Theme: Centenary, 1935-1951.

During the '30s and '40s, the Review consolidated its position as the leading English language architectural magazine, through a mixture of Modernism, tradition and scholarship.

Throughout the 1930s, a spirit of exhilarating change permeated the A.R. J. M. Richards(1) succeeded John Betjeman as assistant editor, moving from The Architects' Journal, where he had occupied a similar post since 1933. H. de C. Hastings continued to be executive editor of both the AJ and AR, exercising imperious control over proceedings. However Richards quickly made his mark with a long essay on industrial design and functionalism entitled 'Towards a Rational Aesthetic' (p56). By 1937, he was editor. Together, Richards and P. Morton Shand(2) set about seriously documenting and analysing Modernism. Morton Shand was a personal friend of Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier and Alvar Aalto and it was he who travelled around Europe, bringing back photographs of their work and writing eloquent critiques of new buildings, such as Aalto's Viipuri library (vol LXXIX, 1935, p 107). Translated by Morton Shand, Le Corbusier was enticed on to the Review's pages - a seminal issue in January 1936 presented Corb's polemic for the Vertical Garden City, backed up by an appraisal of Tecton's Highpoint flats. Corbusier also wrote a glowing tribute (p58) to the MARS Group Exhibition(3) in 1938, that Richards had a part in organising. The new architecture was ravishingly illustrated by the black and white prints of Messrs M. O. Dell and H. L. Wainwright,(4) house photographers for both the AR and AJ.

A number of the leading members of the small band of modern architects in England were of foreign origin - Berthold Lubetkin,(5) Serge Chermayeff, Erno Goldfinger, Erich Mendelsohn and Walter Gropius. Many of these eminent refugees passed through Queen Anne's Gate. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy designed a memorable issue on the English seaside and its holiday traditions in 1936; also in that year, another emigre, Nikolaus Pevsner(6) wrote to Richards asking whether he would be interested in publishing an article on the role of the designer in industry. From this tentative start, Pevsner went on to become a key contributor.

One of Richards' early innovations was to instigate a consistent critical framework for appraising buildings 'in which the function of the building and the evolution of its design were analysed, both generally and in detail'. He also began to travel around Britain, often in the company of the painter John Piper, to delve into architecture's vernacular roots, as embodied by buildings, townscape, landscape and materials; everything from pubs to milestones. The notion that traditional design could be related to modern architecture's widening vocabulary without resorting to pastiche was consistently explored through articles such as the Nautical Tradition (p59), the Bath Road (vol LXXXV, 1939, p229), Fully Licensed (celebrating the great English pub, p60), and eventually consolidated in The Functional Tradition (p66). Yet the AR's Modernism never denied the value of the past. Nor did it stint itself on promulgating an inclusive, sometimes messy, Betjemanesque vitality. A series on 'Minor Masters of the Nineteenth Century' included a copiously illustrated article on 'Urbain Dubois, chef-de-cuisine to the Prussian Court' (vol LXXX, 1936, p85). The exotic travelogues continued - Hugh Casson was exported to South Africa (p61); W. A. Henderson explored the Spanish Colonial legacy of Bolivia (vol LXXXV, 1939, p 165). (Sadly the great Iranologue, Robert Byron, was killed during the War.) As there were no specialist periodicals dealing with interiors, furniture, architectural history, landscape or town planning, the AR set about enthusiastically filling the gap.

By the end of the 1930s, the AR's reputation was established as the leading English language architectural magazine, with subscribers and readers worldwide. The onset of the Second Word War did not seriously destabilise this position, but it did create logistical difficulties and general hardship. In September 1939, the Architectural Press evacuated to Cheam and the WRENS requisitioned Queen Anne's Gate. Paper rationing meant an inevitable loss of the seductive, glossy tactility that had become a hallmark of the Review - some pages were printed on very thin, lightly coloured paper. (Imaginative use of coloured stock became common after the War.) In 1942 Jim Richards left to do war service and Pevsner became (temporary) editor.

The AR began to record bomb damage to notable buildings and looked to countries geographically and politically outside the grip of war - Sweden (again, vol XCIV, 1943), South Africa (Modernism transplanted to the highveld, vol XCVI, 1944) and a major special issue on Brazil, following the 'Brazil Builds' exhibition at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1943 (p63).

In the post-war years, Hastings and Richards assumed control(7) and the magazine's reputation for scholarship and presentation grew. Pevsner's contributions were supplemented by the young Colin Rowe, who in 1947 made his debut with a densely argued critique, 'The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa' (p65). The talented photographer Eric de Mare was commissioned to do an issue on 'Canals', in the style of the 'Functional Tradition' (p65). The first art editor, Gordon Cullen began his magical 'Townscape' studies. The great task of reconstruction was championed as a chance to create a visionary new world - although as early as 1940, Richards had invented a sceptical alter ego, 'James MacQuedy', to take the edge off the AR's Modernist thrust. In 1946 Hastings established the extraordinary Bride of Denmark in the basement of Queen Anne's Gate (p 106), and by the early 1950s, the dark days of war and rationing seemed a long way off. This era culminated in the Festival of Britain and lavish coverage of the South Bank Exhibition (p67), which to the AR represented an optimistic and triumphant flowering of Modernist ideals. C. S.

