3S6D A YOUNG FABIAN PAMPHLET architecture: art or social service? BY PAULTHOMPSON This pamphlet has been written by PAUL THOMPSON, a research fellow of The Queen’s College, Oxford, with assistance from Thomas Pakenham. It does not necessarily represent the views of the Young Fabian Group. The Fabian Society, 11, Dartmouth Street, S.W.l Note.—This pamphlet, like all publications of the FABIAN SOCIETY, represents not the collective view of the Society but only the view of the individual who prepared it. The responsibility of the Society is limited to approving the publications which it issues as worthy of consideration within the Labour Movement. March, 1963 y.f.g. 5 Introduction FYESIGN is not usually regarded as a political question. It is regarded as a matter of personal taste, to be left to aesthetic pundits. If there is any Labour Party attitude to design, it is the feeling that architects should be given more scope to exercise their talents, freed from some of the commercial pressures which undoubtedly make for shoddiness and vulgarity in their work. Architectural design is certainly not regarded as a field in which a direct clash of principles, principles of an essentially political nature, is taking place. Yet this is so. Design in both architecture and town planning hinges upon questions of social priority, questions of how people are to live and work. The architect or planner, because he is generally trained in a tradition which is above all ^esthetic, is constantly tempted to produce an architectural monument at the expense of the convenience of its occupants. Architectural monuments can and do cause suffering. Ill-planned hospitals waste life. Wrongly designed housing can produce domestic squalor. Unconsidered school architecture stunts the education of children. Monumental prestige office blocks can result in business inefficiency. If this is true, then it is important that a politician, whether a local councillor or a potential Minister, should know how to distinguish a socially well-designed building from a bad one. It is not easy: only a close look at different approaches in practice can clearly separate the two schools. What architects say about their work can be misleading. The word functional, for example, often means 110 more than expressing the means of construction. In this pamphlet the two architectural schools are called functionalists and formalists. Functionalists are architects whose over-riding consideration is the needs of the user, who speak of architecture as a service, who tend to favour teamwork, consumer research and programme bidding. The functional ideal is an environment. Formalists are architects who will base a design on aesthetic consideration, who tend to work independently on isolated works (one-off jobs), who believe in the free exercise of their creative intuition. The formalist ideal is a monument. The clearest example of the two approaches in practice is in school-building. L The Two Schools J7ROM the distance most new schools look remarkably similar. Their clean lines, flat roofs and large expanses of window are a familiar symbol of modern British architecture. Post-war British schools have been acclaimed in the press at home and distinguished by critics abroad as one of our best achievements in architecture. Yet when publicity is given in newspapers, or in the volumes of The Buildings of England, or in a survey such as Kidder Smith’s The New Architecture of Europe, usually THE WORST SCHOOLS, just because they are those conceived as architectural monuments, ARE THOSE SINGLED OUT FOR ATTENTION. The reports will explain that their formal plan—gener- 1 ally a symmetrical rectangle, but sometimes a hexagon or even a pentagon—has a functional justification, and that costs have been reduced by shortening the outer walls to a minimum. The fact that very often the size of the classrooms has been reduced to the minimum size permitted is not normally mentioned. It is worth looking closely at one of the most famous of England’s post-war schools, Hunstanton Secondary Modern. Designed by Peter and Alison Smithson, it has been the rallying point of a whole school of young architects, who believe in the simple rational plan, and the plain use of basic materials. (Plate 1). Certainly the school looks rational, and as an architectural design is extremely impressive. Rigidly symmetrical, a long two-storey, polished glass and black steel box set off on the entrance side by balanced boiler-house chimneys and to the south by a great open field, it is neatly planned round a central hall. The brilliant use of the white boiler-house chimney and black water tank on stilts as aesthetic features, the bare brick walls and steel concrete ceilings, the exposed pipes and electric equipment, and the use of an undercoat orange for the scant paintwork, combine to give the impression of a work of art conjured out of the barest elements. Since it was built in 1950-53 it has been visited by some 3,000 architects, and according to the headmaster most of them have left greatly impressed by its architectural qualities. But are the teachers and the 480 boys and girls who use it equally pleased? The school has two obvious virtues. One is that the classrooms are all well lit, with two whole walls of windows. The other is that in each case one window looks over a courtyard towards other classrooms, so that the school has a valuable sense of coherence. Its disadvantages are numerous. The structure, which was experimental, was not suitable for an exposed site with strong salt sea winds and fluctuating temperatures. Insufficient allowance was made for expansion and contraction of the steel frame, and as the door and window frames have twisted the glass has split. The school was originally surrounded by gravel, which was easily kicked up to break more windows. The salt air has corroded the metalwork. Much worse, rigid symmetry of the plan resulted in unsatisfactory allocations of space. The classrooms are nearly all minimum size, and a good half of the school is either staircase or corridor. There are ten staircases, constructed with suspended wooden treads, which act as drums. This, combined with noise through the ceilings, makes an incredible din when any number of children are moving between rooms, and the curriculum has to be arranged to reduce movement to a minimum. There is no provision for several vital facilities —no stockroom, no toolshed, no groundsman’s store, no greenhouse— and nowhere for animals, these latter essential in a country school. In contrast there are two medical rooms (used once a week), a large ‘ broom cupboard ’ in most classrooms, and some rooms with no function at all— as