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Volume 2 Number 4
Editor: E. C. Simpson Art Editor: E. Mervyn Taylor
Two-Monthly Journal of the Architectural Centre Inc.
G.P.O Box 1628, Wellington, C.l December 1949–January 1950
It is so nice and comfortable to fasten on to a slogan — Fitness for Purpose. It creates the feeling that out of a welter of confusion we grasp the security of a firm foothold. The whole purpose of a slogan is to lull us from anxiety to quietude. From the exuberance of the last century when common honesty and practical efficiency were buried beneath a welter of meretricious ornament, was born the slogan “Fitness for Purpose” in England and the “Functional Movement” on the Continent. By noticing that objects which gave least offence and often a thrill of pleasure were those that laid no claim to artistic design, such as aeroplanes, motor cars and modern machinery, and that the better they worked the better they looked, the theory was propounded that true design should be based on function alone and unadorned.
The slogan sounds self-evident. It was intended to suggest that if you made a teapot you should see that it pours properly. It was an anguished protest against the state of wilful whimsey into which design had fallen, and was a plea that objects should do their practical jobs in a practical manner.
It has been misinterpreted to mean that good design is a strip-tease act with the disappointing result that when the clothing is cast aside nothing remains worth looking at.
What is a practical and commonsense principle on which to make a tooth brush, a screwdriver or a tin-opener, is insufficient as the sole working principle on which to design a chair, a house or a plate. To take the knobs off and produce an effect of static streamline is not the sole occupation of the designer.
With all those objects, from a tiara to a teapot, while asking that they shall do their job efficiently, we look also for vital and human character in design, in fact for the quality of “delight.” A chair is expected to be firm, strong and comfortable to sit on. That is part of its function. The rest of its function is to be friendly to its owner and give pleasure. That part of its function, the most important, cannot be defined except in terms of the designer's ingenuity and the owner's individuality.
If we pin our faith to fitness for purpose as the sole guiding principle of design, the “purpose” may prove as stable as smoke.
Letters to the Editor and contributions should be addressed to The Editor, Design Review, P.O. Box 1628, Wellington, C.l., accompanied by a stamped addressed envelope. If written under a pen-name, the writer must enclose his name and address.
The Editor is always glad to consider any contributions. Where possible, they should be accompanied by photographs of the illustrations suggested. Original works of art should not be sent unless requested.
For the purposes of reproduction, glossy photographs are preferable, and contributors are reminded that the appearance of good objects can be easily ruined by bad photography.
A Subscription is the best way to make sure of your copy of Design Review. The subscription is five shillings for six numbers and should be sent to Design Review, P.O. Box 1628, Wellington, C.l.
Only odd copies left of Volume I, but copies of numbers 1, 2 and 3 are still available for new subscribers wishing to start at the beginning of Volume II.
Advertisers are reminded that the readers of Design Review are people interested in well made and well designed products of all kinds. Rates for display advertising may be obtained on application to the Advertising Manager, Design Review, P.O. Box 1628, Wellington, C.l.
was opened for inspection on October 15. The design and building of this house carried out as a School project by the Architectural Centre with the support of local merchants, has aroused widespread public interest.
The house sits cleanly on the steeply sloping site. Glazing in the exposed outer walls is fixed and hinged louvres provide ventilation. External sheathing is of 10in × 1in treated insignis pine board and batten fixed vertically.
Most interesting feature of the plan is the patio. Spacious, sheltered, and private, with direct and easy access from all parts of the house, it provides a valuable extension of the family's living area.
On warm evenings the patio will provide a pleasant and attractive area for the entertainment of friends.
In the living room the built-in fitting includes writing desk, wood and coal cupboard (accessible from outside), radiogram, and divan. The free-standing steel-jacketed flue is designed to make use of heat which is normally lost. The desk lamp is hung on a flexible coupling with spun aluminium shade.