1935

Brussels 1935

Scandinavian pavilions impress at the Brussels International Exhibition.

Perhaps the most interesting thing illustrated by the International Exhibition at Brussels is the character that the modern movement in design is acquiring in the North European countries. Denmark, Sweden and Norway have each contributed living ideas, and in their national pavilions have carried the technique of exhibition display to a new altitude. Those three countries each enjoy an understanding of design not only in industry and in the handicrafts, but in the arts associated with the distribution of goods. This understanding enables them to show well-designed things and to be agreeably inventive in the manner of showing them.

Eastern travels

Nepalese architecture briefly considered on Patrick Balfour's Grand Tour.

The excellence of Nepalese architecture (which, by the way, has never yet been 'done' by an art-historian) is given due praise in Grand Tour. Mr. Balfour compares the cities in the valley of Katmandu to those of Tudor England. The comparison is good in so far as it relates to the materials of the buildings: the mellow red bricks, the tiles and the dark carved wood beams let into the walls and supporting the roofs. But the proportion of Tudor architecture was not its strong point, and the proportions of the Nepalese temple proper (the pagoda-roofed type) compare favourably with the highest standard of proportion in Europe. The five-storey temple at Bhatgaon is, in its way, as balanced and perfect as the Parthenon.

Machine made

The machine as form giver, analysed in the search for a modern aesthetic.

Study of machines as objects and analysis of their several beauties have added many qualities to the designer's vocabulary; among these is an appreciation of the formal, abstract relationship of machine forms. There is no need to point out the debt to the machine owed by certain schools in the so-called 'fine' arts, notably the cubists and the constructivists. Both the machine and the artist have been engaged in resolving the organic world into its essential geometric elements. The constructions of such artists as Pevsner, Gabo and Moholy-Nagy are in fact machines that happen to be non-utilitarian in the purely productive sense. The possibility of their existence, incidentally, points per contra to the weakness of the 'beauty out of pure function' theory. So many of the formal values of the machine have little connection with the machine in operation. The distinction has to be maintained between the machine as an aesthetic object and machine as a source of aesthetic form.

Vertical cities

Le Corbusier presents a polemic for the Vertical Garden City, a drastic, modern antidote to urban chaos.

Have modern times the right to create their own towns, to manifest their spiritual significance? I believe that this tradition, which we recognize as existing is broken and smashed today by the paradox of the town immeasurably extended, and I believe that a new tradition is being born which will safeguard all that was the prime motive power of the preceding tradition. It will be the new tradition of vertical garden-cities, made possible by modern technique. It will replace the horizontal garden-cities by giving what those have ceased to give, bringing what they have ceased to bring; everyday joys, much more real that the illusions of today. Our immense progress will bring immense benefits.

The vertical garden city:

(a) Brings the solution of modern speed: the separation of automobile and pedestrian routes. The whole site is at the disposal of the pedestrian, out of danger from cars.

(b) Gives facilities for the organization of communal services: liberation from domestic slavery, of great importance for women.

(c) Safeguards the site; creates a real landscape and provides the opportunity of admiring it by means of eloquent avenues superimposed one upon another.

(d) restores the land for useful purposes, one of which, at least, is to provide sports facilities at the very feet of the houses; another, if necessary, to provide vegetable gardens for intensive cultivation; much more interesting than the traditional small garden system.

The English at the seaside

The fascinating social and architectural traditions of English seaside towns, lovingly observed and humorously recorded by Osbert Lancaster.

The ritual of bathing itself was becoming ever more elaborated and complicated in the early days of Brighton, when it was still looked on as a species of medical treatment, and a variety of 'duckers' and other attendants had always been at hand to assist the novice, the men bathed naked and the women wore a sort of canvas sack. (At Margate, however, if Rowlandson is to be believed, the women also bathed in a state of nature, which doubtless added considerably to the delight of life on the beach.) Later this was all changed, and the gentlemen were not even allowed to appear on the promenade until the ladies' bathing hour was over. Later still came the bathing machine, complete with a funnel-like awning under which the fair sex could disport themselves, free from anxiety on the score of modesty. The men, on the other hand, until quite late in the Victorian period, wore nothing but their whiskers and a pair of drawers; it was left for a later generation to evolve regulations forbidding the topless bathing dress.

