Switzerland also is feeling the modern movement. Swiss archi tects as a rule are happier in the 18th century tradition than in their more Germanic vein, though in Geneva, Zurich and Basel are apartment houses in the modern manner which compare favour ably with contemporary work elsewhere.
Italy and Spain have contributed little to contemporary domes tic work. Modern Italian apartment houses and villas often re flect a debased version of the classic tradition, with a reminiscence tending towards a modern cubism. Much modern Spanish work is extravagant and overornate, influenced by the more florid phases of the modern Continental development from the Renaissance. Barcelona in particular has contributed some remarkable efforts in extravagant modernism ; this vogue is however on the wane, and there are evident signs of a return towards greater refinement and simplicity.
Few particulars are available concerning contemporary domestic architecture in Russia. Much fine work of classic and i8th century influence forms a nucleus for a possible line of development, though it appears probable that the modern cubist school will strongly assert itself when building recommences on any scale.
The term "housing" has developed a modern scientific sense that is more limited and specific than its original meaning, which was to provide accommodation for domestic life. In the first place housing implies the idea of furnishing homes to groups of individuals rather than to single individuals or to families alone. In the second place good housing implies that the best use has been made of each dollar of cost. So far as desirability is con cerned, the house produced should be the utmost possible within the economic limits set. Housing is that science which devotes itself to the elimination of industrial waste in the production of homes, and attempts to utilize savings in improving the product. Scientific housing necessarily must consider the production of homes of varying size and cost to meet the economic require ments of the various groups within the community.
(A. C. HoL.) In the ten years between 1929 and 1939 "housing" took on a new connotation : the provision of shelter, with Government as sistance, for those not able to find, in the words of the Housing Act of 1937, "decent, safe and sanitary dwellings" at rentals they can afford to pay. The obligation, on the part of the community as a whole, to provide such shelter, just as it supplies water and schools, out of the general tax system, is beginning to be under stood. Housing is thus a social phenomenon, and as such is provid ing a new outlet for architecture and a new approach which is quite different from that to which architects have been accus tomed. The origins of the social housing can be traced as far back
as the 16th century, but the actual impetus came from the over crowding and land speculation in the industrial area. Early efforts at housing reform interested architects not at all; least of all American architects. Robert Owen and Ebenezer Howard, both Englishmen, laid the foundations for public housing, later taken up in the United States. It was the rise of industrialism and the accompanying vast increase in urban population by immigration that created conditions of intolerable overcrowding in cities throughout the country. New York, however, was the only city in which slums were deliberately built and it is for that reason and because reform through philanthropy centred there that the Lower East Side has become synonymous with "slum,"—not because conditions there are worse than in any other city. The Lower East Side simply has had better publicity.
The first efforts at reform were by restrictive legislation and philanthropic enterprise. Neither made the slightest dent either on existing slums or in preventing the creation of new slums. In 1901, due to the arousing of public sentiment by the writings of Jacob Riis and the great factual study of Laurence Veillier and Robert de Forest, a law was passed radically altering the type of tenement house permissible. Excellent as this law was in some ways, it again failed to strike at the underlying cause, the misuse of land. The expectation of speculative profits, based on the belief that there was no limit to the possible growth of popula tion, made habitual land "values" that had no basis, and could never rationally have any basis in fact as determined by use. What happened was a continual push toward the cheaper land at the peripheries of cities, the extension of transit facilities at enormous cost, and the abandonment of the centres to blight and slums. Added to this, a system of accounting which never wrote off the cost of structures because the value of the land was expected to write it off automatically, an intolerable condi tion was perpetuated until the inevitable day of financial collapse. No efforts by philanthropists, who built occasional model tene ments, could affect this. No other type of effort was made; private enterprise could never build for slum dwellers, and never did, simply because the continual rise of construction prices in an expanding market prevented it ever being even remotely profitable to do so.