Dining table and chairs are of tawa with clear cellulose finish. Sponge rubber is used to upholster the chairs. Holes in the back and seat of chairs are for lightness and to allow the rubber to breathe. The wall behind is panelled in natural finish kahikatea.
Comfort with lightness is embodied in the easy chairs. The design is straightforward and sponge rubber and plywood are used to advantage.
Bunks give a nautical flavour to the children's rooms and save valuable space. The sides of the bunks hinge down for easy bed-making. A soft wall-board panel gives space for children's drawings.
“The Demonstration House,” 24 pp. illustrated. Articles on the purpose, history, design, interior and construction. The Architectural Centre, P.O. Box 1628, Wellington C.l. Price: One Shilling post free.
In the main bedroom the top of the dressing-table hinges down over a tray for cosmetics, etc., when the mirror on the underside is not in use. The lamp is adjustable.
The playroom-utility room is readily adaptable to many family uses. Dressed insignis pine is used on the walls and a clear finish accentuates the beauties of the grain. The floor is attractively laid with coloured asphalt tiles and an Esse space heater gives heat by convection and radiation.
Breakfast and light meals may be taken in the kitchen at the linotopped table over which shelves for china are suspended. A hatch opens to the living room where more formal meals are served. Cupboard doors and drawer fronts are natural wood finish.
5 This well-proportioned cottage with a standard plan of a central passage with rooms on either side was built about 1870. There is a lingering trace of Regency in form and in detail. The windows are double hung with a single glazing bar. Note the strong repeating pattern of the fascia to the eaves of the verandah roof, this shortly to degenerate into excessive fret cut patterns which was a characteristic of practically all houses built between 1880 and 1910. The verandah roof in this photograph is of galvanised iron.
6 The Georgian tradition can be traced here. In England this style had long since been replaced by the Gothic revival with its picturesque and romantic forms. The plan is the standard plan of the times, but the elevations and details are of interest. Careful attention was given to the placing of the windows and door between pilasters which support a frieze and cornice. Note the panelling between the foundation and window sills. There is no place for a verandah or porch over the front door in the South Pacific Georgian-style house. Because of the necessity of a good pitch to the roof when covered with shingles, it was a problem to roof the square plan of such a house as this. The solution shown here, which became common, was to truncate the roof, thus forming a central gutter or a flat, which has no doubt been a source of worry throughout the life of the house. This type of construction would be justified by the designer of this house because it was always the aim in the Georgian style to subdue the roof and if possible to hide it altogether. Note the condition of the unpaved road without kerb or footpath.
7 The architect who designed this house had some knowledge of the classic tradition but was carried away by the Victorian passion for display, hence the tower. The sketch without the tower emphasises the commonsense proportions of this house. Note the wide rusticated weatherboards and double hung windows. It is a house of character and considering the time in which it was built, 1890, shows a restraint in detail. The next twenty years of house-building was to see almost a complete break with such restraint.
Sketch of No. 7 with Tower Removed
8 This house when built in the 'eighties was no doubt regarded by its owner as the latest in design and fittings. Note the large single panes of glass to the dormer windows, the curly edge to the dormer gables, with the popular gable spike. The spoutings and downpipes made it possible to store tank water and so provide running water in the kitchen and bathroom (perhaps there was no bathroom), a big improvement on the well. The wrought-iron gate was also no doubt a cause of pride to the owner. There is an interesting transition from this gate to the gate-posts and the fence. The fence is of the simplest construction, of split rails and slotted posts, a sharp contrast to the skilfully built house, which required intricate construction and a high development of technical skill. The builder has completely mastered the problem of constructing dormer windows to such an extent that he preferred to show his skill and the owner's wealth by lighting all upstairs rooms with dormer windows, instead of making use of a window in the gable end, which was the usual solution. In this house the gable windows are missing. The verandah is still popular and was to remain so for the next twenty-five years.