After the bathe the bun. This praiseworthy and agreeable custom seems early to have established itself, with the ultimate and unforeseen result that every seaside town was soon equipped with several tea-shops, that steadily increased in number and hideousness right up to the present moment, when they have surely reached a pitch of ingenious ugliness that, one hopes, can never be surpassed. Other institutions that no self-respecting resort would willingly be without, were the bandstand and the pier, both, alas, brought to perfection at a time when all the glorious possibilities latent in cast iron were first being realized. Another menace that threatened the sober, decent, stucco terraces of the earlier resorts at this time was a growing fondness for a happy combination of red bricks, gables and white wood balconies. In the newer places, such as Bournemouth. the residential districts were built almost entirely in this style. The Isle of Wight, however, remained faithful to stucco for most of its buildings until late in the century, although a few of the larger houses blossomed out into a curious seaside version of Barry's club-house Italian, while Scarborough evolved a species of North-Sea boarding-house Gothic that was all its own.

1937

The end of the Crystal Palace

Le Corbusier laments the demise of Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace, a London landmark which was dramatically consumed by a great fire in November 1937.

The Crystal Palace no longer exists. What has disappeared with it was not a curiosity, but one of the great monuments of nineteenth-century architecture.

That century had a strange destiny. It engendered the architecture of the modern world, exemplifying it in immense and splendid structures. This architecture was the fruit of discovery, of the joy of creation, and of enthusiasm. The mind of man suddenly began to compass unguessed and amazing perspectives. The iron and glass which were furnished by the rising new industries allowed unprecedented forms to be evoked, dimensions such as one may say architecture had never known. I mean the dimensions of those vaulted buildings and huge covered markets that were as light within as fields seen under the open sky. They were built of iron and glass. The international exhibitions of that age of discoveries offered fruitful opportunities for realizing structures of this kind. In London as in Paris stupendous palaces were raised ... but these were fated to gather about them all the worst excrescences of the successive stages of a rising tide of bourgeois revulsion. While the new world was being born the forces of reaction rose en masse. Academism invaded government departments, the schools and institutions. Never had architecture sunk to such a low ebb. The most baneful temper prevailed. It gained the day, and as a result those magnificent vaults of iron and glass which had been the heralds of a new age were demolished right and left.

By some miracle the Crystal Palace still remained as a last witness of that era of faith and daring. One could go and see it, and feel there how far we have still to go before we can hope to recover that sense of scale which animated our predecessors in all they wrought.

Love from FLW 

Frank Lloyd Wright ruminates sentimentally from his sickbed on what current architecture requires most in order to flourish - love, it seems, is all you need.

As I write convalescent - it seems to me that what the Cause of Architecture needs most, to put it into plain homely English, is Love: Love's inevitable devotions to a great art and less concern with these selfish ambitions our capitalistic system forces to be so ruthless: less publicizing: more patient self-sacrificing appreciation. When I think of the short-cuts taken by our young men today and consider the nine years in preparation and six of practice in silence that was my lot, it is to think some modern improvement may have rendered that consecration "dated" or to reflect that perhaps such preparation may have unwittingly contributed, too much, to the "short-cut." This, from me, does sound rather "aged."

But the spirit of youth is ever the spirit of love. And love, I know, has its consecrations as surely as it is love. These consecrations are no longer possible to the eclecticism of the old grand school any more than they are possible to the exploitations of the hard-as-nails new school. But where love is, there architecture will be growing strong in its own right.

Mies exiled

Exiled in America, Mies takes up a new academic post in Chicago.

The news comes from America that Herr Mies van der Rohe [sic] has been appointed Director of the Armour Institute of Technology's School of Architecture in Chicago. Mies van der Rohe [sic] is one of that small but distinguished band of modern architects who worked in Behrens' office (Le Corbusier and Gropius were others). He subsequently exercised a great influence on modern continental architecture as director first of the Deutsche Werkbund and afterwards of the Bauhaus at Dessau (where he followed Gropius). At the moment it seems likely that America will benefit as much from the current ideological heresy-hunting in Europe as Prussia itself once did from a similar outburst in France that sent the ablest of the French Huguenots to seek shelter with Herr Hitler's less obsessed predecessor, the Great Frederick.

Nautical style

As a prelude to the later Functional Tradition, John Piper describes the elements of maritime building.

There is a clear tradition of seacoast building - particularly in England, with its intense maritime pride and efficiency. This is a study of the fruits of the tradition, and of its development by generations of maritime builders; of the use they have made of the sea-influence and the frequent misuse that landsmen have made of it.

The tradition has a strong functional bias, and a vital one. This functionalism has two sides. On the coast waves break and salt foam scatters and denudes, gales blow stronger and the rain is more searching. Buildings must be sturdy and close to the earth. But besides that, the coast belongs to the mariner rather than the landsman. To the mariner the sea is a livelihood, but the coast is dwelling place, harbour, menace, shelter and everything else.

Sweden

In an increasingly unsettled Europe, Sweden remained a haven of stability, full of confident modern architecture.