well as the wasted circulation space. The two grass courtyards, which could have provided extremely attractive and useful outdoor space, are scarcely used; they each have but one badly placed door. The details were equally unsatisfactory, and consequently have been extensively altered. The exposed walls and undercoat paint gave the atmosphere of a workhouse rather than a school, and were soon 2 scribbled all over by resentful children. The classrooms were lined with hardboard, too hard to stick pins into, and unwashable. It is not possible to move blackboards round the room; they can only be on one wall. In a large number of rooms the electric lighting was inadequate. The exposed conduits and pipes create a terrible dust problem. The windows cannot be opened by children owing to their design. The hall cannot be used for films in summer, because the upper lights cannot be blacked out; and so on. Perhaps the perverse sense of priorities is best illustrated by a contrast between the needleroom and the broom cupboards. The cupboards, unnecessary luxuries, have expensive doors, made of reversed hardboard and running on elaborate ballbearing mechanism into intricate locks. The needleroom, occupied by children as opposed to brooms, was denied all luxury; just a plain, bare room with a brutish sink (not even a tile surround), inadequately lit, with no facilities for fitting (essential to dressmaking), and not enough electric points. Hunstanton is not dismissable as a rare freak. It is a much admired building, praised and illustrated in the latest Buildings of England; and designed under conditions demanded by many architects; the Smithsons were given a free hand, and it was built without any modification by the County Education Committee (although they have since had to spend a lot of money on improvements to it). It would not have been difficult to take a completely different school, such as Bousfield Primary. The Boltons, Kensington, by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, and point out planning failures where the aesthetic intention is much more sympathetic. Bousfield is formally planned, but visually it is delightful, and well deserved the award of a bronze medal by the R.I.B.A. Kidder Smith calls it ‘one of the best schools in Europe’. Even so, the headmaster did not share this enthusiasm. However enchanting a school may appear, to those who use it the noise from the central halls, the inadequate provision of lavatories, and the small sparsely equipped classrooms which ‘restrict anything but rather formal work’, are fundamental drawbacks, not bad details to a good design. When compared with most of the pre-1930 schools still in use, with schools without hot water or with earth closets in a backyard, or with traditionally conceived neo-Georgian schools built in recent years, Bousfield and Hunstanton are of course an undoubted improvement. Nevertheless they have failed to provide a setting in which education can fully flourish. Modern architecture can do much better than this. The Hertfordshire approach The alternative approach was pioneered by the post-war schools in Hertfordshire. The Hertfordshire schools are remarkable in two ways. Firstly, they were a response to a drastic shortage, a need for schools as urgent as the present national need for housing. Secondly, they are meticulously based on a knowledge of educational method and theory and the needs of teachers and children. They are educational buildings, not architectural monuments. To a degree unique in modern architecture they combine speed and economy in production with a use of resources based on human need scientifically measured. 3 In 1946 Hertfordshire was already faced with an acute shortage of schools places, and on top of this it needed to prepare for the building of the New Towns and the growth of population in outer London. It was quite clear that traditional building methods could not provide the ‘crash programme’ required. Both materials and craftsmen were in short supply. The team of architects in the county office—men and women like Stirrat Johnson-Marshall, David Medd, Mary Crowley, Oliver Cox and Cleeve Barr—therefore decided to make use of their wartime experience of pre-fabrication and organised production. But they rejected the old inflexible system of pre-fabricating whole classrooms, because they were as much concerned with the quality of schools as with the speed with which they were to be produced. During 1946-47 they evolved a new system of building, based on a standard set of prefabricated components—structural parts, windows, roofing and so on— and organised on an 8 ft. 3 in. planning grid. They were able to make advance orders for the production of these components in light engineering factories, and assemble them on the site with a minimum of skilled labour. The first of these schools was an infant wing for Cheshunt Primary School, built in 1946; the first full programme was in 1947. The schools were a success, the crisis met. By 1948, as a result of the post-war ‘bulge’, the whole country was faced with the prospect of over-crowded schools. The Ministry of Education decided to take up the Hertfordshire method. A development group was set up, led by Johnson-Marshall, Medd and Mary Crowley, which in co-operation with various local authorities explored new methods of school-building and school planning, studying different materials and different types of schools. The Hertfordshire schools had been single-storey, in steel and concrete. Multi-storey buildings, concrete and timber frames, and types of school other than primary were now also attempted. At Wokingham, for example, a secondary school was built on a new type of plan which by grouping rooms on the basis of functional analysis avoided both the old problem of the Victorian ‘three decker’ (noise, bad ventilation and bad aspects for many rooms) and also the new problems of the advanced designs of the 1930’s (sprawl, wasting valuable land, spending almost as much money on corridors as on classrooms, and making the school difficult to administer or supervise). The reduction of wasted money on useless corridor space has been especially successful in the Ministry’s primary school development: it has been possible to increase classroom space from the 520 square feet minimum to 900 square feet or more, while reducing the total floor area of the school by 40 per cent. Through its Building Bulletins issued to describe these projects, the Ministry has been able to exert a healthy influence on local standards of school design. The best known recent application of the Hertfordshire method has been CLASP—the Consortium of Local Authorities Special