R.LB.A. President's View Told to Students Mr. H. S. Goodhart-Rendel, president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, told students at the Institute recently that very few of those who employed an architect knew or cared whether what he gave them was a work of art or not. They wanted something usable, something pretty, perhaps, and generally something cheap, states the "Manchestec Guardian."
Memories of that kind of Victorian architect who was far too artistic for ventilation and drains," siad Mr. Goodhart-Rendel, "have led some of his successors into a propaganda that holds out ventilation and drains and social convenience generally as the architects chief gifts to his fellow men, which they only could be in a view of life that was grovellingly materialistic.
Every architect who allowed a consciously irrational fancy for one shape rather than another to be the prime determinant in a design was falling into the supper-realist's error. Logic, the science of reasoning, was the basis of all artistic processes, and in art was the basis of the art itself, Looking at much that is called architecture, Mr. t-Rendel said, you might not think so, since the name of that art is vainly used for what is often merely stylish construction or sentimental indulgence in the picturesque. In the kind of slang architecture, aptly described as modernistic, you will find that logic has been put on afterwards, just as style used to be.
Modernistic buildings and buildings that were self-consciously picturesque could be very pleasing when perpetrated by clever men. "Looking, however, at the best of this architect ture." Mr. Goodhart-Rendel said, "or, as I should prefer to call it, pseudo architecture, I want you to ask yourselves whether it would be any the worse if, besides making an effect, it also made sense. If you decide, as I believe you will, that it would not be worse but immeasurably better, you will next decide to base your practice upon sense rather than upon sensibility; upon logic rather than upon prejudice."
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.