With unsettled political conditions increasingly curtailing architectural development in many parts of Europe we look towards the Scandinavian countries to maintain a sane tradition of modern building, one that is based on modern architecture's own rational premises rather than on any ideological aspirations. For the same reasons the Scandinavian countries, and probably Sweden in particular, will this year be more than ever the summer holiday destination of the architectural tourist ...

The modern theory of building, which, for lack of a better definition, we can describe as "functionalism," arrived rather late in Sweden. It is only since the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930, which so admirably expressed the spirit of modernism and made a deep and lasting impression upon public, critics and contemporary architects alike, that Sweden has acquired an important voice in modern architecture. When it came there were preliminary battles to fight, and the movement was accepted with unanimity. The problem was to find the correct method of approach to Swedish ways of living, of finding ways of using technical methods in a northern country, and of absorbing logically existing refinements of design.

1939

Fully licensed

The virtues, vices, textures and traditions of the English public house, lovingly celebrated by John Piper.

Engraved glass came into its own in the Victorian public house. It is particularly suitable because it completes the busy patterned wall surfaces that any good bar has to show, outside and in, and it obscures the vision and not the light. Look out for the wonderful patterns engraved and frosted on bar doors, windows and mirrors, and regret that here again we have invented nothing so appropriate to take their place. The birds or ships or flowers elaborately engaged among floral scrolls produce a splendid artificiality. Almost every London and provincial Gin Palace has some to show. Their bars very often have, too, patterned plaster ceillings that are maligned by the too-tasteful, but of good craftsmanship and of thoughtful, elaborate design.

Bauhaus decade

A book on the now defunct Bauhaus provided a fitting commemoration of its radical artistic achievements.

After the Deutsche Werkbund exhibition in Paris in 1930 Paul Fierens wrote: "The Bauhaus at Dessau represents a whole generation of explorers capable of exploiting the numerous resources of modern technics; it is a school and a laboratory at the same time. Germany has realized the importance of the problem, which she has considered in connection with the social reorganization now going on. And that is why, in the history of architecture and the industrial arts of the 20th century, Germany will have the lion's share." But three years later the brief post-war Indian Summer, which had seen the reflowering of German science, art, letters, theatre and music, was to be swept away by the violence of Fascism. With it went the Bauhaus, closed by the National Socialists; now the building is used as a training school for political leaders... Whatever doubts we may have about the sufficiency of the Bauhaus idea, and however much it may appear that the integrity of Gropius' aim was side-tracked by some of his esoteric artistic collaborators, there is no denying that the Bauhaus was a very real achievement, and the first and only serious school of design for the industrial age. Aiming at a co-ordination of all art and design in a new architecture, "the ultimate, if distant, goal" was "the collective work of art - the Building in which no barriers exist between the structural and the decorative arts." The Bauhaus was not an architectural school; it was a technical college for training and experiment in design in a wide sense.

Sweet homes

With characteristic wit, Osbert Lancaster chronicled the perils and peccadillos of modern homemaking.

Mr. Lancaster is an incisive caricaturist of object, and pokes the prettiest fun at stuffed bears holding lamps, draped pianofortes, archaic gramophones, bogus church candlesticks, polyangular looking-glasses and those shiny armchairs which look even more uncomfortable than they are. With delighted vindictiveness one recognizes details from the houses of one's friends - the unmanageable Tudor latches, the Knole sofas, the Van Gogh Sunflowers, the samplers, the chastely starred lampshades from "Pierre Jean" in Sloane Square or "Jean Louis" in Oxford Street. My own withers, I may add, are unwrung, for Mr. Lancaster, no doubt because the style has not been commercially popularized, has omitted to notice what might be called the "Gordon Square Higgledy-Piggledy." This includes curtains by Duncan Grant (or Vanessa Bell), doors and chimney-pieces painted with blobs and croquet-hoops by Vanessa Bell (or Duncan Grant), furniture of every style except the Tudor and modernistic ... tattered unbound French books, Kelim rugs, very large armchairs in loose covers ... paper flowers, casts from the antique, glass snowstorms, mid-Victorian looking-glasses, peculiar French post-cards in colour and paintings by Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell.

Modern primer

J. M. Richards' concisely written guide to the perplexing mysteries of modern architecture attracted good reviews.

In An Introduction to Modern Architecture Mr. Richards has achieved a difficult task, apparently with ease. His opening sentence shows that he is not in the least afraid of what may be implied by his title. "The words modern architecture," he says, "are used here to mean something more particular than contemporary architecture. They are used to mean the new kind of architecture that is growing up with the century as this century's own contribution to the art of architecture; the work of those people ... who understand that architecture is a social art related to the life of the people it senses, not an academic exercise in applied ornament." That is the way to lead off, certainly. He proceeds from there to answer all the questions his readers may be relied upon to ask, and, so to say, shut their mouths before they have time to interrupt. But there is nothing particularly didactic or doctrinaire about this treatize. Mr. Richards knows his subject so well and has had so much experience of the reactions of a variety of readers, that one feels he must succeed where many other writers have failed.

