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Design For Today   3   1935  Page: 37
 
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NEW BOOKS

HOUSING ENGLAND (A guide to housing problems and the building industry, presented in a report by the Industries Group of P.E.P.) Published by P.E.P., 16 Queen Anne’s Gate, S.W.1 5s. pp. 158.

HOUSING ENGLAND

The necessity for an impartial and authoritative study of the housing problem of Great Britain has become more and more urgent in view of the provisions which have now been made for slum clearance and the elimination of overcrowding (by the government). There has always been the feeling, encouraged undoubtedly by supporters of the present National Government, that it is not wise or proper for local authorities to carry on housing at all, and so we have had during the last three years extraordinary emphasis placed on the contribution private enterprise can make to the solution of the housing problem as apart from local authorities, the great social mission of the building societies and the revolutionary work carried out by the public utilities.

Against those advocates of private enterprise in its various forms, one can place the investigations of experts in regional and local administration as well as in building and economics who have stated quite bluntly that the State itself should take over all responsibility for housing, and that any perpetuation of the present muddledom is contrary to efficiency in the actual work of building houses and contrary to national interest as far as it impinges on social welfare.

Intermediate between those groups has come rather special interest attached to different industries such as the Building Trades National Council, the British Steel Works Association and various development associations some of which, under the guise of fundamental research, have been active in putting forward very subtle and intelligent propaganda, not necessarily coincident with the welfare of the public or with an enlightened long term policy on the part of those to whom the responsibility of carrying out large building schemes had fallen.

The latest report of the Political and Economic Planning Group tries to steer a somewhat tortuous course between those three types of interest or policy, but the compilers of this report have been more attracted by the private enterprise thesis than by the thesis of public control and supervision.

They blind themselves deliberately to the real implication of what has happened in housing since the war. Before the war, public ownership and control of housing, particularly on the part of the local authorities, covered a small percentage of the population, but since the war, owing largely to the failure of private enterprise and to the emergence of a new conception of the real standards of living and of public welfare, the percentage of the population housed by local authorities has risen very rapidly indeed, and in a few years’ time we may have a situation where more than fifty per cent, of the entire population of the country, and almost 100 per cent, of the working class population will be accommodated in houses built and administered by local authorities. In other words, housing will in a short time become the most completely socialised public utility in Great Britain.

The question then is, should this process be accelerated or should it be retarded ?

There are many things to be said for acceleration, if acceleration means the adoption of scientific methods of planning out housing schemes, effective co-ordination of schemes and the alignment of such schemes into a clear policy of national, industrial and economic planning. There is nothing at all to be said for the policy in which the present government indulges of acceleration and retardation turn and turn about.

In their refusal to recognise the importance of this change, which cannot really be prevented and can at worst only be slowed down, the authors of the P.E.P. memorandum have condemned to rather academic interest much of the valuable material which they have accumulated and presented with great conciseness and clarity of definition. They point out, for example, the chaotic condition of our present regulations governing building and the utilities connected with building, the muddledom resulting from various types of subsidy in force, the almost complete lack of proper statistical and research organisations in the building industry and the mediaeval organisation of the building trades themselves, but they do not go very deeply into the question of what is really meant by a “ modern house ” and what equipment should be put into this house to make it a decent dwelling twenty years hence.

They are concerned less with the planning of houses to meet a rising, or what ought to be a rising, standard of living than with the possibility of cutting down the cost of existing models. Their examination of the building trades themselves, of building standard houses for the working class, of the incidence of rates and the possibility of de-rating working-class houses are extraordinarily valuable and practical in their application, but the discussion of cost reduction and the detailed comparison of costs under the most rational large scale scheme of building rather emphasise the view which is very generally held that the efficiency of the local authorities is very much higher than the government has conceived it to be.
Costs have been reduced so far by the local authorities that they cannot go very much further, and it is questionable whether a large scale housing company such as the P.E.P. group proposes will show any improvement on the results achieved by municipalities with enormous schemes still to be carried out, such as Leeds, Liverpool or Glasgow.

