artists and fussy consumers are getting bored with willow pattern plates and Jacobean umbrella stands. The big distributor is told by his “stylist” (or should it be “styler”? ) that modernism is a good stunt to bring people into the store, but that sort of emotion will not carry us very far or very surely. The industrial designer has very little authority with the manufacturer, and the elder of the breed are worried at a new and tiresome idea which they neither understand nor like, and naturally cannot do convincingly. We are left to the architect and the interior decorator. Both of them know, or ought to know, enough about the nature of design to appreciate the proper influence of material. Both of them ought to have minds nimble enough to re-act to the new impulses which are changing the direction of European art, and giving it a new significance. Of the two, the architect is more in touch with every class of society, for he designs for the manufacturer not only his office building and his home, but even, in a great many cases, his factory and his warehouse.
The interior decorator tends to be more restricted to working for the individual in the domestic field and with excursions into display for the retail distributor. The architect is in a commanding position if he likes to take a hand in shaping the character of industrial art, because he is the practitioner of the Mistress Art, which comprehends the rest. In England at least there is precedent for this. William Morris was aided at every turn of his work by the architect Philip Webb. Because Webb was a most retiring man his name did not emerge, but alike in
the aid he gave Morris in craft design, and in his notable but only half recognized achievement in architecture, he exercised an extraordinary influence on the art of his day. Ernest Gimson, whose profound skill in furniture design is only now beginning to be realized, was a practicing architect of great ability and a notable fertilizer of the minor arts of plasterwork, ironwork and the like. Sir Edwin Lutyens has made some contributions to furniture and silverwork design; Sir Robert Lorimer has abounded in the same direction. The significance of the work of these and other architects is indicated in notes beneath the accompanying illustrations.
It is, of course, true that the drive and complexity of modern building practice leave an architect little time to devote to industrial design. He cannot be
ONE OF FOUR SILVER MEMORIAL ALTAR VASES
FOR ST. PAUL’S CATHEDRAL
DESIGNED BY SIR EDWIN LUTYENS
THE VASES WERE MADE BY D. & J. WELLBY
TABLE GLASS DESIGNED BY THE LATE SIR
THOMAS GRAHAM JACKSON
WHILE ONE OF THE MOST LEARNED HISTORIANS OF ARCHITECTURE, HE REGARDED WITH NO LESS SERIOUS­ NESS HIS CONTRIBUTIONS TO INDUSTRIAL ART AND COOPERATED WITH HIS FRIEND, JAMES POWELL, IN A
SPIRIT OF ENTHUSIASM