live peacefully in a builder’s bungalow rather than dangerously in an _ architect’s chefd’oeuvre, to gaze upon street after street

of entire turn-of-the-century villas rather than rubble formed from even the best architecture. In any case we have only to look about us at many of our archi-tect-designed public buildings to realise that architects are not infallible, and furthermore many of the most esteemed of our art critics are united in telling ‘us that a simple sod-hut circa 1850 flung up by an early settler on his Saturday

afternoon off embodies more of the basia principles of good architecture than, for example, Wellington’s architectural triumph, the Largest Wooden Building in the World. Without shame I confess that I am not as allergic to the ugly as Mr. Barry Martin, and I would not think death preferable to the "living death of life in an inefficient housebox." Listening to him talk I felt something of the detachment of a Dissenter sitting beneath a clergyman of the Established Church, conscious that the individual has in him a divine spark that can guide him to architectural salvation, and that this spark is not the monopoly of any particular cult.