Pantheon's Vis-a-Vis

Progressive architects regard the capital of the U. S. A. as a gleaming shirt front, dignified but stuffed. During its last great construction years the design of Government buildings was a monopoly of a few urbane neoclassicists, notably the late Cass Gilbert (Supreme Court, U. S. Chamber of Commerce) and the late John Russell Pope (Archives Building, National [Mellon] Gallery). Last week an open architectural competition brought forth the first modern design ever chosen for a national building in Washington. Its subject : a new Smithsonian Gallery of Art.

Since 1906 the nationally owned Smithsonian Institution has had a Gallery of Art, but it is wedged into the massive, domed Natural History Building, the Institution's principal monument. Function of the new gallery is primarily to house and exhibit art owned by the Government, including presumably the immense quantities lately accumulated by the Treasury and the Federal Art Project.

Congress last year named to the Smithsonian Gallery of Art Commission a number of political and artistic heavyweights headed by President Roosevelt's uncle

Frederic A. Delano, chairman of the National Capital Park & Planning Commission. Appointed professional adviser was liberal Dean Joseph Hudnut of the Harvard School of Design. Granted an appropriation of $40,000 and all aglow with its opportunity, the Commission made no bones about what was required: a museum of modern art for Washington.

From 408 competing designs the jury* first chose ten finalists, allowed them five weeks to refine their work, then last week sweated for three days to pick the winner. Not only architecturally but politically popular, it was a design submitted by debt-paying Finland's clearheaded, apple-cheeked Eliel Saarinen, his broad-shouldered, brilliant son, Eero, and his son-in-law, Robert Swanson, all of Cranbrook Academy, Michigan. Professor Hudnut called the prize-($7,500)-winning design "well organized, logical and reasonable . . . yet with classical feeling. ..."

About 250 feet long, five stories high, with two main wings parallel to the main exhibition building and a glass and marble fagade, the proposed Gallery is without frills except for a curving pool and sculpture court beside the main entrance. Its site will be a two-block plot of ground on the Mall directly--and dramatically--opposite Jack Pope's National Gallery, now in construction--a $9,000,000 pantheon with marble wings. Cost of the functional Smithsonian Gallery of Art (which Congress has not yet appropriated) : $1,500,000.

*Harvard's Walter Gropius, Chicago's John Holabird, Boston's Henry Shepley, Philadelphia's George Howe, and Chairman Delano.

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