South Africa

En route by train from Cape Town to Pretoria, Hugh Casson recorded the landscape, buildings and people.

Small towns, no more than a string of shacks along a dusty street, straggle loosely by. They leave an impression of a weed-grown siding, of cables trailing across rickety posts, of rusty car skeletons and paintless fences, a fly-blown store, and perhaps the scarlet mark of a petrol pump ... They seem to have the worried precarious air of a street hawker waiting to be moved on by the police. More casual still, but somehow less self-conscious, are the native huts and villages which inconsequently dot the veldt. What looks like a pile of rusting scrap-iron, a disintegrating mound of mud, or a particularly ill-stacked heap of driftwood, will almost certainly prove upon close inspection, to be inhabited. Flattened tins gape to disclose a wisp of curtain. A rakish stove-pipe penetrates a roof contrived from wire netting and sacks. Outside, among the cooking pots and children, scrawny hens peck dispiritedly and a dusty donkey lies curled agianst a fence. Traditional native building materials and methods, it is obvious, are not used close to the railway line. Corrugated iron is cheaper and far more chic. (So enthusiastically in fact is civilization and its products welcomed here, that the romantically minded native will not call his children Rosalind or Lancelot, as would his counterpart in England, but Telegraph, Half-crown, or Handlebars.) A grove of dusty cypresses guards a native graveyard, a rudely fenced collection of sun-baked mounds, on which sometimes lie such relics of the deceased as an alarm clock or a rusting kettle. An ostrich from a neighbouring farm stalks beside the line, a distant car trails a plume of dust across the veldt, and cloud shadows crawl slowly over the foot hills like spreading stains across a crumpled cloth.

1941

AR bombed

The premises of the AR's printers, Eyre and Spottiswoode, were destroyed in an air raid targeted on central London.

Above is a recent photograph of Messrs. Eyre and Spottiswoode's printing house, looking down Gunpowder Alley, which runs parallel with Fleet Street, London. This is one of many narrow passages that intersect the maze of ancient buildings north of Gough Square, where in the garret of No. 17 Dr. Johnson produced the Dictionary. Eyre and Spottiswoode are His Majesty's printers and the printers of The Architectural Review, and it was unfortunate that the destruction of their premises by enemy action should have occurred when the January number of the Review had just been printed and was still at the printers awaiting binding and distribution.

The view over central London from neighbouring high ground on that theatrical night showed countless nuclei of fire and a continuous red glow reflected on the clouds of smoke that rolled over it. The human dramas played in the streets and shelters had a setting of Plutonic grandeur. A large proportion of the firelight was provided by Wren churches and other architectural treasures; a small proportion was provided by the burning pages of The Architectural Review; and it is not without pride that the Review records that it burnt in good company. For, in common with the people of London, it hopes that the narrow commercial interests that created the disharmony and disorder of the city (and were suitably reflected in the insincerity of its business architecture) will not survive this war, and that the principles of order and dignity that the Wren churches may be said to symbolize will be much more typical of the new city we shall build afterwards. In which case even so valuable a burnt offering as the City's architectural treasures will not have been sacrificed for nothing.

Voysey obituary

Voysey's death in 1941 marked the passing of a link with a particularly fecund period of English architecture.

Those who had the privilege of meeting Voysey in recent years remember him as a gentle, courteous man who received one in his characteristically furnished study at the top of a long flight of stairs in St. James's and talked about times and events that no one else remembered, or as a shrunken figure in blue enveloped in a large chair at the Arts Club, where he was accustomed to spend many of his days. But his death is not the passing of a tired old man but the disappearance of our closest link with one of the most creditable episodes in the whole history of English architecture.

War design

Design during wartime offered a chance to exploit Modernist precepts of simple forms and fitness for purpose.

The chief distinguishing quality of all emergency design is that it is design in a hurry. But during war-time it is also design on whose rightness life or death may depend. The street lamp in the blackout if it is too light attracts bombers, if too dark causes street accidents. The stretcher if badly designed can be fatal to a fractured spine case. The shelter if illegibly marked remains unused during air raids. The evacuation camp if wrongly constructed may be rat-infested, or worse, infection-breeding.

Emergency design must be rigorously functional and in its meaning self-evident. Moreover, as it is leisureless design, frills are out of the question. Now these specific characteristics of emergency design - fitness for purpose, directness of expression, distrust of applied ornament - happen to coincide with fundamental characteristics of the best contemporary architecture and design. The war and its sudden imperative needs afford thus an opportunity of the first order to the clear-headed and the determined - not only in strategy and diplomacy, but also in design.

