the sixth congress of the International Union of Architects, attended by 1,898 delegates from nearly 60 countries, met in London in July to discuss the theme “New Techniques and Materials —Their Impact on Architecture”. Considering that for the last fifty years one of the tenets of the Modern Movement has been the application of industrial and mass-production techniques to architecture, it might seem a little surprising that this subject should still be thought suitable for an IUA Congress. However, anyone looking at the state of building and architecture will readily understand that this is a problem with which neither architects nor their clients—the public—have yet come to terms. In practice, the architect stands completely helpless in the face of the mass housing needs all over the world, resulting not only from the rapid increase in population, but also from the legacy of bad housing from the past. Figures of such magnitude mean very little, but an apt illustration would be that 200 cities of 50,000 inhabitants each need to be built every year, merely to absorb the increase in world population. It is clear from the experience of the immediate past that this cannot be achieved by the present methods of building.

In terms of formulating new ideas or even achieving a synthesis of existing thought on the subject, the Congress achieved nothing. This was mainly attributable to two factors. Firstly, as international goodwill and peaceful co-existence were the order of the day, the delegates refrained from mentioning, let alone discussing, the social and political factors which are the crux of the problem, for it is these much more than materials and techniques that in the end dictate architectural developments; secondly, the differing stages of development of the countries represented made the pretence of any universally applicable answer to the question ridiculous: for the backward countries the application of industrial techniques to building is not only impracticable but undesirable in view of the resulting unemployment. The Congress did, however, succeed in recapitulating some of the salient points of the subject, such as the role of the architect, the place of new materials and, very broadly, the principles on which a solution should be based.