Programme. Nottinghamshire in 1955 was wasting 10 per cent of its school building costs on precautions against mining subsidence; there was a severe shortage of skilled craftsmen; and even steel and cement if not ordered in advance suffered from arbitrary scarcities. Some schools were taking three years to build. The new county architect, D. E. (now Sir Donald) Gibson, set up a development group under D. W. Lacey and Henry 4 Swain, two architects from Hertfordshire (Lacey is now Notts. County Architect), which evolved a modified pin-jointed steel system based on a Ministry school at Belper. Its diagonal steel bracing made it stable without being rigid; its parts could be pre-fabricated, and on the site the school built in four months with a minimum of skilled labour. In order to get the full economic benefits of factory production, other mining counties were approached, and in 1957 the consortium known as CLASP was set up; seven authorities joined at first and more since. Gibson moved to the War Office in 1958, which then joined the consortium. A typical CLASP Primary School, exhibited at the Milan Triennale International School-building Congress in 1960, was awarded the top medal, and as a result, West Germany and Italy have made longterm agreements by which they receive CLASP working drawings and architectural advice. A similar school building congress was held in England in 1962, spreading the idea further abroad, while a second consortium of English authorities, SCOLA, has now been formed. Progress of this kind has not been universal. The Ministry is not able to impose its improvements on local authorities, and some, such as Surrey, stick to symmetrical formally planned schools with pitched tile roofs, providing cramped accommodation expensively. But the Ministry has established maximum cost limits and imposed revised minimum planning standards, and fixed building programmes two or three years ahead to make production economies possible. The result of even these limited measures has been impressive. Without them we should have certainly built fewer schools at a much greater cost during the last decade. National building costs rose by over 60 per cent, between 1949 and 1959. But school building costs have actually been reduced. In 1949 the average primary school place cost £190, the average secondary school place £325; in 1959 they cost £150 and £255 respectively. Certainly some of this reduction is due to excessive Ministerial cheeseparing, and the Government has chosen to use most of the savings for less useful purposes than education. Nevertheless it has saved school building from the worst of the cyclical axe. Educational Value It is very easy to mistake this achievement for a simple advance in building technique—just better systems based on factory production replacing the essentially pre-industrial approach of traditional builders. It is much more than this. On the constructural side alone the methods by which systems are evolved, using teams of specialists, bringing the manufacturer and builder together before the design is made, break down the isolation of client and architcet, and of architect, specialist and builder. The technique of cost analysis relates each aspect of the construction or plan to the whole, so that its worth can be rationally considered. ‘ If we are to get value for money, we must know where each penny goes in the building. This means that the cost of previous buildings must be analysed in detail and a systematic method found of comparing the results. Comparison reveals what is economical and what is extravagant, what can be afforded within the cost limits and what cannot be afforded. Techniques for measuring costs to a fraction of a penny per 5 square foot have been devised V Cost analysis is as important to educational as to structural advance in building; the real value of each space cannot be assessed unless the sacrifices made to produce it are known. Consequently the earliest Hertfordshire schools were able to give an unprecedented importance to educational needs against external appearances. The Nottinghamshire CLASP schools are designed on a basis of educational requirements derived partly from the Ministry Development Group and partly from local headmasters and inspectors. The process of investigation, experiment and follow-up must be continuous to be successful. In the Ministry Group it has become a fine art. Their experimental schools have been economic because they have been humane, built around teachers and children instead of fitting them into an architectural pre-conceived structure. This is their lesson. Consider Amersham (Woodside) Junior School, completed in 1957. It is not even pre-fabricated—it was intended to show that rational planning and organising building methods were equally effective when local builders were employed. Yet it is the most important single step forward in school building since the first Hertfordshire school in 1946. In Mary Crowley’s words, ‘ the process of design started with the education of the designers.’ They already had their Hertfordshire experience: they now set out on an intensive course to broaden their knowledge, reading and discussing with educational experts the traditions and latest trends in primary education, and visiting 30 schools to watch teachers and children at work and consider the design implications— ‘ to watch . . . crowds of children lining up to wash out their paint brushes under one tap placed awkwardly in the corner of a room, and to decide, therefore, to design a long sink with several taps. . . .’ The Building Bulletin- eventually issued by the Ministry describing Amersham is packed with minute and telling observation of children in these schools, and gives a tremendous feeling of sympathy for the friendliness and exuberance of the atmosphere which they usually found. The actual design began with furniture, which largely determines the use made of a room. Yet little furniture had previously been designed specially for use in schools (because few people work simultaneously in the fields of education and furniture design), and had therefore been selected in bulk from manufacturers’ catalogues. The effect was obvious—‘ the chalk-board that would not wipe clean, the child writing with his cheek almost touching the table top, the ink spilled as a table was moved, the books without shelves, the drawings stuck to plaster walls or even to windows, the untidy stacks of equipment, the rubber boots piled on the floor beside the shoe lockers.’ Instead of basing a design on the body measurements and postures of children, adult furniture had been sentimentally scaled down to child size. Much other equipment, such as basins and lavatories, was on an adult scale. A complete new set of equipment, which is now generally available and widely used, was therefore designed—chairs, five types of table, window seats, wall-benching, easels, display units, woodwork benches, lockers, and so on. The new basin, with taps providing pre-mixed water on pressure, the 1 Britain’s New Schools, XU Trienale of Mileno, M.O.E., 1960. 2 Building Bulletin 16, Junior School, Amersham, M.O.E., 1958. 6 angle of spray and shape and size of the bowl all calculated, works more easily and saves hot water. The new classroom sink uses original tile designs, so that the work of an artist contributes to an object in everyday use, instead of being put in some ceremonial passage. (Plate 8.) The design of the rooms was based on the furniture and the activities of teachers and children, and the school planned as a whole by considering the movements between the various rooms. With classrooms, for example, it was decided that the essential needs were: — (1) Space for 41 people to move about in comfort; (2) Space for 41 people to sit at tables, arranged both formally and informally; (3) Space for smaller groups to make things of great variety, with wall-benching, water, display surfaces, tough flooring and walls and plenty of light; (4) Space for living objects of many kinds (such as plants, tadpoles, birds); (5) Space for inanimate objects, also of great variety (such as rocks, pulleys, lenses); (6) Space for the study of books, and for individual research; (7) Space for acting, dancing, singing and playing of instruments in small groups; (8) Space for storing materials, tools and work; (9) Outdoor space for growing things and for other activities in fine weather. Round these needs the shape of the classrooms, with their shallow bays, evolved. (Fig. 2, page 33.) In order to make the classroom as large as possible, corridors were almost eliminated, and the circulation round the school is planned through a garden courtyard. (Plates, 2 and 7.) This courtyard is given typical treatment as a place where children can meet and play in small groups, or read quietly, or watch pond life; or where a teacher can bring children to work, or to act some historical scene. The layout is deliberately intricate, with complicated shapes, different textures, colours and surfaces, trees and plants, changing levels, water, seats, a summer house, a shady verandah with wide shallow steps, a low parapet to sit on or climb over, and views into or through the school building. It is a brilliant miniature of the whole Hertfordshire approach. Another Ministry School shows how a similar richness can be achieved inside a building. Finmere Primary School in Oxfordshire, designed by the Ministry Group in 1959, is for 50 village children of varied ability, aged 8—11. Architecturally it might be considered the return to the primitive shed—it is just a low-roofed square. (Plate 5, Fig. 1.) Inside there are no set classrooms, just as there are no set classes. The children work in fluid groups, different for different work and individual needs, but mixing older and younger. The children get on by themselves without constant supervision, allowing the teachers to concentrate in turn on a particular group. The plan is therefore a series of small working areas, all with some privacy but all part of the whole—a covered outdoor verandah, a kitchen, and a sitting room for the younger children with rocking chair, window seat and fire; a bedroom alcove, three studies with tables and chairs, display panels and 7 bookshelves, a library comer, and two workshops. Lavatories are incorporated in a civilised way in the corner of each classroom instead of as a battery at the end of the yard. In the centre of the school is a central space for dance, drama and music, and by folding back the movable partitions the whole school can become a single space. Watching a group of children reading in an alcove (Plate 4) it is incredible to think that this school, providing a civilised—one is tempted to say adult— setting for education, costs no more than its equivalent in the old institutional formal manner. Of course neither of these two schools are perfect; for it is the essence of the Hertfordshire method that their faults should be sought out, in order to be corrected. The storage space provided is better arranged at Finmere than at Amersham, for example. In both schools the exterior, partly due to the use of an anaemic yellow brick, carries its plainness too far. This is not because the architects did not care about appearances. At Amersham they made a deliberate attempt to recapture for cheap traditional building some of the elegance of the pre-fabricated school—by the provision of splayed reveals from floor to ceiling, the extension of door and window frames to the ceiling, the use of door linings in thick walls, suspended ceilings, and the omission of framed opening lights above window transomes. The aesthetic care taken with the new fittings is obvious, and internally Finmere is an intricate spatial masterpiece of a very exciting kind. It is difficult to believe that without any internal sacrifice the outside could not have been made more convincing. Certainly the pre-fabricated CLASP schools are much smarter. These failings are nevertheless minor when compared with the achievement. The two schools convey a wonderful sense of freedom, a delightful setting in which education can thrive. Architecture alone cannot make education, and not all the teachers use the building fully; but none find their work stunted by their surroundings. Amersham and Finmere have given the best that modern architecture can give to society, an environment that is both an inspiration and a means to a fuller life. 2. The Housing Crisis TN the last few months there has been a sudden realisation that what has been achieved in schools could be applied to housing. Certainly the challenge in both fields is similar. We have a housing crisis, and all the prospects of a growing crisis. It is a crisis aggravated by planning failures; by the drift to the south in search of work and to the suburbs in search of quiet and fresh air. There is in fact a surplus of dwellings over households in every part of the country except London and the south-east, where there are 220,000 more households than dwellings. Homeless families and caravan-dwellers are thus one end of the problem. Decaying older housing is the other. We still have over 500,000 condemned slums, and at the present rate of clearance in the worst northern towns, such as Liverpool, they will be the homes for another two or three generations of children. Jn addition to this, there are over 