Evening star., 1962-04-08
-r.-*s
Cities
OA
o'1 People
The Looks
Of Things
BY ROBERT J. LEWIS

N - " " ~ n APIA L.
~ Fires of the spirit, un-
like the kind that firemen
soon put out, can burn with
an unquenchable flame.
When you're suddenly
awakened by smoke in your
10th-Story room at the Hotel
Plaza at midnight, what do
you do next? In my case, I
turned on the lights and
spent 80 frustrating seconds
peering into ash trays, un-
der the bed, and out into the
hall before finally picking up
the telephone.
THE fire is in the grand
ballroom" the girl at the
switchboard said. Keep your
door and windows closed, and
you'll be all right"
Within three minutes, I
was dressed and pushing the
button of the elevator down
the hall.
AS 1t turned out, the tele-
phone operator was right. 1t
was a smoky fire off the ball
room that was soon put un-
der control. Another five
minutes and I was back in
bed, reflecting on a differ
ent kind of fire some people
had built in the grand ball
room at a meeting earlier in
the day.
FROM MANY PARTS of
the country, nearly 500 peo-
pie met this week in the
Plaza at that day long con-
ference. Their aim was to
light a fire under an all-too-
often complacent American
acceptance of unattractive
surroundings.
Led by the American Insti-
tute Of Architects, they were
there to start what they
hoped could become a ma
tional movement to improve
as the late Mr.. Sam Ray
burn once put 1.-THE looks
of things around here"
Being architects and not
politicians - and therefore
maybe not so clever about
choosing popular words -
they called the meeting, THE
First Conference on AeS-
thetic Responsibility"
What they wanted to say
was, Lets do something to
get rid of the junkyard look
in American cities and try
to substitute a little more
beauty for all this uglineSs
that's beginning to over
whelm the country" 81
DOING THIS MIGHT seem
to be an immense undertake
ing Of unbelievable complex
ity. You could stumble into
a real blind alley, for exam
pie, by getting into an argu-
ment over what is beautiful
and what is not.
Russell Lynes, managing
editor of Harper's Magazine
and one of the conference
speakers, took pains to point
out that some things that
today are considered to be
downright ugly may, tomor-
row, be highly valued for
their beauty.
There are many people
who think that Rome is the
most beautiful city in the
world" he said.
yet it is layer on layer
of what has been, over the
ages, considered ugly. 1t is
Romanesque and Gothic and
Baroque. All these words for
describing styles, please re-
member, were first used as
terms of opprobrium and
not of endearment, epithetS
to describe ugliness, not
beauty"
THUS, AS MIR. LYNES i'm
piled, discussions of abso-
lutes are not always neces-
sary to a goal of improving
the looks of things in cities.
But, it seems, you do have
to keep your eyes open for
the images that are often
sive. For if you do this you
will be seeing some of the
things that have, as Mr..
Lynes said, "crawled out of
our urban centers and made
an unholy mess of our land
Scape."
The main thing, the con-
ference agreed, is to keep on
looking. Once you are so
surfeited with blots on
the landscape that you close
your eyes to them, every
things lost.
Which brings us back to
the real objective of the pio-
neering meeting, and to the
key word in its name.
As usual, the Greeks used
the key word first.
They called it "aesthet-
ikos." It meant "to see what's