We consider the proposal that a housing company should be formed with a subsidiary building company on the model of a private enterprise, to develop working class houses, without a government subsidy and without apparently any real control by the public as represented by the government or local authority, as no improvement on what is already being carried out by speculative builders assisted by the building societies. It is no real improvement on the very large housing companies which are already engaged in destroying the amenities on the outskirts of London and the big towns. It is questionable whether it will reduce costs even to the level of those already achieved by local authorities.

On this side, consequently, the report is disappointing. The main problem is not to be found in the reduction of costs, but in the elaboration of some machinery which will ensure not only effective public control over housing developments, but also the translation of the terms of the Town Planning Act of 1932 into the housing schemes required for the working class.

A subsidiary problem, almost as important, lies in the discovery of what should be the proper equipment of a working-class house, in view of the fact that such houses may be designed to remain habitable for at least 50 years.

The memorandum of the P.E.P. group clears up many things and is in the nature of a large scale exploration of existing tendencies and existing practice. To that extent it is extraordinarily valuable, on the constructive side it is definitely disappointing.

HUGH QUIGLEY
Design For Today   3   1935  Page: 38
 
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TWENTIETH CENTURY HOUSES by Raymond McGrath. (Faber & Faber. 21s. net.)

ART AND INDUSTRY by Herbert Read. (Faber & Faber. 12s. 6d. net.)

INDUSTRIAL ART EXPLAINED by John Gloag. (George Allen & Unwin. 5s. net.)

A HISTORY OF EVERYDAY THINGS IN ENGLAND by Marjorie and C. H. B. Quennell. Vol. IV. The Age of Production. 1851-1934. (B. T. Batsford. 8s. 6d. net.)

ART AND INDUSTRY

One of the most hopeful features of contemporary discussion of the things that matter has been the desire of the architecttural profession not merely to explore the fundamental tendencies governing the revolution of design and construction, but also to explain intelligently their desires and conceptions.

Two of the books in front of us have been written by architects and one of them at least must be regarded as a major contribution to the study and appreciation of the principal factors governing design at the present time. All four books have been written in good living English and they are a pleasure to read.

Mr. McGrath has followed with care the evolution of what may be regarded as a modern style of architecture, particularly design and construction of houses from the end of the eighteenth century onwards. He illustrates forcibly (in this he is very effectively assisted by John Gloag and Marjorie and C. H. B. Quennell) the disastrous effect of the industrial revolution on architecture, but he is rather less cynical in discussing the neo-Gothic architects of the Victorian era than Mr. Gloag. The designer of a flamboyant building like the Law Courts or St. Pancras Station had a genuine desire to give some contemporary sanction to architecture which at the same time would preserve a well encased tradition. It is not sufficient to laugh at the achievements of the industrial epoch and dismiss them as dangerous and soul-destroying fantasticherie. They gave enjoyment to someone and the realisation of that enjoyment is a measure of the culture of the time.

A nigger in West Africa may discover the miraculous in mass-produced Brummagem jewellery and his discovery is not dissimilar from aesthetic appreciation. The whole trouble about the Victorian Age was that it seldom got beyond the West African nigger standard. It liked its morality easy, its social values reduced to the alphabet, its decoration ready-made and mass-produced and it invariably confused aesthetics with banality.

It is interesting to trace the emergence of the modern spirit with its impatience at empty formulae, its hatred of commercialised decoration, and its real desire for simplicity, from such beginnings as William Morris’ “ Red House ” and the works of C. F. Voysey and Charles Rennie Macintosh.

It is too early yet to decide what the architectural characteristics of the new classicism will be. There is certainly an air of indecision about almost all of the houses illustrated in the survey, particularly British examples and not all of the achievements have a full aesthetic justification. The enthusiasm for flat surfaces, wide expanses of glass, held between horizontal or vertical lines, and rigid arrangement of balconies, has not in every case produced a perfectly fit or pleasing result. Examples illustrated from Stuttgart and Brussels are, on the whole, disagreeable experiments which lack something to make them human.