3,000,000 houses built before 1880, most of which are badly laid out in cramped streets, without bathrooms and often without inside lavatories, and even if improved cannot for long provide an acceptable housing standard. Conversion however worth while in the short run, will at best delay the need for replacement. Finally, we are about to face a problem of even greater dimensions; with the trebling of traffic in the next 20 years, ground and first storey dwellings fronting on to trunk roads will become uninhabitable. We cannot be content with housing in which sound sleep is impossible and the atmosphere is permanently polluted by carbon monoxide fumes. The building industry is at present producing about 250,000 houses a year. Less than a fifth of the population can afford to buy or pay an economic rent for a new house,1 so that private house-building is concentrated on satisfying the growing needs of the affluent—the proportion of young adults demanding separate dwellings, or city men buying a second house in the country, will go on rising. At present, to prevent housing standards falling (i.e. to keep the number of unfit houses over 100 years old steady), we need an extra 100,000 houses a year. To tackle the problems created by road traffic and population drift, we shall need far more. The Minister of Housing has recognised that it cannot be done by traditional building methods.- The shortage of craftsmen will remain while factory work offers a stabler employment. The industry is dominated by small, disorganised firms and craft unions. Two-thirds of firms employ less than five men, under a quarter of the labour force is in the bigger firms with over 500 men although new building (rather than maintenance) occupies two-thirds of the building workers. Building is seasonal, and affected by wet weather, making rational programmes and secure employment difficult, consequently the big firms often suffer from recurrent disputes and strikes. The housing situation is, therefore, comparable with the crises which produced the architectural revolution in schools. How far have the Ministry and local authorities responded in the same way? Hitherto the Ministry has played a much less stimulating role. It has criticised designs, but without cost limits, and without a technique of cost analysis. The architects who criticised the designs for the Ministry had no building practice, and there is no inspectorate to report results, as there is in the Ministry of Education. The first major experiment in pre-fabrication was carried out by Barking Borough Council only in 1961. The most important work in co-operating with contractors at the design stage has been the L.C.C.’s Picton Street scheme. Two groups of local authorities now are forming consortia, one in Yorkshire and the other in the Midlands. Various experiments have been made in the planning of housing groups or blocks, notably by the L.C.C., Coventry and Cumbernauld New Town. But all these efforts have been haphazard. There have been no Building Bulletins issued by the Ministry, and building programmes have been fixed from year to year, subject to frequent cuts as the national economy fluctuates. The result has been rising costs, in spite of reduced minimum standards. 1A. S. Needman, National Economic Review, November, 1961. 2 Sir Keith Joseph, at the Conservative Conference, 1962. 9 This policy has now been reversed in principle. A Ministry subcommittee (Parker-Morris) has made it clear that we are building housing of an unwisely low standard; with badly fitted and ventilated kitchens, inflexible plans, primitive refuse disposal, noise, bad heating, and altogether cramped; and in estates which fail to separate pedestrians and cars, or provide enough play space for children or room for car parking. A Ministry development group under Cleeve Barr and Oliver Cox (both of Hertfordshire origin), has been set up. It has built a group of old people’s flatlets at Stevenage, in an adapted CLASP system, planned on a joint study by architects, sociologists and housing managers. It has also designed forty houses in West Ham which embody the main Parker-Morris recommendations, and very recently completed four houses in Sheffield at the same price but in half the time taken to build a normal house. They are built in a new steel and timber light pre-fabricated system known as 5M. Building Bulletins are to be issued describing these projects, and it is hoped to evolve a method of cost analysis. The Housing Future The danger is that the development group will not be able to tackle the problem at a sufficiently fundamental level. The cost carrot is less appetising. Standards of construction and consequently prices are much lower in housing than in school building, and there is thus less immediate prospect of building development reducing costs. We have got to face spending more money on housing to achieve the necessary increased quantity and higher quality. Certainly research should bring a much more economic use of housing land. A good illustration of the possibilities here is the L.C.C. scheme for the Deptford river front, on which work has just started. It uses a scissors plan worked out by a development team under David Gregory-Jones. Hitherto there has frequently been a space wasted on awkwardly shaped constricted urban sites because tall flats could only be aligned north-south; otherwise either one half of the flats would have all rooms facing north, or else access would have to be by an outside balcony along the north side—unpleasant, expensive, noisy, and destroying privacy. The new plan (Plate 5) consists of maisonettes on three half levels, with bedrooms all on one side and living rooms all on the other, alternately stepped up or down in opposite directions so that they interlock over a central corrider which is threaded through them. Thus all the facades are used as window and access balconies are avoided, the flats can be aligned in any direction and the most important rooms can always be given the best light. The method can be applied to lower terraces of flats with equally important results; the stepped section in a six-storey terrace would allow protected room terraces on top and walled gardens below, so that in very high density developments—up to 140 per acre—a large degree of communal open space can be combined with a private roof terrace or garden for a quarter of the households, the terraces perhaps enclosing a public garden and children’s playground safe from road traffic. The virtue of the scissors plan is not that it cuts costs, but that it raises the quality of housing. In the same way, the introduction of 10 pre-fabrication and long-term programmes negotiated