THE FARM LANDSCAPE 287 



panies who run these operations to see if they will attempt to provide 

 a small amount of diversity on these large landscapes. 



I would say second, that agricultural architecture is growing less 

 pleasing and it is becoming more the processing plant of the large 

 monocultural operation. Isolation of such plants in the countryside 

 is not good enough reason for their being allowed to be bad archi- 

 tecture. Many industrial buildings have great beauty and agri- 

 cultural ones should try to reach a pleasing standard. 



I think architecture should be one of the first things taught to a 

 child, not by telling him but by giving him architecturally sound 

 bricks instead of just square blocks and letting him play with those. 



Third, I feel that the policy of taxing land can be rather upside 

 down. If you tax lands when development takes place, then you 

 retard development insofar as somebody wishes to keep a farm as 

 a farm. If you tax on potential, as is now general in the United 

 States (but not over-all there are counties that have changed in 

 this respect,) it means that the farm between two subdivisions is 

 squeezed out. It has to develop. 



I feel that the tax on development, after development has taken 

 place, would be a sounder process. I also, fourthly, would like to 

 bring up the matter of zoning of private lands adjacent to large pub- 

 lic land areas such as national parks and national forests. These 

 lands rise in price as soon as these public areas are proclaimed and 

 a very poor style of development can and does take place on the very 

 periphery of large and beautiful wild lands. 



I feel that zoning of a buffer area around these natural wild lands 

 would help not only to beautify them, but would maintain the areas 

 in the condition for which they were chosen. 



I think at the moment that some of these things are politically im- 

 possible, but they should not be politically impractical within a fairly 

 near future. 



Mr. WENKAM. I am very pleased that Mr. Rockefeller empha- 

 sized in his opening remarks that we need not carry on philosophical 

 speculation; that we are here not to just talk about natural beauty, 

 but to offer concrete suggestions on how to keep what little we 

 have left. 



Even Hawaii, famed for its beauty, has not been spared the devel- 

 oper's axe of progress. It may seem unbelievable, considering the 

 fact that Diamond Head is the prime symbol and scenic asset of 

 Hawaii's $320 million tourist industry, but there is under construe- 