If we except the work of Raymond McGrath and Wells Coates among the British architects, we cannot say that contemporary British examples are as good as the German, or, for that matter, as the Dutch. The flat-roofed house may become too reminiscent of the flat-roofed monstrosities which are now being scattered over South London by the speculative builder. There is some danger, therefore, that the most advanced architecture may end in barren, factory- made erections on the one side or precious creations on the other, which the Joldwynds foreshadow.

The study by John Gloag is almost completely overtaken by the larger monographs of Herbert Read and Raymond McGrath, but he says some devastating things about the curious conception ruling among enthusiasts for design in the nineteenth century that art should be applied to industry, the truth being, surely, that if industry is carrying out its real function, it should not require any art application, but should be art itself.

Herbert Read questions the theory that if a product is efficient in its function then it will have automatically a proper design and he makes a distinction between what may be regarded as machine design and that which is motivated by manufacture and the conditions of the efficiency of the finished product, and aesthetic design which owes something to the desire of the human mind for beauty, even if such beauty is not coincident with a machine-made function.

There is a danger, however, that the attempt to reduce design to a philosophy may end in preciosity and elaboration rather than in simplicity and speed. The author quotes with approval the statement made by Professor Gropius that “ artistic design is simply an integral part of the very stuff of life ” and he is intent to show that the great body of the achievement in the industrial and decorative fields has been due to a mistaken effort to escape from life into a decorative vacuum.

It is unfortunate that in a book of such magnificence the illustrations should have been derived so largely from German sources. If one were to judge from those illustrations one would assume that the greater part of the British achievement in design came to a conclusion somewhere about the seventeenth century or early eighteenth century. The book is also very weak on large scale industrial design.
The compilation by Marjorie and C. H. B. Quennell gives an illustrated commentary to the three books already mentioned, but it suffers from lack of completeness and is not, as far as modern developments are concerned, very representative. It takes no note of the revolutionary effect of electricity, for example, and gives us no indication of the changes effected by research into new materials and methods of using such materials.


BUILDING TO THE SKIES by Alfred C. Bossom (The Studio, 10s.6d. net.)

Here is a book written professedly for the lay reader but which, unlike so many of its kind, does not therefore presume that he is also a half-wit. It is happily free from the vulgarities of most “popularisations,” and it is a book that very few architects, builders or technicians could consider themselves too well instructed to read. In brief, it is a model of its kind ; it tells a story that fits it for a Christmas present to an intelligent schoolboy without insulting the most intelligent and instructed adult.

This is not to say that we like all the pictures or agree with all the author’s enthusiasms, particularly his aesthetic ones. Many of the buildings shown have no merit except size : a large number that are magnificent in massing are lamentable in detail. All through, the standard of judgment seems a little too near Babbitt’s. “ As always, he noted that the California Building across the way was three stories lower, therefore three stories less beautiful, than his own Reeves Building.”

(Continued on page 40)
Design For Today   3   1935  Page: 40
 
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(Continued from page 38)

We are dazzled and, it must be confessed, vulgarly thrilled by colossal statistics. It is delightful to know that 150,000 letters a day are delivered at the Woolworth Building, and that £500,000 worth of building was accomplished each month on the Empire State Building and that in the whole structure 58,000 tons of steel, ten million common bricks and so on and so on, were used. C'est magnifique mais ce n’est pas l'architecture.