Photographs by Courtesy of the Turnbull Library
1 View of Garden-court and entrance
2 Gallery
Family Requirements: Husband and wife with occasional guest. Provision of space suitable for entertainment.
Site: Set well back from road amongst trees on fruit farm. Ground is perfectly level. No views.
Plan: Planned with area of 1150 square feet, it provides a living room of 30ft × 15ft and a gallery 22ft long. The gallery opens on to a garden court where a swimming pool will be provided. The living room opens on to a paved area for informal living. What would normally be the passage is widened to approximately 6 feet, glazed, and forms a second living area with small increase in area and cost.
Construction: Brick veneer, concrete floor (no reinforcement), Neuchatel roof. Steel sashes.
Colour: Deep grey carpet, white walls, light grey ceiling, dark red upholstered chairs.
3. The built-in dressing table has been designed and detailed with skill. Above table level mirror covers the whole of the recess with a flush light built into the soffit.
4. The wall-to-wall windows featured in all rooms are particularly successful in the bathroom. They increase the apparent size of the room and provide maximum daylight.
5. The steel window sashes are a feature which provide maximum glass areas and efficient opening parts.
6. When the walls are practically all glass, wide eaves are necessary to reduce glare and keep out hot mid-summer sun.
If the present rates of population growth and house building in Auckland were maintained, the net housing shortage will be overcome within four or five years.
This may be great news to many people but considered in relation to the over-all question of healthy urban development it may be associated with the beginnings of municipal bankruptcy and economic and social decline.
This is a startling paradox!
What are the reasons?
New Zealand is now possibly the third most urbanised country in the world. About two thirds of the Dominion population live in cities or towns. In the North Island well over one third of the population lives in the two main centres, Auckland and Wellington. This great concentration has come about in two ways: firstly by an “urban drift” in general from the open country to the towns and secondly by a concurrent shift from the smaller townnships to the larger cities.
These are staggering figures, beating many of the continental urban concentrations after a mere 100 years, and we must ask ourselves whether the form and quality of our urban development is equal to the terrific demands that must necessarily be made on it under these circumstances.
A critical examination of our towns and cities generally shows firstly an inner area (the “old” part) somewhat dilapidated and scruffy with undeveloped and badly developed land, waste land, traffic congestion and yet with a large portion of the area devoted to streets unnecessary for access or for traffic and useless for any other purpose; secondly, the outer area sprawling in an atmosphere neither urban nor rural, neither town nor country where ribbon development, generally of houses, stretches well beyond what should ever be the true urban area.
The impression is clearly one of an incoherent and an ill-defined urban pattern that appears to have few of the truly desirable urban qualities and yet manifests no compensating rural characteristics. On this diseased core we graft more and more fresh building because our population is steadily increasing still. As there seems to be all-round agreement that the population increase in itself is a healthy and desirable feature, we must do something to improve the urban conditions into which are inevitably born about two thirds of the young generation.
There is no doubt that our physical environment influences our human existence and while the town planner directly influences the physical form only, indirectly he inevitably provides, or attempts to provide for a better urban life.
An inner area somewhat dilapidated and scruffy, with undeveloped and badly developed land.
So much for the pattern evolved in the past. What of the development of the last few years and that taking place today?
Due to restrictions of wartime and the shortage of the post-war years, about the last 10 years altogether, building development has been confined almost exclusively to housing. Virtually no redevelopment or replacement has taken place, that is, practically all the new building has taken place on newly developed land on the outskirts of the towns where land is supposedly cheaper and all the older and more decadent quarters have been left in use. Consequently, the building industry has been organised to build almost exclusively single, one-storey houses and that accounts for the fast rate of building and the prospect of overtaking the net housing shortage in a few years with which we started our story. (“Net shortage” means the difference between
The outer area sprawling in an atmosphere neither urban nor rural, where ribbon development stretches well beyond what should ever be the true urban area.