Changing times

The cataclysm of war prompted some reflections on the nature of change and the challenges of the future.

The real parallel is not between this war and any other war, but between this war and the industrial revolution of rather over a century ago. Then, as now, the changes that civilization continually undergoes were suddenly accelerated, most violently so in the social and economic worlds. Architecture at first tried to pretend that the good old days of the eighteenth century had not gone for ever, and then, realizing too late that they had, failed altogether to adapt itself to the new world that these changes had brought about. It lost touch with reality and sank into the chaos of the nineteenth century. Today we are in much the same position as we were in the time of Sir John Soane, the Reform Bill, the birth of steam traction and gas lighting, Chartism, the Brighton Pavilion, negro emancipation and Napoleon Bonaparte. And one task of architecture today, as of everything else, is to admit at once that the old days are gone for good and to keep in touch with the new days, refusing at all costs to allow our own war, revolution, violent upheaval of civilization or whatever we care to call it, to cut architecture adrift from the realities on which it depends - adrift into a new eclectic age in which architecture is a respected professional mystery but not an essential part of the machinery of civilization.

Brazil

Far removed from wartime Europe, Brazil's emerging Modern Movement was recorded in a notable special issue.

Brazil is very much alive to her future possibilities, for the exploitation of her natural resources by modern industrial methods is only beginning. The temperate climate and absence of frost allows concrete to be exposed here in any weather and this material has been chosen almost exclusively for contemporary building. Iron has yet to be worked on a larger scale before steel can be employed in the building industry to any extent.

Le Corbusier's visit to Brazil as consultant marked a turning-point in the history of modern Brazilian architecture. His ideas were absorbed by a brilliant band of architects and by them developed. The modern movement blossomed suddenly. It by-passed the infant stage. The problem of heat and light, a question never tackled by the old school, has been successfully solved. Two main types of sun-baffles, the pierced concrete screen or 'camboge'; and the quebra-sol or brise soleil, are both used in a revolutionary way. But the most striking thing about these new buildings is that they are entirely Brazilian - as Brazilian as Swedish buildings are Swedish. So Brazilian are they, they do not seem to conflict with the earlier architecture.

1945

A new vision

The end of the war ushered in an era of reconstruction - the AR wondered what the new world would look like.

The war in Europe is over, and reconstruction is on our doorstep. Are the national plans ready? What houses are to go where? How many will be built, how many temporary, how many permanent? How will the monuments of the past be handled? How will they be kept alive? What factories will be moved, wherefrom and whereto? Have these years of struggle been used to build up that corpus of information without which no successful planning can be done? Has there been enough energy to spare from the immediate needs of the war to grapple with the necessary research and survey problems? And has there been enough governmental encouragement? We don't know.

There is however one need which quite certainly has not been satisfied; and it is a need which can be satisfied without extensive research. It is not easily satisfied all the same, because it demands a new vision, the vision of what this country will look like when all the planning has been done.

Peaks and ruins

The terrible destruction wrought on German cities was sombrely recorded.

Germany's cities all look alike. The main streets are canyons in a landscape of peaks and ruins; the side streets are narrow paths; the side streets are narrow paths that wind between cascades of rubble yellow with last summer's weeds, out of which the russet sticks of steel protrude at all angles. There is no question of cleaning the ground as we have done. This will be the work of years. A technique must be worked out, then new vast machines designed and built, of which there is no prospect. So the peaks and grids stand in the thin snow, ochre and black terra-cotta, with lumps and lozenges of concrete dangling on their webs of reinforcement - subject after subject for a fashionable landscape. A few halls have been patched up, whence huge expensively dressed audiences, tearful from the Brahms Requiem or the Ninth Symphony, disperse to their cellars. The fantastic landscape through which they go might be anywhere. Old streets, new streets, rich streets, poor streets, streets of Pomerania and Bavaria and Westphalia are assimilated in the Gleichschaltung of death.

Visual re-education

The AR's half century was marked by a special issue summarising its contribution to architectural debate and making a rallying mission statement to its readers.

Let it therefore be boldly stated that the REVIEW has a "call", a call of quite a low-class, evangelical kind. It does not set out to lead a political or moral or even a social revolution, nor is it ever likely so to do, however great the temptation ... The REVIEW has another job to do, in its own way no less revolutionary - sociologists would perhaps class it as an aspect of the same revolution. Underneath its more obvious aims, running through them and linking them together, is another less tangible one, which may be described by the words visual re-education. Since it is the most imponderable of the REVIEW's policies, and thus the most open to misunderstanding, this is one that deserves to be given, on this special occasion, a good airing. It is founded on the belief that when politics, technics and sociology have been given their due, architecture remains an art, and architects must turn out, in the long run, to be artists or nothing. This does not mean that they must not be politicians or technicians; it does mean that their political and technical selves will ultimately subserve their artistic selves.