But Mr. Bossom is alive to the implications of all this. He admits that the skyscraper could not “ have been received with such rapturous acclamation except by a people easily impressed by mere bulk, quicker to recognise advertising rather than aesthetic values ” and generally regarding building as an instrument of vast publicity and rivalry. But none the less, whatever the motives, great things have been achieved and nothing greater than the elaborate system of work known as the Time and Progress Schedule. What this means and what it could mean to us if applied to ordinary, earth-keeping buildings is illustrated by Mr. Bossom’s contention that £25,000,000 a year of our building bill is wasted by poor organisation and obsolete practices, and that “it is thanks almost wholly to this scheduling of everything in advance and working to an agreed time-table that buildings in America cost no more to erect than in England, are completed far more quickly, yield larger profits both to the owner and the contractor, and at the same time enable the operatives to be paid from three to five times the wages that they receive in Great Britain.” It is also highly significant that while in England 60 per cent, of building costs is for material and only 40 per cent, for wages, the exact reverse is true in America. The average English employer is only too ready to blame wages for the high cost of building. Let him read this book and, stimulated by its indictment of the British building trade, investigate further and see what can be done with his own department before he tries to cut the relatively low wages of his operatives. We are embarking on an enormous scheme of public building. If the rebuilding of the slums is not to result in rents that will cripple the workers and lower their health standard by using money necessary for food we cannot afford to throw away £25,000,000 a year.


ARTISTS IN UNIFORM by Max Eastman. (Allen and Unwin, 7s. 6d. net.)

We published in our November issue an enthusiastic article on the art training of children in Soviet Russia. It is a damping experience to read Max Eastman’s book afterwards because, although he deals almost entirely with writers, we must conclude that he would present the same depressing picture of the fate of pictorial art under the present regime. On the other hand it must be borne in mind that Eastman is a Trotskyist and however sincere his wish to be just, it is difficult for him to see any good in Stalinism. We do not accuse him of a false picture of artistic conditions ; we have no evidence on which to make such an accusation. But it is always fair to take a man’s prejudices into consideration when weighing the value of his pronouncements. Nobody, least of all a communist, can avoid presenting things from his own angle. Pure objectivity is probably impossible even for the scientist.

Again, the decree of April 23rd, 1932, has swept away most of the abuses which he so effectively presents and even if we admit his charge of inconsistency against Stalin we must still recognise that his book is now rather of historical importance than a contemporary social document.

But when all allowances have been made, there can be no doubt that those who understand and believe in creative art will be shocked by the stupid procedure which attempted to harness it to a political machine and by the mental and even physical sufferings of those writers who dared to be individualists. One of the most interesting aspects of an interesting book is the emphasis laid on the views of Lenin and Trotsky on these matters. Both of them, Eastman seems to establish, believed in the essential independence of art and the need for the artist to develop individuality even in a state-system which does not encourage it in other members.

Eastman’s argument is freely illustrated with the dramatic stories of what happened to certain writers who did not toe the line and the even worse things, morally, that happened to some who did.


EXHIBITIONS

International Architecture at R.I.B.A.—66, Portland Place. Till 3rd January. 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. (Saturday 5 p.m.).

Exhibition of Industrial Art.—At Burlington House, Piccadilly, W.L From 4th January, 1935.

New Homes for old Housing Exhibition. Charing Cross Station (Underground). From 1st January to 14th January, 1935.

Modern Indian Art on Traditional Lines by S. Fyzee Rahamin. At The Arlington Gallery, 22, Old Bond Street, W.l. Monday, 10th December till Christmas.

Unit One. Corporation Art Gallery, Derby, till 12th January, 1935.

Rugs, Carpets, Lino Cuts and Paintings by Ronald Grierson. At Bloomsbury Gallery, 34, Bloomsbury Street, New Oxford Street, W.L Till 24th December.

Sewed Pictures by Molly Booker. The Lefevre Galleries, la, King Street, St. James’s, S.W.l. Till 29th December.

Picture Boxes by Bertha Wright. The Lefevre Galleries, la, King Street, St. James’s, S.W.l. Till 29th December.

Contemporary British Painting. Tooth’s Gallery, 155, New Bond Street, W.L From 17th January, 1935.

L’Exposition Universelle de Bruxelles. April to November, 1935.