ARCHITECTURE

Evening Post, Volume CXXV, Issue 48, 26 February 1938, Page 16

ARCHITECTURE

VISION OF FUTURE I INSPIRING EXHIBITION I (From "The Post's" Representative.) LONDON, January 12. A prophecy of the shape of things to come is given at an exhibition of architecture in London this month. The Mars (Modern Architectural Research) Group, an anonymous affiliation of architects, engineers, scientists, and writers : connected with ' architectural organisations on the Continent, has transformed the New Burlington Galleries into a world of the future, to show how modern architecture can solve the various problems of transport, housing, health, and amusement. ' The average age of the Mars Group, which dates from 1933, is 35. Its members are not out for individual credit. They claim that Ihe days of the nineteenth century architects with big names who were known for certain buildings are over, and that architecture is now more a matter of planning for the whole country than of single masterpieces for monstrosities) in the Commercial-Renaissance manner. The lay-out of the exhibition is in itself an example of what architecture can achieve by means of metal and glass screens, huge photo-murals, "montage," and other up-to-date methods of display. Elaborate models show schemes for rebuilding London as the ideal city.and a novel device enables visitors to make their own experiments in house-planning. Models of buildings are shown from every aspect, and there is also a "skeleton" house on the lines of an X-ray photograph, revealing the complicated equipment necessitated by heat, Light, power, ventilation, refrigeration, water, gas, electricity, telephone, radio, and so on. There is built-in furniture which makes the smallest room spacious, and a model nursery erected on- a raised platform so that a grown-up person sees it as it appears to a child. No excuse now for windows too high, to give a view, toy'cupboards too tall for the topmost shelves to be reached, basins so high that they can only be used by standing on a chair! An especially interesting sectionshows the material, with which an architect builds. Metals, how a whole equipment can. be stamped out of sheet metal like the parts of a car; glass, not merely used for windows; bricks, the exquisite 'textures of which they can be made; reinforced concrete, and how it is reinforced; glass wool, used as an acoustic absorbent; aluminium foil, for insulation; photo-murals, for decoration; the latest equipment for door handles' switches, telephones, and the latest uses of leather, textiles, and wood veneer. ■ The exhibition as a whole emphasises by its example the need of creating a modern architecture which will be 'to our age what Gothic, Jacobean, Georgian, and Regency buildings were to theirs, and naturally it is proving of as much interest to men and women concerned v/ith planning their own homes as to scientists and the trade.