OTD in early British television: 11 January 1938
John Wyver writes: after Alexander Calder yesterday, we can continue the theme of early television’s engagements with modernism by focussing on New Architecture, a 17-minute talk on Tuesday 11 January 1938 given by John Summerson and prompted by the now-famous exhibition (with Ashley Havinden’s glorious catalogue cover above) organised by the MARS Group.
Summerson is regarded now as perhaps the most distinguished British architectural historian of the twentieth century, but in 1938 the 33-year-old writer was working as an editor for the magazine Architect and Building News. Endeavouring unsuccessfully to become an architect himself, he had worked briefly for the MARS Group, but his career path was set by the publication in 1935 of his biography of the Georgian-era architect John Nash. His subsequent architectural writing is more associated with the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than with the the buildings of his own time.
All we know of the broadcast about the MARS Group show is that Summerson illustrated his remarks with drawings and photographs of modern buildings, and models from the exhibition, as well as including a film sequence identified only as “road” from one of the productions of the GPO Film Unit.
Here’s Wikipedia on the MARS Group:
The Modern Architectural Research Group, or MARS Group, was a British architectural think tank founded in 1933 by several prominent architects and architectural critics of the time involved in the British modernist movement.
The group first formed when Sigfried Giedion of the Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne asked Morton Shand to assemble a group that would represent Britain at their events. Shand, along with Wells Coates, chose Maxwell Fry and F. R. S. Yorke as the founding members. They were also joined by a few members of architectural group Tecton, by Ove Arup and by John Betjeman, a poet and contributor to Architectural Review.
The group’s greatest success came in 1938 with a show at the New Burlington Galleries, but it also left them in debt. The MARS group proposed a radical plan for the redevelopment of postwar London, the details of which were published the Architectural Review in 1942. At its height there were about 58 members in the group. The group itself began to lose steam along with the movement and many members left as a result of creative differences. The group finally disbanded in 1957.
The excellent online site modernism101.com, which sells rare books and periodicals about the visual; arts, has a copy of the catalogue for sale at $1,500 (if only!), along with a very informative catalogue entry, including the cover image above and this description of the exhibition:
The MARS Group chose direct engagement with the public as their strategy and the New Burlington Galleries as their battlefield. They organized the installation thematically in small vignetttes about the family, the community and the natural landscape. Large photographic enlargements and bold graphics instructed the visitors about Modern architecture and how it could respond to the changing needs of everyday life. Furnished interiors showed the Modern home environment.
Talks producer at Alexandra Palace Mary Adams appears to have a particular interest in modern architecture. Or at least to have thought that it made a good subject for television, perhaps because talk about it could be linked to the home. Architecture Today was a 1937 series that featured among others Walter Gropius, Serge Chermayeff, Patrick Abercrombie and Raymond Unwin. Contributors to other architecture talks included Berthold Lubetkin (introducing his new London Zoo elephant house; see the earlier OTD for 26 November 1937) and Frank Lloyd Wright.
Summerson had already contributed radio talks before his television debut with the MARS Group broadcast. Famous Midland Houses was a Regional Programme series written and presented by him in the summer of 1937. After several wartime talks, he returned to television with The Prince’s Park, a July 1946 feature only weeks after the re-start of the service about the architecture of Regent’s Park and its architect, John Nash.
Following this he became a regular broadcaster on both radio and television, with one notable programme being Tomorrow’s Buildings in December 1947. By this point Summerson was Curator of the Sir John Soane Museum, and he chaired a discussion to mark the centenary of the Architectural Association. Radio Times noted that, ‘The programme will be seen by many distinguished foreign architects on television sets specially installed at the reception held in London this evening.’
John Summerson’s final television appearance would seem to be as presenter of an Open University programme, Profit and Patronage in Urban Development, about ‘the 18th-century development of Bloomsbury to see what lessons we can learn today’, in August 1983. Which means that he contributed to the medium’s engagement with architecture for almost half a century.
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