The ideal villa

Colin Rowe compares the proportions of villas by Palladio and Le Corbusier in a densely argued critique.

Corbusier selects the irrelevant and the particular, the fortuitously picturesque and the incidentally significant forms of mechanics, as the objects of his virtuousity. They retain their original implications of classical landscape, mechanical precision, rococo intimacy; one is able to cease hold of them as known objects, and sometimes as basic shapes; but they become only transiently provocative. Unlike Palladio's forms there is nothing final about their relationship; their rapprochement would seem to be affected by the artificial emptying of the cube, when the senses are confounded by the apparent arbitrariness, and the intellect more than convinced by the intuitive knowledge, that here in spite of all rules to the contrary, there is order and there are rules.

In praise of canals

The potential of canals, as both traffic routes and generators of landscape, buildings and structures, was explored and photographed by Eric de Mare.

It is generally believed that inland transport by water is obsolete and that the canals now concern only a dying race of boatmen and a few melancholy antiquarians. This attitude is understandable, because, thanks to a hundred years of poor organization, neglect and, indeed, deliberate sabotage by vested interests our waterways are not merely in bad condition but are technically out-of-date by many decades. In fact, many of them have changed very little since the days of the Industrial Revolution.

Nevertheless, water transport as such is by no means obsolete. This is proved by Continental countries where modern inland waterways flourish under state control. That our own waterways, in spite of their condition, continue to carry a surprising amount of traffic shows the tenacious vitality of this kind of transport.

Two wars have shown that, as an alternative to rail and road during times of stress, the canals are of the greatest use. From the point of view of military defence alone, canal revival might therefore be justified. In these days of road and rail congestion more benefit would be derived by expenditure on the waterways at the present time than on any other form of transport. There is every reason why we should revive them.

1950

Aalto's roots

Sigfried Giedion analyses the essence of Finland and its crucial importance in Alvar Aalto's life and work.

When Aalto was in the USA in 1939, building the Finnish Pavilion, he and I were once sitting with Brancusi, the great sculptor. Brancusi had been speaking of some work that he had done for an Indian maharajah when Aalto suddenly exclaimed, 'I see now, Brancusi! You stand at the cross-roads of Asia and Europe!' Finland is also at the crossroads of east and west, but just now we would lay most stress on the fact that many remnants of primeval and medieval times still remain alive there and intermingle with modern civilization. This double nature is instilled in Aalto too, and gives creative tension to his work.

Finland is with Aalto wherever he goes. It provides him with that inner source of energy which always flows through his work. It is as Spain is for Picasso or Ireland for James Joyce. Part of the essence of present day art is that its true representatives have their origin in a definite human environment and are not creating out of a vacuum. But it is also part of its essence that barriers between space and time, barriers between countries and barriers between future and past are torn down and, with a bold sweep, our own period, the whole world and the whole of history are embraced.

Urban America

A special issue on America attempted to grapple with the vast continent's emerging urban forms and patterns.

QUESTION What are the outstanding visual characteristics of the American urban scene - what does man-made America look like?

ANSWER by Christopher Tunnard. Briefly, standardized grid-iron towns with central 'pyramids' sometimes forming into cliff-like escarpments, marking higher land value; vast engineering undertakings like the TVA, Chicago River and Grand Central Station, New York, remarkable for big-thinking as well as skill, and providing a much-needed stimulus to the rest of the world.

QUESTION What part does the modern architect play in the task of re-creating America?

ANSWER by Henry-Russell Hitchcock. He has had no small success in persuading isolated groups to accept a contemporary manner of building which reflects what is best in American techniques and ways of life. All the same the main current of the nation's life passes him by. This, the REVIEW suggests, is because modern architects in the US - in company with those of other countries, but to an even more marked extent - lack a common front. As a result, in an age when even simple issues are grasped only with difficulty the excessive splitter of hairs is by-passed as a difficult character.

Picasso at 70

Picasso's seventieth birthday was marked by an exhibition at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts.

October 25 was not only the day of the general election; it was also Picasso's seventieth birthday. In honour of the latter event the Institute of Contemporary Arts put on an exhibition of nearly eighty drawings and watercolours made by the master since 1893, at which date he was a student at the School of Fine Arts in Corunna. If those whom the gods love die young and if the gifts with which the gods endow a man are any measure of their love for him, it is astonishing that Picasso should have been allowed to live out his biblical span. What is perhaps even more astonishing is that in fifty-eight years of working life, he should never have shown the slightest sign of settling down as a member of the happy band of Picasso's imitators.

South Bank

Six years after the end of the war, the South Bank Exhibition embodied an optimistic flowering of modern ideas.

