versus the

VOL XV., No.7

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TO~ OF THI TIMES

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DIYlslon of Put.He Information, World Heaft.h Orpnlzatl~

Artldu aod pflotosraphs that appear In World Health and .... not copynaht may be reproduce4 free. Prints of pictures will be Hnt to editors, who

A

Doctor

versus the

architects

The proliferation of vast blocks of flats has given rise to a great deal of dis- cussions for and against.

World Health asked Dr.

Robert-Henri Hazemann, who is lnspecteur General of public health in France, to give his opinion on this topic. In this interview · by Hubert d'Havrincourt, Dr.

Hazemann makes it clear that he is not in agreement with what the architects are now doing in his country.

- Why did you become involved in town-planning, Doctor 1

- If you agree that super-urbaniza- tion and the craze for big buildings cause tension and are bad for mental health, then it must seem natural for a public health worker to want to counteract these effects on family an,d community life. Nowadays, it is not so much the physical side of housing that gives trouble as the mental side.

Noise

- On the fringes of large towns, enormous blocks of dwellings are spring- ing up. Do you think that people can live happily in these large blocks 1

- One of my colleagues lives in a Paris suburb, ip. a seventeen-storey tower of flats, about fifty metres high. It is the noise that worries him most. As you know, many such buildings do not have support- ing walls but curtain walls, which are hung on the framework. These walls are light and act as drumheads, so that noise from the upp~r floors reverberates down to the lower floors. This is the main cause of noise, which irritates because it is so intrusive. My friend is ever assailed by loudspeakers, children crying, and other people's quarrels. Family life on one floor interferes with that on others, 3

with deplorable results. The noise tends to gradually destroy the family as a unit.

Mother is exhausted, father comes home tired from his day's work wanting a little rest and quiet, but every evening he almost dreads going home, because he knows that there's not much chance of finding peace. A kind of double promiscuity results from noise and lack of space. Some experts are apt to forget that freedom needs space: how can father get a little r_elaxation, such as reading his paper while mother cooks the . dinner, if his son is always under his feet

at the wrong moment?

Gangs

- But aren't there ·prescribed stan- · dards of space ?

- Indeed yes: they tell us that chil- ren do not need much space, that seven square metres is enough. Well, I don't agree. We can't have the sort of function- alism that simply decrees a corner for sleep, and a corner for homework. It is not surprising that in such surroundings parents turn the children out of the flat and send them to play somewhere else; or that the children end up as members of gangs.

- What can you do about the child·

ren?

- Their needs can perhaps be met half way. Children have a right to their corner and, if possible, to a rpom of their own, where they can play with their friends. Children need a social life as much as anyone else. If the parents don't help them, they will go out and create a social unit for themselves in the streets. Our blousons noirs, or young hooligans, get up to no good for lack of

' I

affection. The people who build these great groups of dwellings maintain that there are no gangs of young people hanging around. "The children in the new blocks" they say "are not yet old enough to form gangs ... " What is certain is that the parents are not always in a position to look after their children. Think of a twenty-storey building, with perhaps four flats on each floor. With an average of two or three children to a flat, that -makes, for one stairway, 150 or 250 children. If all the parents send them to play downstairs, there's a whole little army on the loose in some waste ground.

- But suppose there is no room to make a corner for the children 1

- Father and mother can at least be sympathetic and show affection. I don't say that that never happens, but if a child falls sick, he should be cared for at home provided it can be done without risk. He should not be sent to hospital for every little complaint. In Paris, 49 % of young children in hospital are mild cases that could well be treated at home. It is an old saying that one loves only those for whom one has suffered.

If the mother has suffered for her child and has sat up all night on his account, her ties with him will be all the closer . . This is lost in the cold, anonymous, in- different atmosphere of the hospital.

A child abandoned in such a strange place may even have what is called an attack of hospitalism.

- But parents can't do everything.

Father is at work, mother has to run the house and do the shopping, and per- haps goes out to work herself. Is family life at all possible in these great housing estates 1

- Yes, one wonders. In some of the big blocks there is a sort of selfish in- difference between one storey and an- other. In the social vacuum of faceless crowds, people have no spontaneous urge to make acquaintance and be friends with their neighbours. Some of them live like travellers without luggage: babies go to the nursery; children go to school; sick people, whether their illness is physical or mental, go to hospital; old people go to the old people's home. There is no kind of social maturing process and it is a sad fact that in shantytowns and

slums people give their neighbour a hand much more readily. Community life is a ground creeper, not a climbing plant. If people in buildings of twelve, eighteen or twenty storeys could only get together over the problem of looking after the children, family feelings would not wither so easily and social services would not have to stand in for parents so freql).ently.

. - What are the possibilities for improvement 1 In particular, how can new development projects become more than mere dormitories 1

- The English have made a successful experiment with their new towns. These towns do not have more than 50,000 in- habitants, are intended specially to relieve congestion in the large towns, and are built at a fair distance from the large towns. They have schools, social and cultural centres, gymnasiums, and also light industries. There are some high blocks of flats for single people. Round them are gardens and detached houses in varied lay-outs. The industries are grouped round the town, and the men can therefore work more or less on the spot.

