Page:Old Towns and New Needs.djvu/90

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THE TOWN EXTENSION PLAN
61

facility of regulating our town development on better lines than in the past; but the purpose of all this is to make of our towns dwelling places more fitting for a race of beings who do not live by bread alone, but who require also mental culture and an outlet for the expression of their spiritual aspirations. When you want to erect a new municipal building or a new cathedral, having settled the requirements, practical or hygienic, that the building must serve, you call in the artist to give form to the building, that it may express by its beauty something more, something which throughout the ages every race of man has felt to be necessary to the completion of his work; and so must it be in our city building. When sociologists and surveyors have settled the requirements, and economists and engineers have settled the possibilities, then we, as our forefathers did, must call in the man of imagination, the artist, to clothe these requirements in some beautiful form. The Greeks and Romans did this as you may see from the beautiful re-creation of Ephesus and others of their cities. The mediaeval builders succeeded also, though on quite different lines, as is evident in Rothenburg, Nuremburg, or any city where mediaeval remains to any extent exist. The town planners of the Renaissance in like manner gave order and beauty to their cities, and their works, as being nearer our own time, we should study with special care, such examples for instance as may be seen in Paris, Karlsruhe, Turin, or Copenhagen.

Your Manchester Society of Architects have already made sketches for a plan of a Manchester suburb which are