The current exhibition of photographs, prints and models illustrating, movements in architecture during the past decade, now on view at the galleries of Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, presents modern construction developments in a thoroughly comprehensive and interesting manner.

Three Leaders

Modern architecture in Europe has reached a definition of style through the work of three leaders, Le Corbusiner in Paris, Ouid in Rotterdam, and Mies Van der Rohe in Berlin. In the last decade their style has become international. The design depends principally upon the function which the building is created to serve, with no consideration for the traditional principles of symmetry. The second feature is that modern architecture employs almost exclusively the new building materials, concrete, glass, and steel. The beauty of the style rests in the free composition of volumes and surfaces; the adjustment of such elements as doors, windows, and vents; and the perfection of machined surfaces.

Poetry in Industry

A study of 10 photographs by Kilham of Rockefeller's new Radio city development shows that the camera can be made as sensitive to art as the human eye, and that there is a fine poetry in the clattering bigness of industrial activity which rivals the tranquility of classicism. Several of the photographs are studies in light and shadow on the clay models of Radio City, appear like actual buildings seen from the air. Richard and Hofmeister, Corbett, Harrison and MacMurray, Hood and Faulihour are the architects who have designed the Rockefeller project. It consists of eight separate units, staggered to admit maximum air and sunlight, all of which are connected by an underground level. A theatre and Opera House accommodating almost 6,000 people, and six acres of roof garden are novel features of the construction, which is now going on between Fifth and Sixth Avenue and Forty-eighth and Fiftieth Streets. Photographs show excavation proceeding at night and a rivet heater. In the interior scenes shadows flicker and flare with Hogarthian exaggeration.

New York Skycrapers

Another part of the exhibit shows typical examples of New York sky-scrapers ranging from the classic Gothic of the Woolworth Building, to the ultra modern emphasis upon the vertical line as exemplified in the soaring tiers of windows, and strips of concrete of the Daily News Building. The graduated indents of the older Chanin Building are in sharp contrast to the sheer lift of the new Empire State Building. showing that transition is taking place rapidly.

Zoning Law

The zoning law has influenced the direction of modern architecture. By making set-backs from the street at certain heights in crowded districts of the city in order to provide air and sunlight in the streets and for smaller buildings, a new shape has been imposed upon architects. But even with this restriction, the space left cannot be completely utilized since the pile must continue to taper to satisfy the eye. The American Radiator Building which is built of black brick rises to a height of 200 feet where a gilded tower, illuminated at night, seems to float in a hazy cloud. New buildings are usually built in the mass envelope shape, with either slight frequent by flanking towers. Dean Edgell of the Architectural School says that the pure graduations or a central pile supported mass impression of modern buildings, which makes them seem like a titanic product of Nature rather than a creation of man, is the principal point in modern architecture.

Men Like Skyscrapers

"It has been said that the skyscraper was forced upon New York by reason of the narrow limits of Manhattan Island. This entirely misses the point. Men build skyscrapers because they like skyscrapers. They concentrate them in a district because they wish to concentrate them. There are plenty of places for skyscrapers in restricted Manhattan, yet none is built. Such concentration is the result of need and the natural growth. The disadvantages are obvious. Traffic conditions are appalling and steadily becoming worse. I venture to forecast, however, that whatever is done, it will not take the form of abolishing the skyscraper by law. On the contrary, buildings will probably grow higher, and congestion increase. We can no more stop the growth of a city than we can stop the revolution of the earth on its axis. The measures to meet the new conditions will probably take the form of double, triple, and quadruple tracking of traffic levels, viaducts, and chambers consecting buildings underground, together with other expedients that seem like figments from the imagination of H. G. Wells. To destroy the new growth would be futile, and one is tempted to say, criminal, if it were possible. Control it we must, and the zoning law is the first method of control".

"Without definitely stating the fact, we have sensed that Architecture is just entering upon a Renaissance, which will probably be regarded in future histories as a great architectural epoch."

Not Confined to New York

Modern architecture is not confined to New York. The new style stressing the horizontal line in low two-story residential buildings with great rectangular areas of cement and glass, has materialized in a large homestead development in Vite Park, Cleveland, where the New York architects, Clauss and Daub have made a venture. An art Guild Hall in Darien, Connecticut, is an example of the latest developments carried out on a large scale. In Berlin, prominent residences are done in the chaste modern style. In Soviet Russia, and near Frankfurt, simple modern tenements are housing poor people. Nor is the use confined to business buildings or residences. A newspaper plant, a grain elevator, and a paper mill have invested in modern buildings. Einstein's laboratory, a Paris garage, a dentist's office and many salons of the S.S. Bremen have adopted the new fashion.