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The following is a comment number forty two taped by Robert C. Weinberg on April twenty first the subject is the four in one house I will now start on my last broadcast I mentioned a church in Harlem which I thought was an excellent contribution to modern design but I forgot to give credit to the architect or to identify the exact location the building is the Episcopal Church of the crucifixion which was destroyed by fire in one thousand nine hundred sixty three and is located on Lenox Avenue and the architect is cost us Mack Lou Zara D.'s as I said the other day it is an excellent example of good modern design now what I want to talk to you about today is the foreign one house something which appeared in a recent issue of the real estate section of the Sunday papers where the headline caught my eye I quote one house inside is four outside unquote I was sure this must have been a misprint and that and that what was intended was what house outside is for inside since one of the many objectives of the architect today is to create the maximum number of varieties of interior layout in residential construction whether houses or apartments to fit within a single appropriately designed exterior shell that can be repeated in group form to create an effective street scene without conspicuously advertising the interior differences this is the secret so seldom achieve these days of truly civilised day in architecture which one travels to see in such varied examples as the cottages of Cotswold or the townhouses of Georgetown. But no the headline was correct for when reading on it of the continued text on the following page where four illustrations were run of some hapless houses by a misguided builder New Jersey I found that indeed he has done the sadly familiar thing of making a standardized plan and hanging different sorts of phony decorations on the outside I really thought that this sort of claptrap was finally become passe and I hope sincerely that the intelligent buying public will not continue to fall for it here we have a basically conventional uninteresting unimaginative impractical two story plan of the sort that used to be built three or four generations ago for most the lower middle class people who usually had one or two underpaid maid servants for the days housewives who cannot fine much less afford even one so good try to avoid this sort of thing since keeping house and two floors is scarcely the easiest thing to do I'm speaking of course bought houses in the suburbs where help even part time is hard to come by townhouse naturally townhouses are not only within walking distance of occasional help but I generally much more compact and these widespread detached houses selling in the forty thousand dollars class which should have for the suburban housewife the convenience of a modern layout on a single level but to get back to the architectural or rather the non architectural qualities of the particular development illustrated in the Sunday real estate section. It will have no unifying character due to the artificial diversity of the houses exteriors here we have the same plan she in four different outside mannerisms none of them of any distinction or style whatsoever some of the gimmicks are pure Sharon such a shock such as shutters that are obviously not meant to be shut and which have about as much reason for being as lace doilies and a black on the back of a plush armchair is worse still there are such tacky details as using different materials brick shingle and crap and in the same house using paired windows spaced windows or Dhamma windows all for the same bedroom layout and worst of all one of the houses with a garage attachment a vertical stripes sports a pair of two story columns at the front door looking for the all the world like a silly school girl in modern dress topped by one of her great grandmother's feathered hats this may pass at a fancy dress party ARAC I'm up and parade to plaster it out of houses that customers pay good money for is an insult to their intelligence and a blight on the community it also depresses real estate values with so many good examples of the magic of architecture finally being built in our suburbs by intelligent builders and developers it is really too bad that our newspapers waste valuable letterpress pages on trash of this sort let the buyer beware this is Robert C. Weinberg critic at large in architecture and planning. This is Comment number forty one by Robert C. Weinberg taped on April twenty first and to go on the air on a four sixty seven the subject is zoning in the city in the nation's capital hour now start. As an architect Plana whenever I visit the nation's capital district I cannot help but observe the many differences between the developments there and those in New York one of the most interesting observations that I made when I was there just last month and was driven around the more densely occupied parts of Washington itself both in the downtown and in the Northwest residential areas is how many many more individually excellent buildings mostly private houses whatever they may be used for now that Washington still has compared with New York these parts of Washington also contain literally hundreds of rows of houses on the more modest streets as well as individual houses of comparatively modest size and cost which would merit landmark designation if they were found in New York City today but and here is the big but all this is maad when one looks not as an architect at the individual buildings but as a planner at the Urban Design effect as a whole very few of these houses or groups of houses officially close to each other are related to create any unified block or street scene that would be characterized that would characterize a section of the city as an historic district in New York under a new landmarks law of course this definitely does not refer to old Georgetown or old Alexandria which is something quite different supposedly beautiful historic districts in every sense of the wood in most parts of Washington however the individually good houses are also lost amid a general confusion of sizes and shapes they have no cumulative late pleasing effect at all if it were not for its broad avenues and trees shaded streets Washington would have very little distinction as a city its zoning has been so's hit or miss or so ineffectively enforced that tall and low buildings as well as open parking lots break up the skyline indiscriminately. Inappropriate commercial uses used car lots filling stations and totally out of scale shopping centers intermingled with residential areas in a visit in a visual chaos in a way that even New York with all its intrinsic shortcomings has never approached the same alas is true of the outskirts of Washington within isn't as well as beyond the District Line and again I expect exclude special places of historic quality like George Town Alexandria and a few other carefully preserved remnants bygone times the suburban parts of the district and more particularly of ALEC in County Virginia and among Gummer in Prince George's County in Maryland which together form the Washingtonian equivalent of Brooklyn Queens in the Bronx are developing in this recent postwar decade the population explosion in a totally uncontrolled mess this deplorable condition however is beginning to have its reactions as one can see by reading that excellent local newspaper The Washington Post which gives much more space and intelligent reporting to zoning and building matters than the New York New York's newspapers I have before me a clipping caption rustlings neon landmark big motel sign rise to twelve stories which notes with proper editorial discussed the approval by a local board at Arlington County of a pair of fourteen bicep forty seven foot neon signs to be erected on top of a twelve story tower being put up by a popular hotel chain right on the shores of the Potomac River not only would good planning discourage such a traffic generator of this size at this particular scenic spot but instead it considerations in our only arcs of a bizarre would like to hope would rule against such a building anyway in a quiet residential suburban district. But to approve a neon sign on top of it would be unheard of in New York and most of its suburbs because our zoning would not allow it New Yorkers and by that I include the residents of many of our suburban areas as well who are going to can congratulate themselves as being a little bit more enlightened and the property owners in and around Washington the hopeful indication for Washington however is that in this newspaper story as well as a dozen others I clipped from a single Sunday issue of The Washington Post all report growing opposition on the part of civic groups who are beginning to react healthily against the sort of abuse of their town scape as well as their landscape in Prince George's County for example civic groups have joined together to oppose not only high rise apartments and low density areas but also six lane highways and high density shopping centers with their vast parking fields there is also evidence of citizen concern for maintaining and following adopted master plans rather than having politically minded officials blandly ignore them and Grant variances to builders who have sufficient influence best of all the Washington Post real estate editor does not record rest content with merely reporting these happenings but unlike the real estate editors of our New York papers let's his proper concern for improvement of his city show through is stories with a gratifying editorial bias in favor of the design this is Robert C. Weinberg critic at large in architecture and planning.