England Home and Beauty - ACE052.5

Coronation motif (1937) on fabric. Flowery ceramics and carpets. Patterned floor coverings. "… despite past improvements, the aesthetic quality of our manufactured goods is still unduly low…" Wall lights and eccentric ceramics. Complaints about "the antique vogue". Furniture catalogues. Electric fires: "Machine-made mouldings on furniture, a tricky device to make an electric fire look like a flickering coke fire. All that is immoral and so are sham materials and sham technique…" Photographs of table lamps, tables, dressing tables. Ceramic patterns depicting country cottages. Rows of semi-detached houses: "… to put down great masses of people in new buildings without giving them any opportunity of religious or social life, will be to create generation of semi-pagans with no real consciousness of their social or political obligations." Photographs including one of family in the porch of their house named "Insanity". A clock; ceramics. "One can roundly damn the whole of our age. One can commiserate with or hope to transform the men and women who have lost their mental equilibrium in the vortex of modern life, but I do not believe that to decorate their homes with traditional gables and dormers helps them in the least. On the contrary: this only widens the gap between appearance and reality …" Apartment buildings, houses, interior design details. "Our investigations into housing and town planning problems have been based on the needs of the community… I believe that work of this kind leads to material advances which have nothing to do with politics… There is no hard and fast formula for doing this or that in the new architecture… For even living organisms like animals and plants can all be realised against a stark plain surface of a wall." Multi-panelled stained glass window representing yacht under sail. Catalogue of pottery and glassware reproduced from 1937 Paris Exhibition, decorated with British, French and German flags: "ARP activities were perhaps the feature of this year’s exhibition… It is to be hoped that such exhibits will play no part in the exhibition [in two years’ time]." Woman smoking. Architectural features, interior designs; man and woman preparing to go out for the evening, leaving the house. Credits