Even those who are most insistent that architecture is an art will admit that there is a limit to what aesthetics can do to gild distressing human arrangements. The truth of this has been brought home to English people in a painful way by the dilemma of ‘housing’. For perhaps no modern building problem has had so much architectural skill lavished on it. But if its fruits are on the whole more seemly than they were forty years ago, this is on the surface only and cannot hide the fact that the conception— whether it is realised, in an estate or a neighbourhood or a new town—is humanly unsatisfactory. If we enquire why and how this is so, all objections lead back to the intractable defect that there is altogether too much of it. ‘Intractable’ because those who still want houses will explain that so far as they are concerned there is altogether too little.

It is not only monotony to the eye which is complained of—though this is at least an indication that there is something wrong—but the great distances which everyone must walk to get anywhere and the social defects which these distances produce and which are generally described as ‘thinning of the social fabric’. Distances so ‘take it out of’ people that they do less, participate less, see less of one another. And it is perhaps this toll on social life which we are chiefly aware of when we remark the lifelessness of our new localities. They are an aggregation of units which do not add up to a commune.

It is surely clear that no urbanity in the architectural arrangements can make up for defects of this kind; but that the fault must lie, if not with basic requirements, at least with the present mode in which they are supplied.