Architect Hails Growing Awareness of Structure's Creative Possibilities

The structural element of building design which used to be dismissed as "a necessary evil" has been recognized by modern architects as a primary means of creative expression, Felix Candela said last night in the first of this year's Charles Eliot Norton lectures.

Candela, who is a professor at the National School of Architecture in Mexico City as well as a designer and builder, is the first of the three prominent architects who are sharing this year's Charles Eliot Norton Professorship of Poetry.

Before the modern period, Candela said, "structure did not play a very big role in style because style was based on the secondary and mainly ornamental elements of building. The exception to this rule was the classical type,

The Greeks invented the post and lintel because it seemed to them extremely logical, he said, but "no one with any common sense" would use it.

"Architecture is an applied art." It is enslaved to structure, Candela emphasized. If architects try either to begin their work where the structural solution is ended, or to ignore the limitations structure imposes, they are distorting their possibilities for expression.

Candela was careful to point out that structure is not the only problem in architecture, however. Various schools have regarded it as such, some to provide a welcome outlet for a "craze for originality" in the invention of new shapes, some as a basis of "a permanent rational style."

These two aims are mutually contradictory, Candela went on. In reply to the first of these schools, he declared that, unlike other arts, which can be developed along lines calculated to appeal mainly to the specialist, architecture is a public art, whose function is to communicate to all people. "It is not possible to change all the symbols at once, and still communicate with people."

Nor can structure offer "the solution to the problem of unity in architecture," Candela continued. The solution, he suggested, is in the acceptance of a permanent style in which the secondary components, not necessarily ornamentation alone, but some of the more subtle elements, are varied.