Letters.

CLASHING CERTIFICATES

SIR: The publication of two sets of architectural awards in one month was perhaps a coincidence, but one is struck by the contrast between the Stirling Prize (shown in the RIBA Journal) and your ar+d results. The winning schemes alone are astonishingly different: one, a glossy, expensive space craft landed in the middle of London to cater for cricket, an increasingly esoteric and unloved sport (at least in its homeland), the other a small and humble orphanage halfway up the Himalayas.

Comparisons may be odious, but they are certainly telling. The London building has, we are told, learned from the construction methods of the transport industries. The Nepal one draws on traditional techniques and materials, and the enthusiasm of the local community. On the one hand, it is difficult to see quite what the transfer of technology from transport will do for architecture -- particularly when the ovoid upper part of the structure is made almost manually by a yacht manufacturer and attached to in-situ concrete legs (where are these normally used in the transport industries?) with junctions that are rather less than elegant.

On the other hand, the lessons of Nepal are clear and applicable to a wide range of buildings, not only in the Third World.

Yours etc

JANET HAYWARD

Amsterdam, the Netherlands

PC COMPATIBILITY

SIR: Your launch of the ar+d Awards undoubtedly does service to younger and relatively unknown architects around the world (though we had seen some before!). A provoking banquet was served up, but could the main dish, the Norwegian-Nepalese Orphanage, have been a little too overflavoured with the sauce of Political Correctness?

We look forward to further feasts, with slightly less conventional flavours.

Yours etc

ENRICO JAMES

New York, USA

EDITORS BACKSTAGE PLEASE

SIR: A strange puzzle in AR October: a plea in your letters column (p34) to make buildings more human by showing people, or at least ways they might live sensibly -- by having curtains at night. You present buildings as stage sets. But in a page or two, you were delighted to flaunt yourself, and your jury members in the act of deciding on the winners of your Award. Please try to get the balance right. People in buildings, yes -- editors, writers and the rest in the background. Otherwise, you will end up like one of those trade American magazines, in which portraits of the protagonists seem as important as the buildings they try to show.

Yours etc

HERMAN BENZ

Cologne, Germany

CRACK AWAY

SIR: I disagree strongly with Simon Murray, who takes you to task for being superficial in your Outrage criticisms (AR November p34). Good buildings deserve thorough examination of all their parts, which you tend to do in your longer articles. But some are just so bad mannered, pretentious or coarse that they deserve thorough chastizing, no matter how well their innards work. Keep the cane swishing.

Yours etc

PHIL SWAINE

Sydney, Australia.

MONSTROUS MONUMENTS

SIR: Your leading article on architecture and housing (AR November) hits the chisel with force, You draw attention to how housing solutions used to be achievable which were both fine urban statements and liked by their inhabitants. This congruity of aim was because architects, developers and owner/tenants had things in common: wealth and the shared urban culture which flowed therefrom in days before the internal combustion engine. You don't often hear that housing of the poor in places like Bath or Boston made exemplary city patterns.

During the twentieth century, there has been a continual dichotomy between architects desire to make formal statements and provision for decent living conditions. A few have managed, in Germany during the '20s, in Sweden in the '40s, in Britain in the '50s. Even recently, one thinks of the work of people like Erskine and Behnisch, and some of the schemes that you showed in the issue. But the illustrations to your leader indicate that (at least in the Netherlands, and probably elsewhere) young housing architects have started to worship the monumental again with object tower blocks. What dreadful cost to urbanity and decency. Surely, in modern societies, there must be a vast area of design to be explored between such monstrosities of a would-be avant guard (outdated ideal surely) and the low grade productions of the developers which swarm across the landscapes of all First World countries.

Yours etc

HENRI LABONNE

Brussels