England Home and Beauty - ACE052.4

Fabric designs "… for beauty lovers…" Ceramics. "National resources can only be developed by intelligent effort…" Carpet and rug designs by Marion Dorn. Built-in furniture, including use of glass and stainless steel. "In a little while, this wilderness of geometry and negative colour in which we have been groping … will have passed away… public taste insists on personality…" Curved staircase. Ceramics. Glassware. Stainless steel tea service. Details of carved wooden furnishings. Statues of huntress with bow, woman with dog. Advertisements for Kodak, family outing by car, woman sailing (Cadbury’s). "Certain developments of modern life having changed our conditions of living enormously, namely the spread of sport and games, and of course the motor car…" Images of cars, pictures of loggia, couple on terrace, family in country setting, etc. Ceramic designs of flowers and other plants. Photographs of houses and blocks of flats including Berthold Lubetkin’s Highpoint Two (1937-1938): "… The true meaning of functionalism lies indeed in the belief that a house is a machine for living in. But the accent is on ‘living’. Architecture cannot be realised while social needs of living remain unmet." A Hoover vacuum cleaner being used on rug. "Of a house, a chair, a telephone, we must ask ourselves ‘does its design enable it to fulfil its purpose as well as present conditions admit?’…" Wall lights, ceiling lights, table lamps. Clocks. Table and radio. "… You must first startle your shopkeeper by asking about ‘fitness’. The movement starts with you, listener." Ceramics. Radios. Novelty teapots. Houses and apartment blocks. "Our middle class slum dwellers are saddened and devitalised by the dreadful dreariness of the places in which they live. A pestilence ought to carry away the architects and builders responsible for them." "What we build must stand up to the test of time…" Isokon buildings, Lawn Road, Hampstead (Wells Coates, 1933-1934). Furniture designed by Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer; a wastebasket by Gropius. The house at Old Church Street, Chelsea, by Gropius and Maxwell Fry (1936), and several pictures of the Wood House, Shipbourne, Kent, by Gropius, completed by Fry (1937). "… England has lost Gropius largely through her determination … to avoid taking risks."