They are able to pay more attention to their families and neighbours, and have more time at home than the suburbanites with their eternal shuttlecock travel.

In dormitory suburbs, which are often more than an hour away by bus or train from the place of work, family life during the week is probably reduced to two hours each evening, and that is not enough relaxation for anybody.

- Would you say then that the average person living in a large housing estate never manages to get any rest 1

- Of course I don't want to imply that everyone in such apartment houses suffers from insomnia, but it is true that modern life, increasingly restless, noisy

... the children should be entitled to their corner, their room, if possible, where they can talk and play with their friends ...

KALISH ER

5

•.. in some blocks of flats there is a sort of selfish indifference between one storey and another ...

Sleep

factories

and agitated, afflicts the average man with more and more psychosomatic illness. I mean such things as gastric ulcer, heart disease, cerebral haemorrhage, skin diseases and allergies. This sorry cata-_

logue is a list of the body's distress signals. Man is. imprisoned by his work, his machine, his factory, his office, and a few hours of relaxation with his family is a form of escape from which he may now be debarred. A game of skittles with his son, or a round of bowls with a few neighbours are among man's weapons against the Machine, Charly Chaplin's Machine in Modern Times. Although children's diseases are much less dan- gerous than they used to be, parents are every year consuming more aspirin, more tranquillizers and other drugs, and we are told that there are n6 longer enough mental hospitals. The more hectic the daily grind, the greater is a man's need for family life and intimacy. Friendly company is the ideal way to restore the balance.

- Is there any quick cure for this state of things 1

- As a general answer, yes: by proper planning of housing programmes and by teamwork. What I mean is that large housing estates should no longer be built without regular round-table discus- sions at which architects, contractors, engineers, sociologists, family represen- tatives, social workers, nurses, doctors

KALISH ER

of different specialities and especially psychologists can all have their say. If that were done, no more housing estates would be built before the services and equipment that are now essential had been decided upon: we should no longer have the distressing sight of those great suburban blocks with their hundreds of noisy little cells standing in barely cleared waste ground, without shops, streets, or playgrounds-and often without schools or even a dispensary.

- How do you see the function of the architect in a large housing estate 1

- St. John ·Perse, a~ the ceremony when he was presented with the Nobel Prize, said: "Are we not entitled to hold that poetry is as legitimate an instrument as logic?" I believe that the good architect, the good townplanner, should think of himself as · the poet of large building schemes, the poet who will bring harmony into the lives of men, into their families, 7

ARCHITECTURE

into their apartment house, into their part of the town. The architect himself does not often live in such places, but he should always have in mind a picture of the kind of family life that will be possible in the environment he is creating.

He should be the craftsman of homes and neighbourhoods; the master, not the slave, of modern techniques.

- Should houses be high or low ?

- Most men want to be in touch with their kind, and it should be remembered that people show less mutual indifference when they live close to the ground. They know each other better and converse

everyone is Utopian, and does not even seem to be desirable. There should be houses with a moderate number of sto- reys, perhaps between one and six, an1 the lay-out of streets and squares should show variety. It is wrong to neglect streets; they reflect man's need to communicate, and make for social links.

That is particularly true of shopping streets, in which there should be small shops· as well as large: have you ever seen two women chatting in a large store?

A large housing estate should be some- thing entirely different from a collection of great horizontal and vertical blocks,

tower? Frenchmen don't like this mania for size. It would be much better to have some communal building, mainly for the growing numbers of young people. It is up to the architect to find the best means of preserving the essential freedom of the individual. And I mean political freedom, the freedom of the individual among his neighbours and, which is very important, the intimate freedom of everyone in his home. What must not be forgotten is the touch of imagination which is sovereign against the bustle and nervous tension of industrial life.

- So one is actually tempted to ask whether the slum is not a better moral environment than barracks and vertical anthills.

- Obviously there must be some reservations about preferring slums. · If you carry that line to its logical conclu- sion you would have to bring down-and- outs into the argument, and they are ill from too much freedom. It is clear that our present way of life, especially when people are crowded together in a small space, detracts from true civility, an_d inclines us to social relations without grace or, worse still, to plain indifference.

Some people in condemned districts have been frightened at the thought of leaving their slum; some have flatly refused to go into brand-new houses; others left their bright new dwellings to return to squalor. These are extreme cases, which could be met by a style of architecture and layout that would encourage people to create their own social patterns: the buildings have to be modern, of course, but should not be out of scale with man as a social animal. The task is difficult.

Social science is young, but our social psychologists should get to work and take a leaf out of the nutritionists' book who have shown the scientific grounds for many of the rules of cookery disco- vered, intuitively or empirically, by the cooks of long ago. The main thing is not planted round a central tower, like lumps to "construct" future generations after of sugar standing alternately on end and · the pattern of the machines that build more. To provide a separate house for on edge. In any case, why have a central their houses.

Slums or

bright buildings

KALISH ER ..• the good town-planner is the poet

who harmonizes the lives o( men and their families ...

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