I spent a couple of hours yesterday' in the exhibition of the "Mars" group "otherwise the Modern Architectural Research Society. At the entrance in an illuminated frame is a copy of the old Elizabethan Sir Henry Wootton's Book on architecture, opened at the page where he defines "well building" as having "three conditions, commoditio, frmenes and delight." But the modern designers clo not seem to have learnt these rules very well. for their buildings are certainly much. Jess commodious than those of the past, and in most instances very much Tess firm, and it would be hard to jeall them delightful.
In one direction Mars deserves all encouragement when it insists that architecture and town-planning are part of each other, and its scheme for the future London, with great ronds running out from the centre like spokes of a wheel, all buildings being closely grouped about them with great wedges of green country in between, is certainly encouraging. 'There are also plans, in model form, settlements, they could hardly' be called villages, would save much am destruction of woods and elds, though they are rather distressingly symmetrical, (You remember how Mme de Maintenon said of Louis XIV, "We perish with him in sym-merry").
On the other. hand one cannot help fooling that in trying to make our houses more comfortable, with more Tight, Better bathrooms, more labour saving gadgets, modern architects are making unnecessary assaults on external appearance. The great blocks. fof flats so common now, which appear to consist of ong bands of unadorned concrete, suspended above each other Without apparent support are not essentially different from the older flats except, as I heard one lady say, "that they are - uglier." With uns conscious cruelty to themselves the Mars exhibitors show in one room. large pictures of famous building styles of the past, Norman, Gothic, Tudor and Renaissance: to which they proudly claim the modern age is now adding a new chapter. Well, the future will judge.
'One interesting section is a model nursery. The beds, canvas sheets fightly' stretched in a frame, are arranged above each other Uke bunks In a ship, with a rope ladder by: which. the infants climb to their Fespective lairs; in one corner a trap Jdoor lifts up to disclose a pool for falling toy boats on; and all the furniture is sealed' down tothe proportions of an average child of four to six. I seem very captious to-day but T wonder whether children really ike this. Ordinary furniture, by' its very. vastness, lends itself to all sorts of exciting possibilities in the way of dens and caves In the games which a child invents for it~ self; and there must be many people who"ean remember the immense pride one felt on being promoted from fa high chair to an'ordinary one,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.