with manufacturers and builders will increase speed, but it cannot be expected to lower the present rock-bottom cost of cheap houses. Pre-fabrication in Sweden and Russia has been used extensively, and has proved both quick and cheap, but this is because lower standards of housing have been accepted. The systems used have been inflexible, pre-fabricating large-scale units—the kind of system which was rejected by the Hertfordshire architects. There is a danger that impatience will lead to some crude pre-fabrication of this kind in England; already the L.C.C. have designed an estate of factory-made flats with inflexible room sizes at Woolwich. We shall have to evolve a better system than this. If we fail, pre-fabrication, which in the Hertfordshire school was a great step forward in civilised values, will become a frightening menace. Jt could mean the mass production of barracks for the workers as degrading as the Victorian Peabody tenements; and to judge by a scheme now rising in Camden Town, built by the Reema Construction Company for St. Pancras Borough Council, the danger is a real one. There is no doubt that these crude pebbledash boxes, relieved of complete monotony only by water stains, primitive in their refuse disposal, ineffective in sound insulation, bleak beyond words, are far far worse than the neo-Georgian tenements which the same authority is building a short distance away. A real advance will only come when we begin to apply intensive social observation to house design. The most elementary details are often wrong on the best new estates—the refuse disposal bins are too small, the kitchen equipment does not fit so that there is no dining space left, the children’s play-spaces are designed as abstract sculptures which are useless for play. Everything is either ordered in bulk from a catalogue or designed by an architect who has no means of discovering its functional success. It is not even possible to know when designing a standard house plan how many people will live in it; the house is just a shell to hand over to the housing manager. It may be the house of a family including three adolescents, or a young couple with one child, or two unmarried people, or a middle-aged couple with a newly-married daughter—one living room and two bedrooms would still suffice. Some would want to use their bedroom as a private sitting-room or study, others not. The plan would not differ. And the most advanced ‘ modern ’ house plan, the open plan, ignoring noise and the need for privacy, is functionally worse than the traditional shell. Its attraction is chiefly aesthetic. It may be argued that to design a house from inside out like the Amersham school would be dictatorial or impracticable, partly because people want to choose their own furniture and find their own use for each room, and partly because the shape of the family is constantly changing. The first problem really springs from the second. If we could evolve a completely new type of housing group, a building structure within which there was room for a family to add and alter rooms as it grew, and to discard them as it contracted, there could be no more objection to a range of fitted bed-sitters, single bedrooms and double bedrooms than there is to a fitted bathroom or kitchen; and there is no doubt that a communal living room designed with an understanding of the variety of its uses could provide a tremendous advance in freedom 11 from the present plain box. But it will need long and widespread social research (not confined to working-class households), and many building experiments. The creation of a really functional internal and external environment may result in something closer to a living organism than a traditional building, a kind of breathing human honeycomb, in which the constant facade is forgotten. This is speculation. What is clear is that the future of housing depends on the way in which we treat social science. It is worth describing as a warning the way in which, because social observation has not been attempted, social theories can be misused. No English architect has more impressive command of architectural style than Denys Lasdun. His work includes Peter Robinson’s in the Strand, the new luxury flats overlooking Green Park, and a borough council housing scheme in Bethnal Green. The Bethnal Green scheme has been much applauded for its novel cluster-block plan, a tall block with short wings projecting from a hollow centre. Lasdun has justified the design on the grounds that it creates a sense of community. He had no evidence that it would do so, and a recent survey by Peter Willmott and Edmund Cooney of the Institute of Community Studies suggests that this type of plan makes its inhabitants feel exceptionallyisolated. It is difficult for a visitor, seeing the communal drying spaces perched high into the wind with slatted wooden sides and masses of exposed piping, or standing in the well of the entrance, the coarse bare concrete columns pencilled with obscenities, looking up at the fantastic criss-cross pattern of galleries above, recalling perhaps a Piranesi engraving of a prison, not to feel that the architect’s real intention (and achievement) was to combine in one building the Eesthetic effects of an East End backyard and a Neapolitan tenement. Another housing scheme, started last year in Preston, was designed by James Stirling and James Gowan with an explicit intention ‘ to maintain the vital spirit (‘ Saturday Night and Sunday Morning ’) of the alley, yard and street houses that the new development is replacing . . . a neighbourliness and a communal vitality which are quite absent in the standard solution—the suburban dilution of the garden city’. To this not unworthy social end they have not only recreated the local Victorian atmosphere by an architectural style derived from cotton mills, acid red Accrington engineering brick contrasted with bands of blue brick and white concrete, detailed with traditional briek-on-edge wall coping and bullnosed window sills, but they have planned most of the flats so that the entrance is through a service yard with coal-house and dustbins next to the front door. 3. Public Architecture rJnHE Preston scheme suggests clearly enough that even if architectural policies at the Ministry of Housing are improving, there is a tough battle ahead. The same is true of public building as a whole. Undoubtedly the recent amalgamation of departments in the Ministry of Public Building and Works marks an advance in policy, but a few measures to speed up industrialised building will by no means change the government into an ideal architectural patron. 