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Ontario Association of Architects. Toronto, February 5th, 1937

I am honoured to be asked to open the exhibition of your
Association. I am always honoured to be asked to do something for
which I am manifestly unfitted, since the invitation implies a compliment
to a knowledge which I do not possess. But architecture is
one of the arts in which every man must have a personal interest. It
affects us all in our common life. We may be blind to the beauty of
pictorial art; we may be totally deaf to music; but we must have a
roof to cover us, and the most complete Philistine must have some
interest in architecture.

I have no technical knowledge of the subject, but I would
venture to offer you, with profound respect, a few observations. I
was brought up in a country, Scotland, which has comparatively few
old buildings of any architectural pretensions. What between fighting
England and fighting among ourselves, and being a little too vigorous
at the Reformation, we managed to destroy most of the architectural
achievements of our ancestors. I have spent most of my
life in a country, England, which has happily many noble relics of
the past. And in my youth I spent some years in a country, South
Africa, which did not destroy her old buildings, for the simple reason
that she never had more than a few. I have, therefore, been led
to reflect a good deal upon what an architectural tradition means in
a country. It seems to me that you may have too much in the way of a
tradition, and you may have too little. The world moves fast, human
needs change their character, new mechanical inventions develop.
If you are bound hard and fast by a narrow tradition you will be apt
to produce buildings which do not truly serve the needs of the com-