Letters.

HUMAN SCALE IN HOLLAND?

SIR: I have some regard for the work of Bolles Wilson, particularly their library in Munster, but I'm worried by their latest work in Hengelo, the Netherlands (AR April). The pictures you show run rather counter to the critical text. Blundell Jones rightly points to some of the qualities of the planning, particularly the creation of the smaller square, though surely Wilson goes too far when he compares it to St Mark's in Venice. The comparison shows precisely what is wrong with Hengelo.

In St Mark's, all the buildings from the eleventh to the nineteenth century have a degree of common scale, even the Doge's palace and the great cathedral relate to Sansovino's library and the buildings surrounding the piazza, however much bigger and more important the houses of God and the Prince may have been. That scale is given by the human body and its movements through space, as well as by the limitations of masonry spans. At Hengelo, programme and perhaps planning and construction regulations seem to have conspired to prevent any continuity of human scale. The department store is perhaps the worst offender, though the new housing looks solidly forbidding. From glimpses of the buildings in the old square, it seems that there was a continuity of scale going right up to the 1960s, even in the converted and rebuilt parts.

OK, the store is big, and its size should maybe have been emphasized as it has been. But did it have to change scale in detail so radically? The entrance seems to be no more than a strip of bland and unwelcoming metal doors. Its upper parts are essentially shed-like, pierced by meaningless openings, and the roof seems to be an attempt by the company to hook the sky, rather than offer welcome and shelter to visitors. Maybe there was a need to make a statement, but did it have to be so coarse? As Catherine Slessor says in her Comment: public spaces need a 'resolve to keep private initiatives under public control'.

Yours etc

JONATHAN MEYER 

New York 

SHARP CRITICISM

SIR: Extraordinarily strange your taste in Delight is sometimes. The April version looked like nothing more than a sharpened up version of an ancient stone circle (the Celtic ancestors did them better), doused with a thick brew of distilled turbid pond water.

Yours etc

JAMES BRODERICK 

Dublin

DESIGN DEVELOPMENT

SIR: Does Latona really act as contractor and developer of his own designs (Tasmanian visitor center, AR March, p66)? If so, for G's sake get him to rewrite the practice books and persuade him to tell us all how to do it. Or dictate them while he's getting on with his work. Architects might get back their prestige again.

Yours etc

FRED CONSTANT

San Francisco 

MODERN CORRUPTIONS

SIR: Andrew Saint in his review of the Perret book notes mentions Auguste's unfinished essay of homage to 'Mussolini batisseur' (AR April, p96). This is one of the few mentions of the way many famous Modern architects were prepared to lick the boots of dictators and authoritarian regimes in the inter-war periods (and in the occupied countries during the Second World War). For instance, Mies's attempt to come to terms with the Nazis in 1933 is always underplayed, so (for all the efforts of Charles Jeneks) are the roles of Le Corbusier as Mussolini worshipper and pander to the Vichy government. The co-father of the International Style, Philip Johnson being a devotee of the American Fascist movement is not often mentioned in the hagiographies of the old gentleman: now seen as patron saint of New York architecture.

There must be many more examples. Isn't it about time to examine all this clearly, and find out how far heroes of the Modern Movement would have gone to get work. In a sense they were lucky that Hitler, Stalin and later Mussolini -- after some sort of conversion -- all preferred forms of Classicism. Rejected by the authoritarians mostly on grounds of style, they could present themselves after the War as champions of democracy, cruelly punished for maintaining their beliefs. What if (as might once have just been the case) taste had gone the other way and Speer, Troost and the rest had been the ones who did not get the work? Would we all be post neo-Classicists now?

Yours etc

ADA HAVNAR

London SE1