12 The full Hertfordshire approach has immense possibilities. They will not be realised without a positive use of state influence in many directions. In universities as well as in schools, in hospitals, in railways and motorways, in the armed services, in the nationalised industries and the civil service, there exists a tremendous field of public architecture either directly commissioned or largely financed by the government. The kind of intense questioning which was needed to produce Amersham and Finmere schools could be used as an agent of progress in itself, sorting out real function from obsolete tradition. But it will not be enough to establish a few building research groups and hope that the universities and the Building Research Station will fill in the gaps in our knowledge. Although the universities and the Building Research Station have done excellent work, there is no denying that its scope and quantity is insufficient. What is needed is a large number of research teams which can attack fundamental problems, ask fundamental questions, test their results by building projects, and finally see their findings applied in general practice. Only the government could do this effectively. The extent to which research has been neglected is shown most dramatically in the case of hospitals. The Ministry of Health do have a small Research Development Group, but the building of their first project (an out-patients department at Walton Hospital, Liverpool) has only just started. A Hospital Engineering Research Unit was set up at the University of Glasgow in 1960 to investigate the difficulties in planning engineering services (water, electricity, gas, heating, ventilation, etc.) for new hospitals, and although it had not completed its work an interim report was issued in August, 1962, because of the ‘ dire necessity for information.’ It is a frightening indication of the suffering which traditional building can cause, that this interim report is concerned with basic problems such as the ventilation of operating theatres. As far as hospital wards are concerned there is apparently ‘ virtually no information on the minimum standard of ventilation required. . . . There is no bacteriological or clinical standard for the ventilation rate nor is there any information of importance on the relation of crossinfection to the pattern of air flow between rooms in the unit.’ In a situation of this kind it is clear that much more extensive building research is essential—indeed very literally a matter of life and death. The real reason why research has so far been inadequate is that it challenges traditional attitudes. Tf effective it will blow away the cobwebs of amateur administrative hierarchy which collect in all established institutions; but it is equally likely to be smothered by the cobwebs and reduced to marginal questions. If it has been so successful in the field of primary education, it is because of the progressive attitude of the Ministry and of a growing number of primary teachers to educational method. In secondary education, where official policy is more traditional, the Hertfordshire approach has only been partly exploited. In new building for the universities, where traditional local methods of building are almost everywhere taken for granted, it has been almost entirely ignored. The only exception is Johnson-Marshall’s plan for York University. A more typical approach is found in the new buildings for the University of Sussex. The design was inspired by the 13 Colosseum. The architect for the new Churchill College in Cambridge, Richard Sheppard, has been candid enough about his approach. ‘You cannot define how a college works. Tt is not a logical entity. If anything, it is illogical and its design may even be eccentric.’1 This is not a very cogent argument for not investigating the function of an educational body. If its function can be more precisely defined the money provided for its buildings can be better spent; if the function turns out to be inherently irrational, public money should not be squandered in its support. Administrative cobwebs are as common in Whitehall as anywhere. This is why it is difficult to greet with unqualified optimism the recent change of government policy towards the building industry. The new Ministry of Public Building and Works absorbs the works departments of the War Office and Air Ministry as well as the old Ministry of Works. The prelude to this amalgamation was a series of exposures of waste. The government’s road-building programme had been tarnished by loud rumours of unnecessary extravagance in the clumsy bridges on the Ml, the posthumous neo-Georgian bridge by Sir Edwin Lutyens lor the Staines by-pass, and the technical backwardness of the Chiswick flyover. The Air Ministry, whose works department with an annual expenditure of £30,000,000 had no architectural post above draughtsman level, had refused to accept the proposals for reform made by a committee of investigation. In contrast to this Sir Donald Gibson at the War Office, to which he was appointed in 1958, had been attempting to apply pre-fabricated methods. He had produced a new standard barrack design which is a characteristic result of functional research. (Instead of mass dormitories, long corridors and little-used large communal rooms, there are bed-sitting rooms each for four soldiers, equipped with wash basins and drying cupboard; without any increase in cost the life of the ordinary soldier has been notably enhanced.) The Post Office, also absorbed, had another active research group. In November, 1962, Gibson was appointed Director General of Research and Development at the amalgamated Ministry. His job is to co-ordinate and extend all the research and development work throughout the government service, and to encourage the adoption of industrial production and building programmes as widely as possible. The revision of building codes and by-laws, of contract procedure, of architectural education, and of information services are all under review. But so far it is not clear how far these laudable ends are to be accompanied by more funds for research, what opportunities the new Ministry will have for its own building projects, what spheres of building these will cover, and whether the emphasis will be on con-structural or functional research. Nor is it clear whether the new building standards will simply relax the numerous unnecessary regulations and local by-laws which make it difficult for private builders to use pre-fabrication, or whether new standards and a series of local building centres are to be used to coerce the building industry as a whole to better methods and higher quality. The possibilities are so far-reaching that it is difficult to imagine their full exploitation by a 1 Observer, 2nd September, 1962. 