The South Bank Exhibition thus fills the traditional role of nursery of new ideas in a particularly timely fashion, since the problems presented to its designers, especially the small size of the site, reflected many of the problems that constantly confront architects and planners in this overcrowded island: how to give a feeling of space while economizing in the use of space; how to achieve a compact urban character while avoiding congestion - visual and actual; how to weld the ideas of many architects into a whole without stifling originality or imposing uniformity; how to marry the new with the old so that one does not harm the other, but, on the contrary, so that the qualities of each enhance the other.

These problems occur with special frequency in that most difficult but at the same time most exciting of all post-war architectural tasks, the building of the new towns. In fact the South Bank Exhibition can itself be regarded as a newtown. It is a temporary town (or, more precisely, the non-residential quarter of a town) deposited on the banks of the Thames, where all can learn the lessons it contains and appreciate the ideas it contributes.

1 James Maude Richards trained as an architect, but soon gave up practice to become an eminent architectural writer and critic. He edited the AR from 1937-1971; the longest and perhaps most influential tenure of any of its editors.

2 Between 1934 and 1935 Morton Shand had completed an important series of articles entitled 'Scenario for a Human Drama', which drew attention to the early pioneers of the Modern Movement and emphasised the continuity of aim between the English Arts and Crafts designers, other Continental avant garde movements and the new European Modernism. Morton Shand was fluent in both French and German and travelled extensively. However, he was dismayed by the crudity of much postwar architecture.

3 The Modern Architecture Research Group. For a time it played an important role in fostering the cause of Modernism in England.

4 Despite (or perhaps because of) Dell having only one eye, their senses of composition were superb and their technical prowess impeccable.

5 Richards highly valued Berthold Lubetkin's intellectual, cosmopolitan influence. Lubetkin's modernity extended well beyond architecture. Richards recalls 'Lubetkin was the first man I remember seeing with a zip-fastener on his trousers'. Memoirs of an Unjust Fella, J. M. Richards, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1980, p 131.

6 Pevsner was studying at Birmingham University where he had taken up a Research Fellowship - his subject was the English tradition in industrial design. Later, when war became imminent, he got his wife and children out of Germany and settled in Britain. In 1939 Richards introduced him to Allen Lane, who had set up Penguin Books in 1937 and was looking for an author to prepare a volume on European architecture. The long association between Pevsner and Penguin Books (and the subsequent monumental Buildings of England series) stemmed from this meeting.

7 Though there was also an editorial board, consisting of H. de C. Hastings, Pevsner, Richards, Osbert Lancaster. Subsequently Hugh Casson replaced Lancaster.

RELATED ARTICLE: MARS Group

The MARS Group Exhibition in London enthuses and enthralls Le Corbusier.

On January 19th I dropped out of an airplane into the midst of a charming demonstration of youth, which revealed the architecture of tomorrow to be as smiling as it is self-reliant. Much has certainly been accomplished. It is no longer a case of fighting a battle all over the world, but of victory already won in every part of it. The characteristic quality of the New Architecture - and therefore of this MARS Exhibition - is that it anticipates the needs of mankind. Consequently, it substitutes dwellings which vouchsafe their inmates all the essential joys of life for the gloomy dens built during the last century. The New Architecture springs from the depth of the human heart. That is why it has launched a deliberate crusade against brutality, indifference, selfishness, and stupidity. This generous sentiment has prevailed because it knew how to dispose of the marvelous resources which the mechanical Age has put into our hands. Those constructive weapons were the fruit of a Technical Revolution. In this London exhibition you are confronted by men of good faith and good-will, men with the enthusiasm and sensitiveness of artists, who found their architectural faith on the heart of man, imbued with the tender aspiration to shape a home for it that shall be truly such on every day in the year. But to do so they have to face the gravest problems of planning, sociology, and economics - problems which raise the question of action as the only answer to inertia and routine.

RELATED ARTICLE: Functional style

J.M. Richards enlarges upon the notion of the Functional Tradition.

The conception of a Functional Tradition, as readers of the REVIEW will appreciate, is not one that is new to these pages. It has been touched on where clearly some anonymous force was seen to have dictated the form assumed by a bridge, a windmill or a pub, a form that appeared so satisfactory in the circumstances that it was natural to ask how it happened ...

Today we are attempting consciously to design things in terms of the most suitable materials, processes and performance standards to satisfy one or several specific functions. These same principles, unexpressed, have unconsciously controlled the forms evolved by countless generations of blacksmiths, masons, wheelwrights, millwrights and shipwrights. This is the Functional Tradition. This is the living tradition from which each successive generation can learn and has learned, and our generation is no exception. In many quarters it has of course been submerged, ignored, overlooked, even suppressed as one architectural style gave way to another, but it has nevertheless survived by virtues of its fundamental vitality and inner necessity. Today its meaning and importance is undergoing a process of reassessment, and as the contemporary designer undergoes his trial by machine, he should be able to look at familiar forms through new eyes, taking courage and drawing inspiration from a great anonymous tradition.