Art: MARS

Since January 3, 15,000 Londoners a week have filed reverently into Burlington House to see the annual winter show of the Royal Academy—this year a whopping display of 17th-Century European art to which the King lent four famed canvases by Rubens. Fortnight ago a smaller exhibition of larger import opened a few blocks away at the New Burlington Galleries and immediately began to draw comparable crowds. This was the first solo exhibition of England’s five-year-old MARS (Modern Architectural Research) Group, which now numbers about 60 members in the United Kingdom and at least one, Harvard’s Walter Gropius, in the U. S.

In process of crystallization since 1933, the MARS exhibition was actually one of the most effective presentations of modern architecture and planning ever made. As Frank Lloyd Wright has gone back to Thoreau for common sense on building (TIME, Jan. 17), MARS architects and engineers invoked the authority of the Elizabethan Sir Henry Wotton, Izaak Walton’s fishing companion, whose The Elements of Architecture defined good building as “commoditie, firmeness and delight.” A “needs” section of the exhibit contained nothing less than a scheme for remodeling London, notable for its acceptance of the present radiating arterial roads and the insertion of park spaces between them so that a series of “green wedges” would penetrate almost to the centre of the city.