At the same time it produces further sprawl on the outer fringes of the cities. If this type of development is continued beyond the next five years when the net shortage has been satisfied it would then represent replacement of derelict accommodation but in the wrong place. It would, in fact, cause a shift of large numbers of people annually from the old decadent centres of the cities to the outskirts without any provision for the rehabilitation of the vacated areas. That would seal the doom of our city centres for good. Even today local bodies in the outer areas have reaped a false sense of prosperous growth while in actual fact some of the worst features of our present urban conglomerations are accentuated and exaggerated.
The engineer and economist must judge this sprawling form a great hindrance to satisfactory urban life with their crowded buildings, congested streets, inadequate open spaces and well nigh intolerable expenditure on widely strung out engineering and transport services. From a social point of view also, there is an atmosphere of disintegration, a lack of coherence of definition and meaning.
The qualities we should strive for in urban life are difficult to assess and more difficult still to plan and provide for. The essence of the problem is to concentrate people close enough together to get social integration and urban correlation and still provide adequate room for movement and recreation. Then some spatial sense and order to the whole could well emerge.
The economics of badly sprawling development have become clear but apart from the difficulties and costs of transportation and services, the sheer
City Development says:
“Ultimately, every well-administered municipality, in order to save itself from bankruptcy and hopeless arrears, must offset the tendency towards suburban growth by taking substantial measures towards its own renovation. Not merely must the municipality discourage such uneconomic growth by resisting premature subdivision, by withholding assent from ill-advised express highways, bridges, or tunnels that open up cheap land outside the municipality's area of control: what is much more important is that it will seek to make the city itself permanently attractive as a human home by slum clearance, large-scale housing, neighbourhood planning, and park development. On any priority schedule for cities, these things come first; and other municipal improvements are acceptable only to the extent that they directly further the movement towards urban rehabilitation.”
In New Zealand particularly, urban planning involves no decanting of population, no reduction of density, with new towns serving as receptacles of the resultant “overspill” as the English call it. Rather does it involve compaction, filling up and the attainment of an urban entity out of the all too loosely sprawling structure. We are faced with the use of both an urban fence or rural zoning (greenbelts) to prevent sprawl and the positive encouragement to redevelopment and urban rehabilitation in the old parts of the towns. They must go hand in hand and one will be largely ineffective without the other.
Obviously then we cannot continue for ever to concentrate on building up more and more land with single cottages miles from the centre, on constructing miles upon miles of new roads destroying valuable farm and market gardening land, miles upon miles of water and drain pipes, miles upon miles of tram and train tracks; we cannot continue to sink more and more money into even greater fleets of buses—while the very same facilities exist only half-used in the inner parts of the cities. To continue this trend is uneconomical and must lead toward municipal bankruptcy.
Rehabilitation of our central urban areas is the only answer but what are the basic facts and figures supporting such a policy?
We must start investigations immediately because it will take some years to prepare detailed plans and a further time lag will occur before the building industry has readjusted its organisation from small house construction to large scale developments. It is anticipated that by that time the material supply position for cement and steel may be more favourable.
Here is shortly summarised the example of Auckland conditions:
In Auckland much of the development during the last ten years has been in outlying areas while more central areas and considerable numbers of unbuilt on lots in fully serviced areas remain unused.
The building industry has been organised to build increasing numbers of dwellings—predominantly single unit houses—until it is, in Auckland, building annually almost twice the number of houses required to house the annual population increase.
Yet on the other side of the ledger we find the following:
The percentage of households comprising either one or two persons is at the least 30% of the total households and is probably considerably more than that.
The last census in Auckland in 1945 showed that 7% of the total number of private dwellings were occupied by a single person only; fully 24% were occupied by two persons (not necessarily related). A further 24% of dwellings housed three persons (not necessarily all a biological family).