14 Conservative government. Its lack of interest in more than superficial reform, its dislike of public spending and the extension of state activity, are likely to be fatal handicaps. Whatever progress the new Director makes under the present government, immense possibilities will be open to a Labour government. It is not only the future of specialised building—hospitals and schools, railway stations and barracks—which is at stake. It is a question of the degree to which architecture is to make its potential contribution to the improvement of the day-to-day environment of the people as a whole. It is a question of the quality of factories, offices and housing. Through the nationalised industries and the civil service the state is one of the largest employers in the country. It should lead research and development in factory and office design. It could be building model prototypes. There is no doubt that they are needed. So primitive is the present state of knowledge, that a report recently published by Peter Manning of the University of Liverpool department of building science showed that the officially recommended minimum daylight provision for factories was only half what was needed in practice. Work in modern factories was quite unnecessarily being carried out by electric light throughout the day, simply because architects had been misinformed. The same kind of mistakes are made in office design, and the Liverpool building science department is also carrying out pioneering work in this field. A research group, consisting of a physicist, a geographer, an architect and a psychologist, is undertaking a study of the new Co-operative Insurance Society office in Manchester, based partly on observation and partly on a series of surveys of opinion among the office workers, to discover the effects of environmental factors such as heating, lighting, colour and floor layouts. The first survey, producing 80,000 answers for analysis, has already been made. Functional research of this character can make office work both pleasanter and more efficient; in the words of Brian Wells, the psychologist of the office group, ‘ working in bad conditions, whether the individual is aware of them or not, may result in accumulated fatigue and irritation. The effect on the individual may be both poorer work and social maladjustment. There should be no need for this to happen if psychologists and architects tackle the problem of design together.’1 The Edwardian bulks so recently rising in Whitehall indicate the change of attitude which will be needed before government offices live up to this possibility. 4. A Political Choice ETORMALIST schools, neo-slum housing, Edwardian offices are not rare freaks. They are typical products of the present state of architecture. One reason for this is that architects in private practice have not the time for their own research. Another is the commercial pressures on them, the demand that speculative housing should be cheap, that office buildings should contain as much lettable space as can be 1The Guardian, 23rd October, 1962. 15 squeezed on the site. But these buildings are also encouraged by architectural tradition. A lot of architects dislike, or at best ignore, the Hertfordshire approach. They see it as a limitation to their creative freedom. It is not that the prefabricated building system evades aesthetic consideration. A great deal more care is taken with the proportions of the structural system and far more intense questioning and refinement goes into the shape of each individual part than is possible in a normal building. In their detailing present Hertfordshire schools are marvellously clean and sophisticated. The informality of planning gives tremendous opportunities for imaginative landscaping and for shaping the school to fit the site. For an architect who is prepared to use a satisfactory range of standard elements to produce an environment both internally and in the landscape which is as beautiful as it is useful, rather as an 18th century builder of a modest house used standard elements in a convenient but pleasant way, the Hertfordshire approach is ideal. For those, inspired by Michelangelo, by Corbusier, or by the Victorian Gothic revivalists, who wish to see each building the fresh work of an inspired artist, who will sacrifice convenience for a facade, Hertfordshire is anathema. But is there a place for such architects in a social democracy? Is there any place in public architecture—schools, housing, town planning —for those who would sacrifice a child’s happiness at school for the pleasure of formal design? THE WHOLE ENVIRONMENT SHOULD BE THE PRIMARY CONSIDERATION. Architecture as a pure art, isolated like sculpture, only flourishes in tyrannies like the Renaissance principalities or their modern equivalents. It Would be absurd for a Labour government to tolerate it in public building programmes. It is no less absurd that many Labour councils still patronise it. Architectural policy is in fact a political choice, and a choice which should be clear to the Labour party. If the public does not demand from architects the full advantages which the Hertfordshire approach has shown possible, a great opportunity will be lost. It is a frightening fact that already, because public acclaim for the CLASP schools has concentrated on their prefabricated structure rather than their functional planning, the most recent Nottinghamshire secondary schools show a return to the monumental formalistic approach. West Bridgeford Grammar School may look neater than the earlier careful informality of Tuxford Secondary Modern, but the neatness is achieved at the cost of unnecessary corridors and small unsatisfactorily lit classrooms. The clear lesson, which of course produced the Hertfordshire approach, is that prefabrication alone is not enough. Only a really enlightened government policy will be able to guide architectural development in the right direction. There are two basic needs: more knowledge, and stronger influence where knowledge exists. In hospitals and housing, offices and factories, railway stations and barracks, no less than in schools and universities, the same double opportunity is open; on the one hand to develop factory-made building systems designed with more attention to essential problems (because in each single traditional building each decision has to be made again), produced more economically on long-term contracts and assembled 16 By courtesy of “ Architectural Review Plate 1. Hunstanton Secondary Modern School. By courtesy of “ Architectural Press.” Plate 2. Amersham Junior School. ¦H M4 H i~i