Tectural Articles X

Forecast.

So far as the mass of men are concerned the home of the future depends on the development of the new housing science. If land is to increase indefinitely in value and is to be developed uneconomically and wastefully it is problematical whether the individual house will be able to survive, except as a luxury for the very rich, and in the great cities even the very rich may be driven to seek some desirable type of multiple dwell ings as the inevitable solution of their home problem. The factors that will count are land, financing and the proper use of labour, and materials. Land must be properly used; financing costs can be reduced by lessening the speculative risks and doing away with too rapid depreciation. Much is to be hoped for along the lines of a more efficiently organized building industry. Much, too, is to be hoped for from the introduction of new materials and methods of construction. For example, at the present time, experi menters are trying to discover ways of making a practicable steel house and a practicable concrete house. Reinforced concrete which has been so successfully applied to industrial construction has at yet received only scant consideration as a medium for multiple dwellings.

Assuredly in the future large scale operations must come to the front. It must become possible to plan for a whole city block at once. In this way light and air will be permanently guaranteed and proper recreation space provided within the block. Cities of

the future will have to depend on large scale operations to get rid of large sections of their areas which have been blighted by undesirable and uneconomic construction. The illustration on p. 88o shows a project worked out by Arthur C. Holden and Asso ciates, architects, in consultation with the committee on the re gional plan of New York, for the development of a great area of not less than five blocks which incorporates within the design com plete educational, religious, athletic, social and recreational fa cilities for its residents. Some such attempt at orderliness must of necessity follow from the inconveniences, waste and chaos of pres ent city life.

For the immediate future it must not be concluded that the general trend in housing from the individual to the multi-family house will put an end to the traditional American individual home at once. The American home may survive present tend encies. The point to be made, however, is that many of the individual homes that are produced to-day are a bogus product. The public must familiarize itself with the elements of scientific housing if it is to understand and to discriminate when it buys. If one-half the brains and energy that have been applied to the new automobile industry could be applied to improving the present type of housing, it would not take ten years to double the effi ciency and desirability of the home that can be afforded by the average man. (A. C. HoL.)