No more than 50% of households can be assumed to consist of families with children of school age and under. While no provision is made for small flats for single persons, pensioners, bachelor students, young marrieds, or retired people on a modern hygienic and comfortable standard, there are in fact over 15,000 apartment house and boarding-house dwellers in the City of Auckland alone with well over 20,000 in the whole of the wider metropolitan area.
Altogether it appears that in Auckland at least 40% of the total families are units of one or two persons only, neglecting all those one and two person families living in private dwellings housing three or more people.
Fuller investigation seems to be required into this question, but at this stage I would be rash enough to make a preliminary estimate in round figures of the living accommodation requirements as follows:
It will be seen that in the urban area there is a variety of family or household type and size presumably there is room for a variety of type and size of living accommodation. Such variety could cover single unit houses, group houses, terraces and flats with, I think, advantage to the population as a whole.
The figures show that areas at present ripe for redevelopment, if redeveloped in the most logical way, could accommodate their present inhabitants under vastly improved conditions and in addition provide for the net housing shortage of the city thereby avoiding the further costly outward sprawl described earlier. Such a scheme would involve the building of a number of blocks of flats and the raising of population densities in suitable areas. Does that inevitably present a bad feature?
If for instance, single person and two person households only were housed in flats and units—they could be built in spacious parks with abundance of sunlight and air, recreation areas and tree-shaded walks. And yet, as said above, with a much higher population density than was accommodated on the same area previous to such redevelopment, when buildings were crowded and insanitary.
Population densities are not necessarily a measure of the quality of living standards in an area and arbitrarily quoted figures can be misleading.
A few figures taken at random in Auckland show that densities bear no true relation to the quality of the respective living standards.
While for instance the relatively high densities of some decadent areas in Auckland (30 to 70 people per acre) may be considered as the cause of the slum conditions, there are other derelict areas with no more than 25 persons per acre. On the other hand there are up to 300 persons per acre in some of the best modern blocks of flats recently built in Auckland.
Therefore, for future development, net residential densities consistent with our conditions and with satisfactory open development may be:
Single unit houses—up to 20 persons per acre.
Group and terrace housing up to 30 or 40 persons per acre.
Flatted development (3 storey up to 50 or 60 persons per acre.
Flatted development (7 or 8 storey) up to 100 or 120 persons per acre.
Provided areas are planned comprehensively and not as small individual sites, these densities can provide pleasant living conditions through a variety of housing types.
The need for and the difficulties of the decadent areas are well known. Where rehabilitation of decadent and near uncontrolled outward spread continues and redevelopment of older areas lags behind, these areas become municipal liabilities, the multiplicity of ownerships and land holdings discourages any attempts by private individuals to carry out any new building development, and in any case, the holdings are usually of such a small area that rebuilding of individual sites is neither economic nor desirable. It seems to be almost universally recognised today that the tasks of rehabilitation and redevelopment of blighted areas cannot be undertaken by private enterprise alone. Only with co-operative action by National and Local
One aspect of the overall economics of redevelopment may be illustrated by an example in Auckland where two properties having the same potentialities, and both having at present fundamentally the same services, return in rates,
Area A (old decadent housing)
— approx. £70 per annum per acre.
Area B (new flatted development)
— approx. £1200 per annum per acre. (on a rating system based upon rental values).
I have covered very briefly, only some of the background of this aspect of urban planning, but I feel there is no doubt that sound urban growth must involve progressive rebuilding rather than continuously expanding such urban growth. In New Zealand, with almost all our older development in “impermanent” materials and with considerable areas in the larger cities either at, or approaching the stage of their first rebuilding, realisation of that fact is particularly important.
The most imperative demands of a planning scheme in an urban area such as that comprising greater Auckland would be:
1. Designation of desirable population densities for all parts of the urban area based on factors of municipal economics.
2. Analysis of type and size of dwelling units required to meet the housing requireemnts of all sections of the population.
