MR. SHAW AND THE ROMAN TEMPLES

Evening Post, Volume CXXV, Issue 36, 12 February 1938, Page 27

MR. SHAW AND THE ROMAN TEMPLES

The views of Mr. Bernard Shaw on architecture; ancient and modern, are given in a foreword which he contributes to the catalogue of the Mars (Modern Architectural Research) Group Exhibition, at the New Burlington Galleries, in London, says the "Daily Telegraph and Morning Post."

The extravagantly "impressive architecture" of the ancient Roman temples and their more recent imitations is "not worth twopence" in Mr. Shaw"s view.

"Architecture of this kind may be called impressive erchitecture," he writes. "It persists from Baalbek to the country seats of our landed gentry, to the terraces, gardens, and squares of Bayswater and Bloomsbury, South Kensington and Regent's Park and to the newest fanes of the Church.

"I lived for 30 years in Adelphi Terrace, which was built to reproduce in London the splendours of the Palace of Diocletian in Split, and for nearly twenty in Fitzroy Square, where you may still see what the impressive architects called facades.

"As to the terrace, it has just been razed to the ground arid even deeper.

I speak with the authority of personal experience when I say that in neither of these residences was there a bathroom, and in both the sanitary arrangements had had no place in the original plans. In impressive architecture it is the outside.that matters most, and the servants do not matter at all.

■'The Mars Group represents a violent reaction against impressive architecture," he writes. "It considers the health and convenience not only of the inmates but of their neighbours and of the whole town . . . though, of course, it is often baffled on this point just as Christopher Wren was.

"Martian architecture is part of a new artistic movement. Its unprejudiced search for new beauties of form is in its favour, for the seekers after what Dickens's blacksmith happily called the architectooralooral always find themselves back again at Lancaster Gate or the Tate Gallery, and we have had enough of that. At least. I have."

The patrons of the exhibition include the Earl of Derby, Viscount Wakefield. Lord Horder, and Sir Michael Sadler.