THE ARCHITECTURE CLUB.
[COMMUNICATED.]
UNDER the presidency of Mr. Thomas Hardy (himself an ex-architect) and the chairmanship of Mr. J. C. Squire, " the Architecture Club " came into official being at a birthday dinner on the evening of July 20th. Seeing that the proceedings at this celebration were intended to be entirely informal and private, the promin- ence given to the affair in the daily press is significant, and would seem to show a public interest that is highly encouraging and a general and creditable curiosity as to what precisely the Club is " after." Though no two members would be likely to agree in their definition of the exact aims of our new Association—largely on account of its newness and its very wide terms of reference—there can be no objection to one member giving some account of the general ideas and aspirations as he himself conceives them. The prime object of the Club is, briefly, to increase the number of architecturally seemly buildings erected through- out the world--especially in that part which is English- speaking and most especially within the British Isles—and, by all legitimate mean;, to frustrate the perpetration of architectural crimes and ineptitudes. To this end the Club has recruited itself, very carefully, within a strictly limited membership, from amongst those architects whom there seems the best reason for terming " good," from those journalists and writers who, besides being eminent in their own profession, have given proof of an understanding interest in that of architecture, and from the ranks of those men of light and leading, the dilettante and the connoisseurs, who, in the Augustan age, would have been called "the patron class."
No one " in the •know ' would now assert that there is any lack- of good architects, though no one of any obser- vation could possibly deny that, despite this, for every decent building put up in England there is a disfiguring crop of calamitous erections to be numbered by the hundred. Clearly there is something wrong about this illogical state of things, and its setting right is one of the chief items on the Architecture Club's agenda. The Club aims at mending matters by acting as timition officer and middleman between enlightened producers and the often perplexed and uninstructed consumers, between the good architects and the general building public. If a man wants a portrait painted and is prepared to pay the requisite price he will quite probably employ one of the score of artists who have won public favour through the excellence of their painting, whose names will be more or less familiar to him through appreciations in the Press and whose works are known to h. through public exhibitions and through reproductions in the illustrated journals. There will be no lack of directing posts or, indeed, of a kind of public opinion—Inmost of social -pressure—urging him towards one of a certain set of studios that have received the blessings of the acknowledged art critics and the patronage of the admittedly fastidious.
No such beneficent pressure exists in the case of archi- tecture—there has been (with one recent and notable exception) no informed criticism of architecture in the lay Press, no journalistic " featuring " of new buildings, however important or meritorious, no mention of architects, no representative architectural exhibitions of a sort that could possibly excite public interest. It is such deficiencies, amongst others, that the Club is pledged to remedy. Good architecture is as -cheap as bad—actually, of course, infi- nitely cheaper—and most 'of the atrocities perpetrated are committed in ignorance rather than from any honest zest for ugliness. •Architects' • charges, like those of solicitors, are standardized and coded, and to employ an incompetent when a master of the art can be secured for the same fee would seem to indicate a short-sighted charity or else such ignorance of the aesthetic and structural proprieties as is scarcely less than barbarous. It is more probable, however, that people employ bad architects because they do not know who are the good ones, and the writing members of the Club are to see to it that this strange conspiracy of silence regarding the designers of our buildings shall come to an end and that honour shall be given where honour is due.
The writer and amateur members care only that good work shall increase and bad diminish, and have very logically decided that the education of public taste and the stimulation of public interest .in architecture, together with the " backing " of competent architects, are the best means for the attainment of their ends. The Club is only in its infancy and has so far done little but dine and talk, yet its existence has already had an effect on the less Philistine daily Press through the medium of its writer members—witness the accounts of the opening of the New County Hall where, contrary to precedent, the name of the architect was allowed to appear—and its influence must surely grow. One can see it gradually becoming an active power for good .in all matters of building and ,sculpture, of decoration and town planning, a body whose approval or censure will be quoted as authoritative, if not as final, whose judgments will receive such respect as those delivered by the Lords of Appeal. An Olympian academy of specialists may, nay must, become. an albatross _around the neck of any art, gradually strangling its life out and ultimately reducing it to a dry skeleton of no interest or use to the ordinary healthy layman. By its rules the Architecture Club must consist of architects, writers, and " others ".in equal proportions— the number of each estate being at present limited -to fifty--and it is through its " non-professional constitution that we may look for a liberal, vigorous and progressive influence and a policy in touch, not only with current architectural phases and fashions, but with the vital needa and aspirations of everyday life, whether religious, com- mercial, domestic or civic. When a good architectural deed is done in a naughty world it should be made to shine forth in a hundred newspaper paragraphs, when sense and sensibility are flouted by the erection of a building that is either stupid or vulgar its author and owner should be made aware of their blunder—they should be made to blush as for any other lapse from good taste or good sense. They should, moreover, be made to feel that such obtuse disregard for the amenities of a civilized community is not even good business, and that in the long run good architecture undoubtedly " pays." The Americans have long realized what has hitherto been hidden from most of our commercial interests.
The voice of the Architecture Club will be loud in protest from a hundred sources against what seems mean or unworthy in building, it may make suggestions and recommendations that will carry increasing weight as— scrupulously living up to its charter—it becomes more and more recognized as the chief arbiter of taste in matters of architecture and tactile civic amenity. Obviously there are numberless directions in which its beneficent inter- ference is pressingly needed—innumerable opportunities for its work of education and propaganda. If the Architecture Club fails of its high endeavours it will not be for lack of objectives, which are as clear and ambitious as were those of Jack the Giant Killer.
The Club is out to kill the modern public apathy with regard to architecture, and if it fails it will only be because it has not sufficient courage, resource and energy to defeat so enormous and well-established a giant as has so un- accountably been allowed to grow up amongst us, to the devastation of the world in general but of our islands in particular. Those good citizens who hate and fear the ravages of the blind and idiot monster should welcome the young champion that was born at last week's dinner. Most of the great ideas that have been translated into action in our country have materialized through the mediumship of " a dinner," to the clash of knife and fork. May the rite of Thursday week presage a long and increasingly useful mission by the newest society for the prevention of violence to our senses and the preservation of civic and rural
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