POINTS FROM LETTERS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 422, 25 July 1947, Page 5

POINTS FROM LETTERS

J:

ROSE

(Auckland)

wants to know if The

Listener "‘cannot abide a breath of candid criticism" and if we really think that critics. have no axes to grind, A critic, he argues, ° is also an author, has quite a fair-sized exe to keep in trim, but confesses that he has not’ seen G.M. at the grindstone so far,

7 More letters from listeners will be found on Pages 18 and 19

LETTERS FROM LISTENERS

(continued from page 5) UGLY BUILDINGS Sir,-In his article arguing the corruption of taste in New Zealand, Mr. Fairburn used as a yardstick, the results of a competition in the English literary journal Horizon which awarded piizes for photographs of Ugliest Buildings. "The winning snaps were bad enough," he said, "but one could find a hundred

examples that were much more horrifying around the suburbs of Auckland." Before we meekly brand ourselves as being unfit even for adult audiences, it might be as well to be certain that we are listening to the right oracle. I enclose three other opinions on the subject of what Astragal in the Architects’ Journal (January 30, 1947), calls "the staggering results of the Ugliest Buildings Competition." One of these protests is made by Gropius, one of the most famous of modern architects. Mr. Fairburn’s key words are "simple" and "honest." Let us, he says, aim at a nation-wide taste in architecture and the applied arts for the simple and honest, and let us abandon pretentious and vulgs snobbery. As a ‘simple, honest soul, I have applauded these excellent senti"ments ever since I became aware 20 | years ago that these were the sentiments that the serious, the culturéd, the up-to-date should applaud. But I have never been able to still a perverse small voice telling me that I prefer the unconscious snobbery of the pretentious /and the vulgar to the conscious deter- | mination of the cultured to be strenu- , ously simple and honest. I suspect, in fact, that there is something very complicated about being simple and honest, but being a simple end honest soul. I wouldn’t really know.

NORMAN

BLOOD

Wellington).

ENCLOSURE (1) It seems to us absolutcly absurd that the building of Wells Coates, erected in 1934 as the first modern building in England after the sleep of three decades, is brought in that kind of relation, and completely inadequate with the iiterary and artistic line of your highly estimated magazine-S. Giedion, Sec-retary-General to "Les Congrés Internationaux a Moderne" in Horizon, April, 1947. ENCLOSURE (2) The photographs are bad, the captions incomplete or inaccurate, and the decision of the Editor may have been final, but it is certainly not right. The visual quality of the winner, for instance, is surely an inexpert wilfulness rather than downright ‘ugliness, and since an element of fantasy is never out of

place in a country retreat, this would seem almost a virtue. The Isokon Flats (second prize) are admittedly-like most buildings in London-in need of repainting, but to call them ugly is to imply that their form is distorted and that their shape has been conceived by an untrained and insensitive mind. This is a ludicrous misjudgment of a building which,- for all its faults, is generally considered to be a minor milestone in the history of this country’s architecture, and expresses in all its dimensions the control of an imaginative and purposeful mind. . . . As for the "Group of 1870 Buildings Maryport," they are certainly dilapidated, but they are not disordered or malformed, any more, if the sashwindows are any guide, than they are 1870. It may be argued that there is no such thing as an ugly building-just as there is no such thing as an ugly colour. It all depends 6n where and how it is placed. But most people would agree that there are buildingsperhaps a reader would like to suggest one or two?-whose appearance is so actively offensive to the eye that they can genuinely be called ugly. The readers of Horizon do not seem to have found such buildings, nor’ would it appear that the editors of Horizon would recognise them if they saw them.-Astragal, in Architects’ Journal, 30.1.47. ENCLOSURE (3) ; Reading the December issue of Horizon, I was baffled to find the Lawn Road Flats near Belsize Park, London, brandished under the pot "Ugly Buildings Competition."

I lived in these from 1934-37 and remember the building, which I know very well, to be cheerful and good to live in. Its designby Wells Coates-is a result of careful study of contemporary living. If the colour of the building should be unattractive at present this cannot veil the basic soundness of the handsome building of which I thought London could be proud. I fail to undesetand the point of view of the jury making this derogative award.-Walter Gropius in Horizon, April, 1947.