3. Definition of the limits of the urban area based on future expected population.
4. Cessation of all subdivision and development for urban purposes in areas outside the defined boundaries.
5. The correlation of the remainder of the fundamental aspects of urban development; commercial and industrial location, communications, transportation, etc., into a fully considered overall plan.
Essentially, the basic statistical data as to our requirements are available; the necessary legislative powers are available; a housing authority (a Government Department) is already building 25% of all the dwelling units built per year; thus the means of providing for an orderly, efficient and economic urban structure are at our disposal. But we continue heading in the opposite direction.
If it is conceded that a reversal, or at least a partial modification of our present policy is essential, then it must be borne in mind that the first tentative planning on a new approach must precede development by years. This paper was intended, not as an answer in itself to this problem, but was intended to suggest that the information available indicates a situation that warrants full investigation before we proceed blithely to perpetuate our present policy of urban development.
Dear Sir: I promised, when I left New Zealand a year ago, to write to you occasionally as a sort of roving correspondent. If only I had fulfilled my offer in those first exciting weeks in this country, how much easier my task would have been! A few rapid notes of the impact which this new scene made upon my untravelled eye, some sweeping generalisations about English building—the easy claptrap of a more or less literate journeyman-architect—and the conscience, if unwary, would be satisfied.
Now, I'll keep to the things which allow of more accurate description in mere words, to thoughts and trends which have emerged from work over here.
I've been working now for about ten months with a small group of people under Berthold Lubetkin on the design of a New Town in County Durham. Briefly the job is to house thirty thousand people—about the population of Palmerston North—on an oasis of farmland roughly a mile square in the centre of a circle of collieries.
To the Chief Architect-Planner, Lubetkin, the main fact is that here is a piece of land of limited dimension and extremely marked character and the job is to put a town on it. At the moment there are about five farmhouses, one very minor road, a pumping station, and the hallowed but empty site of an ancient village on it.
It is a beautiful piece of land, contained in its low hill ridges and rounded like the palm of a hand. “A pity to build on it,” is the usual bald comment. This comes mostly from local people who may justly claim, as the victims of a century of bad building, a little cynicism as regards the development of land. To them this usually means destruction, and one can only agree in the face of such remarks that to build the usual town on such a site would certainly be nothing short of rape.
But it doesn't follow that this is inevitable. It has not always been so. Having once, from its southern approaches, seen Durham City rising serene in its landscape, one can still believe that a town may be built to grace its setting. For if, in the “outspread hand,” which I have called the site of Peterlee, there is placed a town as compact and precise as Durham, nothing of the present quality of the scene will be lost and a further quality—the contrast of rural and urban forms—will be added.
This is the broad significance of Peterlee as a general architectural event—but in its narrower technical significance this new town seems to mark the end of a conflict within town planning itself. The nature of this conflict is clear enough if the opposing parties are named as, on the one hand, the school which produced the standard written works on the “Art of Town Planning” some thirty years ago, and, on the other, the immensely painstaking and methodical type of present day planner who cares for anything but the “Art of Town Planning,” but is capable of producing three volumes on the anatomy of a given slum at the drop of a hat.
So it seems ironical that when the zealots for the Beautiful New City are dead and their dream, plans embalmed in their original sepia wash, the job they yearned to do has fallen into the hands of a race of planners who prefer to be called urban morphologists and shy like startled ponies at the word “beauty.” Sound training in economics, politics, sanitation and engineering has fitted them to smell out a slum in the best regulated communities. Nothing is more thrilling to them than a thoroughly bad old town lined up on the surgical table.
The danger in this state of affairs is obvious. While the doodlings of a late Victorian academic would hardly yield a town equal to present day conditions, there is now the inverse danger that our own performances may fall just as far short on the other side. Out of the mountain of technical reports, working data and appendices to Acts which “planning” has produced during its recent boom period, may emerge a rather ill-balanced mouse of a town.
