Two Years' Architecture

A large pink Zeus for the pediment of the Philadelphia Museum smiled glassily down last week on the 50th Anniversary show of the New York Architectural League. It was a show that few serious art students could afford to miss. Two floors of the Grand Central Palace contained a fairly complete review of the past two years in architecture, not only of the U. S. but of Sweden, Mexico and Soviet Russia.

Protesting that "functionalistic" modern architecture was being excluded from the exhibition, Art Dealer Thomas Mabry and a number of architects held a rump show on West 57th Street of their rejected concrete-and-gaspipe designs. But the committee of the Architectural League had not excluded all examples of functional architecture. There were rows & rows of photographs and designs of such buildings, and chief exhibit of the show was the "Magic House," a complete three-story affair of polished aluminum and glass, designed to take the place of the rows of jerry-built Olde Englysshe cottages for families of modest means which speckle U. S. suburbs. Designed by A. Lawrence Kocher and Albert Frey, the Magic House has no excavated basement. The owner enters through the garage, climbs a staircase near the oil-burning furnace room to a duplex living room, dining room, library. The designers expect that the covered sun porch and outdoor living room will be the most popular feature of the house. They claim that the three-inch walls of aluminum and celotex are better insulated and more weatherproof than the eight-inch frame sidings of suburban cottages.

Enthusiastic about the Magic House (which will sell for less than $5,000) was well-known Modernist Architect Harvey Wiley Corbett, co-architect of the Chicago World's Fair and of Manhattan's much- criticized Radio City (TIME, March 16). Said he:

"I'm betting the public comment will be: 'It may be efficient, but I wouldn't live in it if you gave it to me.' Well, just imagine a row of imitation English cottages such as we have today. . . . Across the street imagine a row of modern machine houses, all light and air, renting at half the price because they are half as costly to build. They'll choose the machine houses to live in, and when they have found how comfortable and convenient they are, they will begin to think the machine houses beautiful and the imitation English cottages ugly."

Notably absent from the exhibition was the storm centre of modern architecture, the model for $250,000,000 Radio City. The designers were still tinkering with it last week. Prominently present, however, was bristle-headed, kinetic Raymond Hood's model for the scarlet-blue-&-gold Electrical Building for the Chicago World's Fair. Among Norman farmhouses for Pennsylvania tycoons, Spanish palaces for Hollywood directors, French Gothic cathedrals for Idaho Baptists, critics were more interested in Delano & Aldrich's design for the new U. S. Embassy on the Place de la Concorde, Paris.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.