SINGAPORE & THE FEDERATION OF MALAYA
Even Architects of good repute have been known to cheerfully inflict upon the lay public sparkling essays in draughtsmanship converting domestic houses into Ambassadors' Summer seats and to ascribe tone to a Fried Fish Factory by the presence of luxurious limousines parked at the main entrance.
It is not suggested that unadorned severity should be the sole aim of architectural representation nor an over indulgence in Freudian speculation. Indeed, it is no impossible task to offer a third dimensional aspect to a client without resort to any ruses of falsification of scale, dramatization or the carefully considered background tones which, in reality, rarely combine for the accentuation of good points and the suppression of inferior qualities in a building.
An Architect will gain most credit when the lay public know him as he really is. The product of a long and arduous training cannot be considered as anything else but a realist. The undue emphasis of any part of his Catholicity is ungenerous to him as a whole. No less of an artist than a practical man, no more of a prophet than a planner.
There are undoubtedly many instruments of misleading publicity and propaganda which will eternally condemn the architect to nursing other peoples fractious infants. Accord- ingly there are also many other instruments of good, but, the final judgement always lies with the public,
For one bright essayist there are a hundred misguided disciples, notwithstanding, upon behalf of the enlightened few it is pleasurable to quote Aldous Huxley from his book "Antic Hay":
"Architecture is a more difficult and intellectural art than music thats just a faculty you are born with as you might be born with a snub nose. But the sense of plastic beauty is something that has to be developed and intellectually ripened. Its an affair of the mind, experience and thought have to draw it out. There are infant prodigies in music, but there are no infant prodigies in Architecture.
A man can be an excellent musician and a perfect imbecile. But a good architect must also be a man of sense, a man who knows how to think and to profit by experience. Now, as almost none of the people who pass along the streets of London, or any other city of the world, do know how to think or to profit by experience, it follows that they cannot appreciate architecture. The innate faculty is strong enough in them to make them dislike discord in music; but they haven't the wits to develop that other innate faculty-the sense of plastic beauty-which would enable them to see and disapprove the same Barberism in Architecture."
Both Traditionalist and Modernist architects will find little to criticize in Huxley and at this juncture is may be aprropriate to give him at least one quiet parting cheer.
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