This doctrinaire town would have its ring road and its by-pass, it would dispose itself in sequestered, green belted neighbourhoods, each neighbourhood having a calculated number of shops and playing fields, a pub, a nursery school and one and a half churches or whatever the statistics say. In the geometric focus of all these curvaceous bundles of hygienic homes would lie the Town Centre, with its various parts as apparent as on a new born baby. But carefully hidden out of sight would lie the industries, and carefully segregated from everyone the traffic and the drains would no doubt function perfectly, in all a sanitary, economic and eminently practical desert.
At Peterlee I have seen enough of Lubetkin's approach to believe that this will not happen. His preoccupation with formal values has made certain that pure doctrine and data are kept in their place as mere references and working checks.
His attention has been wholly concentrated on the ultimate form of the town, and initially on the prime mover to that end—the nature and shape of the site. The slopes and surrounding crest lines, its incidental bumps and hollows, and the influence of one particular feature—an enormous tree-lined ravine penetrating the site from the south—have all been the subject of minute study.
One result of this is a determination that the physical extent of the town should be decided, completely if possible, by the visual limits imposed by the crest lines. The whole subject of population density is being re-explored in this light. The town is regarded as an essential visual unit from the start and no sprawling perimeter is welcome. Again, once the town is accepted as a unity there seems no reason to believe that its subdivision into neighbourhoods of (say) 10,000 people would improve it, socially or functionally. By the same argument there is no final reason why everything except the domestic functions of eating and sleeping should take place at the centre of the town. Some of its architectural gestures in the way of public buildings may usefully be dispersed to inject formal contrast and social activity into the residential areas around it. Present day text-book planning on the other hand would insulate them at all costs from such forms of life.
Even, it seems, selected industries could with care be admitted into these hallowed areas to intensify and vitalize the deadly dormitory. And for the same reason it is hoped to keep densities equally high over the entire residential area and avoid the usual “tailing-off” in the outer parts.
However, this is merely raising questions about “established principle.” It is
Peterlee will, it is hoped, function well and be hygienic as a result of the latter's investigations, but it may also recognize once more that anything from a building to a town is first and last a creature of the human brain, and as such inherits all the potentialities of beauty and ugliness which that parenthood implies.
Sir: I agree with what Mr McCormick says in his review of “Here and Now” in your last issue. The magazine does embody prodigious effort, intending to add a ventilating system to the defective machinery of New Zealand democracy; in arrangement and contents it is designed for a large and heterogeneous public. He quite rightly doubts whether the editors have yet succeeded in their design; he quite rightly calls his own review irresponsible.
Where he failed in his review was in what he left unsaid. According to him, “Here and Now” offered a choice for prime minister between a calculating humbug and a political cretin. But in actual fact was the choice so very different? Was Mr Fraser in recent years straightforward and disinterested in his methods? Is Mr Holland a wise and capable political leader?
Mr McCormick knows better, and the question arises how far he and his ilk are responsible for the sorry level to which New Zealand's standards of political morality have declined.
Mr McCormick has a very clear head. He would make an excellent editor for “Here and Now,” and is very welcome to the job, as he knows. Few men are more aware than he of the cumulative effect that independent magazines can have in focussing the activities of writers on social questions (vide his centennial survey “Letters and Art in New Zealand,” pp. 170 et seq.).
Since the strangulation of “Tomorrow” ten years ago we have had no broadly circulating critical press in New Zealand. “John Lee's Weekly” and “The People's Voice” have spoken out plainly and valuably on occasion, but their audience and appeal are clearly limited. “Here and Now” is an attempt to fill the gap; to provide a wide open forum, an opportunity for our trained thinkers, upon whom there rests a strong responsibility to keep a critical eye on our social and political life.
“I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary…,”
But the boys in the ivory tower are slumbering very nicely thank you. Perhaps only when their wages are cut in half will they descend to the dusty arena, to think and write concretely of the evils of bad government.
Sir: I would like to support
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