Two events occurred which had effects subquently far-reaching on evolution in design. One was the "Chicago Tribune" competition in Chicago, where a design by the Finn Ohel Saarinen attracted a great attention because it broke away from a feature usual in the design of tall buildings—namely, the convention of giving it a base, shaft, and cornice, Saarinen's building shot straight up as a sort of jet of piers and windows. The Americans saw in it the future of skyscraper design, and it was not long before English architects were using the same idea in the design of shops and office buildings. There have been many modifications of that crude idea since, and we have buildings like "Peter Jones" in Sloane Sqvare io show how it has developed via experiments on similar lines in Germany.
The second event was the Paris Exhibition of 1925, which exemplified the sort of modern design which had not crystallized and today is apt to be disdainfully labelled as "modernistic." There were some very signiücant buildings there, from Czecho-Slovakia, Poland, Sweden and Russia, and they have all been used as the basis for further development. If one may hazard a guess, our next drive is going to be ior still more comfort and convenience. The problem of the future will be the provision of it with no money to pay for it. Comfort, security, low first cost and maintenance—problems like these form a nice little collection of headaches which we are bequeathing to the next architectural generation.
On the aesthetic side it is quite possible that there may be brought about a renewal of the lost contacts between architecture and painting and sculpture, Our modernists have swept the floors and put away all the old familiar stage properties. The stage is now ready, but for what? The purity of the best modern work is its greatest asset, and perhaps it may become allied, as was the purity of Greek architecture, with those other arts from which so much sustenance is to be obtained,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.