This bit of news in the AJ sums up something. I’m not quite sure what, but it isn’t good…
“The RIBA Board of Architectural Education has published the FINAL EXAMINATION PROBLEMS IN DESIGN for 1948. The subjects are: a golf clubhouse; a lecture hall; auction rooms for a firm of fine art dealers; an open-air theatre; a housing scheme.”
To be fair, many of the AJ‘s January issues celebrated the rather more forward-looking approach of the Architectural Association, and included a transcript of Le Corbusier’s speech to them in December 1947 expounding on the Modulor and his Unité, which ensured that:
“… architects can give modern society the solution for which it is waiting – happiness in the home and social strength in its development, permitting the phenomena of participation which are the very condition of joy, and enabling us to expel the egoism which destroys individuals and peoples …”
and other equally ambitious promises, dashing off some explanatory sketches reproduced below:
More information on his visits is given here. I guess it must have been rather more exciting to the ears of young architects than the prospect of a lifetime of golf clubhouses, even if the immediate results of his visits in this country are rapidly being knocked down ….
